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The Economic Grammar of Destruction

The oral assessments of retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, which reached the public in 2025, offer a holistic political economic framework that renders the customary military and diplomatic templates for making sense of the war in Ukraine dysfunctional. His diagnosis points to the existence beneath the conflict of a complex architecture of interests and capital that not only triggers it but also makes it perpetual. The cornerstones of this architecture are the strategic asset consolidation of transnational financial institutions, demographic engineering discourses intertwined with geopolitical projections, and institutionalized corruption networks that grow by feeding on the war itself. This perspective makes it possible to read the destruction on Ukrainian soil not as the result of a linear conflict but as the instrument of an almost programmatic process, operated for the transfer of resources and the restructuring of power across a broad spectrum ranging from agricultural lands to defense industry facilities, from diplomatic corridors to reconstruction funds.

The Financial Siege of the Black Soil: The Transformation of Agricultural Lands into a Strategic Asset Class

One of the clearest phenomena that Macgregor draws attention to is the consolidation activity of large asset management companies, embodied specifically by BlackRock, in Ukrainian agricultural lands. This activity gains momentum despite, or rather precisely because of, the humanitarian and economic collapse created by the war. As documented by GRAIN (2023), the conflict conditions have overturned the ownership structure in the agricultural sector, creating a vacuum favorable for capital accumulation. The Oakland Institute (2024) interprets this situation as the redefinition and financialization of Ukraine’s black soil, considered among the most fertile lands in the world, as a long term strategic asset class at a time when fragility in the global food supply is escalating.

Plank and Gonda (2024), placing the process on an empirical foundation, reveal how investment vehicles they characterize as “vulture funds” have converted the devaluation and institutional vacuum created by the war into an aggressive purchasing strategy. At this point, the Transnational Institute (TNI, 2024) report emphasizes that the issue is not merely a transfer of ownership; as land, one of the most concrete components of national sovereignty, passes into the control of transnational companies through financial instruments, the regulatory authority of the state over the land is also effectively eroded. Macgregor’s phrase “the plunder of the country’s future and lands” describes precisely this multidimensional loss of sovereignty: The war has assumed a function that both accelerates this transfer process and renders it invisible behind a veil of military urgency.

“New Israel” as a Strategic Narrative: A New Safe Haven Projection for Capital

The discourse voiced by Macgregor that Western Ukraine will be transformed into “a kind of new Israel destination,” although it may appear on the surface to be a speculative demographic claim, is in fact a symptom of a much deeper geopolitical vision. When viewed through the critical geopolitics framework of Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Toal, 2023), this discourse reinforces the thesis that the war is a spatial and capitalist restructuring project. According to Toal, the struggle is not only about which state’s borders the land will remain within but about which economic and legal regime that land will be integrated into. The long term forecasts of Friedman (2024) provide an indirect background to this thesis, arguing that Eastern Europe needs to be repositioned as a strategic hub in the context of the energy and trade corridors of the 21st century.

In this context, the “New Israel” discourse coincides not with a mass population transfer but with the idea of developing Western Ukraine as a new “safe haven” and strategic depth for global capital. This could mean the redesign of the region’s institutional, legal, and financial infrastructure in a way that provides maximum security and minimum regulation for foreign investors. The warning of Rodrik and Stiglitz (2024) comes into play precisely at this stage: The post war reconstruction process, if not supervised, carries the potential to turn into a colossal resource transfer mechanism for rent seeking local and global elites. Macgregor’s concern is the risk that the reconstruction of Ukraine, under the control of the same interest groups that devastated the country, will create a “rent republic” in which national resources and demographic structure are irreversibly transformed.

Profit Centers on the Target List: Russia’s Asymmetric Political Economic Response

Macgregor’s most critical observation regarding military strategy is the marked shift in the target selection of the Russian Federation. Statements from sources connected to the Kremlin pool (Kremlin Pool Spokesperson, 2025) confirm that Moscow is no longer exclusively targeting military infrastructure but has also added to its target list the corruption networks and commercial assets that carry direct Western investment and are alleged to be connected to the administration in Kiev. Galeotti (2024), placing this strategy in its historical context, shows that Russian military doctrine has long been based on the principle of breaking the enemy’s war capacity by directly threatening the interests of its economic and political elites. The strike on a defense industry factory alleged to be connected to Zelensky is a concrete reflection of this doctrine.

Such an action produces a dual outcome. On the one hand, it provides a conventional military benefit by weakening Ukraine’s long range strike capability. On the other hand, in its more complex dimension, it carries the character of a direct message to Western investors and their partners in Ukraine. Le Billon’s (2023) concept of “post war predation” becomes a critical analytical tool at this point. Le Billon discusses how networks feeding on the war economy can survive after the conflict and continue to dominate the economy. Russia’s striking of these strategic facilities can be read as a counter economic move that aims, by directly targeting “the spoils of war,” to undermine the structures that obtain this profit and to make the war costly for them as well. The war thus transforms into a multidimensional struggle conducted through the destruction of financial and institutional targets as much as through artillery fire.

The Commercial Logic of Diplomacy: Negotiation in the Shadow of Side Deals

The points of impasse in peace negotiations are also shaped on the same political economic plane. The “lack of seriousness” criticism reported by Macgregor, which appeared in the Russian press regarding figures such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and also permeated the official minutes of Foreign Minister Lavrov (2024), is a symptom of the qualitative transformation that diplomacy is undergoing. Beebe and Beebe (2024) conceptualize this transformation as “shadow diplomacy”; this type of diplomacy, conducted outside official channels through business and personal relationships, makes conflicts of interest almost inevitable. Walt (2024) evaluates this situation as the result of a transactional mindset in which the essence of diplomacy is reduced to a “deal.”

Moscow’s extremely instrumental and cynical attitude, to the effect of “first send serious people to discuss the main issue, then we can make side deals with you,” represents the peak of this crisis of confidence. The Kremlin implies that it believes the primary motivation of Western negotiators is not to secure a ceasefire but to guarantee their own personal and institutional shares of post war Ukraine’s strategic pie, including reconstruction, energy resources, and agricultural lands. The report of Transparency International (2024), documenting the high perception of corruption in Ukraine, constitutes the objective ground for this suspicion. The widespread perception of corruption calls into question not only the fate of aid to be sent to the country but also the scale of the rent battles revolving behind the peace negotiations. The final picture is that the diplomatic table is increasingly moving away from being a platform to end the war and is coming to resemble an auction where the economic opportunities created by the war are being negotiated over how they will be shared.

Conclusion: A Self Feeding Rent Mechanism

When these interconnected claims of Macgregor are considered holistically, an understanding of the Ukrainian conflict emerges that distinguishes it from conventional categories of war. In this understanding, the war manifests itself not as an interstate security crisis but rather as a self feeding rent mechanism in which transnational capital consolidates agricultural lands (Oakland Institute, 2024), geopolitical restructuring projects are put into practice (Toal, 2023), local and global elites realize profits through institutionalized corruption mechanisms (Transparency International, 2024), and Russia responds to this multilayered structure precisely by destroying these profit centers (Galeotti, 2024). The fundamental dynamic of the conflict has transformed from territorial control into determining which transnational capital network will gain control over this land and all the economic value it holds. Every military engagement in the field, every diplomatic move at the negotiating table, and every large scale investment decision is becoming a function of this colossal rent war. Unless this mechanism is deciphered and a radical transparency and international accountability regime capable of dispersing the web of interests is constructed, hopes for peace appear condemned to remain in the shadow of this complex and dark economy.

References

Beebe, G., & Beebe, J. (2024). “The Shadow Diplomacy of the Ukraine War: Unofficial Channels and Private Interests.” Foreign Affairs, 103(2), 112-126.

Friedman, G. (2024). The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (Updated Edition). New York: Anchor Books.

Galeotti, M. (2024). Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Expanded Edition). Oxford: Osprey Publishing.

GRAIN. (2023). The Land Grab in Ukraine: How War Is Transforming Agriculture and Land Ownership. Barcelona: GRAIN Publications.

Kremlin Pool Spokesperson. (2025, March April). Press statements made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Moscow: TASS and RIA Novosti Archive.

Lavrov, S. (2024). Minutes of the Annual Press Conference of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Security and Diplomacy. Moscow: Publications of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Le Billon, P. (2023). “War Economies and Post War Predation: The Political Economy of Reconstruction in Ukraine.” Conflict, Security & Development, 23(4), 289-312.

Macgregor, D. (2025). Public Assessments of Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor on the Political Economy of the War in Ukraine, Corruption Allegations, and Peace Negotiations. [Verbal Statement Transcript].

Oakland Institute. (2024). War and Land Grabs: The Financialization of Ukraine’s Farmland. Oakland, CA: Oakland Institute.

Plank, C., & Gonda, N. (2024). “Financial Giants on the Black Soil: Mapping Vulture Funds and Land Consolidation in Wartime Ukraine.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 24(2), 345-368.

Rodrik, D., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2024). “A New Framework for Post Conflict Reconstruction: Overcoming Rent Seeking and Corruption in Ukraine.” Journal of International Economic Law, 27(1), 45-72.

TNI. (Transnational Institute). (2024). Profiting from Crisis: The War in Ukraine and the Global Land Rush. Amsterdam: TNI Agrarian Justice Programme.

Toal, G. (Gearóid Ó Tuathail). (2023). “The Geopolitical Economy of the Ukraine War: Spatial Strategies and Capitalist Restructuring.” Geopolitics, 28(5), 1807-1832.

Transparency International. (2024). Corruption Perceptions Index 2023: Focus on Ukraine. Berlin: Transparency International.

Walt, S. M. (2024). “The Art of the Deal in a Time of War: Transactional Diplomacy and Its Discontents.” Foreign Policy, Spring Issue, 34-42.

Sefa Yürükel
Danish ethnographer and social anthropologist (MA)
Aarhus University, 1997
Independent Researcher
Fields of Research: International Politics, Public International Law, Geopolitics, Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Systems and Structures.

Moving Beyond the Traditional Narrative of War

The Russia Ukraine war is predominantly discussed in international relations and security studies literature along the axes of military strategy, geopolitical rivalry, and normative international law. However, the recent assessments of former senior Pentagon advisor Colonel Douglas Macgregor shake this narrative profoundly, shedding light on the invisible economic and political layers of the conflict. His claims suggest that the war actually serves a grand economic restructuring project, an attempt by global capital to reshape the region, and the fortification of interest oriented corrupt networks. This article aims to systematically address these complex theses put forward by Macgregor and to reveal the political economic anatomy of the war.

The “New Israel” Discourse: A Geopolitical Engineering Project

Macgregor’s most striking and controversial claim is that certain circles are “talking about turning Western Ukraine into a kind of new Israel destination.” This statement points not to a simple demographic shift but to a deep geopolitical engineering project. The potential components of this project are as follows:

· Strategic Repositioning: Given Israel’s current geopolitical challenges and regional security dilemmas, the idea of creating an alternative “safe haven” or strategic depth in Eastern Europe, particularly in Western Ukraine, which has historically been home to a Jewish population and possesses fertile lands.
· Demographic Engineering: The phrase “by depriving Ukrainians and bringing people from Israel” contains a highly speculative and ethically problematic claim that the chaotic environment and humanitarian crisis created by the war could be used as a tool to fundamentally alter the demographic structure of the region.
· Transfer of Capital and Influence: This scenario implies not only the movement of people but also the transfer of enormous financial capital, technological know how, and political influence to the region. This could lead to a transformation that fundamentally shakes the existing socio economic and political balances of the region.

This discourse positions the war as a premeditated process of “creative destruction” and implies that one of the motivations behind the conflict is to prepare the ground for this radical transformation.

The Plunder of Land: BlackRock and the Financialization of Agricultural Lands

The most concrete and convincing pillar of Macgregor’s thesis is the activities of the global investment giant BlackRock in Ukraine. The claim that “BlackRock is collecting hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land in Ukraine” points to a silent and profound economic transformation being carried out in the shadow of the war:

· Asset Transfer and Capital Consolidation: War conditions lead to a massive devaluation of asset prices, widespread economic fragility, and uncertainty. This environment offers a unique window of opportunity for actors with enormous capital accumulations like BlackRock to consolidate some of the world’s most fertile agricultural lands (“black soil”) at extremely low costs.
· Controlling Future Food Security: This process is not merely a real estate investment. In an era where global food crises and climate change are becoming increasingly pronounced, gaining control of strategic agricultural lands is becoming a supranational instrument of power. This represents the transfer of sovereign rights through financial means, fully meeting the description of “the plunder of Ukraine’s future and lands.”
· The Economic Motivation of the War: From Macgregor’s perspective, the prolongation of the war and the destabilization of the country are functional for the sustainability of this kind of plunder economy. The longer the conflict lasts, the more the Ukrainian state’s capacity to protect its assets and safeguard the public interest diminishes, thus facilitating such large scale privatization and expropriation processes.

Russia’s Strategic Response: Hitting “Profit Targets”

According to Macgregor, the Russian Federation is highly aware of this political economic game and is adapting its military strategy accordingly. The observation that “Russia is now striking targets in Ukraine that carry direct US and Western investment” indicates a transformation in the nature of the war. The most concrete example of this is the strike on a Ukrainian Ministry of Defense factory allegedly linked to Zelensky:

· Dual Targeting Strategy: The destruction of such targets serves two purposes. First, militarily, it weakens Ukraine’s long range attack drone and missile production capacity, reducing its ability to retaliate. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it physically targets the direct investments and interests of the West, making them feel the cost of the war directly.
· Dismantling Corruption Networks: The emphasis that the factory in question is “connected to Zelensky” shows that Russia is also instrumentalizing the anti corruption discourse in its target selection. Through these strikes, Moscow is sending the message that it is targeting not only the military economic infrastructure but also the established “rent networks” between Western capital and local political elites.
· Escalation Signal: This strategy is also a strategic communication directed at Western decision makers. By saying “Your investments are not untouchable in this war,” Russia demonstrates its capacity to spread and escalate the cost of the conflict toward the financial centers of the West.

The Impasse of Diplomacy: The Problem of Seriousness and the Shadow of Side Deals

Macgregor’s assessments of the peace negotiations are equally sharp. According to him, Moscow “does not take the current mediators seriously” and is demanding more competent names at the table. The comments appearing in the Russian press, particularly regarding the positions of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, reveal how diplomacy has become mired in a crisis of trust:

· The Legitimacy Crisis of the Mediators: Moscow’s emphasis on “son in law” and “the President’s former business partner” points to the potential conflict of interest that overshadows these individuals’ diplomatic missions. This situation creates the perception that the personal and commercial relationships of the negotiator take precedence over their role in the search for a solution.
· Two Tier Diplomacy and Corruption: The Kremlin’s statement that “after the talks, we can make side deals with them at their own convenience” reflects an extremely cynical and deep distrust. This points to a perception that the primary aim of Western negotiators is not to end the war but to pursue privileged opportunities (such as reconstruction tenders, energy deals, agricultural land concessions) that will serve their own commercial interests in an environment of chaos.
· Getting to the Source of Financing: Macgregor, getting to the root of the problem, draws attention to the overlap between the Gulf capital pushing for war and the networks manipulating the peace process. From this perspective, he implies that neither war nor peace is an independent end; both are instruments through which the same transnational capital groups “generously profit.”

Conclusion: Transformation into a Multilayered Rent War

When Douglas Macgregor’s claims are evaluated as a whole, the picture emerges that the war in Ukraine has gone far beyond a classical territorial and security conflict. The arguments examined throughout the article indicate that the conflict has taken on a multilayered structure, caught between a land grab carried out by global financial institutions, a radical geopolitical engineering aimed at ethno demographic restructuring, a rent economy operating through corruption networks, and a Russian military strategy that is redefining its strategic objectives in full awareness of all this.

From this framework, while the conflict itself becomes an end for the structures profiting from the war, the peace process turns merely into a negotiation over how this profit will be distributed under new conditions. Macgregor’s warning is clear: Russia, in order to disrupt this multidimensional game, will continue to pursue a strategy that targets not only the enemy at the front but also the economic interests at the heart of the war. This stands before us as a fundamental problematic that further complicates the hopes for peace and stability in Ukraine.

References

Macgregor, D. (2025). Public Assessments of Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor on the Political Economy of the War in Ukraine, Corruption Allegations, and Peace Negotiations. (The article is based on the transcript provided and the verbal statements made by Macgregor during an interview or conference.)

Sefa Yürükel
Danish ethnographer and social anthropologist (MA)
Aarhus University, 1997
Independent Researcher
Fields of Research: International Politics, Public International Law, Geopolitics, Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Systems and Structures.

The Invisible Map of War

The oral assessments of retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor from 2025 offer a disturbing diagnosis that shakes the established military and diplomatic narratives surrounding the war in Ukraine. His revelations lay bare a deep political-economic structure that underlies the conflict and renders it perpetual. This structure operates far from the discourses of international law and sovereignty, on a plane where the concentration of global capital, geopolitical engineering projects, and institutionalized corruption networks intertwine. Macgregor’s words reveal that the war is perceived not merely as an instrument of total destruction but also as a window of opportunity for radical economic restructuring, a kind of “creative destruction” process. From this, it can be argued that the struggle taking place on Ukrainian soil has transformed from a conventional war into a multi-layered proxy war aimed at redesigning the food security of the future, energy corridors, and the strategic settlement of populations.

The Financial Occupation of the Black Soil: Capital Concentration Under War Conditions

One of the most concrete phenomena Macgregor draws attention to is the process by which giant asset management companies like BlackRock are consolidating Ukrainian agricultural lands. This activity should not be considered independent of the chaotic conditions of war but rather as a direct function of them. The GRAIN (2023) report documents that the fragility created by the conflict in the agricultural sector has led to a historic concentration of land ownership. The Oakland Institute (2024) goes even further, defining this process as “financialization” and interpreting BlackRock’s strategy as an attempt to consolidate Ukraine’s black soil, one of the most fertile lands in the world, as a strategic asset at a time when the global food crisis is escalating.

The peer-reviewed study by Plank and Gonda (2024) empirically reinforces these observations. The authors reveal how investment vehicles they describe as “vulture funds” have turned the devaluation and uncertainty created by the war into a unique buying opportunity. The Transnational Institute (TNI, 2024) report completes this picture by emphasizing that what is happening is not merely a transfer of assets but also the erosion of sovereign rights through financial mechanisms. This is precisely the situation Macgregor describes as “the plunder of Ukraine’s future and lands”; the war functions as a catalyst that accelerates the transfer of national assets in favor of transnational capital and legitimizes this process under a military cover.

“Western Ukraine” as a Strategic Vision: The Repositioning of Demography and Capital

The most speculative yet equally illuminating claim voiced by Macgregor is the discourse of transforming Western Ukraine into a “new Israel destination.” This expression should be read not as a crude claim of demographic engineering but as a symptom pointing to a profound geopolitical restructuring project. When examined through Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s (Toal, 2023) critical geopolitics framework, this discourse strengthens the thesis that the war is a spatial and capitalist restructuring project. According to Toal, war is a struggle not only for territorial control but also for which economic and political order that territory will be integrated into. Friedman’s (2024) long-term geopolitical forecasts provide an indirect theoretical basis for this project, predicting that Eastern Europe will cease to be a buffer zone in the power struggles of the 21st century and become a hub for new energy and trade corridors.

From this perspective, the “New Israel” discourse coincides with the idea of building a new “safe haven” and strategic depth for global capital. This could mean, rather than a physical transfer of population, the transformation of Western Ukraine’s institutional, legal, and financial infrastructure into a high-security, low-regulation attraction center for capital. The work of Rodrik and Stiglitz (2024) is cautionary at this point; if not strictly supervised, post-war reconstruction processes risk turning into a colossal resource transfer mechanism for rent-seeking local and global elites. This is precisely Macgregor’s concern: the potential for the reconstruction of Ukraine, under the control of the same interest groups that devastated it, to turn the country into a “rent republic.”

Targets Behind the Front Line: Russia’s Political-Economic Counter-Offensive

Macgregor’s most critical observation regarding military strategy is the transformation in Russia’s target selection. Statements made by sources close to the Kremlin (Kremlin Pool Spokesperson, 2025) confirm that Moscow is now directly targeting not only military infrastructure but also corruption networks linked to the “Kiev regime” and Western investments. This strategy is placed in a historical context in Galeotti’s (2024) work; Russian military doctrine has long adopted the targeting of the interests of the enemy’s economic and political elites as a method of war to break its war-fighting capacity. The strike on a defense factory linked to Zelensky is a current manifestation of this doctrine.

This action produces a two-pronged result. First, it serves a military purpose by weakening Ukraine’s long-range strike capability. The second and more complex consequence is a direct message to Western investors and their local partners. Le Billon’s (2023) conceptualization of “post-war predation” becomes critical here. Le Billon examines how networks profiting from war survive and dominate the economy even in peacetime. Russia’s striking of these facilities is a counter-economic strategy that aims, by targeting the “spoils of war,” to undermine the gains these actors derive from the conflict and to make them bear the costs. This demonstrates that the war is sustained not only by artillery fire but also by the destruction of financial and institutional targets.

The Shadow Realm of Diplomacy: Side Deals and a Crisis of Trust

The deadlock in peace negotiations, as Macgregor points out, is also shaped on the same political-economic ground. The criticism of “lack of seriousness” directed at figures like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, which appeared in the Russian press and was also reflected in Lavrov’s (2024) official minutes, expresses a deep crisis of confidence created by the personalization and commercialization of diplomacy. Beebe and Beebe’s (2024) analysis of “shadow diplomacy” provides an ideal framework for conceptualizing this situation. The authors discuss how the increasing role of informal channels and businesspeople in diplomatic processes makes conflicts of interest inevitable. Walt’s (2024) critique of transactional diplomacy completes this analysis, framing the issue as one in which diplomacy itself is seen as a “deal” and negotiators fall under the suspicion of chasing advantageous side opportunities for themselves rather than solving the core problem.

Moscow’s cynical attitude, to the effect of “first let’s discuss the matter with serious people, then we can make side deals with you,” is the peak of this crisis of trust. The Kremlin is openly implying that it believes the main motivation of Western negotiators is not a ceasefire but to grab a share of the post-war reconstruction pie. Transparency International’s (2024) report, showing why the perception of corruption in Ukraine becomes even more critical during wartime, provides the objective ground for this suspicion. High perceptions of corruption damage the narrative of investing in the country’s future while simultaneously fueling the suspicion that similar rent battles lie behind the peace talks. As a result, diplomacy risks moving away from the goal of ending the war and turning into a platform where the economic opportunities created by the war are negotiated over how they will be shared.

Final Assessment: Unlocking the Rent War

When brought together, Douglas Macgregor’s seemingly disparate claims present an extremely coherent and dark paradigm for reading the Ukrainian conflict. In this paradigm, war ceases to be a classical security problem; it transforms into a fluid form of conflict in which global financial institutions consolidate agricultural lands (Oakland Institute, 2024), geopolitical engineering projects are tested (Toal, 2023), local and transnational elites profit through institutionalized corruption (Transparency International, 2024), and Russia responds to this multi-layered structure by directly targeting these interest centers (Galeotti, 2024). The ultimate aim of the war manifests itself not as territorial gain but as determining which transnational capital network will control this land and the economic resources upon it. Therefore, every ongoing engagement in the field, every move at the negotiating table, and every investment decision is a chess piece in this colossal rent war. The path to peace cannot be built with formulas that ignore this complex web of economic interests, but only with a radical mechanism of transparency and accountability that can decipher and dismantle this web.

References

Beebe, G., & Beebe, J. (2024). “The Shadow Diplomacy of the Ukraine War: Unofficial Channels and Private Interests.” Foreign Affairs, 103(2), 112-126.

Friedman, G. (2024). The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (Updated Edition). New York: Anchor Books.

Galeotti, M. (2024). Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Expanded Edition). Oxford: Osprey Publishing.

GRAIN. (2023). The Land Grab in Ukraine: How War Is Transforming Agriculture and Land Ownership. Barcelona: GRAIN Publications.

Kremlin Pool Spokesperson. (2025, March-April). Press releases issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Moscow: TASS and RIA Novosti Archive.

Lavrov, S. (2024). Minutes of the Annual Press Conference of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov on Security and Diplomacy. Moscow: Publications of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Le Billon, P. (2023). “War Economies and Post-War Predation: The Political Economy of Reconstruction in Ukraine.” Conflict, Security & Development, 23(4), 289-312.

Macgregor, D. (2025). Public Assessments of Retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor on the Political Economy of the War in Ukraine, Corruption Allegations, and Peace Negotiations. [Transcript of Verbal Statement].

Oakland Institute. (2024). War and Land Grabs: The Financialization of Ukraine’s Farmland. Oakland, CA: Oakland Institute.

Plank, C., & Gonda, N. (2024). “Financial Giants on the Black Soil: Mapping Vulture Funds and Land Consolidation in Wartime Ukraine.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 24(2), 345-368.

Rodrik, D., & Stiglitz, J. E. (2024). “A New Framework for Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Overcoming Rent-Seeking and Corruption in Ukraine.” Journal of International Economic Law, 27(1), 45-72.

TNI. (Transnational Institute). (2024). Profiting from Crisis: The War in Ukraine and the Global Land Rush. Amsterdam: TNI Agrarian Justice Programme.

Toal, G. (Gearóid Ó Tuathail). (2023). “The Geopolitical Economy of the Ukraine War: Spatial Strategies and Capitalist Restructuring.” Geopolitics, 28(5), 1807-1832.

Transparency International. (2024). Corruption Perceptions Index 2023: Focus on Ukraine. Berlin: Transparency International.

Walt, S. M. (2024). “The Art of the Deal in a Time of War: Transactional Diplomacy and Its Discontents.” Foreign Policy, Spring Issue, 34-42.

Sefa Yürükel
Danish ethnographer and social anthropologist (MA)
Aarhus University, 1997
Independent Researcher
Fields of Research: International Politics, Public International Law, Geopolitics, Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Systems and Structures.