Grigory Yavlinsky:

Russia started its military operation in February 2022 and assumes its share of responsibility for what happened. History will set the record straight. However, today the key goal here is different – to achieve an immediate ceasefire. We need to find a way out now – we need to find a solution that will bring to an end the loss of lives and the destruction of the future. And if we are talking about the restoration of justice, then today the ultimate justice is to save human lives, stop the advance towards a global nuclear disaster and not to allow the future of our children and grandchildren to be destroyed.

Regrettably, the hysterical reaction of the western press and a number of European politicians to the recent phone call by Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin merely attests to the populism and irresponsibility of such voices. In actual fact, we should be welcoming both the actual contact between the presidents of major nuclear powers and the creation of the initial framework for constructive negotiations.  The United States and Europe must, together with Russia and Ukraine, step by step develop the grounds for and persistently try to reach agreement on a ceasefire, and draw up a plan to end the war and subsequently bring peace to the European Continent. This is a major objective that is extremely hard to achieve in the new environment that we find ourselves in.

Ω Ω Ω

It should be acknowledged here that over the past thirty-five years the West has taken a number of actions which led ultimately to the conflict and confrontation with Russia.

Everything started with the failure of Russia’s economic reforms at the start of the 1990s conducted under the direction of the IMF and with overt political and exceptional financial pressure exerted by  the United States, with hyperinflation reaching 2,600% and criminal privatisation. This was followed by NATO’s actual expansion eastwards: Poland, Czechia and Hungary were admitted to the alliance in 1999.

Berliner Zeitung:

Baerbock verplappert sich: Nach der Wahl Milliarden für Ukraine
Eigentlich wollte die EU das Waffen-Projekt bis nach der Bundestagswahl geheim halten. Doch Annalena Baerbock ließ die Katze aus dem Sack.
Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz bekräftigte seine Unterstützung für den EU-Vorschlag, eine Notfallklausel auszulösen, um die Verteidigungsausgaben massiv zu erhöhen, den von der Leyen letzte Woche auf der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz forcierte. Nach diesem Vorschlag werden Länder für Militärausgaben von den Schulden- und Defizitgrenzen der EU befreit. Bis jetzt waren solche grundlegende Veränderungen der EU-Strukturen nicht möglich.

Ein neues Milliarden-Paket könnte, wie bei Corona, durch gemeinsame Schulden finanziert werden. Auch gemeinsame Schulden sind gemäß der EU-Verträge eigentlich verboten. Entsprechende Ideen werden allerdings längst ventiliert. Das Problem: Zahlreiche EU-Staaten haben wegen der milliardenschweren Corona-Hilfen mittlerweile Zahlungsschwierigkeiten. Sie müssen ihre Haushalte sanieren, was in der Regel nur auf Kosten der Sozialleistungen geht.

Video-Player

Media error: Format(s) not supported or source(s) not found

Datei herunterladen: https://mwehle.eu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Wagenknecht-responds-to-question-about-Ukraine-invasion-RTL-Kreuzverhoer-16.02.2025.mp4?_=2

00:00

00:00

00:00

Pfeiltasten Hoch/Runter benutzen, um die Lautstärke zu regeln.

Stern: Wagenknecht im Kreuzverhör: „Bin kein blinder Pazifist“
The reasons behind the invasion are completely sidelined here. It’s not really accurate to say the breadth of debate or discussion is limited, as there is no real debate, just a single dominant paradigm.

Wolfgang Streeck: 2008 was a first warning that this way of life of capitalism — to live on a continuously growing mountain of borrowed money — could not continue forever. And then, of course, came the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The latter in particular, in my view, signified the end of a world which US capital could penetrate at will, to sustain a regime run out of Washington and Wall Street that was meant to include the rest of the world, including Russia and China, and the Global South anyway.

Ewald Engelen: Does that imply that we may have a false conception of what the end of a regime actually looks like?

Wolfgang Streeck: We tend to think that the temporality of regimes is the same as the temporality of human beings, that the regime shifts we see coming will happen somehow during our lifetime. That mistake was made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who expected to witness the end of capitalism in person. The same for Joseph Schumpeter, certainly for Max Weber, and for Werner Sombart, who in the 1930s thought that he was living in “late capitalism.”

So, in that sense one can say that human beings are prone to misread fundamental change. With the war in Ukraine, it comes to mind that the three major historical moments in the reorganization of capitalism were three major wars. There were the Dutch-English wars of the seventeenth century, when the center of capitalism moved from Amsterdam to London. Then there was World War I and the postwar settlement after 1918, which expedited the end of empire, launched a world of nation-states, and prepared another territorial shift, this time from London to Washington. The third was after World War II, with the Keynesian settlement, which embedded nation-states in a United States–dominated global trade regime.

Maybe we now see a repeat in the sense that capitalism adjusts itself to new conditions, in ways that we cannot yet predict. What is coming to an end now is the liberal international order, backed by US imperialism, which was the result of the breakdown of the Soviet Union: in that case the change happened without a war, but related to the arms race of the 1980s.