The US is up to its old colonialist “nation-building” tricks in Ukraine
The US is hell-bent on doing to Ukraine what we did to Afghanistan, Iraq and others, and at a scale not seen before.
Ukraine is, in many ways, the culmination and the pinnacle of modern US hegemonic ambitions. It encompasses and embraces every facet of the American Empire, from the economic to the geostrategic.
Never before have the interests of all the American oligarchs — from Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the political and media establishment, and the corporate plutocracy — been able to join together on one single project that will benefit them all equally.
Making Ukraine “the 51st state”
It is no secret that the US has been trying to use Ukraine to attack Russia for the past 75 years. Beginning with operation Red Sox in the 1950’s and operation Aerodynamic in the 1960’s, Ukraine (and Ukrainian nationalists) has always been seen by the US deep state as a lever and/or a battering ram which they could use against the USSR.
But the real value of Ukraine to the US Empire emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union — that is when the US corporate oligarchy realised the tremendous financial and economic potential that Ukraine posed — not just as a way to “weaken Russia” economically, but as fertile ground for US economic colonisation. Ukraine’s vast natural resources, coupled with its malleable and corrupt government, made it the perfect target for exploitation.
This article will explain “The American Playbook” that defines the steps that the US has taken to colonise Ukraine.
Those steps are as follows:
Step 1: Divide and Conquer — i.e., create a civil conflict within the country, then back the side that is most willing to work with the US both politically and economically. As with various other neocolonial projects, this has traditionally meant backing the fascist / anti-communist faction against the more socialist / liberal side. Ukraine is no exception.
Step 2: Introduce “Western Values” — this means using well-funded NGOs and “civil society” groups to spread Western-style cultural liberalism, which acts as a smokescreen for the introduction of global neoliberal capitalism, destruction of the Commons, repeal of regulations and all government participation in the economy as well as all governmental oversight
Step 3: Effect the US Corporate Takeover — having “Americanized” the target country’s government and society, the US imposes massive privatisation and financialisation of the entire economy, allowing the US corporate oligarchy to “gobble up” the country’s natural and human resources, industrial base and wealth.
Step 4: Establish a Corporate Oligarchy — once the US corporations have established their firm grip on the economic and societal levers of power, create a de facto “one-party State” in which the government remains completely under corporate control and buttressed by a captured media that is also controlled by the corporate oligarchy.
The following is a full description of how the US has implemented and executed these steps in the case of Ukraine .
Step 1: Divide and Conquer
History tells us that there is a huge difference between Western and Eastern Ukraine. Indeed, while Ukrainians living in the Eastern provinces are overwhelmingly Russian, the Western Ukrainians are part of the Austro-Polish-Lithuanian tradition, Catholic and European leaning.
In fact, Stepan Bandera’s hometown of Lviv was actually called Lemberg at the time of his birth. It was the capital city of Austrian Galicia.
Russophobia, Galician-style ; or what’s old is new again
But it all started with the forced “Catholicization” of Russians living in Galicia.
According to the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ):
In 1890, as a result of the so-called “Great Break” policy, the representatives of Galicia who consider themselves separate from the Russian people, entered into an agreement with the authorities of Austria-Hungary, according to which they swore allegiance to the Vatican, loyalty to Austria, and promised to be in alliance with the Poles.
The UOJ continues:
Thus, all Russophiles were declared “Muscovites” and “agents of Moscow” generously paid for their views with “Tsarist rubles”. Denunciations, very often initiated by representatives of the Union, were poured in abundance against the Orthodox clergy and intelligentsia. Very soon reports to the authorities grew into the direct physical destruction of both Orthodox priests and ordinary villagers who did not agree with the tactics of Catholicization.
A Concentration Camp for Russians
The very first concentration camp built in Europe was built by the Austrians in WWI at Thalerhof. That was where they imprisoned all the Russophiles in the territory we now know as Ukraine.
The Austrians drafted the Western Galicians to round up all the Russian speaking, Orthodox people in the territory and put them in the camp, where they languished unless they agreed to convert to being “Ukrainian”.
From Wikipedia:
The Austro-Hungarian authorities imprisoned leaders of the Russophile movement…those who recognized the Russian language as the literary standard form of their own Slavic language varieties and had sympathy for the Russian Empire. Thus, the captives were forced to abandon their identity as Russians, or sympathies for Russia, and identify as Ukrainian. Captives who identified themselves as Ukrainians were freed from the camp.
What the Catholic Western Galicians did in 1914 is closely parallel to what they are trying to do today in Ukraine
A true “borderland”
So you see, there was always this massive split in the Ukrainian territory. Ukraine means “borderland” in both Russian and Polish, because it was always a border (or buffer) region between the Catholic Germanic/Aryan Europeans in the West of the country, and the Orthodox Slavic Russians in the East.
I believe Putin — just like any Russian leader — wanted Ukraine to remain just such a border region, a buffer between the Russian sphere of interest and that of the Western powers.
Many people accuse Putin of saying that “Ukraine doesn’t have a right to exist”, I believe this is incorrect. I believe Putin intends that Ukraine does not have the right to STOP being the diverse ethnic, cultural and religious state that it has always been. In other words, the culturally mixed Ukraine does not have the right to become a unified “mono-cultural” nation of “ethnically pure” Western Ukrainian Catholic nationalists.
Ukraine: A Country Divided
The split in the country’s population is evident in the 2010 election results. As one can see in the election map below, Ukraine was split, with everyone West of the Dnieper river voting for the pro-Western Tymoshenko, and everyone East of the river voting for the pro-Russian Yanukovych.
In fact, Ukraine almost resembled the US in its “red states versus blue states” divide, and the closeness of its elections.
Despite the closeness of those 2010 elections, however, there was still a majority of Ukrainians who did NOT want to join the EU and NATO.
Many of them were still wary of a military alliance that had the old nemesis Germany at its heart.
Say what you will about Yanukovych, he at least realised the duality of the nation he headed, and was willing to allow both the Orthodox Russians in the East and the Catholic Galicians in the West to exist according to their own values, language, culture and religion.
The US could not let that stand — they needed to have the anti-Russian, pro-NATO Western Ukrainian nationalists in power. That was why the US State Department, under Victoria Nuland, spent $5 billion orchestrating a coup d’état that helped the right wing ultranationalists seize the levers and organs of government.
In fomenting the 2014 Maidan Coup the US intervened like some arrogant “deus ex machina” and arbitrarily plucked the small bands of radical Western nationalists from their Galician enclaves and set them up in power in Kiev.
The US puts its thumb on the scales
The balance of power was thus upset; the Western Ukrainian cultural and political influence was artificially given preeminence over the Eastern one, and the resulting ultranationalist regime that took power, led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk and the Svoboda party, started passing laws that sought to ban all things Russian from Ukrainian life. As we have seen recently, even the Eastern Orthodox religion is being outlawed and eradicated.
The Western powers, led by the United States and buttressed by their domestic allies “on the ground” in the form of far-right Nazi Banderite ultranationalists from the Western provinces, have pursued a “nation-building” exercise of the disastrously colonialist type that the US is so fond of.
Only, instead of bringing Western/American culture and values to the Muslims, they seek to bring Western/American culture and values to the Russians, both in Ukraine and — eventually — to Mother Russia herself.
Yugoslavia is the model
In 1984 the Reagan Administration issued a “Secret Sensitive” National Security Decision Directive (NSDD 133) entitled “US Policy towards Yugoslavia.”
This document, according to Prof. Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa, “set the foreign policy framework for the destabilization of Yugoslavia’s model of market socialism and the establishment of a US sphere of influence in Southeastern Europe”.
The US set about applying what Chossudovsky calls “strong economic medicine” under the leadership of the IMF and the World Bank. The “reforms” implemented by these financial arms of the US hegemon “ultimately led to the destruction of Yugoslavia’s industrial base, the demise of the workers’ cooperatives and the dramatic impoverishment of its population”, according to Chossudovsky.
Indeed, the IMF and World Bank have for decades been the main financial “shock troops” that the Western powers (US and UK) have used to impose neoliberal capitalism on nations around the world.
Putin prevented the “Yugoslavisation” of Russia
At the end of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, Russia was on the brink of becoming another Yugoslavia. The economic “shock therapy” and “reforms” such as the West had imposed on Yugoslavia were being imposed on Russia, and Western capitalists were drooling over the prospect of stealing all those resources and wealth.
The American imperialists were following their globalist economic Playbook.
Putin turned all that around. He jailed some of the oligarchs, and made tough deals with the others. He put an end to the “transatlantic” organisation that was raping Russia, and for that crime, the West has hated him ever since.
Ukraine is now ripe for the plucking
The Americans are now doing to Ukraine what they did to Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, and so many others, either through war or so-called “color revolutions”. They are poised to impose economic austerity, neoliberal capitalism, and various forms of globalism on the unsuspecting Ukrainians, so many of whom have been blinded by their desire to become “Europeans” and join “the West”.
It is one massive, cruel joke.
What those aspirations actually lead to, however, is onerous IMF loans, the evisceration of the social safety net, the decimation or even elimination of pensions, food and energy subsidies, housing assistance, and other social programs.
In short, it means adopting a top-down, draconian macroeconomic policy with exploitation by neocolonial global capitalism at its heart.
In other words, Ukraine is following the American Playbook on steroids.
Step 2: Introduce “Western Values”
The next step in that American Playbook is imposing “Western Values” on the victim through a wide array of NGOs and other “civil society” organizations operating in concert.
The $5 Billion that Victoria Nuland spent on brainwashing Ukraine did not just go to propping up and empowering the ultranationalists and Nazis — it inculcated in the Ukrainian population the idea that “Ukraine belongs in the EU” and “Ukraine belongs in NATO”.
It is a simple fact that no country even remotely as much of an economic basket case as Ukraine is has ever been invited to join the EU.
As I explain below, the hard facts all indicated that signing an agreement to enter the EU is simply not practicable, and posed a disaster that everyone could clearly see.
Everyone, that is, except for the Russophobic ideologues in the West.
What Yanukovych saw
President Viktor Yanukovych was extremely wary of all the various strings attached to any financial aid from the West. The Oakland Institute reported on Yanukovych’s problems with Western financial institutions in 2014:
In 2010, the president [Yanukovych] vetoed tax reform that was part of austerity measures demanded by the IMF as a conditionality for an aid package. In 2011, the IMF put the deal on hold because the government failed to pass a very unpopular pension reform bill, which aimed at cutting public spending through raising the age of retirement for women and increasing the time of workers’ salary contribution to their retirement funds by ten years. The IMF was also displeased that the government watered down gas price increases.
Still, it is important to remember that Yanukovych was elected in 2010 on the promise to sign an association agreement (AA) with the European Union, and it appears that he made efforts to deliver on that promise.
Yanukovych actually “made some tough decisions” in 2010–2011 that enabled the agreement to be completed and initialed in 2012.
Moreover, it would be political suicide for Yanukovych, as it would impose enormous hardships on the poor and the elderly in Ukrainian society — those who formed a large part of his political base.
Yanukovych realised that, for a poor country like Ukraine, signing an AA with the EU would simply lead his country and his people to economic enslavement:
East European countries that enter into trade agreements with Europe are compelled to accept the straitjacket of European rules and regulations. Most significantly, Europe’s state aid laws prevent governments from supporting or subsidising domestic industries, and even from simply lending money at preferential rates of interest. The rules are bad enough for countries such as Britain, but for the economies of East Europe, warped by the post-Soviet catastrophe and in need of state-led development policies, they are a disaster.
In fact, Yanukovych’s advisors calculated that implementing EU standards would cost Ukraine $104 billion.
Moreover, signing a deal with the EU would have cost Kiev $500 billion in trade with Russia.
The EU’s “austerity on steroids”
The EU agreement was, of course, a Neoliberal capitalist plan that would have rolled back many of the generous subsidies, cash assistance schemes, pensions and price supports that formed the Soviet-style Ukrainian social safety net.
Moreover, the AA compels Ukraine to open up its public infrastructure — telecoms, transport, postal services and electricity — to privatisation.
It was the realisation of the above state of affairs that drove Yanukovych to reject the EU association agreement.
As NAOC, a NATO-funded NGO reported in February 2014:
The EU has offered just $800 million in aid as a potential insulator against the immediate effects of joining the EU. When one considers that Ukraine thinks the immediate blow of an EU deal to its economy will be in the region of $20 billion, the EU’s proposal does not even begin to address any issues. Russia on the other hand, have offered $15 billion of economic aid to Ukraine to help mitigate any potential economic disasters in the near future.
So Yanukovych was faced with a choice: accept $800 million when he believes he needs $20 BILLION, or take the $15 billion from Russia.
According to Bloomberg News in 2013, the nutshell version of what forced Yanukovych’s choice was the following:
While Western financial aid required cuts to household heating subsidies…and spending reductions, the president [Yanukovych] said Thursday that Russia’s deal has “no strings.”
Those “strings” were also an impediment. The EU deal would have required that Ukraine submit itself to the tender mercies of the IMF and World Bank, which would have required not just the aforementioned cuts to heating subsidies, but also across the board cuts to pensions and other parts of Ukraine’s extensive social safety net, much of which which was critical due to the lingering after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster.
Putin also promised to cut the price of gas supplies to Ukraine by about one-third to $268.5 per 1,000 cubic meters, from about $400, and to convert $15 billion worth of Russia’s National Welfare Fund, an emergency fund, into Ukrainian securities.
In short, Russia was offering Ukraine a “sweetheart deal”.
Once the pro-Western coup government took control, however, they canceled the Russian deal and set about immediately to sign the EU association agreement.
The coup junta that took power after the Maidan coup was not just pro-Western, it WAS Western. The BBC reported that:
“In an unusual development, three foreigners were appointed to Ukraine’s new government this week”.
Indeed, they were three of the most important cabinet appointments and perhaps the most important of all, that of the powerful Finance Minister, went to Natalie Jaresko, an American-born and educated businesswoman of Ukrainian descent, a veteran of the US State Department who moved to Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR. She is a denizen of the NATO think tank, The Atlantic Council, and is a a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Financing and Capital.
In 2001, Jaresko became CEO of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund, a private equity fund established by the US Congress and USAID to “invest in Ukraine’s economic development”. There, she enriched herself by $1.77 million while “investing” US taxpayer money, according to Consortium News.
In 2004, she co-founded the Horizon Capital, a US government-funded investment fund in Kiev and worked as its CEO.
Title V comprises 28 chapters in the fields of energy cooperation; macro-economic cooperation; management of public finances; taxation; statistics; environment; transport; space; cooperation in science and technology; industrial and enterprise policy; mining and metals; financial services…
As the Brookings Institute crowed:
Ukraine has a rare second chance after the missed opportunity of the 2004 Orange Revolution to put itself on a course to becoming a modern European country, just as neighbouring Poland has done.
That second chance had to be imposed by force, through a violent coup d’état, but the West was finally getting what it wanted — even if they had to kill democracy in Ukraine to get it.
Russia responds
Russia moved quickly to raise tariffs on Ukrainian imports, and thereby restrict business between the two countries. This was disastrous, as Russia was Ukraine’s single largest export market, accounting for nearly a quarter of the country’s international trade.
In response to Ukraine’s signing the EU AA, the Kremlin took a number of steps. Various items have been deemed unsafe and blocked from the Russian market: chocolate, cheese and potatoes, for example. Russia also drastically raised the price Ukraine pays it for natural gas.
All this did was serve to make Ukraine even more abjectly dependent on the West, and especially the United States.
The IMF and World Bank descend on Kiev
Now that Yanukovych was gone, the so-called “international financial institutions” (IFIs) could return triumphant to Kiev to sell their neoliberal snake oil to willing buyers.
As noted in Oakland Institute’s 2014 report, “Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict”:
The relationship with IFIs changed swiftly under the pro-EU government put in place at the end of February 2014. Just a week after the instatement of the new government, the IMF rushed a mission to Kiev. Assessing the conditions of the $17 billion loan, Reza Moghadam, the IMF European Department Director, declared at the end of this visit that he was “positively impressed with the authorities’…commitment to an agenda of economic reform and transparency”.
Likewise, the World Bank announced a $3.5 billion dollar aid package, but imposed neoliberal conditions on the country, asking the government to limit its own power by “removing restrictions that hinder competition and by limiting the role of state ‘control’ in economic activities.”
The report summarises:
While the Bank and the IMF carry out their activities in many countries under the guise of democracy, development, and economic growth, their intent is clear in the case of Ukraine. The rush to provide new aid packages to the country indicates that both institutions rewarded the change to a pro-EU government that is aligned with the neoliberal agenda of the IFIs.
As the Institute reported at the time, the World Bank and the IMF were “pushing through structural reforms and austerity measures that will greatly influence the lives of all Ukrainians”.
Indeed. The New York Times, not surprisingly, was cheerleading the neoliberalisation of Ukraine, saying they “bolster the confidence of foreign investors” by addressing the Ukrainian agricultural sector’s “red tape and inefficiencies.”
Now that the Kiev coup government had agreed to give up Ukraine’s sovereignty and surrender to neoliberal globalism, the stage was set for multinational corporations to begin their systematic plundering of Ukraine.
Step 3: The Corporate Takeover of Ukraine
Western corporate oligarchs have been slavering over the riches of Ukraine for a long time, and the ultimate goal has always been to literally buy the country and its resources. Of course, to do that, they first needed to buy the government.
Zelensky’s “Fire Sale”
Enter Volodymyr Zelensky, the perfect puppet to promote Western interests. Here is a man who was an actor before becoming elected. And he won election — at least in part — because of his fame as a comic actor who portrayed the Ukrainian President in a popular TV show for many years.
Zelensky is not a politician or an ideologue; he is not a nationalist or even a patriot, if his on-stage antics and standup routines are any indication. He is the perfect “empty vessel”, ready to carry water for the US and EU.
And he is leveraging the current conflict to accelerate the wholesale raping of his own country by rapacious Western corporate interests.
BlackRock buys black earth
Everyone knows that Zelensky has spent the last year as the darling of the Western world, feted at major events like the World Economic Forum to the recent G7. Although it has not been as heavily publicised, Zelensky has also been making the rounds of American chambers of commerce, speaking to the American corporate oligarchy and signing deals to sell off his country wholesale to the West.
Zelensky has already done a deal to allow BlackRock to manage Ukraine’s rebuilding after the war.
BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment managers, has been providing “advisory support for designing an investment framework, with a goal of creating opportunities for both public and private investors to participate in the future reconstruction and recovery of the Ukrainian economy,” the company said in a statement last month.
BlackRock is infamous for its aggressive efforts to privatise literally everything. In fact, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink had already been named as a future Treasury Secretary by the Clinton campaign in 2016, and BlackRock team was going to lead the charge in privatising Social Security if Hillary had won the White House.
Luckily, that did not happen.
The massive privatisation and profit-taking that Fink and BlackRock were denied in the US, however, they hope to accomplish in Ukraine.
Plundering “the world’s breadbasket”
Ukraine, with its 32 million arable hectares of rich and fertile black soil (known as “cernozëm”), has the equivalent of one-third of all existing agricultural land in the European Union.
A tantalising prize indeed for Western agribusiness and banks.
Despite the moratorium on land sales to foreigners, by 2016, ten multinational agricultural corporations had already come to control 2.8 million hectares of land. Today, some estimates speak of 3.4 million hectares in the hands of foreign companies and Ukrainian companies with foreign funds as shareholders. Other estimates are as high as 6 million hectares.
In a 2014 report entitled, “The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture”, the Oakland Institute noted:
News reports indicate that in 2012, Monsanto’s Ukraine team doubled in size, and in March 2014 — just weeks after President Yanukovych was deposed — the company invested $140 million in building a new seed plant.
DuPont has also expanded its investments in Ukraine of late. In June 2013, the company announced that it too would be investing in a new seed plant “to meet increasing demand in the region”.
The report continues: “in the last decade, the agricultural sector [in Ukraine] has been characterised by a growing concentration of production within very large agricultural holdings that use large-scale intensive farming systems”.
This could not be possible without the active help of Zelensky:
The moratorium on sales, which the US State Department, IMF and World Bank had repeatedly called to be removed, was finally repealed by the Zelensky government in 2020, ahead of a final referendum on the issue scheduled for 2024. Furthermore, in January, a report by USAID, the U.S. Agency for Assistance and Cooperation, lamented the absence of a reliable land market in the country that was limiting economic growth.
Since Zelensky took office, business has been booming. An analysis by Open Democracy revealed that ten private companies controlled 71 percent of the Ukrainian agricultural market, including multinational corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill.
The final step in the American Playbook entails creating a society that reflects the totalitarian system that currently exists in the United States.
“Inverted Totalitarianism”
The American Empire can only work properly if the US vassal states operate under the same system that exists in the USA. This system is called “inverted totalitarianism”, a name given it by Sheldon Wolin, an American political theorist, who wrote:
“Unlike the Nazis, who made life uncertain for the wealthy and privileged while providing social programs for the working class and poor, inverted totalitarianism exploits the poor, reducing or weakening health programs and social services, regimenting mass education for an insecure workforce threatened by the importation of low-wage workers.”
Renowned journalist Chris Hedges explains further:
In classical totalitarian regimes, such as those of Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. But “under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics — and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”
There is no denying that Ukraine today is a country that is fully driven by economics. The round-the-clock search for ever more “support” from the West has led to an endless parade of congresses, symposia, roundtables, conferences, trade events focussed on “Investing in Ukraine”. Even at the World Economic Forum, Zelensky was feted and hailed as a hero.
“Manufacturing Consent”
Under Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine has taken a radical turn towards totalitarianism:
In March 2022, Zelensky banned all opposition political parties, claiming they were “colluding with Russia” (sound familiar?)
The For Life Party — Zelensky’s biggest political rival — was banned even though its members represent over 10% of the Ukrainian Parliament
Also in March 2022, Zelensky shut down all opposition TV outlets — again, claiming “Russian collusion” — and combined all Ukrainian news outlets into one state-run media organisation.
In January 2023, Zelensky went even further, giving his government broad authority to shut down news websites and sanction journalists.
Currently, the media landscape in Ukraine is as restrictive and one-sided as that of the US — and perhaps even more, thanks to the war with Russia.
Disempowering workers
As mentioned above, a big part of inverted totalitarianism involves keeping the working class down and powerless. This was obviously a tall order for Zelensky, given Ukraine’s socialist history, but in March 2022 he was able to leverage the war with Russia to eliminate most labour rights and eviscerate trade unions in Ukraine. He signed anotyher law in August that allowed for more exploitation, legalising “zero-hour contracts”.
As Oleg Vernyk, President of the “Zahist Pratsi” Independent Labor Union, wrote at the time:
“Once again, the ruling neoliberal party of the president, “Servant of the People”, began to attack the labor rights of Ukrainian citizens. While workers defend Ukraine’s independence from Russian armed aggression, President Zelensky’s faction in parliament stubbornly attempts to deprive workers of their labor rights and social norms.”
The 51st State
So — let’s review:
Pliant, anti-Russian, far-right extremist government in place? CHECK.
Western “Values” of neoliberalism, financialisation, privatisation in place? CHECK.
Natural resources, land, plant, industry sold off to US corporate interests? CHECK.
Political economy, electoral system and mass media all under control by the corporate uni-party? CHECK
In addition to the above, the US taxpayer is footing the bill for the entire Ukrainian economy. Salaries, pensions, subsidies and other expenses are all being paid by the US government.
To the extent that Ukraine will ever again function as a country post-war, it will be a country that has literally sold off everything it has to the US corporate oligarchy.
And why not? Ukraine is now the de facto 51st US State. US corporations and financial interests are buying everything in sight, US investors are seeing visions of meteoric growth once the war ends and they can begin REALLY exploiting Ukraine and Ukrainians under the newly “reformed” labour and financial laws.