Ukraine war: Sanctions backfire?
In February 2022 President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation ordered his armed forces to invade, or conduct a special operation in, Ukraine. West war commentators claim that Putin expected his special operation to be quick and successful, remove the government of Ukraine and install his own favoured leadership. In Moscow, the official motivation for the special operation was and is different. For Russian politicians, Russia’s special operation was meant to denazify the ‘terrorists’ integrated into the Ukrainian army since 2014. These ‘neo-Nazis’ were and are still accused of wantonly killing Russian speaking Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine.
The Occident and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) moved quickly to impose economic sanctions on Russia and the prognosis was that Russia’s economy would crumble, the Russian would rise and drive Putin out of office. As the war progressed, Ukraine was heavily armed by NATO countries, with some mercenaries or freelance fighters joining in the war. Two months later. Russia’s massive army seemed to be on the retreat. RT TV reported that, in fact, the withdrawal from Kiev, Karkiv, and other cities was tactical as Russia’s main goal was to secure the Eastern and South Eastern Russian speaking regions, which goal seems to have been achieved.
The Ukraine war has proved that sanctions, when carelessly applied, can backfire. In the USA and the UK inflation is reported to be at its highest in 40 years all because of the sanctions that the NATO countries applied on Russia. The price of basic edible goods is soaring. Everything is blamed on Putin’s war.
In Africa, Latin America, North America, and other regions, the price fuel has skyrocketed. The price of fertilisers has gone up all over the world because, we now learn, the whole world largely relies on Russian and Ukrainian chemical fertilisers. Wheat is in short supply across the world all because, we now learn, the bread eating world relies on Russian and Ukrainian wheat.
The United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Gutteres, has mournfully appealed to Russia’s president to show a humane heart and allow the shipment of grain and other staples from blockaded Ukrainian ports. But Russia is quiet, playing its own joker in the current West-East economic war. Why the Secretary General is not appealing to NATO to stop the sanctions, only Jah Rastafari knows.
We have asked before why the world is more interested in fighting and imposing sanctions than in finding a settlement. If Biden had asked for talks with Putin well before the war all this suffering would not have happened because essentially the war would have been avoided. If the EU wasn’t belligerent in its approach, the war would have been avoided. The Great Mahatma Gandhi said that words of peace are more potent than firearms. If NATO had not taken the president of Ukraine as a victim who needed unqualified support, the war would have been averted because Russia’s concerns could have been addressed without resorting to arms.
Pope Francis has not minced words. The real beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine are the arms manufacturers and nations are using Ukraine as a testing ground.
While the arms manufacturers are raking in profits, the people all over the world are suffering.
Indirectly, though, this suffering is good. It teaches us to rely on our own. Instead of relying on foreign energy and chemical fertilisers, governments all over the world, especially those that rely on farming, should invest in chemical fertilizer production. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, fertilizer production should be upped. International lenders should assist with loans to regional bodies to build regional fertiliser production facilities.
In Malawi, some years back, the government of (ka) Ngwazi Bingu wa Mutharika commenced a fertiliser production factory in Lilongwe. Before he even died, the fertiliser factory project was abandoned or shelved. His successors have not even mentioned it in their budgets. It is still shelved. The building erected to house the production is still standing in Kanengo.
Now, we know what relying on ‘otherness’ can do. If Africa, Latin America, and Asia had their own high production fertiliser manufacturing plants, the Russia-Ukraine war would not have had much impact on us, perched thousands of kilometres from the war epicenter.
If, we, in Africa, had acknowledged that we are an agricultural continent, chemical fertiliser production would have been our first priority. Now we know it should be and it will be. We hope.
