Ukraine’s uprising against NATO, neoliberals and oligarchs – an interview with Boris Kagarlitsky

Click here to access this interview from CounterFire (Britain). (a must-read article)

Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Moscow-based Institute for Studies in Globalization and Social Movements.

Kagarlitsky's description of the events in Ukraine, and related events elsewhere, supplemented by an astute class analysis provides an excellent understanding of the current complex nature of the Ukrainian conflict. What we've gotten up till now from most of the alternative media are one-dimensional views portraying the conflict as a popular resistance against a Western sponsored regime in Kiev, or the good versus evil Manichean paradigm. The scene in Ukraine and Europe is much more complicated than that. Just take a cursory look at the following excerpted paragraphs, then read and study the complete article.

This crisis [the global economic crisis in 2008] not only undermined the capacity of the Ukrainian elite to achieve compromise but it also brought in new players such as the EU, the US and Nato. Given the level of crisis in the West, the important factor for stabilising the system became its expansion. And the EU is very much in trouble, especially in the south – the capacity of these societies to reproduce themselves is so undermined by neoliberal policies – that you can hardly say how to keep these societies functioning without moving away from neoliberalism. But this is precisely what the neoliberal elites are not going to allow. The only chance to escape or solve these contradictions is to expand the system, and shift more resources into the system.

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There is a permanent conflict among the Russian elites, especially after the first wave of sanctions against Ukraine. Sections of the Russian elite began to panic, and also they hate these people’s republics because they are very threatening for the Russian state, raising debates about nationalisation, overthrowing the oligarchy and so on. 

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While there are progressive demands on the one hand from the grassroots, there are also bourgeois elements within the republican leaderships, and also constant pressure from Moscow not to move in these more progressive directions, using its capacity to control the frontier and provide or stop supplies of food and ammunition to blackmail the republics. For example, they tried hard to block nationalisation programmes that were declared in both republics, unfortunately with some success. If they were to go forward, Moscow would cut supplies. So there is a constant struggle. But there is also a constant struggle inside Russia because there is a growing movement to defend these republics, and there’s a growing movement to support these very demands. So it’s a struggle that’s continuing on both sides of the frontier.