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Grigory Yavlinsky Speech to the Munich Security Conference
Russian started its military operation in February 2022 and assumes its share of responsibility for what happened. History will set the record straight. However, today the key goal here is different – to achieve an immediate ceasefire. We need to find a way out now – we need to find a solution that will bring to an end the loss of lives and the destruction of the future. And if we are talking about the restoration of justice, then today the ultimate justice is to save human lives, stop the advance towards a global nuclear disaster and not to allow the future of our children and grandchildren to be destroyed.
Regrettably, the hysterical reaction of the western press and a number of European politicians to the recent phone call by Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin merely attests to the populism and irresponsibility of such voices. In actual fact, we should be welcoming both the actual contact between the presidents of major nuclear powers and the creation of the initial framework for constructive negotiations. The United States and Europe must, together with Russia and Ukraine, step by step develop the grounds for and persistently try to reach agreement on a ceasefire, and draw up a plan to end the war and subsequently bring peace to the European Continent. This is a major objective that is extremely hard to achieve in the new environment that we find ourselves in.
Ω Ω Ω
It should be acknowledged here that over the past thirty-five years the West has taken a number of actions which led ultimately to the conflict and confrontation with Russia.
Everything started with the failure of Russia’s economic reforms at the start of the 1990s conducted under the direction of the IMF and with overt political and exceptional financial pressure exerted by the United States, with hyperinflation reaching 2,600% and criminal privatisation. This was followed by NATO’s actual expansion eastwards: Poland, Czechia and Hungary were admitted to the alliance in 1999.
Baerbock verplappert sich
Baerbock verplappert sich: Nach der Wahl Milliarden für Ukraine
Eigentlich wollte die EU das Waffen-Projekt bis nach der Bundestagswahl geheim halten. Doch Annalena Baerbock ließ die Katze aus dem Sack.
Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz bekräftigte seine Unterstützung für den EU-Vorschlag, eine Notfallklausel auszulösen, um die Verteidigungsausgaben massiv zu erhöhen, den von der Leyen letzte Woche auf der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz forcierte. Nach diesem Vorschlag werden Länder für Militärausgaben von den Schulden- und Defizitgrenzen der EU befreit. Bis jetzt waren solche grundlegende Veränderungen der EU-Strukturen nicht möglich.Ein neues Milliarden-Paket könnte, wie bei Corona, durch gemeinsame Schulden finanziert werden. Auch gemeinsame Schulden sind gemäß der EU-Verträge eigentlich verboten. Entsprechende Ideen werden allerdings längst ventiliert. Das Problem: Zahlreiche EU-Staaten haben wegen der milliardenschweren Corona-Hilfen mittlerweile Zahlungsschwierigkeiten. Sie müssen ihre Haushalte sanieren, was in der Regel nur auf Kosten der Sozialleistungen geht.
The Overton Window has become a peephole.
Stern: Wagenknecht im Kreuzverhör: „Bin kein blinder Pazifist“
The reasons behind the invasion are completely sidelined here. It’s not really accurate to say the breadth of debate or discussion is limited, as there is no real debate, just a single dominant paradigm.
Wolfgang Streeck: 2008 was a first warning that this way of life of capitalism — to live on a continuously growing mountain of borrowed money — could not continue forever. And then, of course, came the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The latter in particular, in my view, signified the end of a world which US capital could penetrate at will, to sustain a regime run out of Washington and Wall Street that was meant to include the rest of the world, including Russia and China, and the Global South anyway.
Ewald Engelen: Does that imply that we may have a false conception of what the end of a regime actually looks like?
Wolfgang Streeck: We tend to think that the temporality of regimes is the same as the temporality of human beings, that the regime shifts we see coming will happen somehow during our lifetime. That mistake was made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who expected to witness the end of capitalism in person. The same for Joseph Schumpeter, certainly for Max Weber, and for Werner Sombart, who in the 1930s thought that he was living in “late capitalism.”
So, in that sense one can say that human beings are prone to misread fundamental change. With the war in Ukraine, it comes to mind that the three major historical moments in the reorganization of capitalism were three major wars. There were the Dutch-English wars of the seventeenth century, when the center of capitalism moved from Amsterdam to London. Then there was World War I and the postwar settlement after 1918, which expedited the end of empire, launched a world of nation-states, and prepared another territorial shift, this time from London to Washington. The third was after World War II, with the Keynesian settlement, which embedded nation-states in a United States–dominated global trade regime.
Maybe we now see a repeat in the sense that capitalism adjusts itself to new conditions, in ways that we cannot yet predict. What is coming to an end now is the liberal international order, backed by US imperialism, which was the result of the breakdown of the Soviet Union: in that case the change happened without a war, but related to the arms race of the 1980s.
President Trump has spoken to Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the phone to try to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war
Trump said he has a concrete plan to end the war.
“I hope it’s fast. Every day people are dying. This war is so bad in Ukraine. I want to end this damn thing.”
Addressing National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who joined him in his study aboard Air Force One Friday night, the president said: “Let’s get these meetings going. They want to meet. Every day people are dying. Young handsome soldiers are being killed. Young men, like my sons. On both sides. All over the battlefield.”
Vice President Vance will meet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference next week.
Trump has said he wants to strike a $500 million deal with Zelensky to access rare-earth minerals and gas in Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees in any potential peace settlement.
On Iran, Trump told The Post: “I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear. I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it. . . . They don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die.”
“If we made the deal, Israel wouldn’t bomb them.”
But he would not reveal details of any potential negotiations with Iran: “In a way, I don’t like telling you what I’m going to tell them. You know, it’s not nice.”
“I could tell what I have to tell them, and I hope they decide that they’re not going to do what they’re currently thinking of doing. And I think they’ll really be happy.”
“I’d tell them I’d make a deal.”
As for what he would offer Iran in return, he said, “I can’t say that because it’s too nasty. I won’t bomb them.”
„No words“ is an overused comment on social media I think, often lazily taking the place of analyzing an article or statement one objects to. Here, though, I really do find myself at something of a loss for words. Describing Trump as a dangerous buffoon, saying he sounds like a mobster threatening violence if the terms of the deal he offers are not accepted, has all been done. In 2025 these phrases sound trite. What does one say, though? What must it have been like to be Putin on the phone with Trump? I also see this Post interview on social media feeds which view Trump as a well-intentioned peacemaker.
From time to time I remember Noam Chomsky’s address at the 2022 National Solar Conference at the University of New Mexico, in which he detailed his major concerns for human civilization:
The primary concerns have been the growing threat of nuclear war and the failure to prevent lethal global heating.
In the last few years, a new concern has been added. The deterioration of the arena of rational discourse, which is all too apparent. Unless we can use our capacities for thought in an arena of rational discourse, there’s no hope of closing the dread gap in time to save ourselves.
Glasnost and roads not taken
It was for this reason that Gorbachëv initiated a series of public debates. The policy was encapsulated in the slogan of glasnost. This is a difficult word to translate, broadly connoting ‚openness‘, ‚a voicing‘ and ‚a making public‘. Gorbachëv‘s choice of vocabulary was not accidental. Glasnost, for all its vagueness, does not mean freedom of information. He had no intention of relinquishing the Politburo’s capacity to decide the limits of public discussion. Moreover, his assumption was that if Soviet society were to examine its problems within a framework of guidance, a renaissance of Leninist ideals would occur. Gorbachëv was not a political liberal. At the time, however, it was not so much his reservation of communist party power as his liberating initiative that was impressive. Gorbachëv was freeing debate in the USSR to an extent that no Soviet leader had attempted, not even Khrushchëv and certainly not Lenin.
—Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia, (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2020), 448.
08.02.2003 Fischer is not convinced
Es sind Augenblicke, in denen deutlich wird: Hier stehen sich zwei Konzepte, zwei politische Ansätze gegenüber.