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volodymyr zelensky
We've Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?
Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going to last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.
Dec 28, 2022
When the president of thepoorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we've reached Peak Zelensky.
It's a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media's shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, "Methinks the media doth hype too much."
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity.
Let's remember that before ascending to his country's presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky's greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I'm not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I'm not joking.
Now, he's Europe's George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect.
Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.
Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn't want you to know.
The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.
In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?
Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.
In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine's electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?
The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.'s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don't. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?
On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, "Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo."
Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.
That's more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn't even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.
Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going to last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.
The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.' imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.
France's Macron and Germany's Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.
Macron suggestedin a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. "We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table."
Scholz was even more specific. In anarticle in Foreign Affairs he declared, "We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe."
This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.'s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia's security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.
Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In aWall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, "Our focus is…to take back territory that's been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th."
Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.' earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken's opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.
Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.
Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It's the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: "The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis." Ding. "Contestant #3?" "Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?"
A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn't have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.
Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin's highest priority and what he asked for--and was denied--in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.
U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.
Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they've constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.
Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let's be honest, often abused--since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.
Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.
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Zelenskyy Accuses Russia of Using Zaporizhzhia Power Plant as 'Nuclear Weapon'
One nonproliferation expert said "there is a high risk that an accident like that of the Fukushima disaster in Japan could occur" if shelling continues at Zaporizhzhia.
Sep 05, 2022
Days after United Nations officials concluded on a long-awaited visit to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine that the Russian-occupied facility has been "violated," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday night that the Russian military is effectively using a "nuclear weapon" by continuing to control the plant.
Zaporizhzhia, which the Russians took over soon after invading Ukraine on February 24, is the largest power plant in Europe, and Zelenskyy compared the occupation to the Russians occupying "six Chernobyls," referring to the deadliest nuclear disaster in history.
"It means the biggest danger in Europe," Zelenskyy told "World News Tonight" on ABC Sunday evening. "So, they occupied it. So that is--means that they use [a] nuclear weapon. That is [a] nuclear weapon."
\u201cEXCLUSIVE: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to @DavidMuir: Russians are using Zaporizhzhia as a \u201cnuclear weapon.\u201d https://t.co/23yrptnbWd\u201d— ABC News (@ABC News) 1662332573
Zelenskyy's comments followed a long-awaited inspection of the facility by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which demanded access to the plant amid weeks of shelling, for which Russian and Ukrainian officials have blamed one another.
The inspection revealed that the plant had repeatedly been disconnected from Ukraine's power grid for the first time in its history. Fires caused by the shelling have also damaged the plant's transmission lines, as Common Dreams reported late last month.
The damaged connections to power lines forced workers to use a lower-voltage reserve line to power equipment that cools the plant's reactors.
"In the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would not allow a reactor to operate under those conditions for more than 24 hours," Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, toldThe New York Times Monday.
The fighting has sparked fears of a nuclear disaster, and IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi warned last week that continued destruction to the "physical integrity of the plant... is something that cannot happen."
Valeriia Hesse, a Ukrainian nonproliferation expert, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Saturday that a disaster like the one that happened at Chernobyl in 1986 is unlikely at Zaporizhzhia because of differences in the plants' reactors, but "there is a high risk that an accident like that of the Fukushima disaster in Japan could occur" if shelling continues.
"In my view, the two most likely scenarios threatening the safety of [Zaporizhzhia] are projectiles hitting a spent fuel storage or the plant's cooling systems being damaged," said Hesse. "Another scenario is to blow up the machine room at the working power units, which is outside the containment building. However, the plant's staff has claimed to be prepared for such a scenario."
The IAEA said it was establishing a long-term presence at the facility, which is still being operated by Ukrainian workers as Russian forces occupy the plant.
"There shouldn't be any military personnel," Zelenskyy said Sunday. "There shouldn't be any military equipment on the territory. And there shouldn't be the workers of [the] nuclear power plant who are surrounded by people with firearms."
Ukrainian officials called on the IAEA to provide more information about the status of the plant as four of the six inspectors left Zaporizhzhia Monday.
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Russian Invasion Threatens All Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plants
Ukraine and Russia should negotiate an agreement to protect plant personnel and allow safe shift changes as well as emergency preparedness and response activities.
Mar 06, 2022
Russian troops in Ukraine seized Europe's biggest nuclear power plant Friday after shelling set part of the complex on fire, ringing alarm bells around the world of a potential nuclear disaster.
None of the reactors were built to withstand a military assault.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of waging "nuclear terror" by attacking the plant deliberately and warned of the potential for another Chernobyl-like catastrophe, which took place in northern Ukraine in 1986 when the country was still part of the Soviet Union.
Plant personnel are operating the 5,700-megawatt, six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant under "gunpoint," according to Ukrainian nuclear officials, and local authorities confirmed that the fire was extinguished around 6:20 a.m. local time (11:20 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast) after burning for nearly five hours.
Fortunately, the fire was confined to a training facility and apparently did not damage the plant's safety systems, and there was no release of radioactive material, according to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, the threat posed by Russia's occupation of the plant, located about 342 miles southeast of Ukraine's capital Kyiv, has not by any means dissipated.
The Zaporizhzhia plant is just one of four Ukrainian nuclear facilities whose 15 reactors provide more than half of the country's electricity. None of the reactors were built to withstand a military assault. Although there is no way to know if Russia intentionally targeted Zaporizhzhia, all of the plants are also vulnerable to indirect fire that could damage critical support systems and surrounding infrastructure, potentially resulting in a fuel meltdown and a radiological release that could contaminate thousands of square miles of terrain.
As the situation on the ground unfolds, there are four major issues to keep in mind about the risks facing Ukraine's nuclear sites in the midst of a war:
Nuclear fuel requires constant cooling
Water-cooled nuclear power plants such as the reactors at Zaporizhzhia utilize the intense heat produced by the fission of nuclear fuel to convert water into steam, which then spins turbines to generate electricity. Under normal operation, electrically powered cooling systems remove the heat by pumping water through the reactor core. If the cooling is interrupted, the fuel can heat up within a matter of hours to a temperature at which it can become damaged and begin to release highly radioactive fission products. If adequate cooling is not ultimately restored, the fuel can melt through the steel reactor vessel and--in the most severe situation--the containment structure can leak or rupture, releasing fission products to the environment.
This sequence of events occurred at three of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011. At Fukushima, an enormous earthquake disrupted the electrical grid that provided the power to run its cooling systems, and the tsunami that followed the earthquake flooded the site, disabling the emergency diesel generators and electrical distribution systems needed to provide backup power in the event that onsite power is lost. Despite the best efforts of plant personnel working under dire conditions and using whatever means were at hand, including car batteries and fire trucks, they were unable to restore sufficient cooling to prevent the three meltdowns. Hydrogen generated by the reaction of the fuel's metal cladding with water accumulated to dangerous levels, resulting in hydrogen explosions that breached the confinements of two of the reactors and allowed more radioactive material to escape.
It's important to note that even if a reactor is safely shut down and no longer generating electricity--which was the case at Fukushima--the fuel remains hot enough to damage itself if cooling is not sufficient. Nuclear reactors have pools on site to store used, or "spent," nuclear fuel underwater, often in densely packed configurations. Like a reactor core, these pools require electrically powered cooling systems, although if cooling is lost there will typically be more time for plant operators to prevent fuel damage than with a reactor core. But for both reactors and spent fuel pools, reliable, long-term backup power is critical.
The Ukrainian plants' spent fuel cooling pools are adjacent to the reactor vessel in the containment building, but they are smaller than pools at U.S. plants.
Ukrainian plants are prepared for accidents, but not military attacks
There are a number of events that could trigger a worst-case scenario involving a reactor core or spent fuel pool located in a war zone: An accidental--or intentional--strike could directly damage one or more reactors. An upstream dam failure could flood a reactor downstream. A fire could disable plant electrical systems. Personnel under duress could make serious mistakes. The bottom line: Any extended loss of power that interrupted cooling system operations that personnel could not contain has the potential to cause a Fukushima-like disaster.
This danger is partly offset by the measures many countries required in the aftermath of Fukushima to strengthen the ability of nuclear plants to cope with accidents, known as station blackouts, involving long-term losses of both offsite power and onsite emergency diesel generators. Plant owners acquired additional equipment to provide emergency cooling, including portable diesel generators and diesel-powered fire pumps, and developed strategies to use them. However, these measures only work if the equipment is available and functional when needed, and plant personnel are capable of setting them up in time. Thus, this emergency equipment must survive whatever event disables installed (non-portable) plant equipment, and personnel must be able to get the equipment where it needs to go.
Nuclear plants have to ensure this post-Fukushima safety equipment can survive extreme weather events and earthquakes, but it is unlikely that they have "hardened" it enough to survive a major military assault. Each of the six reactors at Zaporizhzhia has three emergency diesel generators and there are two additional generators shared by Units 5 and 6. That configuration is more protective than the U.S. requirement for only two emergency diesel generators per reactor unit. Ukraine requires nuclear plants to store sufficient fuel to operate the generators for seven days, the same as in the United States.
While redundant safety systems are necessary, they are not sufficient. There is always a risk of "common-mode" failures that affect all redundant equipment in the same way, so plants also need diverse backup systems. At Zaporizhzhia, there are additional options for restoring power, including connections to local hydroelectric plants and a thermal power plant. And if plant operators cannot restore power through normal means, then they would have to resort to using the 16 on-site mobile pumping units (fire engines) that the site obtained during its post-Fukushima upgrade. However, the likely availability and reliability of these units, especially under attack conditions, is unknown.
Plant operators' health and safety is a major concern
Another issue that has become glaringly apparent is the fate of nuclear facility personnel when their workplace is seized by a hostile power. The takeover of the Chernobyl site on February 24 resulted in a situation where, as the Ukrainian government reported in a March 2 letter, Russian occupiers have kept plant operators at the site for a week without a new shift to relieve them, are subjecting them "to psychological pressure and moral exhaustion," and giving them "limited opportunities to communicate, move, and carry out full-fledged maintenance and repair work...." This dangerous situation raises the question of how shift turnover could be accomplished--that is, whether offsite personnel would be willing or able to report to work under such conditions. A prolonged inability to bring in fresh replacements would obviously impair the ability of the onsite staff to get enough rest to do their jobs effectively.
Although Chernobyl, which has no operating reactors, does have a spent nuclear fuel storage pool requiring attention, the problem of staff turnover will be more acute at operating nuclear plants such as Zaporizhzhia, which--given Ukraine's reliance on nuclear power--likely cannot afford to be out of commission for more than a short time. And even if the country did shut them down, they would still require a significant complement of operations and maintenance personnel to manage the reactors and spent fuel storage facilities. Plant staff would experience fatigue on top of stress, which could lead to serious mistakes in running the reactors. If Russia takes over the plants, it may have no other choice but to bring in its own personnel to take over plant operation.
A Ukrainian meltdown would not be another Chernobyl
As Chernobyl so graphically demonstrated, a nuclear accident in Ukraine has the potential not only to contaminate Ukrainian territory, but also Belarus, Russia, and much of the rest of Europe. Although also Soviet-designed, the VVER-1000 light-water reactors in Ukraine, such as the six at Zaporizhzhia, are fundamentally different from the Chernobyl design. They are not as vulnerable to the particular sequence of events, including a massive steam explosion and long-duration fire, that made Chernobyl so severe and led to the wide dispersal of radioactivity over both Eastern and Western Europe, and even caused detectable levels in much of the Northern Hemisphere.
The consequences of a nuclear accident at one of the four operational Ukrainian nuclear plants could be similar to that of Fukushima, however. Multiple reactors could experience a loss of cooling and core damage without necessarily causing the major confinement breach that occurred at Chernobyl. The most significant land contamination from Fukushima extended at most some 25 miles from the site. Because of Fukushima's location on the coast, however, 80 percent of the radioactive material the disaster released into the atmosphere is believed to have drifted over the ocean, which would not be the case at Ukraine's land-locked plants. And even local contamination could greatly complicate the ability of Ukrainian authorities to care for both its civilian population and its troops.
After Fukushima, reactor owners worldwide also made plant modifications and developed plans to mitigate any radioactive releases that could occur after a core-melt accident. At Zaporizhzhia, operators installed systems in some of the reactors to neutralize hydrogen gas that could be released into the containment, but such systems generally cannot cope with high rates of hydrogen formation. Ukrainian authorities also determined that it would be appropriate for plants to install filtered vents to allow operators to reduce containment pressure without releasing large quantities of radioactive materials, but implementation has been slow. Other vulnerabilities, such as the potential for containment bypass in VVER-1000s in the event of a core melt accident, are even more difficult to address.
What can be done? From a safety perspective, the best-case scenario would be for Russia and Ukraine to establish "safe zones" around nuclear plants, modeled after the temporary "humanitarian corridors" that the two sides have agreed to create. In addition, Ukraine and Russia should negotiate an agreement to protect plant personnel and allow safe shift changes as well as emergency preparedness and response activities.
Let's hope cooler heads prevail.
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