Summary in seconds: presenting the war in Ukraine as a crime, the war perpetrators, and victims, is Russia the sole perpetrator, supporting autocracy in the Russian Republic, dark money everywhere, and what to expect in our upcoming article.
Towards the end of my previous editorial article, “The Ukrainian Hysteria: (1) should we care?”, I promised to investigate the Ukrainian war as a crime. Since the detailed features of the Ukrainian war are not yet available, I will utilize the rules of investigative thinking1 to analyze available information and attempt to create a picture of this crime. In this article, I will present the criminals who are responsible for this war and their victims.
The Ukrainian war perpetrators and their victims:
In any conflict, there is nothing further from the truth than rushing to incriminate the ones who fired the first shot as the sole perpetrators. History tells us that in violent confrontations between two groups of people, decisions taken behind closed doors (days or even years earlier) were the first acts of aggression that preceded firing the first bullet, and our current conflict is no different. With the current scarcity of undisputed evidence pointing to the ones committing the crime, it seems much easier to identify the war victims first, then look for who put them in this category and name them as predators.
In the 2022 version of the long-standing Russia-Ukrainian conflict, there is a spectrum of victims. There is no doubt that Ukrainian civilians and members of their military are paying the highest price as a consequence of this war. In the meantime, we must not lose sight of the suffering on the Russian side. Russians are victims of an autocratic regime that works for the pleasure of one man, “The Dear Leader.” The person at the top of this corrupt cesspool is surrounded by a clan of oligarchs who support the regime as long as they can get away with their systemic theft structure. Russian conscripts are teenagers forced to march into this meat-grinding conflict without even knowing who are they fighting.
The impact of this war does not stop at the Russian-Ukrainian border but rather extends to many brown and black people who live thousands of miles away, and in many cases, never even heard the word Ukraine. We should not forget the pain that this war is inflicting on millions in the Middle East and Africa who have lost the ability to provide a morsel of bread to their families.
Now, if these are the victims, who are the perpetrators? Clearly, the Russians are the major suspect of this crime. After all, they crossed their neighbor’s border with soldiers, tanks, artillery, and anything else their archaic army could spare. They shelled Ukrainian cities and villages indiscriminately, killing, and injuring thousands and displacing millions out of their homes and neighborhoods.
However, on the aggressor’s side of the equation of this conflict, the Russians were not alone. There are disguised suspects that may have played a role in setting the scene for the Russian invasion. Suspects, like NATO member countries, including the United States. The fingerprints of their crime are all over the policy of swallowing ex-Warsaw Pact countries and denying Russia the comfort zone that it enjoyed since the end of WWII. NATO soldiers used to be at the German side of their shared borders with Poland; now they are directly looking into the eyes of their Russian counterpart across the borders of the Baltic countries and Belarus.
Did the Russians have legitimate rights to push back against the slow and deliberate shrinkage of their buffer and comfort zones, which they created and maintained along their eastern borders after their horrific suffering in the Great Patriotic War, also known to non-Russians as WWII?
The US, with some help from its Western allies, is also indirectly responsible for the creation of the autocratic regime that has been in control of the Russian Republic since its resurrection in 1991. Evidence of supporting Boris Yeltsin (a corrupt, drunken Politian) to seize and hold the position of the first elected President of Russia has been reported in multiple respected newspapers since the 1990s.2 In addition, a newly declassified memo provided a window into the Yeltsin-Clinton relationship in 1999.3 The memo stated how President Yeltsin of Russia introduced Vladimir Putin as a potential successor for the Russian presidency and asked President Clinton for his approval.
The Russian pyramid of kleptocracy stayed in power in Russia for almost thirty years and stole billions of dollars from their helpless and oppressed citizens. This persistent and well-orchestrated embezzlement of the Russian state started shortly after the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and continued throughout his reign, which lasted until the last day of the 1990s. The corruption and organized theft of Russian resources worsened during Vladimir Putin’s time in power, which lasted for over two decades. The question is, could that massive transfer of “dark money” have been done without the knowledge of the “renowned” intelligence agencies in Europe and in the United States, especially after 9/11 when every penny crossing international borders was tabulated and closely followed? I do not think so!
In 1997, Forbes Magazine4 published their “World’s Billionaires list,” which included four Russians for the first time. The magazine named them “the earliest Russian oligarchs” who got rich during the chaotic privatization of the 1990s. In April 2022, the same magazine counted 83 Russian billionaires in its yearly “Billionaires list”, and the magazine considered 68 of them to be oligarchs. If Forbes magazine was aware of who is who on the Russian billionaires list, do you think that the formidable Western intelligence agencies did not know about them?
These oligarchs did not hide behind the doors of their mansions and did not bury their stolen loots in the Siberian wilderness. They bought luxury condos in prominent avenues of our major cities, and they socialized with our rich and powerful. They ordered our shipyards to build them yachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars and swaggered them in our ports and waters. They bought famous sport teams in our countries and paraded with them in our downtowns when they won any local tournament. They were in the news every time they bought a large, rare diamond or a painting worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They did not hide; they were in our faces, and nobody dared to ask them, “How did you get these billions?” or even the more important question, “How much corruption did you manage to inflict on our societies with this dark money?”
In its 2020 report5, the US think tank “the Atlantic Council” mentioned that Russians have about ‘ONE TRILLION US DOLLARS’ of “dark money” hidden abroad. The report added, “this money can be exploited and steered by the Kremlin for espionage, terrorism, industrial espionage, bribery, political manipulation, disinformation, and many other nefarious purposes.”
Top of Form In the next article of this series, I will cover the Ukrainian war timeline from before February 24 to September 11, 2022.
References
1. Crime Investigation Process: according to criminologists, to understand the process of criminal investigation it is necessary to recognize the distinction between investigative tasks and investigative thinking. While investigative tasks focus on the process of information gathering, investigative thinking concentrate on the process of analyzing information and theorizing to develop investigative plans.
2. Americans Claim Role in Yeltsin Win
The Los Angeles Times
By: Eleanor Randolph: July 9, 1996 @ 12 AM PT
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-09-mn-22423-story.html
3. Putin’s ‘A Solid Man’: Declassified Memos Offer Window Into Yeltsin-Clinton Relationship
Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty
By: Mike Eckel: August 30, 2018 @ 20:58 GMT
4. The Forbes Ultimate Guide to the Russian Oligarchs
Forbes
By: Giacomo Tognini and John Hyatt – updated April 14, 2022
5. Russian oligarchs: Where do they hide their ‘dark money’?
BBC News
Published 28 March
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60608282
* This article was previously posted on June, 2022 in my earlier blog “My Islam”. The article has been slightly modified to fit its current posting date.