While railways stall, hospitals fail and scandals spread, Brussels still finds endless billions for its pet proxy war
NATO-EU Europe, that tense, unhappy realm of deeply unpopular yet aggressively doctrinaire centrist regimes, has many grifts.
Its elites, whether national or EU, in business, politics, and the mainstream media and think-tank sinecure system are stunningly inept when it comes to addressing the urgent, even vital problems of their subjects. They could not care less about critical economic decline and general impoverishment, crumbling infrastructure, withering education, and scarce, unequal health care, to name only a few.
But the same elites are endlessly creative and tirelessly busy when looking after themselves, from top to bottom. Recent and countless examples of this ever more shameless divergence between not doing their job of looking after the public interest, on one side, and extensive as well as exclusive “self-care,” on the other, are easy to come by.
Concerning the self-care, we have, for instance, just entered the umpteenth iteration of Ursula von der Leyen – the German boss of the EU doing double duty as US viceroy – illegally deleting the evidence of her very shady deals, from the Corona pandemic (‘Pfizergate’) to the Mercosur trade scheme to Ukraine and handling US President Donald Trump (the ‘Washington Group’).
In Germany, the second-most powerful man in the ruling (if barely) mainstream conservative party, Jens Spahn, has just been exposed as a long-time associate of a secretive network linked to US oligarch – and Antichrist obsessive – Peter Thiel. That’s a new one. Before that, Spahn was mostly known for his extremely suspect and certainly enormously wasteful wheeling and dealing during the pandemic.
Across the Channel, meanwhile, Great Britain is still one of the largest money laundries in the world. According to a fresh report, it is handling a whopping £325 billion of dirty money per year, equivalent to 10% of its GDP.
Regarding letting the public realm go to hell, the entire railway grid of Germany has just gone kaput for a night, with hundreds of trains stranded. And no, not because of sabotage by big bad Russia (and this time even the Ukrainians stayed away from German infrastructure), but a combination of sheer homemade incompetence and decades of deliberate neglect. In Britain, a thorough, forensic report has just revealed that more than 500 mothers and babies were hurt or died as a result of years of systemic negligence and cruelty in two public health care institutions. France, meanwhile, is rocked by a massive scandal involving the severe abuse of minors at dozens of state kindergartens and primary schools.
In a situation like this, you’d think that even the most selfish, conformist, and tunnel-visioned elites would see the need to act, even if only to ensure self-preservation. And act, it turns out, they can: for Ukraine, that is. Or to be precise, not really for Ukraine, if by that you understand ordinary Ukrainians, but for the ultra-corrupt and de facto authoritarian regime currently in power in Kiev. That is the real message of the last Ukraine Recovery Conference just held in the Polish city of Gdansk: The proxy war must go on, at any price.
Money matters: According to Kiev, the two-day conference resulted in the signing of 160 agreements worth €10 billion. Von der Leyen used the conference to announce the disbursement of the first, €3.2-billion tranche of a planned €90-billion ‘loan’ (one of those special ones never to be paid back, at least not by Ukraine). That, according to Von der Leyen herself, comes on top of the well over €200 billion already wasted on one of the most corrupt crony regimes in the world. She’s proud of that, inconceivable as that may seem to a mentally sane European citizen. There also is a special deal with the World Bank worth another cool €3.4 billion.
Lives do not matter: The EU has taken care to make clear that yet more billions for Kiev are not a sign of compassion with ordinary Ukrainians. Indeed, at the same time as it has opened the money spigot even more, it has also signaled that, in return, the Kiev regime will keep feeding Ukrainians into the meat grinder of war. And the EU will make sure they won’t get away. According to a new EU Commission (i.e. von der Leyen’s personal apparat) proposal, Ukrainian men aged 23-60 will soon find it harder to escape conscription by asking for refugee status in the EU: Stay home, young men, because it is sweet and glorious to die, well, not so much for your country really, but for the regime in Kiev that has sold you to the EU. How having even more young males killed off in a country already in deep demographic catastrophe is supposed to promote Ukraine’s “recovery” will remain a mystery.
Another thing that matters very little is history, or to be precise the history of Ukrainian nationalist genocidal ethnic cleansing of Poles in World War II. Not that Polish governments have ever been anything but exceedingly generous about this past, perversely making Warsaw a champion of Ukrainian regimes, one after the other, that not only do not give a damn about these crimes but cultivate a cult around their perpetrators.
Yet recently, Ukraine’s current leader Vladimir Zelensky has pushed his luck a little too far by going out of his way to offend Polish sensibilities with yet another round of public honors for Ukraine’s fascist butchers of World War II. Add the fact that Poland’s political leadership is currently split between a president who is not willing to accept such insults from Kiev and a prime minister who is, as well as the coincidence that this year’s Ukraine Recovery Conference took place in Poland and things were bound to get difficult.
Zelensky had to mail back a high Polish state order he never deserved in the first place, and then stayed at home to sulk. Instead Ukraine’s prime minister, Yulia Sviridenko, went to Poland to cash in. And that is the larger, depressing point, for now at least: Kiev can display its fascism fetish to its heart’s content, even toward Poland, a country with thousands of families who lost members to Ukrainian mass murder and where a solid 60% majority of the population are against helping Kiev get into the EU. But it won’t make a difference in the end. The grift must go on.
In that sense, the Zelensky regime running Ukraine and the EU with most of its national centrist regimes are, actually, a good fit: none of them display the least interest in or respect for what their people want or need. If the Ukraine Recovery Conference has shown one thing, once again, it is that European mainstream and Ukrainian elites do have the same “values”: absolute arrogance, corruption, and a practical contempt for democracy while abusing its name.
