Archive | 2025/12/23

Jednokierunkowa maszyna migracyjna

Dec23

Jednokierunkowa maszyna migracyjna

Aynaz Anni Cyrus

Jak państwa islamskie i azjatyckie bronią swojej tożsamości, podczas gdy Zachód rezygnuje z własnej

Talibowie poinformowali, że 9 grudnia irańscy strażnicy graniczni zabili co najmniej dziesięciu Afgańczyków próbujących nielegalnie przedostać się do Iranu. Los dwóch kolejnych osób pozostaje nieznany. Ciała zostały przekazane rodzinom, lokalni przedstawiciele Talibów zażądali wszczęcia dochodzenia, na co Iran do tej pory nie odpowiedział.

Po tym, jak opisałam to zdarzenie – ani niezwykłe, ani zaskakujące dla kogokolwiek znającego realia regionu – zdałam sobie sprawę, że to właściwy moment, by rozszerzyć tę dyskusję. Ten incydent obnaża bowiem znacznie szerszy problem, z jakim mierzymy się na Zachodzie, i pokazuje, jak dalece silniejszych działań wymaga sytuacja, jeśli rzeczywiście chcemy chronić nasze własne państwa.

 

Zachód pochłania falę nielegalnej migracji z krajów o większości muzułmańskiej i azjatyckiej, a jednocześnie odmawia zadania trudnych pytań czy zmierzenia się z realiami tych migracji ludności. Nie dzieje się tak dlatego, że Zachód jest wyjątkowo współczujący. To wynik powtarzanego w kółko, błędnego przekonania, że dyplomacja i sygnalizowanie moralności mogą zastąpić egzekwowanie prawa, bezpieczeństwo i zachowanie tożsamości narodowej.

Śmiertelna w skutkach reakcja Iranu na migrantów z Afganistanu jest dobrze udokumentowana. W ciągu ostatniej dekady Afgańczycy byli tam rozstrzeliwani, bici lub deportowani bez żadnego przesłuchania i bez procesu sądowego. Iran uzasadnia to względami bezpieczeństwa narodowego i konsekwentnie trzyma się tej polityki.

Turcja stosuje tę samą logikę. Human Rights Watch potwierdziła wiele przypadków, w których tureckie siły graniczne otwierały ogień do Syryjczyków próbujących przekroczyć granicę – w tym do rodzin z dziećmi. Ocaleni opisują ostrzał bez ostrzeżenia i natychmiastowe odsyłanie z powrotem. Ankara zaprzecza wszystkim oskarżeniom i kontynuuje tę politykę do dziś. I mogę zaświadczyć, że takie traktowanie nie ogranicza się do Syryjczyków – Irańczycy próbujący przedostać się do Turcji spotykają się z tą samą reakcją: użyciem broni, wypędzaniem z powrotem i zerową tolerancją.

Historia Arabii Saudyjskiej jest jeszcze bardziej jednoznaczna. Raport ONZ z 2023 roku udokumentował setki Jemeńczyków zabitych na granicy saudyjsko-jemeńskiej z użyciem karabinów maszynowych i ciężkiej broni. Niektórych rozstrzelano po złapaniu. Rząd saudyjski nie zmienił swojej polityki ani nie sygnalizował zamiaru jej zmiany.

Siły graniczne Indii zabiły w ciągu ostatnich piętnastu lat ponad tysiąc obywateli Bangladeszu. Amnesty International i inne organizacje wielokrotnie dokumentowały przypadki strzelania „bez ostrzeżenia” do rolników, nastolatków i pracowników migrujących. Indie bronią tej polityki jako niezbędnej dla stabilności państwa i walki z przemytem.

Malezja, Tajlandia i Indonezja regularnie odsyłają łodzie z uchodźcami Rohingya z powrotem na otwarte morze. Łodzie z migrantami były odrzucane i pozostawiane bez wsparcia, co prowadziło do śmierci głodowej. Nikt w Azji Południowo-Wschodniej nie traktuje tego jako problemu praw człowieka.

Chiny stosują najbardziej surowy model: osoby przekraczające granicę nielegalnie – zwłaszcza obywatele Korei Północnej i Mjanmy – są zatrzymywani, „znikają” lub są odsyłani do krajów, gdzie czekają ich tortury. Nie istnieje żadna ścieżka azylowa ani kontrola opinii publicznej.


W ten sposób świat poza Zachodem egzekwuje swoją suwerenność – konsekwentnie, bez przeprosin i z przekonaniem, że tożsamość oraz stabilność są nierozerwalnie związane z kontrolą demograficzną.

Iran pozostaje irański, ponieważ broni irańskości. Turcja pozostaje turecka, ponieważ państwo nie dopuszcza niekontrolowanego napływu. Arabia Saudyjska pozostaje saudyjska, bo odrzuca jakikolwiek wpływ demograficzny. Indie utrzymują swój trzon demograficzny, stosując siłę, gdy uznają to za konieczne. Chiny utrzymują jednolitość społeczną poprzez model zerowej tolerancji.

Nie znaczy to, że te rządy troszczą się o dobro swoich obywateli – ale zależy im na zachowaniu własnego sposobu życia, zasobów i kontroli. Chronią swoje rynki pracy, tożsamość kulturową i strukturę polityczną z pełną determinacją. Nie odwołują się w kwestii swojego przetrwania do argumentów moralnych, oczekiwań z zewnętrznych.

Tymczasem Zachód postanowił postrzegać ochronę granic jako porażkę moralną, a nie podstawową funkcję państwa. Uczy się nas, że suwerenność to rasizm, ostrożność demograficzna to ekstremizm, a tożsamość narodowa to wstydliwa spuścizna historii. Rezultat jest przewidywalny: jedna strona zachowuje spójność, podczas gdy druga rozpuszcza się w paraliżu decyzyjnym.

Premier Wielkiej Brytanii, Keir Starmer, niedawno wezwał do rewizji Europejskiej Konwencji Praw Człowieka, ponieważ Europa nie jest w stanie deportować nielegalnych migrantów bez procesów prawnych, nakazów sądowych i reakcji politycznej. Nawet podstawowe procedury usuwania wymagają współpracy sądów, NGO, parlamentu i wielu organów nadzorczych.

Iran nie negocjuje swojej polityki granicznej z sądami ani organizacjami pozarządowymi. Turcja nie debatuje nad deportacjami w parlamencie. Arabia Saudyjska nie pyta aktywistów o zgodę. Indie nie czekają na międzynarodowy konsensus. Chiny w ogóle nie dopuszczają społeczeństwa obywatelskiego do głosu.


Różnica ma charakter strukturalny: Zachód potrzebuje zgody, by działać. Reszta świata działa, ponieważ przetrwanie jest samo w sobie uzasadnieniem.

Państwa wysyłające migrantów na Zachód nie przyjmują migrantów z Zachodu, nie dopuszczają do zmian demograficznych u siebie i nie pozwalają, by obca kultura kształtowała ich społeczeństwa. Ruch migracyjny ma charakter jednokierunkowy, ponieważ bodźce działają tylko w jednym kierunku.

Konsekwencje tego ponoszą zachodnie miasta, podatnicy, systemy społeczne i lokalne społeczności, podczas gdy kraje wysyłające migrantów pozostają odizolowane od presji kulturowych, ekonomicznych i bezpieczeństwa, które ich obywatele przenoszą na Zachód.


Przekaz jest jasny: oni chronią swoją tożsamość, oczekując, że Zachód zrezygnuje ze swojej. Oni strzegą swoich granic, jednocześnie wykorzystując zachodni opór wobec jakiejkolwiek ochrony. Oni utrzymują stabilność, eksportując destabilizację. I to działa tylko dlatego, że Zachód uczestniczy w kapitulacji wobec samego siebie.

Dla jasności: nie opowiadam się za zabijaniem migrantów. Wskazuję jedynie na konsekwencję działań tych państw i egzekwowane przez nie zasady – zasady, które stosują bez wahania – podczas gdy Zachód nie jest w stanie zastosować nawet ich najbardziej podstawowej wersji.

Link do oryginału: https://substack.com/home/post/p-181249287

@liveuptofreedom  10 grudnia 2025

Aynaz Anni Cyrus – była muzułmanka, ateistka, urodzona w Iranie Amerykanka, autorka bloga Live Up to Freedom, 

Zawartość publikowanych artykułów i materiałów nie reprezentuje poglądów ani opinii Reunion’68,
ani też webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyraźnie zaznaczone.
Twoje uwagi, linki, własne artykuły lub wiadomości prześlij na adres:
webmaster@reunion68.com

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Ukrainians

Dec23

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Ukrainians

Park MacDougald

Yes, Hunter Biden was a crook, and many people who put Ukrainian flags in their bios are deeply annoying. But in reality, Ukrainians are a brave people fighting a war against a vicious foe, and their fight, in many ways, is ours

Young members of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade, recruited under a new model of voluntary military service ‘Contract 18-24’, take part in a tactical field training exercise at an undisclosed location in the Donetsk Region, on May 1, 2025 / GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images

Last month, the Trump administration kicked off its latest effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war with its “28-point peace plan,” reportedly authored by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and delivered to the Ukrainians on Nov. 20. In an abrupt 180-degree turn from what had looked like the increasingly pro-Ukrainian drift of administration policy, the plan endorsed maximalist Russian positions on territorial concessions and was delivered to Kyiv as an ultimatum, backed by the threat of total abandonment if Ukraine refused to comply.

A month later, the Ukrainians have whittled down the deal from 28 to 20 points, stripping out the most pro-Russia provisions. (The original plan, in fact, now looks to have been authored in substantial part by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.) The United States and Europe have taken turns venting their frustrations at one another, while the Russians—the only party that can bring the war to a close—have given no indication of any interest in a Trump-brokered peace by Christmas. The war, for now, looks set to go on.

I was not surprised at this outcome. When news of the peace plan dropped, I was in Kyiv as part of a small junket for journalists organized by the nonprofit Razom for Ukraine. Our group, which mixed “hawks” and “doves” in roughly equal measure, had spent the past few days crisscrossing the city, meeting with Ukrainians and doing our best to wrap our heads around the war. Having only followed from afar, I’d expected the Ukrainians to be exhausted, and I wondered if the United States might in fact be doing them a favor by providing them with a useful pretext to end the fighting.

I was therefore surprised by the violence with which nearly every Ukrainian we spoke to rejected the American offer. “If President Zelenskyy comes to the Parliament with this deal,” Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a member of parliament from the opposition European Solidarity Party, told us on the night the details leaked, “I pity him. I really do.” Her view was backed by survey data. A December poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found that 75% of Ukrainians considered a deal along the lines of the 28-point plan “completely unacceptable,” while 63% were willing to endure the war for as long as necessary.

Surrender, of the sort that many felt the United States was proposing, was not an option.

It was hard not to be impressed. Since the collapse of the Global War on Terror, it’s become common for Americans on both the left and the right to rail against “forever wars” in far-off locations—by which they mean the United States’ nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failure of which was symbolized by the rapid collapse of the Afghan government in 2021. On large sections of the American right, Ukraine had become identified as an especially corrupt province of the “globalist” empire—Hunter Biden’s piggy bank, artificially kept afloat by the “neocons” and “warmongers” who allegedly profited from conflict with Russia.

This view was impossible to sustain upon contact with reality inside Ukraine. What I saw instead was, in terms of the morality of international conflicts, one of the more black-and-white situations I could imagine. The government of Ukraine may be corrupt, but ordinary Ukrainians saw themselves as—and were—fighting to defend their homes and their freedom against invasion by an external empire that appeared to have all the hallmarks of evil. They were doing this not because America had tricked or bribed them, or to carry out the sinister “regime change” plans of Victoria Nuland or Barack Obama, but for the simple reason that they felt it was better to die free than live as slaves. This was something I thought Americans, however rightfully fatigued by stupid wars, should still be able to relate to, if not necessarily pay for.

Later that night, walking through the dark streets of mid-November Kyiv, one of my colleagues said something that by this point summed up my own feelings as well.

“I’m going to be ashamed of myself as an American,” he said, “if we sell these people down the river.”

In peacetime, Kyiv is about a 10-hour direct flight from Washington, D.C., but the journey today is an elaborate series of connecting flights and train transfers, which, for the weary traveler, can combine to make you feel as if you were visiting the dark side of the Moon. Once you arrive in Kyiv, however, you are struck by what appears as a relatively normal, even bustling, Eastern European city. Compared to cities like Warsaw, which were effectively razed during the Second World War, it has kept its gorgeous medieval core largely intact, and its skyline is still dotted by gold-domed monasteries and cathedrals. There are few visible signs of war damage, and the city’s cafés, bars, and restaurants were buzzing with activity. The only thing that seems off, at first, is the darkness. The Russians had made a special point of targeting the electrical grid, and the city suffers from rolling blackouts for up to 10 hours per day. Hotels and other large businesses have backup generators for when the city’s electricity shuts off, but in residential districts, you could look down an entire city block and see only a handful of lights.

Mostly, it was the threat from the skies that reminded me of the war. The majority of attacks usually come at night, and for us, they were little more than a nuisance that meant taking the elevator down to the hotel bomb shelter at 3 a.m. It was worse for ordinary people. Most apartments do not have bomb shelters, and after four years of war, few Ukrainians are willing to drag themselves, let alone their children, out of bed in the middle of the night for what could be a 20-minute walk to the closest subway station. On the night of Nov. 18, we received warnings that Russian strategic bombers were taking off in what was predicted to be a large missile attack on Kyiv. Most of our party slept in the shelter. We awoke after a quiet night to discover that there had been a major barrage—not in Kyiv but in Ternopil, a “safe” city in western Ukraine. Cruise missiles had struck two apartment buildings, killing 36 people, including seven children.

Kyiv at dusk on Nov. 19, 2025. / Courtesy the author

We were arriving in Ukraine at what locals told us was one of the most difficult parts of the war. We reached Kyiv on Nov. 15, and the big news was a massive corruption scandal that had broken the week prior. Several close associates of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had just been implicated in a scheme to steal some $100 million from the state-owned nuclear energy agency, Energoatom. In Ukraine, as in much of the post-Soviet world, official corruption was par for the course; the difference was that Ukraine also had a powerful civil society that had pushed for the creation of independent anticorruption agencies following the Maidan Revolution of 2014. It was these agencies that had investigated and exposed “Mindich-Gate,” named after the businessman Timur Mindich, one of the conspirators.

Worse, the situation at the front was bad. After months of grueling fighting, the Russians were on the verge of capturing Pokrovsk, a town in Donetsk that Ukraine had invested heavily in defending, and they were on the move in the south, too, in Zaporizhzhia. The army was struggling to recruit new soldiers and to prevent those it did recruit from deserting or going absent without leave.

There were also worries that Ukraine’s few clear advantages—aside from the motivation of citizens to defend their own homes and families—were now eroding. Ukraine had long enjoyed superiority in the use of drones, but over the past year, the Russians had begun to innovate in this domain. To solve the problem of jamming, they had pioneered the battlefield use of fiber-optic drones, and they had also developed specialized counter-drone units like Rubicon, which hunted Ukrainian drone crews and wrought havoc on Ukrainian battlefield logistics. The Ukrainians were adapting through the mass adoption of unmanned ground vehicles, or ground drones, to bring men and supplies to and from the front. But it was unclear if these innovations would be enough.

One could certainly find pessimists. “We are living in a big hospice where people are dying,” one senior Ukrainian politician, who asked not to be named, told a small group of journalists on the second day of the trip. “It’s a nice place with drinking and eating, but then you say, Oh, this guy is gone. OK, forget about him and move on.” Morale, both at the front and among civilians, was “very low.” Recruitment was stalling. The generals, including Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, recognized they were defeated, but they fed Zelenskyy “bullshit” about how they were winning. “They all want some bastard to sign the shitty paper,” our source said of the generals, “and then they will complain, OK, we were ready to fight an extra 10 years, but this bastard did this.”

Ukraine was not like Russia, where the vast majority of the population had been enserfed until the mid-19th century; it was a frontier society where the people had grown accustomed to doing things for themselves.

This politician thought Ukraine should be angling for whatever deal it could get. We were speaking days before news of the initial U.S. plan leaked, but he indicated he was already in backchannel talks with the Americans. He was worried about Witkoff, the only man who truly had Trump’s ear, because he was a “real-estate guy,” not a “diplomat,” and he had been seduced by Russian promises of “big deals.” Dmitriev, he said, had “sold Witkoff the story of the United States and Russia making a lot of money together if only they could solve this little question with Ukraine.” He was more optimistic about working with Vice President JD Vance, but Vance wanted Ukraine to offer to cede the parts of the Donbas it still controlled, which would be a hard sell to the Ukrainian public.

The real problem, he explained, was Andriy Yermak, then the powerful and widely reviled head of Zelenskyy’s office. The good news was that everyone was scheming to take him out. Our source predicted Yermak would be gone by Thanksgiving. He turned out to be off by one day. Yermak resigned on Nov. 29, after he, too, was implicated in Mindich-Gate.

But Yermak was hardly the only roadblock to a settlement. Zelenskyy had been steadily losing popularity in Ukraine, and the corruption scandal had weakened him further. Ukrainians did not want elections. But neither were they ready to accept a deal that looked like surrender. An earlier KIIS poll, from September, found that 76% were willing to keep fighting for a better deal even if the United States cut them off from all support. A freshly compromised Zelenskyy was therefore in no position to sign a deal that such overwhelming majorities rejected. Indeed, some of the Ukrainians we spoke to saw the corruption scandal as a good thing. It would force Zelenskyy to make the changes necessary to continue the war.

“Icompletely disagree with the defeatist position that, Oh Ukraine is screwed anyway, and it’s going to be disastrous,” said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who served as minister of defense from 2019 to 2020. “It’s not that disastrous. I’ve been close to the line of contact and spoken to people. I don’t see any despair there whatsoever. People are quite confident in what they’re doing.” There were problems, no doubt. “Of course, in some parts of the front, Russians are applying the utmost pressure, focusing pretty much all they have,” he added. “And it’s very difficult there. But in other parts, we successfully block their advances. If we had even more drones, their movement would be neutralized everywhere.”

Zagoradnyuk’s view was common among the military men we spoke to. Yes, things were hard, but Ukraine was not out of options. The Americans, after all, had been wrong before. In 2022, the U.S. intelligence community had famously predicted that Ukraine would fall in three days. Here they were four years later, still fighting.

It was in the nature of Western analysts to underestimate Ukraine, Yevhen Hlibovytskyi, a social analyst and founder of a think tank called the Frontier Institute, told us over drinks in Kyiv one night. “From the Western point of view, Ukraine is as strong as Ukraine’s institutions are.” But this was the wrong way to look at it. Ukraine was not like Russia, where the vast majority of the population had been enserfed until the mid-19th century; it was a frontier society where the state had, for centuries, been distant and weak, and where the people had grown accustomed to doing things for themselves. “Civil society and volunteer networks in Ukraine are stronger than anywhere in the West,” Hlibovytskyi said. “In the developed world, civil society is kind of an add-on. You have the formal system, and then you have the add-on. In Ukraine, it’s one of the pillars of the system.”

Part of civil society’s responsibility was helping to fight the war. Ukraine’s formal defense and procurement industry was complemented by a massive array of civil society groups, small businesses, and informal private networks. Nonprofits and civilian volunteer groups were raising hundreds of millions of dollars to crowdsource equipment for the frontlines; during a trip to Dnipro, we’d stopped at a gas station where signs advertised that all proceeds from coffee sales went to procuring drones. Small-scale defense production, meanwhile, was literally embedded in the structure of Ukrainian society.

We visited a small drone start-up whose office was concealed in what looked, from the outside, to be a mechanic’s shop, tucked away near a freeway exit on the outskirts of Kyiv. The company’s CEO, a demobilized veteran named Artem, was a tall man with heavy, angular features and piercing blue eyes. He walked with a limp, a product of multiple shrapnel and gunshot wounds endured at the front, and his appearance called to mind a middle-aged Dolph Lundgren if the actor had spent two years fighting in a trench. Artem spoke fluent, idiomatic English that mixed complex military and technical terms—ionosphere, over-the-horizon capabilities—with millennial internet slang (because reasons), a product, he said, of his prewar life writing code for Western companies to “make Black Friday sales happen.”

Artem’s company was working on developing an un-jammable radar system that would render fiber-optic drones obsolete and, in his telling, allow Ukraine to begin decimating Russian logistics dozens of miles from the front. The tiny workshop, a handful of computers tucked in among workbenches and machine tools, was full of the flotsam of modern warfare: drone parts, circuit boards, disassembled guidance systems. At one point, he showed us a Styrofoam doohickey that looked like a slightly oversized Nerf football with fins attached to the back. It was a cheap air-defense drone that, when packed with explosives, was excellent at taking down Russian Shaheds. Someone in our party asked what sort of outcome to the war he and other veterans would be satisfied with. Artem said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Moscow had much to recommend it as a course of action but would unfortunately be bad for the environment. He would settle for carving up the Russian state instead.

It was men like Artem, and the industriousness they represented, that made the Ukrainians confident they could continue holding out. One analyst described how, after the February Oval Office blowup between Trump and Zelenskyy, he spoke to a half-dozen American friends who predicted that without U.S. assistance, Ukraine would crumble within six months. “I reached out to Ukrainian intelligence,” he said, “and I started asking them, what’s on your radar? They told me, well, maybe we can last three or four more years.” He laughed. “I told them this doesn’t make any sense. I understand if you have such incredible differences in the beginning of the war, but this is three years in. Where does the difference come from? They said that from the U.S. perspective, you can assess only the visible things. But the visible things are only part of the things.”

This decentralized, innovative element of Ukrainian society also had a foothold in the armed forces, via Ukraine’s elite “branded units.” These units—Azov, the Third Separate Assault Brigade, the Khartia Corps—had been founded as volunteer militias by either businessmen or nationalist activists, which allowed them to operate outside the top-down strictures of the formal Ukrainian military. Many of Ukraine’s most senior generals, like Syrskyi, had been educated in the Soviet system and commanded their units accordingly, but the branded units were led by men who had come up since the start of the war with Russia and thus ran them according to the principles of modern business. They used marketing techniques like sales funnels and YouTube ads to compete with each other for recruits, and they employed Key Performance Indicators to track combat performance. Their officers were young and often impressively well-educated, and they were known for delivering results while protecting the lives of their men. In mid-December, after I’d returned home, I opened X one morning and read accounts of a devastating Ukrainian counterattack on trapped Russian forces in Kupyansk, a city near Kharkiv that Putin had declared “fully liberated” in November. The counterattack had been led by Khartia.

The branded units were particularly skilled in adapting to the frenetic pace of technological change on the battlefield. I’d often heard the war analogized to World War I, but this analogy, I learned, was at least a year out of date. Gone were the tank battles, massed infantry assaults, and trench warfare of the war’s early stages. Even the idea of the “front line” was obsolete. In its place was the “kill zone,” an area stretching around five kilometers in either direction from the theoretical line of contact, in which anything visible was at constant risk of destruction. Behind this was a much larger “gray zone” extending some 30 kilometers from the line, where enemy drones and artillery could still strike but were less densely concentrated.

Within the kill zone, it was dangerous to mass forces or use vehicles, unless under the cover of night and fog. Troops were typically forced to hike from the edge of the zone to their firing positions, usually concealed dugouts that could fit only a handful of men. Ukrainian defensive lines were a complex web of drones, mines, sensors, and obstacles, supplemented by small teams of infantry. The Russians would probe these lines by sending “infiltration teams”—often only one or two men, sometimes unarmed—into the zone to look for soft spots. Most died, but a few inevitably got through.

This was, as one might imagine, a mentally taxing form of warfare. I spoke to “Odesa,” a sergeant in the Third Assault, who had volunteered in 2014 when the Russians seized his hometown and had been fighting ever since. He was still recuperating after being wounded in combat near Kharkiv over the summer.

Odesa had been part of a small team assigned to a four-day rotation at a firing position on the line of contact. Driving in the gray zone on a road they had used safely earlier in the day, they struck a mine that had been dropped from a Russian drone, killing their driver. They drove back to their staging area to get a new vehicle and then tried a second time to approach the kill zone. This time they were spotted and struck by a suicide drone, disabling their vehicle and breaking Odesa’s leg in two places. “When you are hit,” he explained, “the most important thing is to keep moving, because the explosion will attract more drones.” His men, all of them injured, split up and walked or crawled their way to their firing position. They stayed there for four days before being relieved.

“It is hard for many people, psychologically, to adjust to this phase of the war, even people who have been fighting for four years,” Odesa said. “Everything is difficult. Moving is difficult. So is getting supplies and evacuating wounded. You must do everything slowly. You are always looking in the air, and looking at the ground, for something that might kill you.” His unit attracted foreign volunteers, and some were American veterans with combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan. “They know war,” he said. “But when they get here, they say they had no idea how hard war could be.”

When I asked about claims that Ukrainian morale was crumbling, he shook his head. Yes, there were issues in portions of the army and on certain sectors of the front. But his own unit was well-led, and morale was high. “We know what we are doing and why we are doing it.” He said he was eager to get back to the front.

The Russians have a particular hatred for Protestants and evangelicals, whom the ROC denounces as heretics and cult members.

“I think the way it’s going to go is that the most successful brigades are eventually going to grow and replace the traditional ones,” Zagorodnyuk said. “Third Assault, Khartia, and so on. I think they’re going to grow, and they will absorb the others because they are effective. They don’t have much of a problem with recruitment, they don’t have problems with loyalty, and they don’t have problems with combat efficiency in their areas of responsibility. So eventually we’ll see a commander in chief from one of those places.”

In fact, even our pessimistic politician had told us something similar. During our conversation, I had pressed him: Was it really true that everyone had given up hope? Not everyone, he said. There was Mykhailo Fedorov, the 34-year-old minister of digital transformation, widely seen as an ally of the modernizing forces within the military and civil society. “He’s the only guy who has a war plan. He wants to change the high command. He wants to replace them with young people who have proved themselves through performance, so that ordinary people understand these are not Soviet Union people, they are commanders who care about people’s lives.”

Fedorov believes Ukraine can lean even further into automation to achieve what Zagoradnyuk had called, in an essay for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “strategic neutralization.” “You build two drone lines, then electronic jamming lines, and combine everything purely in defense, and then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. So the Russians understand this is a really big wall and they cannot get through. This is a brilliant concept.” Fedorov’s ideas had not been adopted, our source said, due to “Yermak’s intrigues.” But now Yermak is gone, and as of my writing, Fedorov is one of the leading candidates to replace him.

Many of the Ukrainians we spoke to still thought they could win—not by reconquering territory, but by putting up such fierce resistance that the Russians would eventually be forced to stop. Many more felt they had no option. Surrender, of the sort that many felt the United States was proposing, was not an option. Nobody trusted Putin’s intentions; he had violated a laundry list of agreements in the past, and a weak deal would simply be an invitation for the Russians to invade again. Few, moreover, believed the Russians wanted territory for its own sake. Putin wanted to destroy Ukraine as a political entity.

“There is no such thing as living under Russian occupation,” said Dmytro Bodyu, who had been a bishop at the Apostolic Christian Church in Melitopol when it was occupied by the Russians in 2022. Bodyu, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had attended Bible college in Texas and spoke in a slow, mellifluous baritone that mixed Slavic disregard for definite articles with a noticeable Southern twang. “If they take over Ukraine, there’s not going to be a Ukraine, and most of the people who love Ukraine will be dead or gone.” He described the Russian policy of demographic engineering, or what Western analysts have described as ethnic cleansing, in the occupied areas of Ukraine, which combined forced deportations of Ukrainians, the arrest and murder of local leaders loyal to Ukraine, the suppression of Ukrainian language, and resettlement with ethnic Russians loyal to the Kremlin. “I stay in contact with people on occupied territory,” Bodyu said. “Mostly there are no Ukrainians left, just people from north of Russia.”

The aftermath of a Shahed drone strike on an apartment building in Dnipro, in which two civilians were killed. / Courtesy Damir Marusic

In a sense, Bodyu was lucky. The Russians tightly regulate all Christian denominations aside from the Russian Orthodox Church, but they have a particular hatred for Protestants and evangelicals, whom the ROC denounces as heretics and cult members, and whom the Russian security services treat as presumptive agents of the CIA. The Russians arrested Bodyu in March 2022. “They told me, we hate Americans, we hate evangelicals, and we hate Nazis. You’re all three.” His captors demanded to know the name of his CIA handler and threatened to execute him when he wouldn’t comply. But Bodyu still had friends in the United States who convinced the State Department to intervene on his behalf. The Russians agreed to let him go.

For Protestant clergymen without such connections, occupation often meant torture or death. In November 2022, Russian troops seized Anatoliy Prokopchuk, an evangelical deacon, and his son, Oleksandr, from their home in Nova Kakhovka. Their bodies were discovered a week later in a nearby forest.

“I’m from the South. I’m a Republican. I understand all this,” Bodyu said, when one of us stated that the American commitment to Ukraine was waning. “People get tired of war. They get tired because we live in a time where everything is fast. We need to change the pictures. Everybody is hoping, OK, let’s make a deal somehow, who cares how? Let’s just finish all this.” He paused. “You are asking us to make a choice. There is no choice.”

Razom introduced us to several leaders from Christian denominations—Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, evangelicals, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, all of whom relayed stories of brutality and persecution at the hands of Russian forces. This was, I figured, in part an effort to counterprogram the widespread claim, which had been advanced most prominently by Tucker Carlson, that Zelenskyy was engaged in the persecution of Ukrainian Christians—a crime that, in Carlson’s telling, may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Zelenskyy is a Jew. The claim was based on a series of political disputes over the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, effectively the local branch of the ROC, which had culminated in a 2024 Ukrainian law banning religious organizations with ties to Moscow.

A majority of Ukrainians supported that law, and those we spoke to were adamant that the church had been a de facto tool of the Russian state. They peppered us with anecdotes about Orthodox priests loyal to the Kremlin who had hidden weapons or ammunition for the invading Russian forces or provided lists of “subversives,” often leaders from rival churches, for the Russians to arrest. Several of the Christian leaders we met with singled out Carlson by name for spreading Russian “lies” and “propaganda” about Ukraine.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Carlson was unpopular in Ukraine, and these leaders were making a connection I was starting to make for myself. Bodyu and several other evangelical leaders had stressed that the ROC considered Protestants, and evangelicals in particular, to be heretics and cultists. I’d spent most of the past two years covering Israel’s war in Gaza—and the domestic information war surrounding it—and I’d written extensively about Carlson’s attacks on evangelicals and “Christian Zionism,” which he’d denounced as a “brain virus” and a “heresy.” At the time, I’d understood these attacks in the context of Carlson’s burgeoning obsession with Israel and Jews: American evangelicals were supportive of Israel, which gave Carlson an interest in discrediting them. However, I had not linked Carlson’s anti-evangelical rhetoric to Russian state propaganda, or to his bizarre tirades against Zelenskyy and fawning interviews with Russian leaders. In Ukraine, the connections seemed obvious.

One evening, we went to the former home of Mark Sergeev, one of Ukraine’s most popular evangelical pastors. The home, or what was left of it, was in a new development in the outer-ring suburbs of Kyiv, a popular neighborhood for young families who needed space for their small children. Now the entire block was little more than a pile of rubble. A Russian Iskander ballistic missile, a massive nuclear-capable weapon designed to hit hardened military and infrastructure targets, had struck Sergeev’s home while he and his wife were there with their three sons. They had had only a few minutes’ warning to bring their children down to the ground floor, where it was safest, and their eldest son had been in his room on the second floor when the missile struck. The force of the blast had obliterated most of the home and knocked down the walls on the house across the street, but miraculously, everyone in the family survived.

The remains of Mark Sergeev’s home outside of Kyiv. / Courtesy Damir Marusic

Sergeev arrived half an hour late; he had a problem with the generator at home, and his children needed the light to study for school. He was young, with long curly hair and a few days’ worth of whiskers on his face. Compared to the man in his YouTube videos, he looked haggard and thin. He spoke adequate but halting English. Prior to the war, he’d lived for a time in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he still had family, but he had felt a calling to spread God’s word in his homeland and returned to Melitopol, in southeastern Ukraine, to plant a church. He lost that church, and his home, when the Russians came. We were now standing at the site of the second home he’d lost in the war.

Sergeev showed us a video of himself standing outside the remains of his own home the morning after the attack, playing a guitar and leading his congregation in songs of praise. It was such a beautiful, simple thing, and I was struck by the strength it took to lose everything and still give thanks.

“I performed two funerals last week,” he said, “but on Sunday we had 10 baptisms. So maybe in the end it is OK.” At some point in our conversation, one of the guides from Razom stepped away to take a phone call. She came back crying. Someone had called to tell her that her friend had just been killed fighting in Zaporizhzhia. “This is what it is like in Ukraine,” she said. “But you have to be happy. You cannot be crying all of the time.” Sergeev nodded.

Later, he pulled out his phone to show us a clip of Carlson’s November interview with Robert Amsterdam, a Trump-connected lobbyist for several pro-Russian causes. One of these was the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Amsterdam was explaining that Ukraine was a “one-party autocratic state that has no comparison to democratic values.” Zelenskyy was engaged in the “criminalization of Christianity” and the “torture” of faithful Christians. Sergeev paused the video. “This hurt my heart,” he said. “I was crying, really. Because we are trying to show the world. We are preaching the Gospel and the Russians are just killing people.”

“This is not just a war against us, about taking land,” Sergeev went on. “This is a spiritual battle. They are trying to destroy and take our freedom. And I think Putin, even, doesn’t understand how the devil is using him.”

I was—am—resistant to spiritual explanations of worldly phenomena, but there was something in what Sergeev was saying that struck a chord with me. I had, over the preceding year, become increasingly disaffected from the faction of the right that had adopted a stridently anti-Ukrainian posture. One could, of course, make rational arguments about the roots of the war or its costs, or the desirability of avoiding escalation with a nuclear-armed Russia. But these were often tinged, especially on social media, with an undeniable sadism directed toward people like Sergeev or the Ukrainians fighting on the front line, as if a pastor who’d fled Russian occupation in order to freely worship God—a story so primal in its moral clarity that it stands at the heart of not only the American national myth but also the Jewish and Christian faiths—should naturally be an object of mockery and resentment. This type of reflexive moral inversion, complete with invocations of the need to put “America First” and the “right” to question official rhetoric, seemed to stem from the wider type of epistemic confusion that had recently revived the “Jewish Question” as a live topic in conservative debate, or sought to recast Hitler as the unsung hero of the Second World War. There was something disordered and compulsive about the whole enterprise that reminded me of Jordan Peterson’s idea, borrowed from Carl Jung, that people could be possessed by ideas as if by demons, which could compel them toward ends they did not fully understand.

Sergeev believed in good and evil, and this gave him a language in which to speak about such things. “They will do it again,” he said of the Russians. “Because you have 140 million people living in this crazy kind of propaganda spirit. It’s the same with Israel. Does Iran stop? No, they have this crazy idea. Israel released all these guys from prison into Gaza. I think these terrorists are going to attack again. Maybe a couple years later. Because it’s inside them. I mean, it’s a spirit inside.”

I thought, as I listened to him speak outside the ruins of what had once been his home, that this was as good an explanation as anyone had offered me over the past two years on my beat. I thought, too, of the lesson of the Alcoholics Anonymous scenes from Infinite Jest—that the great temptation of smart people is to believe clichés are false because they are simple, when sometimes they are the only true thing that can be said. Sometimes evil really is a kind of spirit inside.

“Right now, I understand everything,” Sergeev went on. “I am praying with my kids every day. Praying for our soldiers who are fighting for us. I understand God is still working with this nation because the whole world gave us a couple of days. Countries in Europe thought we had three weeks, and then we were going to die. But we are still standing.”

After meeting with Sergeev, our group loaded in a van to begin our two-day journey to Dnipro, a city on the Dnieper River some 300 miles south of Kyiv. Our insurance had deemed it too dangerous for us to stay overnight in Dnipro, which is only about an hour’s drive from the front, and so that night we stayed at a chintzy Soviet-era roadside motel in Poltava Oblast. We woke before dawn the next morning to continue our journey. At some point, we turned off the modern highway to take a back road, and it was as if we’d taken a time machine 50 years into the past. We drove over potted, narrow roads through endless wheat fields and tiny villages in which the property lines were marked by corrugated iron. Outside our window, a woman in traditional dress dragged an unwilling cow into her field. About the only signs of modernity were the graveyards full of little Ukrainian flags over the graves, which presumably contained bodies of the recently fallen. I thought of small towns in the American South where, during the Civil War, virtually all the men of a generation had been wiped out in one bad battle.

If Kyiv felt modern and European, Dnipro, formerly Yekaterinoslav and then, under the Soviets, Dnipropetrovsk, was authentically Soviet. Stalin had forcibly industrialized the city and made it into a center of the Soviet space and defense industry, and the city as a whole had something of the retro-modern quality of New York City’s Corona Park. Dnipro was a large city, with more than a million people, and its population had grown since the start of Russia’s invasion due to the influx of displaced people from the occupied territories. Still, it was close enough to the front to get hammered by drones and missiles virtually every night, and many residents we spoke to were considering leaving. The deputy mayor, who escorted us on our brief tour—which included a stop at the John McCain reading room in the Dnipro Public Library—told us he had already made his preparations for what to do if the Russians came. He had a duty to continue serving the people here, but he did not blame anyone who fled.

We met there with local religious leaders, many of whom had been forced to abandon their congregations in the occupied territories. All could reel off lists of coreligionists who had been tortured or executed. Near the end of our talk, one man introduced himself as a third-generation Ukrainian Baptist pastor. Both his father and grandfather had been persecuted by the Soviet Communists, as had many of the older men in the room. What Ukraine meant to him was freedom from this persecution. “We are thrilled,” he said, “that after Ukraine’s independence, every religious group and every denomination was able to blossom.” He thanked us for coming to a dangerous place to hear his story, and he thanked “the people of the United States, because free people should help free people.” As we were getting ready to leave, he said he would pray for us and asked us to deliver a message.

“Please tell the American nation that when you do good, do not fatigue. It is very important to continue doing good.” I shook his hand and told him I would do my best. Then our group piled in the van for the six-hour drive in the dark back to Kyiv.

On our way out, as we were stuck in rush-hour traffic, our air alert systems began going off in unison. Russian ballistic missiles were headed our way. There was no shelter to go to; our security told us to get out of the city as fast as we could. Behind us, we heard an explosion and felt a small pressure wave. There were nine of us in the van; some prayed, others joked or simply gritted their teeth. Nobody relaxed until we crossed the bridge over the Dnieper that took us outside of the city, leaving the pastor and his flock behind.

It makes me sad to recognize that large segments of my own political community are devoted to sneering at these people as embodying the worst of our own politics, when the opposite is plainly true. People who are willing to fight and die to defend their freedoms from barbarians are exactly the kinds of allies that America needs, and should seek, anywhere and everywhere around the world, to keep the world from descending into slavery. They are heroes, the same way that American patriots are heroes. The clarity and the bravery with which Ukrainians are defending their homes and their families, and their rights to live and worship freely, against violent and unending Russian attack, are the very same qualities that we need to win our own battles at home. Let us give each other strength, however we can.

Park MacDougald is senior writer of The Scroll, Tablet’s daily afternoon newsletter.

Zawartość publikowanych artykułów i materiałów nie reprezentuje poglądów ani opinii Reunion’68,
ani też webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyraźnie zaznaczone.
Twoje uwagi, linki, własne artykuły lub wiadomości prześlij na adres:
webmaster@reunion68.com

Hamas Ran Gaza’s Aid System — and NGOs Helped Keep the Secret

Dec23

Hamas Ran Gaza’s Aid System — and NGOs Helped Keep the Secret

HonestReporting Staff

Palestinians buy vegetables at a market in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, November 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

For years, international NGOs and humanitarian agencies told the world they were working “neutrally” in Gaza. But according to newly declassified Hamas documents, that neutrality never existed.

In a conversation with HonestReporting, NGO Monitor vice president Olga Deutsch explains how Gaza was run not as a normal territory, but rather as a tightly controlled police state where Hamas oversaw almost every aspect of international aid. “No one was neutral or independent in Gaza,” she says. “Hamas controlled everything.”

The documents, seized by the IDF and later declassified, come from Hamas’ own ministries. They show a system in which Hamas approved NGO staff, tracked individual employees, and controlled which projects and grantees received funding.

The “Guarantors” Inside Humanitarian Groups

At the heart of this system is something Hamas called the “guarantor.”

Every international organization working in Gaza had a local liaison, many of whom held senior roles inside the NGOs, and at least some of them were identified as Hamas members or affiliates. That person had two jobs: report back to Hamas on what the organization was doing, and make sure foreign staff didn’t see what Hamas didn’t want them to see.

The guarantors watched staff behavior, tapped phones, monitored social media, and filed detailed reports. Those reports graded organizations as “cooperative,” “medium cooperative,” or “non-cooperative” — but even “non-cooperative” groups still had to toe Hamas’ line if they wanted to operate at all.

It wasn’t just about skimming food or supplies. Hamas treated NGOs as a strategic asset: a way to control the population, gather intelligence, and cover military activity. Aid groups working on agriculture near the Israeli border were of particular interest, because those areas overlapped with Hamas infiltration routes and surveillance of the fence.

One internal report describes a Norwegian Refugee Council delegation visiting an elderly couple whose apartment floor was shaking from below. The couple suspected Hamas was digging a tunnel. The delegation, escorted by Hamas officials, ignored the complaint and moved on. No warning was issued, no public statement was given when the delegation later returned home. Just silence.

Why Gaza Is Different — and Why That’s Not an Excuse

Deutsch acknowledges that working under a terror regime poses real risks for aid workers. But she rejects the idea that this explains everything, or excuses anything.

In other conflict zones, she notes, the same organizations have no problem openly labeling groups like Boko Haram or Al-Qaeda as terrorist organizations, even while negotiating access on the ground. In Gaza, by contrast, Hamas is often softened into “militants” or “fighters,” while Israel is frequently accused of crimes that are never substantiated.

Gaza is also structurally unique. In many war zones, international staff live in fortified compounds separate from the local population. In Gaza, NGOs live and work inside the civilian areas, making it easier for Hamas to monitor their every move — and harder for them to claim they don’t know what was going on.

But whatever the operational challenges, Deutsch says the line was clearly crossed when organizations not only adapted to Hamas rule but then turned around and accused Israel of crimes while hiding what they knew about Hamas’ tactics.

From “Neutral NGOs” to Narrative Warfare

The documents also confirm what Israel has long said about Hamas’ use of hospitals and medical centers.

According to Deutsch, Hamas records show that every hospital and medical center in Gaza had a Hamas wing, with at least one tunnel linked to many of these sites. All the international organizations working there knew that Hamas used protected civilian infrastructure for meetings, medical treatment of operatives, and military activity.

Yet when the IDF struck near these sites after October 7, many of the same humanitarian groups were among the first to accuse Israel of targeting civilians or attacking hospitals, without mentioning Hamas’ presence at all.

Deutsch says part of the problem is what NGO Monitor calls the “halo effect.” NGOs are treated by journalists, politicians, and the public as uniquely trustworthy — as if their reports are objective, apolitical snapshots of reality.

In practice, many of these organizations arrive in Gaza with political assumptions already formed by the media and activist networks back home. They then produce reports that reinforce those assumptions, which are eagerly picked up by international outlets and quoted as fact.

Journalists have told Deutsch they “have to stay neutral,” which, in the Israel-Hamas context, means refusing to label Hamas a terrorist organization even when their own governments have done so. At the same time, these outlets unquestioningly quote casualty figures and narratives that originate with Hamas-controlled institutions.

The result is a vicious cycle: NGOs produce politicized reports, the media amplifies them, and then new NGO staff and donors absorb those narratives as the starting point for their own “humanitarian” work.

From Durban to October 7: This Didn’t Start Yesterday

The entanglement of NGOs, politics, and anti-Israel campaigning is not new. NGO Monitor itself was founded after the 2001 UN Durban Conference in South Africa, where international NGOs embraced the edict that “Zionism is racism” and committed themselves to using human rights language as a strategic weapon against Israel.

What has changed, Deutsch argues, is the intensity. In the last decade, and especially since October 7, accusations that once lived on the fringes — genocide, apartheid, deliberate starvation — have moved into the mainstream language of humanitarian organizations.

At the same time, record levels of antisemitic incidents in North America and Europe have not been treated by major human rights giants as a central human rights crisis, even as those same organizations repeatedly single out Israel.

What the Documents Show — And Why It Matters Now

The Hamas documents at the center of NGO Monitor’s report were seized by the IDF in Gaza and later declassified. Most come from Hamas’ Ministry of Internal Security — the same body responsible for policing dissent, internal surveillance, and managing foreign organizations. A smaller number are linked to the ministries of education and agriculture, where project activity overlapped.

NGO Monitor translated and analyzed thousands of pages, connecting Hamas’ internal tracking of NGOs with publicly available information on the same organizations and their funding.

Deutsch says the timing of the report is critical. As the international community debates how to rebuild Gaza, estimates for reconstruction have reached around $70 billion. If that money is channeled into the same systems that existed before October 7, she warns, the world will simply rebuild the infrastructure that allowed Hamas to thrive.

For individual donors who want to help civilians but fear enabling Hamas or politicized NGOs, Deutsch’s advice is simple: do basic due diligence.

Check an organization’s public statements and social media. See what it says about Israel, Gaza, and the war. Ask whether it operates in Gaza or the West Bank, and what projects it funds there. If the group regularly accuses Israel of genocide, apartheid, or deliberate starvation, that should trigger serious questions.

“Money should be conditional,” she says. “The same logic you use to choose a doctor or a school should apply to the charities you support. Don’t send money blindly.”

A Moment of Choice

Deutsch has been presenting this report in parliaments and policy forums across Europe. For her, the stakes go far beyond the Israeli–Palestinian arena.

The way NGOs, governments, and media handle Gaza’s reconstruction will signal whether the international system is willing to confront how human rights and humanitarian language have been weaponized, or whether it will simply pour money back into an unreformed structure controlled by a terror group.

“If we don’t learn from what these documents show,” she says, “we’re not just failing Israelis or Palestinians. We’re undermining the credibility of humanitarian work and the democratic societies that depend on it.”

To read the full report and learn more about the organization’s critical work, visit ngo-monitor.org

HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

Zawartość publikowanych artykułów i materiałów nie reprezentuje poglądów ani opinii Reunion’68,
ani też webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyraźnie zaznaczone.
Twoje uwagi, linki, własne artykuły lub wiadomości prześlij na adres:
webmaster@reunion68.com