The Killing Fields of Aughinish

Ireland enabling Russia's Barbarity

On 24 March, a consortium of European investigative media outlets, those tireless bloodhounds of the liberal conscience, forever sniffing out the precise coordinates of Governmental sins, reported that the Russian-owned Aughinish Alumina was shipping the lion’s share of its alumina exports straight to Russia. The supply chain has been traced with grim, meticulous precision by The Irish Times in collaboration with the OCCRP, and the kind of people who still believe journalism is a vocation rather than a content farm. And that this innocuous appearing white powder, this refined essence of bauxite, was finding its way, with all the inexorable logic of capitalism, into the aluminium exoskeletons of ballistic missiles and drones. Missiles and drones that have since rained their particular brand of Russian state-sponsored barbarity down on civilian targets in Ukraine: schools, hospitals, apartment blocks, the usual inventory of Russia's recent war crimes in Ukraine, but also the Sahel in Af…