Money Bags*

*Editor’s note: On March 4, 2022, Russia enacted a law that criminalizes public opposition to, or independent news reporting about, the war in Ukraine. The law makes it a crime to call the war a “war” rather than a “special military operation” on social media or in a news article or broadcast. The law is understood to penalize any language that “discredits” Russia’s use of its military in Ukraine, calls for sanctions or protests Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It punishes anyone found to spread “false information” about the invasion with up to 15 years in prison.

Vice Rector of the Russian Foreign Ministry Diplomatic Academy Oleg Karpovich on why the U.S. agreed to provide aid to Ukraine after such a long period.

The Western media turned the U.S. decision to allocate multibillions of dollars in aid to Ukraine into a show that stretched over many days. The result is supposed to signal to Washington’s NATO allies that it’s too early to write off America. On April 24, President Joe Biden signed the corresponding aid bill, and it had already acquired symbolic meaning; i.e., after a period of turbulence and doubt, the collective West has rediscovered its former determination to protect the “rule-based order” and finally deliver a treasured strategic defeat to Russia. In fact, there’s much more mundane reality behind this showboating and aplomb.

Let’s begin with what a careful look at the text of the specific bill allocating funds and arms to Kyiv clearly reveals. In reality, it is not motivated by the interests of fighters for liberal values but by the interests of cynical arms manufacturers — that’s precisely why a sector of the Republicans, including Donald Trump, was finally forced to give in to the pressure of lobbyists.

It’s no secret that almighty weapon manufacturers see the Ukrainian crisis both as an opportunity to test new developments and as easy income for the years ahead. In a sense, it’s instructive to observe that lawmakers ordered the White House to provide the public with a strategy for American policy on Ukraine in the near future. With that, they admitted that currently there are no convincing strategic designs on that subject, which means that billions are being allocated for a project bereft of meaning and substance.

At the same time, the U.S. State Department published a report about human rights in Ukraine that directly lists egregious cases of torture, massive restrictions of rights and freedoms, massive use of child labor, among much more. Considering that in allocating aid, Washington doesn’t condition it on Kyiv fixing the situation, we can say that, in fact, the U.S. actually agreed to sponsor the Ukrainian dictatorship while clearly understanding its nature.

In all likelihood, Russian assets, which Congress allowed the U.S. to seize to support their servants in the best Bolshevik tradition, will be cynically sent to bolster internal Ukrainian repression against all kinds of dissenters — from those common people wishing to speak in Russian to Orthodox believers who refused to betray their church. Volodymyr Zelenskyy will benefit from reinforcement of his repression machine. The growth of opposition sentiment could accelerate significantly against the background of passing the mobilization bill that outraged the majority of Ukrainians and the expiration of the term of the so-called president.

However, it’s doubtful that such details bother the American curators of Kyiv. Curiously, the four-bill package, within which only one is fully dedicated to Ukraine, stands out in its truly global outlook. Washington placed allocations to its Taiwanese henchmen, traditional Israeli allies, and Ukrainian neo-Nazis in the same column.

The “anti-Russia” project is viewed as a part of a complex plan to support U.S. hegemony in different places on the planet — from the Pacific to the Middle East. But it’s more formally viewed as coming from a sense of inertia. Giant financial tranches can’t overshadow an obvious fact: American leadership is going through a stage of erosion, its attempts to provoke or deepen conflicts around the world are not bearing proper fruit, and an increasing number of countries are turning away from Washington in their search for new centers of power.

The only beneficiaries of this process are American weapon makers and corrupt officials on the ground, living by the principle of striking while the iron is hot. Unfortunately, such games, which lead to the deterioration of the entire international security system, can have the opposite effect of putting the planet on the verge of global conflict. And while the West doesn’t think about the consequences of its actions, we clearly realize where they can lead. That means we have a growing number of reasons to quickly realize the objectives of the special military operation and cool the ardor of our geopolitical opponents.