EUROPEAN VALUES AT WORK -- Poland, Ukraine, Russia, EU

 Ukraine is attacked by neighbor Russia for no appreciable reason, other than the unsettling possibility that "Ukrainian politicians" might not love Russia's political elite nearly as much as the latter would like them to. Love is not in the air. Cause for war.

The USA and its allies supply arms and technology to Ukraine. All sides prepare for yet another forever war--Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. Adding a nice touch, a veritable "post-Soviet" couleur locale in Ukraine: Financing for Ukraine's war effort is tied to privatization of the country's assets, especially agriculture, to European and north American capital.

The Big Lie of Ukraine's EU-membership is still touted here-and-there. It is but a psy-op effort designed to conceal the fact that--and, for anyone familiar with the specific, institutional as well as broader, geopolitical histories of the EU, it is amply clear--it is either an exercise in wishful thinking or pure insanity to expect a full Ukraine membership in the EU in the geopolitically foreseeable future. EU capital already got everything it has ever wanted from Ukraine. Full membership would only mean subsidies and free movement of labor--in an EU dominated by the extreme right. Extremely unlikely, if you ask me.

"Horror vacui" (fear of a vacuum) exists in geopolitics. So, preparing on the sidelines, there is the "Intermarium" project, an effort to (re-)establish a contiguous empire linking the lands that had, at some point in history, been controlled by the szlachta, the Polish nobility, connecting the Baltic to the Black Sea in a single suprastate entity, (not unlike the EU, only considerably more Christian-conservative), a geopolitical dream of some on the extreme-right in Poland. Why such a project of relinquishing sovereignty would be more palatable to the range of nationalist to extreme-nationalist to neofascist forces in power in Ukraine than brotherly friendship with Russia, beats me. Obviously I am missing something important here.

Women, children and elderly have fled Ukraine by the millions. A recent Brookings Institution study put the number of Ukrainian refugees abroad at 7.6 million (of which 2.85 million are in Russia, BTW), with another 13 million "stranded in Ukraine," i.e., internal refugees and displaced persons. That's altogether 45% of the country's total population. A vast majority went, first, to Poland. Then, some (mostly people who had already had migrant family members farther west) moved on to Germany and elsewhere in western Schengenland. Some have returned to Ukraine. But many (almost 1.5 million, according to the Brookings source) have stayed in Poland, where language differences are relatively small and millions of Ukrainians are already working, as Gastarbeiter, at deeply depressed wages, giving a major, mostly unrecorded, untaxed and unregulated boost to the Polish economy. Two Polish authors have recently estimated the total number of Ukrainians in Poland at 2.9 million or, 7.6% of the total population of Poland, making up, at least partly, for the labor vacuum created by the westward move--within Schengen or north America--of Polish labor, displaced by the post-socialist restructuring of the Polish economy. The Polish state has tacitly and not-so-tacitly been encouraging the vast subsidy-through-cheap-labor that Polish capital has received from Ukraine, even before the war. As a result, Poland is on its way to becoming a veritable economic "miracle", of a semiperipheral kind, with some measurable economic growth in spite of being in the ailing EU, post-covid, and with a war on the border. All it needs is more countries to exploit through unequal exchange.

It is at this point that the US began direct negotiations with Russia, without involving Ukraine, talks about ending the war and post-war geopolitical settlement. Such negotiations have recently involved direct meetings between the heads (!) of the foreign intelligence services, as in CIA and FSB (!!) of the USA and Russia (!!!).

Two citizens of Poland are killed with missiles manufactured in Russia and fired from Ukraine. It may or may not have been an accident. At this point, several hundred thousand Ukrainian children not to mention their adult female and elderly relatives (remember: the total number of Ukrainians in Poland is almost 3 million, see above), live in Poland.

Russian manufactured Ukrainian missiles rain on the country where Ukrainian refugees have taken refuge. Got it?

"Friendship", the oil pipeline project, the pride of the erstwhile Soviet bloc, is rendered unusable by the Russian air force at several key points in Ukraine.

Kherson is fully mined. Kyiv and other cities are under bombardment.

The winter is coming, to Ukraine and Poland. As well as western Europe that everybody talks about.

Oh, yes, almost forgot: Hey, Europe, boycott Qatar, how dare it do what the West had done for five centuries!

EUROPEAN VALUES AT WORK OFF