US sanctions deepening conflicts in the Balkans – Hungary

Budapest has accused the US of increasing tensions by imposing restrictions on four officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Hungarian foreign ministry said on Wednesday that new US sanctions targeting elected officials are contributing to instability in the Balkans. Peter Sztaray, the state secretary for security policy, was referring to restrictions against several people in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its subdivision, the Republika Srpska (RS).

Sztaray told the Hungarian MTI news agency that sanctions have always failed in the region and that they “do not bring peace, but increase tensions and deepen conflicts.”

The secretary emphasized that “it would be preferable to engage in consultations instead on the basis of mutual respect, not about the western Balkans, but with the western Balkans.” He added that Hungary stands by the democratically elected leaders in the region and “calls for the establishment of a real dialogue as soon as possible.”

Sztaray also confirmed that stability in the region was one of Hungary’s primary national security interests and it would continue to promote peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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US ‘taking revenge on Hungarians’ – Budapest

Washington placed personal sanctions on four officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 31, including President of the RS National Assembly Nenad Stevandic, RS Prime Minister Radovan Viskovic, member of the Bosnian presidency, Zeljka Cvijanovic, and RS Minister of Justice Milos Bukejlovic.

The US says the measures were imposed in response to a new law adopted by the parliament of Republika Srpska, under which the decisions of the Bosnian constitutional court will be invalid on its territory. 

In 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina broke away from the former Yugoslavia, beginning a three-year civil war in the republic, which concluded in a peace agreement between the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. Under the terms of the deal, the Republika Srpska and the Brcko administrative district were created as self-governing entities in the country.

Poland names stumbling block with Ukraine

Warsaw will back Kiev, but not at the expense of its own interests, its deputy foreign minister has said

Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation is “impossible” without Kiev’s recognition that the WWII mass murder of ethnic Poles in Volhynia was a genocide, Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski said on Wednesday.

Relations between Warsaw and Kiev are “unfortunately not the best” at the moment, “due to recent statements by some of the Ukrainian authorities,” Jablonski told the Polish broadcaster RMF24. Poland understands the “emotions” that arose because Ukraine is “under attack,” he added, “but it should not attack its allies, either.”

“We support Ukraine to the extent that it meets the national interests of Poland. So it has always been and always will be,” said Jablonski. 

While there are “many issues” on which Warsaw and Kiev disagree, the WWII-era massacre is by far the biggest problem. The Polish government classifies the murder of up to 60,000 ethnic Poles by Stepan Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1943-44 as a genocide, and has pressed Ukraine to allow exhumations, commemorations and prosecution of those responsible. In Kiev, however, Bandera is a national hero.

“There is no possibility of real Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation without settling this issue,” the minister insisted.

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Poland tells Ukraine it made a serious mistake

Poland has been the hub of NATO efforts to supply Ukraine with weapons, ammunition and equipment. It has also joined the push by six eastern EU members to block the sale of Ukrainian agricultural exports at below-market prices, under pressure from disaffected farmers. 

Responding to Ukrainian criticism of the ban earlier this week, the Polish president’s foreign policy adviser, Marcin Przydacz, said Kiev should instead “start appreciating the role that Poland has played for Ukraine in recent months and years.” 

Ukraine’s foreign ministry responded by summoning the Polish ambassador to protest that Przydacz’s statement was “untrue and unacceptable.” Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s deputy head of office, Andrey Sibiga, posted on social media that “There’s nothing worse than your rescuer demanding a rescue fee from you, even as you’re bleeding.”

Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki called Ukraine’s move a serious mistake, and vowed that “the interest of no other country will ever prevail over the interest of Poland.” Zelensky has sought to cool the tensions, arguing that the two countries are “a real shield of Europe from sea to sea” and that this shield cannot bear “a single crack.” 

Eco-awareness not reducing carbon emissions – study

Companies rated high for Environmental and Social Governance score as low on eco-friendliness as ‘non-woke’ peers, Scientific Beta reports

Corporations with high environment, social and governance (ESG) ratings cause just as much harm to the environment as their peers with low scores, according to research conducted by index provider Scientific Beta and published by the Financial Times on Monday. 

“ESG ratings have little to no relation to carbon intensity, even when considering only the environmental pillar of these ratings,” Scientific Beta research director Felix Goltz told the Times, adding that “the carbon intensity reduction of green portfolios can be effectively canceled out by adding ESG objectives.”

If anything, high ESG ratings were more likely to correlate to a larger carbon footprint, the researchers found, noting that when all three metrics were used, the resulting portfolios were less green than the average index weighted by market capitalization. 

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Musk believes ‘ESG is the devil’ and he’s not the only one

Because social and governance metrics have nothing to do with a company’s carbon footprint or environmental policies – diversity initiatives and anti-corruption measures do not overlap with pollution controls or resource conservation – “it can very well be that a high-emitting firm is very good at governance or employee satisfaction,” thus netting a deceptively high ESG score, Goltz explained.

However, he acknowledged, “even the environmental pillar is pretty unrelated to carbon emissions.” Instead, he said, the metric was determined by more concrete attributes like water use and waste management. 

Ratings firm MSCI ESG Research, one of three agencies whose ESG ratings were used in Scientific Beta’s research, explained that ESG ratings weren’t actually meant to measure a company’s eco-friendliness, even if they had taken on that role in the minds of many in the media and business establishment. 

ESG ratings “are fundamentally designed to measure a company’s resilience to financially material environmental, societal and governance risks. They are not designed to measure a company’s impact on climate change,” the company told FT. Instead, the environmental pillar takes into account future plans to curb carbon emissions, clean technology investments, and management of nature-related risks.

The problem of ESG metrics operating at cross-purposes is likely to become worse before it gets better, according to Goltz, who pointed out that new metrics are constantly being added.

“Investors need to think carefully about which aspects of sustainability they would like to prioritize when building portfolios – carbon reduction or a high ESG rating,” Hortense Bioy, the global director of sustainability research at ratings agency Morningstar, told FT. 

Once hyped as the corporate solution to the planet’s problems by major industry figures like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, ESG has fallen on hard times in the last year. Fink revealed in January that the asset management behemoth had lost $4 billion in assets under management due to the anti-ESG backlash and in June admitted he had stopped using the “weaponized” term.