In Ukraine, a proxy war on the planet
As the Ukraine crisis causes global havoc, US officials won’t negotiate with Russia to end the fighting — and are even willing to “countenance” mounting hunger as a result.
In 2015, one year after a US-backed coup ushered in a US-friendly, far-right-dominated government in Kiev, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer issued a stark warning. “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path,” he said. “And the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”
Mearsheimer’s cause for concern was what he identified as a US-led campaign to convert Ukraine into a NATO proxy on Russia’s border. The events since have proved him to be both tragically prescient, and understated.
In using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there”, as Adam Schiff put it in January 2020, the US has not only sacrificed countless Ukrainian lives. Four months into Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration is signaling its willingness to sacrifice the rest of the planet, particularly the most vulnerable areas.
In an article headlined “Ukraine War Pushes Millions of the World’s Poorest Toward Starvation,” the Wall Street Journal summarizes the impact of the Ukraine war on global hunger:
The World Food Program says that increases in the cost of food and fuel since March have pushed an additional 47 million people into acute food insecurity, when a person is no longer able to consume enough calories to sustain her life and livelihood, taking the total to 345 million people world-wide. Of those, some 50 million are living on the edge of famine.
In the energy crisis that has followed Russia’s invasion, the New York Times adds, “the poorest and most vulnerable” have felt “the harshest effects.” In Asia and Africa, the International Energy Agency recently warned that “higher energy prices have meant an additional 90 million people in Asia and Africa do not have access to electricity.”
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