Andriy Melnyk made a calculation on Twitter on April 22: Ukraine needs a tenfold increase in military aid to put an end to Russian aggression this year. What do you think the Deputy Foreign Minister's intention was with this public message? Most Twitter users or newspaper readers are unlikely to find anything puzzling about it: He hoped for an increase in arms deliveries, albeit realistically hardly by a factor of ten, and wanted to make a small contribution with his means.

According to Wolfgang Streeck, anyone who reads Melnyk so naively has overlooked a fact that is crucial to the presumed state of mind of the eloquent diplomat, which the emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne brought to light on May 1 in an article about the prospect of a new bipolar world order in the online edition of the "New Left Review": Melnyk is a Harvard graduate. And that's why, according to Streeck's conclusion on the individual case, which is not at all dependent on the citation of studies on the habitus formation of foreign students at East Coast universities, he "must have known" that the generous order of weapons would inevitably annoy "his American cartridges".

According to Streeck, America is planning war against China

If Melnyk has accepted this trouble, Streeck continues to explain in the zeal of forging the chain, then he must also have known that no additional help can be expected from Washington because the Americans want to save their strength for the war against China prepared by the Biden administration. At first glance, it seems hard to imagine that someone in the Foreign Ministry in Kiev could see through the interconnectedness of the world situation in this way without having read a preprint of Streeck's essay. But one should not underestimate the training that the global accomplices of the US elite receive at Harvard!

Streeck calls the method he uses in interpreting Melnyk's statement "dietristic hermeneutics," after the way of thinking widespread in Italy, which always asks about backers and ulterior motives in politics. Sociologists generally regard the "dietrismo" as a symptom of Italy's backwardness in the modernization process, a surplus of feudal, i.e. personal, power relations. At the beginning of his essay, capitalism researcher Streeck states that with the Covid 19 pandemic, the whole world has entered a state in which every media consumer is forced to assume every day that there is a truth behind the news.

If Melnyk knew that he could not achieve anything with his April 22 appeal to NATO allies, then who were the addressees? Streeck reveals: his own people. The "ruling Ukrainian clique" is willing to fight "to the bitter end," he said, "driven by the radical nationalist belief that real nations grow on the battlefield soaked in the blood of their best." Streeck, who was involved in the "Stand Up" movement founded by Sahra Wagenknecht in 2018, describes the former ambassador of Ukraine to Germany as "representative of the classic fascist Bandera element in the Ukrainian government".

Streeck's alternative investigative journalism, which reveals the secrets of capital's backrooms through combinatorics, reflects world connoisseurship through a style of cosmopolitanism. Streeck intersperses foreign words in italics in the English text. In the State Department, he paraphrases alleged indiscretions, they do not believe that "a Ukrainian final victory" is imminent. According to what hermeneutics should one understand this choice of words, which suggests that Melnyk's country is waging a war like Hitler? There is nothing behind it, just the cynical will to provoke.