While I am against countries invading each other, I don’t know that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has not had positive side effects. The unipolar global order has largely been destroyed or at least severely disrupted. Throwing Russia off the SWFT system motivated the Asian powers to create a parallel financial system. Globalization has taken a double whammy due to the pandemic and now Ukraine. Multipolarity is rising. The Atlanticist-Zionist-Wahhabi alliance has been weakened by this.

For the past 25 years or so, my main political concern has been the growth of a global totalitarian system, with absolute power concentrated in a single unipolar hegemon, and with a complete integrated global financial system, trade system, and supply chain, along with unlimited military, economic, and technology power, plus nuclear weapons, highly sophisticated psywar and propaganda techniques, and modern surveillance technology. First, the pandemic and now Ukraine have disrupted that to a significant degree.

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko, professor of economics, Berkeley

coauthored with Bohdan Kukharskyy (City University of New York), Anastassia Fedyk (UC Berkeley) and Ilona Sologoub (VoxUkraine)

Dear Professor Chomsky,

We are a group of Ukrainian academic economists who were grieved by a series of your recent interviews and commentaries on the Russian war on Ukraine. We believe that your public opinion on this matter is counter-productive to bringing an end to the unjustified Russian invasion of Ukraine and all the deaths and suffering it has brought into our home country.

Having familiarized ourselves with the body of your interviews on this matter, we noticed several recurring fallacies in your line of argument. In what follows, we wish to point out these patterns to you, alongside with our brief response:

Pattern #1: Denying Ukraine’s sovereign integrity

In your interview to Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept from April 14, 2022 you claimed: “The fact of the matter is Crimea is off the table. We may not like it. Crimeans apparently do like it.” We wish to bring to your attention several historical facts:

First, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 has violated the Budapest memorandum (in which it promised to respect and protect Ukrainian borders, including Crimea), the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation (which it signed with Ukraine in 1997 with the same promises), and, according to the order of the UN International Court of Justice, it violated the international law.

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