German MP Jörg Dornau, onion farmer in Belarus
Jörg Dornau, who founded the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2016, is an agricultural engineer by training – and he runs a farm in Belarus. Located a few kilometres from Lida, in the north-west of the country, he rents its 1,500 hectares from the regime of President Alexander Lukashenka and produces onions.
Those facts are surprising in themselves, but the independent Belarusian magazine Reform News has revealed some disturbing details. The German media had already reported on the Belarusian business of the “Onion King”, as Jörg Dornau is known in his home country, after he was fined €20,862 by the government of the Free State of Saxony in August 2024 for hiding his unlikely business venture.
The Belarusian journalists have now established that Dornau’s farm has employed prisoners – who likely include political detainees, given the nature of the Lukashenka regime. Cybulka-Bel, the company he registered in Belarus, held a contract with the nearby Lida prison. The authors of the article stress that its inmates are not obliged to work. However, those prisoners who do sign up can earn the handsome sum of around five euros for an 11-hour working day on Jörg Dornau’s farm.
Women and war in Ukraine
Conflict can have a dramatic impact on traditional social roles, as was demonstrated by the Second World War and the years that followed. In Ukraine, this historical legacy is not so pronounced, even though more women are now serving in the army.
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The Ukrainian magazine Wonderzine reports on a training programme, Iron Women, to prepare women for jobs as drivers of bulldozers and excavators. The scheme is the initiative of Beredskapslyftet, a Swedish nonprofit. The aim is to help Ukrainian women get skilled up for the domestic labour market, which is suffering cruelly from a shortage of male workers as a result of the war.
The Ukrainian government is also providing training for women. In seven regions of the country, there are now bus-driving courses specifically for them.
Russians and the “collective West”
The independent Russian portal Verstka has found a study published by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences which analyses opinion polls conducted over several decades on how Russians perceive themselves and other ethnic groups living in their country. One of the report’s findings concerns the “consolidation of Russians in the face of the collective West”.
In 2023, 79.9% of those questioned agreed that “Russia [was] an exceptional country that is fundamentally different from the West and [should] therefore follow its own path”. This figure is – brace yourself – eight times higher than in 1998, just before Vladimir Putin came to power. Back then, only 9.5% of Russians were of this opinion. According to the same survey, two thirds of those questioned (68.5%) thought that “Western influences are destroying traditional Russian values”. In the late 1990s, only 16.3% of respondents shared this view.
Even though the Russian Federation is a multi-ethnic country, with more than 190 different ethnic groups living on its soil, half of those questioned in the same poll believe that “Russia is above all the country of the Russians, and the state should represent their interests”. And almost 43% of respondents believe that “Russians are more intelligent and have more talents than other peoples”. The survey appears to show the scale of Russia’s creeping megalomania during the Putin era.
Verstka unearthed another statistic that illustrates a baleful result of Russia’s current “exceptional” path: in two and a half years of war with Ukraine, Russian soldiers returning from the front have killed or seriously wounded nearly five hundred people. Drawing on public court and police data, they found 242 cases of homicide and 227 cases of serious injury committed by individuals who had fought in Ukraine. The perpetrators of the assaults are mostly former prisoners who agreed to join the army in exchange for a reduced sentence, and the victims are mainly their relatives. However, the authors of the article believe that there are probably more cases, as not all of the data is accessible.
Floods in Poland
Poland is slowly recovering from the catastrophic floods in September, which caused extensive damage to towns in the country’s southwest. The blame game has already begun, and this time the climate crisis has a proper role in the discussion, notes Paulina Januszewska in Krytyka Polityczna. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who recently toppled Poland’s hard-right populists, caused an uproar when he blamed the poor state of the country’s dams on… beavers.
His attack on the rodents, which in fact carry out hydrological engineering that is estimated to be worth billions (their dams stabilise water levels and slow the flow of rivers), has provoked some annoyance among environmentalists, who mostly voted for parties of Tusk’s governing coalition.
The new Polish government has so far failed to introduce any serious environmental legislation. This has not stopped Donald Tusk from declaring, with all his statesmanlike authority, that Poland will not accept either the EU’s Green Deal as it stands or its Nature Restoration Law. And yet specialists agree that the extent of the flood damage in Poland is due not only to climate change but also to misguided practices: the felling of mountain forests, the construction of artificial riverbanks, and overdevelopment of flood plains by property developers.
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