The Damage to Ukraine is Devastating: “What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?” MEP Mick Wallace
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US neoconservatives like Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken are using Ukraine as the linchpin of their strategy to undermine and destabilise Russia.
Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion.
In late June 2023, the EU pledged a further €3.5 billion in military aid.
Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EU Commission.
Following this latest pledge, he stated on Twitter:
“We will continue to double down on our military support on both equipment [and] training. For as long as it takes.”
Great news for European and UK armaments companies like BAE Systems, Saab and Rheinmetall, which are raking in huge profits from the destruction of Ukraine (see the CNN Business report Europe’s arms spending on Ukraine boosts defense companies).
US arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also acquiring multi-billion-dollar contracts (as outlined in the online articles Raytheon wins $1.2 billion surface-to-air missile order for Ukraine and Pentagon readies new $2 billion Ukraine air defense package including missiles).
And as for BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, they aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips.
As reported on the CNN Business website (War-torn economy needs private investors to rebuild), JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors.
At the same time, in War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land, the Oakland Institute describes how financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.
With Ukrainian forces struggling on the battlefield, it poses the worrying question: with so much money at stake for Western capital, just how far will the US escalate in order to prevent Russia from securing control over areas of the country?
Meanwhile, away from the boardrooms, business conferences and high-level strategizing, hundreds of thousands of ordinary young Ukrainians have died.
Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly have been staunch critics of the EU stance on Ukraine (see Clare Daly talking in the EU parliament about Ukraine burning through a generation of men on YouTube).
Wallace recently addressed the EU Parliament, describing the heist currently taking place in that country by Western corporations.
Wallace said:
“The damage to Ukraine is devastating. Towns and cities that endured for hundreds of years don’t exist anymore. We must recognise that these towns, cities and surrounding lands were long being stolen by local oligarchs colluding with global financial capital. This theft quickened with the onset of the war in 2014.
“The pro-Western government opened the doors wide for massive structural adjustment and privatisation programmes spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IMF and the World Bank. Zelensky used the current war to concentrate power and accelerate the corporate fire sale. He banned opposition parties that were resisting deeply unpopular reforms to the laws restricting the sale of land to foreign investors.
“Over three million hectares of agricultural land are now owned by companies based in Western tax havens. Ukraine’s mineral deposits alone are worth over $12 trillion. Western companies are licking their lips.”
“What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?”
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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.
Featured image: MEP Mick Wallace (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled
Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.
