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The West concedes to Russia, admitting that the economic sanctions against Moscow are not working, according to a narrative promoted by a well-known pro-Russian website in Romania.
The West is losing the war it never fought
NEWS: “The war is clearly not unfolding as the West had hoped it would! We seem to be in for a long “Stand down!” process, with the West trying to save face. After Ukraine’s accession got postponed at the summit in Vilnius to God knows when and Zelenskyy got told off, another shocking piece of news comes to shatter the official narrative we’ve been fed for the last two and a half years. According to Reuters, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has suggested to Vladimir Putin that Russia would be accepted back into the SWIFT financial-messaging system in exchange for its agreement to extent the Ukrainian grain export deal. […] The West needs Ukrainian grain to feed its population, whereas Ukraine needs to resulting profits to keeps its struggling economy afloat. […] To make this proposal as politically appealing as possible and thus save face, the UN Secretary General stepped forward. The facts are however harsh: the exchange suggested by the West is a humiliation that will be hardly be erased. It’s overwhelming evidence that the West is not winning the war in Ukraine, and a sign that Russia cannot be defeated or isolated, and that Putin’s regime cannot be toppled, as Biden promised”.
NARRATIVES: 1. The West is struggling with an economic crisis which Russia’s return to SWIFT can solve. 2. Ukrainian grain exports are in fact bound to Western markets, not poor nations. 3. Russia is fighting the West.
BACKGROUND: The fallout from the war in Ukraine transpires not just at local level, but it also reaches as far as Africa and the East, upsetting global food security, which is strongly impacted by the role of the two belligerent countries. For instance, according to data provided by the European Commission, Ukraine covers 10% of global grain demands, 15% of corn and 13% of barley. Ukraine is also the largest producer of sunflower oil, accounting for 50% of total global trade. With the launch of the invasion, Russia also imposed a blockade on Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, thus staving off the exports of large quantities of grain. Following negotiations mediated by the United Nations and Turkey, Moscow agreed to allow exports of Ukrainian grain through maritime security corridors all the way to the Bosporus, where the cargo ships were inspected by mixed committees. Vessels carrying Ukrainian grain as well as the ports they used were prohibited from being targeted by war operations.
Earlier this month, however, Russia announced it would withdraw from the Ukrainian Black Sea grain deal, claiming the conditions for its further extension have not been met and condemning several obstacles introduced by the West hindering the exports of Russian agricultural products and fertilizers. The list included difficulties in terms of logistics, payments and assurances, as a result of Russian banks getting banned from using the SWIFT international system of inter-bank payments. As a result, in the last two weeks, United Nations officials have been negotiating with the Kremlin to secure an extension of the agreement, which up to this point remain unsuccessful.
PURPOSE: To promote anti-Western and by extension anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and to fuel pro-Russian sentiment.
Russia’s return to SWIFT – the Radio Yerevan version
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: As Veridica has already pointed out, the sanctions imposed on Russia did not trigger an economic crisis in the West, whereas the fact that Russia is now reporting difficulties in the export of products that were not subject to sanctions proves the measures work. Moreover, the European Union considered the reconnection of Russia to the SWIFT system only after the end of the war in Ukraine. Russia is the one now calling its return to SWIFT, ever since the end of last year, conditioning the extension of the “Initiative on Black Sea grain” on Russian banks getting reaccepted in the international system of bank payments. As a result, as an active party in the agreement on Ukrainian grain exports, the UN did negotiate a number of options that would facilitate the export of Russian agricultural products. In this respect, the American bank JP Morgan Chase & Co was expected to start processing a number of payments for Russian grain exports, guaranteed by the US government. Additionally, the UN is working with the African Export and Import Bank to create a platform that would help process transactions of Russian grain and fertilizers to Africa. Last but not least, representatives of the United Nations negotiated with the European Union to connect a branch of the Russian Agricultural Bank to the SWIFT system for the one-time processing of payments concerning export operations for Russian agricultural products that are not subject to Western sanctions.
The claim that Ukrainian grain exports are actually bound to the European Union instead of Africa and Asia has been promoted by the Kremlin as early as 2022. It can be easily verified that nearly two thirds of grain ships departing from Ukraine are directed to Asia, Africa and the Middle East. A large part of the grain that reaches Europe is also unloaded with a view to being processed and then exported as flour or derivatives to countries struggling with food insecurity.
The false narrative about Russia being at war with the collective West was equally debunked by Veridica. No NATO, EU or other Western state is involved in the conflict in Ukraine, and the war against the West cannot be interpreted as a defensive effort, because no country ever attacked Russia. Rather, it was Russia that invaded a sovereign state. Moreover, the Kremlin failed to provide evidence about actual confrontations on the battlefield against regular troops of any NATO or EU state.
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