People are often surprised when I tell them the only news organ I read with anything approaching regularity is the Financial Times. “Isn’t that the house journal of the opposition, Paul?” Yes, precisely—which is why you’ll find there a largely unadorned truth that you won’t find elsewhere.

Case in point:

Ukraine has large underground deposits worth up to $11.5tn of critical minerals, including lithium, graphite, cobalt, titanium and rare earths such as gallium, that are essential for an array of industries from defence to electric vehicles.

But these deposits, uncommon in Europe, have not undergone any significant exploration or development — processes that take years even under stable jurisdictions. Data is also lacking on the quality of the reserves, which is information investors need before pouring millions into new mines.

That’s not to say that the FT doesn’t have an ideological spin; note that the title of this piece claims that these minerals are why Trump is interested in Ukraine. Left unspoken is the implication that this is a pretty big part of why everyone else is interested in the fate of a country which, just a few years ago, most of the world would have struggled to point to on a map.

By “everyone else”, I mean of course the decision-making clades of government and finance. Those of us who have, quite rightly, supported Ukraine in its struggles have done so because we instinctively feel that war is a monstrous wrong. But “the market”, the cruel and hungry god of this supposedly godless age, feeds on it: the market must grow, must find new externalities to convert into interest-bearing debt.

As the masks fall away from the faces beneath, we need to confront the motivations of our self-appointed masters, and recognise them as different from our own. There will be more Ukraines—and in every such case, we will be told that the need to pick a side is a matter of morality, just as it was with the invasion of Iraq, with the first Gulf War, with the Suez crisis, and so many wars before.

In a sense, that is true. But the choice between Putin or Trump or the EU is, in another sense, no choice at all. The true moral choice is between humanity and economics as we know it—and the article above shows pretty clearly that those to whom we have delegated that choice have chosen the latter.