Eric Draitser presents an alternative analysis of the situation in Ukraine, that gives the lie to both Russian and NATO narratives. He reveals a polity dominated by amoral oligarchs who, regardless of their purported ideological leanings and ethnolinguistic allegiances, are in it for money and power. Whether the picture is accurate or not, it reads like an X-ray, and reveals how government (and politics) masks the true workings of power. Draitse, who is an independent political analyst and host of CounterPunch Radio, offers a nose to the ground perspective that complements John Mearsheimer‘s realist big-power geopoliotical overview.
Cinema pioneer Denis Kaufman’s family was Jewish and hailed from Bialystok in what was once Russia, but is today a part of Poland. Kaufman is known to us by his pseudonym, Dziga Vertov, which he seems to have started using as early as the year 1915. According to an entry in momoscope, “Vertov” is a neologism extrapolated from the Russian verb vertit’sia, to spin, and Dziga is the Ukrainian word for a top, This new name carried connotations of the dynamism of the age. Another aspect of this name change is that it was typical of Russophilic Jewish youth of the revolutionary period.
In the light of today’s crisis and conflict on Ukraine, it is significant that being Russophile does not preclude the pairing of Russian and Ukrainian words in the coining of a pseudonym. In fact, much of Vertov’s seminal ‘Man with a Movie.’ Camera was shot in Ukraine. Here is how this seminal work of modernist filmmaking is described in the Telescope International film database, “A man wanders around Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention. There are few films that better enable the viewer to feel and understand the power of editing than this towering achievement in cinema.”
This perspicacious conversation, which took place on 3rd March, was hosted by the Committee for the Republic, which is a non-partisan, nonprofit American organization that sponsors regular conversations on the challenges faced by the American Republic. This conversation features John Mearsheimer and Ray McGovern giving their views on the ongoing crisis in Eastern Europe. As I have previously shared Mearsheimer’s views (from 2015 and from days before the invasion) on the crisis, I will start the video at McGovern’s segment and outline his key argument here.
Ray McGovern is a long-time Russian specialist. After serving as an Army combat intelligence officer, he was a CIA analyst focused on the Sino-Soviet conflict and then chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. In encapsularing his position, McGovern offers the analogy of being bullied at the hands of bigger bigger guys as a kid, “When I get big I’m never going to let anybody do that to me …. Putin just got big, he got big last year, he got big when the Chinese decided to throw their lot in with him,” McGovern’s proposition is that the shift in the balance of power brought by an emerging Russia-China alignment helps explain Putin’s apparently irrational invasion of Ukraine, an invasion that McGovern himself had failed to anticipate.
This interview with John Mearsheimer was recorded on Tuesday 15th February at Kings College, Cambridge University, online forum, just before Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February. Mearsheimer is a renowned American political scientist and international relations scholar, of the realist school of thought. He presents a view that contradicts what we have been presented with by the mainstream, with regard to the underlying causes of the crisis (presented by Mearsheimer in a lecture from 2015), and goes on to define just what has he believes has precipitated the crisis that has so tragically and rapidly unfolded.
His central argument is that since the advent of the Trump administration, the USA and its allies have accelerated the arming and training of the Ukraine military, with a view to turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO. state. He stresses that, from his realist perspective, this must be unequivocally unacceptable to Russia. Further, he points to recent provocations to Russia carried out by way of territorial incursions made by the British and the Americans. Mearsheimer concludes this talk by saying that the crisis would go on for a long time. It seems that even though he is clear that the Russians had reached their ‘boiling point’, does not anticipate an imminent Russian invasion. In the course of answering the last question, which was about the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons in this crisis, he even says, “I don’t think they are going to invade.”
In an interview recorded on 10 Jan 2022, Chomsky unpacks the crisis that has sinse led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He echoes John Mearsheimer’s vie wanout the necessary neutrality of Ukraine with regard to NATO-Russian relations. He decribes the decision by the USA in 2008, taken against the wishes of France and Germany, to invite Ukraine to enter NATO as being utterely unacceptable to any Russian leader (ie this is not a question of Putin’s megalomania). Like Mearsheimer, Chomsky implicates the expansion of NATO contrary to gurantees given to the Soviet Union at the time of the unification of Germany as an significant cause of the present crisis.
He also suggests that the implementation of the Minsk 2 agreement (2015) which would establish the neutrality of Ukraine, as a possible way forward. However, as Duncan Allan notes, “Minsk-2 supports mutually exclusive views of sovereignty: either Ukraine is sovereign (Ukraine’s interpretation), or it is not (Russia’s interpretation)” he calls this “the Minsk conundrum”.
There are few scenes in 20th-century cinema that I hold as dear as the opening scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo (Mirror). I have identified with the young man in that scene in terms of the struggle to express myself in my art and, in terms of getting through life itself in difficult times …. as Russian forces assault the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv … I am reminded how the young man in this scene struggles to say that he hails from Kharkov (Russian for Kharkiv) …. My prayers are with that boy from Kharkiv.
The Koboi Project 
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