In general, the war in Ukraine is being approached by Western public opinion from a humanitarian perspective that sympathizes with the enormous suffering of the Ukrainian people while at the same time morally denouncing the aggressor: Putin. All this, though undoubtedly a just analysis that gives an accurate account of the culprits and victims, nevertheless brings with it at least two problems.
Firstly, the humanitarian focus gets in the way of hard geopolitical analysis, which is more important than the former both because of what is at stake and because statecraft, as opposed to humane sympathy, acts as the driving force on the global chessboard. But not only does a purely humanitarian focus conceal such important considerations; worst still, those who dare to engage in unsentimental geopolitical discourse outside of military and intelligence circles are automatically condemned by the media and the political class, and then ostracized. Geopolitics, it seems, is a mode of analysis not sanctioned by the court of political correctness.
Secondly, the humanitarian perspective with which the war in Ukraine is being judged greatly simplifies the complexity of actors and interests, attributing quasi-messianic qualities to Zelensky with which to confront his nemesis, Putin, and reducing to one dimension a conflict that in fact comprises many, both complementary and at odds with each other.
One of the most relevant of these aspects is the role that BlackRock—the world’s leading hedge-fund, boasting assets valued at more than $10 trillion—is playing in the Ukrainian war.
Two weeks ago, Ukraine’s president held a video conference with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, in which they reached an “agreement to coordinate investment efforts to rebuild the war-torn nation.” The reconstruction plan will be kick-started with targets set in the short term, as noted after the aforementioned meeting. It was also revealed that some executives of the financial giant will visit Ukraine later this year to advise the government on “how to structure the country’s reconstruction funds,” something that was already stipulated in a collaboration agreement signed on November 10th, 2022, by the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy and BlackRock Financial Market Advisory (FMA).
BlackRock is clearly not in the humanitarian aid business. And while it is hard—or perhaps not so hard—to picture this firm encouraging its clients to consider the reconstruction of Ukraine a “great investment,” it is an image worth contemplating, because presumably it will soon be true.
At the same time, BlackRock’s history in this conflict goes much deeper, both in its ramifications and timing. As early as September 2022, Zelensky and Fink discussed how to attract public and private investment to Ukraine. Just a month earlier, Eric Van Nostrand, who had formerly held positions as managing director and head of research for sustainable investments and multi-asset strategies, left Blackrock to join the Treasury Department, responsible for producing all U.S. money and postage stamps, running federal finance, and overseeing banks. His new assignment? To work as a senior advisor on economic issues linked to Russia and Ukraine reporting directly to Ben Harris, Treasury undersecretary for economic policy.
Added to this, and perhaps most relevant of all, is the role of the world-leading hedge fund manager in the U.S. and global real estate market. Last summer, a Wall Street Journal report claimed that BlackRock was one of the most distorting investment funds in the real estate space, revealing that it was devoting huge sums of money to buying up private homes, from housing developments to entire neighborhoods. Its aim? To raise prices, make home ownership extremely difficult, and create entire generations of rentiers, in addition to other consequences such as the expulsion of the working classes from their ancestral communities, which instead become the exclusive fishing grounds of the rich, investing few.
The piece that completes the puzzle is the source of the money with which the Ukrainian government is paying for the advisory service to BlackRock—which, again, does not include charity in its investment portfolio. And the answer is clear: from the taxes of the leading Western democracies and, especially, from the American taxpayers, who have already in 2022 bank-rolled the Ukrainian military effort to the tune of 13 billion dollars. This effort will continue, as Biden announced at the time, “for as long as necessary.” In other words, all of us are paying BlackRock through Zelenskys government for the elaboration of a road map that guarantees, first of all, its own investments and provides the American giant with the necessary liquidity to prevent us from buying a house, the main predictor of progress and economic and family stability. Such self-harm is only made possible by the malice or ignorance of elected governments and the media, both of which are complicit in a globalist agenda that benefits a few to the detriment of the rest, as BlackRock itself revealed in its forecasts for 2023. Indeed, these forecasts bear a striking resemblance to the vision of the world advanced at the Davos Forum meeting that took place last week and brought together all the usual suspects—not the least of which was Fink himself, who sits on the governing board of the World Economic Forum.
There, Zelensky seems to have gone shopping, for at Davos he finds both the will and the resources he seeks. In addition to BlackRock, which has clear economic interests in this sphere, Odile Françoise Renaud-Basso, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)—which invested 1.7 billion euros in energy, transport and other infrastructure in Ukraine in 2022—pointed out at Davos that “the more we do now, the less we will have to do in reconstruction.”
This urgency is striking, given that the war does not seem likely to end soon, and reconstruction costs continue to rise. A September 2022 joint report by the Ukrainian government, the European Commission and the World Bank estimated that the cost of reconstruction and recovery already amounts to €322 billion, and the figure is rising every day. Hence the shadow of spurious interests and, as time may show,, corruption hangs over the haste with which the reconstruction of the country is being coordinated.
In view of all this, it is advisable to be especially vigilant, as there is no doubt that the information that reaches us through the traditional media is, at the very least, superficial and ideologically slanted. There is not one, but rather a multitude of perspectives from which to approach a conflict of gigantic proportions such as the war in Ukraine, and there are also many interests at stake. As for the agenda of those who seek to profit from suffering and misery thanks to their high political and media connections, we must wake up before it is too late. They are organized and, as you can see, they do not miss any kind of opportunity—not even a war, as Churchill would say. Where is our answer?
