Tag: Russia

U.S. and NATO pave the way for sending troops into Ukraine / by John Wojcik

U.S. troops march in a massive military parade in Warsaw, Poland, on Aug. 15, 2023, to commemorate a 1920 battle between right-wing ‘White’ armies and the ‘Red’ forces of the Bolsheviks. According to the Pentagon’s top general, U.S. and other NATO troops could eventually be marching into Ukraine. | Czarek Sokolowski / AP

Reposted from Peoples World

The nuclear clock ticked ever closer to midnight Thursday when Gen. Charles Brown, Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that U.S. and allied troops, under the umbrella of NATO, will get into Ukraine, “eventually, over time.” He made the remarks as reports were released in media around the world that NATO is considering dispatching soldiers to “help” Ukraine.

Thus far, the Biden administration has officially resisted making statements like that. Such a move would increase the danger of head-on conflict between the two largest nuclear powers in the world. The administration has supported, however, an enormous war budget of a trillion dollars, with a $60 billion add-on recently for more weapons for Ukraine. That war is widely seen as a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Americans have been told, essentially, that they will pay for the weapons while the Ukrainians do the dying. If NATO troops end up in Ukraine, which is what the top Pentagon general is saying, U.S. and Russian soldiers could find themselves facing one another directly on the battlefield.

That, on top of Poland’s request two months ago for U.S. nuclear weapons to be stationed in their country near the Russian border cannot do anything but push the world closer to the brink of potential disaster.

Counting both Ukrainians and Russians killed since the full-scale Russian invasion of that country began three years ago, it’s estimated that hundreds of thousands have been killed. While the dead pile up the coffins containing boys are shipped back to Kiev and Moscow, U.S. arms companies have been raking in a fortune over the war.

The armament makers are using Ukraine as a testing ground for all kinds of new and deadly weapons, including ones they hope to use in future profit-making wars. No one has an accurate read on the extent to which Ukrainian oligarchs have joined in on the profit-making connected to the free reign given to arms companies in their country.

‘Good deal’: A number of U.S. leaders have said the war is a ‘good deal’ because the U.S. economy benefits from weapons sales while only Ukrainians do the dying on the frontlines. Here, Ukrainian workers carry the body of a man killed in a Russian air raid in Kharkiv, Ukraine, April 30, 2024. | Andrii Marienko / AP

Sabotaged peace talks

On the peace front, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that he appreciated China’s continuing attempts to push for a ceasefire and negotiations as a solution to the war. While visiting Moscow, President Xi Jinping said his country will continue to push the 12-point peace plan it announced last year.

That plan was rejected by the U.S., despite statements from the Ukrainian government that it found some parts useful. This week, the Biden administration rejected another proposal from China on a separate issue, an attempt to get the U.S. to agree to no-first-use of nuclear weapons.

It’s all part of a repeating pattern. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, the U.S. has, at times by itself, and at other times with the aid of the U.K. and others, sabotaged numerous attempts by the parties to begin peace talks, telling the rulers in Ukraine that the NATO powers will supply them everything needed to fight the Russians.

Russia began its invasion in February 2022 after the U.S. convinced Ukraine to make no promise that it would stay out of the NATO alliance, which had already moved its troops, including U.S. troops, into countries lining the border with Russia. Before that invasion, the coup government in Kiev spent the years since 2014 sending the most right-wing elements of its armed forces into the Eastern parts of its country, where they killed some 15,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian state that exists today was established with U.S. backing in 2014. It overthrew the corrupt albeit legitimately elected government headed by President Viktor Yanukovych. That government earned the disdain of the U.S. when it resisted austerity demands made by the E.U. in exchange for economic investment. Instead, the Yanukovych government decided it would step up economic cooperation with Russia and avoid the E.U. austerity dictates.

At that time, there was extensive trade between Russia and the E.U., trade that big U.S. corporations, particularly fossil fuel companies, wanted to end so they could step in and rake in the money instead. The U.S., it is now widely assumed, was likely behind the blowing up of jointly-built Russian-German pipelines supplying energy to Western Europe.

Months before, President Biden had assured reporters in Europe that the U.S. would “take care” of the pipelines to end Russian economic benefit. Efforts to investigate the sabotage have been slowed down or had their findings suppressed by many of the major European powers.

Now, when there is widespread recognition that it is past time for negotiations to begin to end the war, the U.S., in statements from its top general and others, is signaling that intends to send troops into Ukraine to directly engage the Russians. The announcement also comes just as Russia has been making major gains on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.

Back in Russia, Victory Day, the biggest annual holiday in that country, was celebrated on May 9. On that date, the defeat of the Nazis by the Soviet Union in 1945 is remembered. In Victory Park in Moscow, U.S.-made M1A1 Abrams tanks captured in Ukraine are now on display alongside German weapons captured from the Nazis in World War II.

Captured Leopard tanks sent to Ukraine earlier this year by Germany are also on display. When the Abrams and Leopard tanks were shipped to Ukraine months ago, they were heralded as weapons that would move Ukraine closer than ever to victory.

Media accomplices

The New York Times has been banging the war drums recently, including constantly reminding readers of the lack of democracy in Russia. The paper’s editors and reporters say nothing about the banning of all opposition parties and news media in Ukraine nor about laws that make most trade unions in the country illegal.

The Times excuses the plans to send in U.S. and other troops under the umbrella of NATO by reporting that the move is designed to relieve “manpower shortages” on the battlefield. Those “shortages” result from massive numbers of Ukrainians being killed and the failure of the government to find replacements.

Ukrainians in their droves are apparently rejecting the attempts to continue this war by refusing to serve. Government patrols have resorted to cruising the streets and seizing people at gunpoint, forcing them, totally untrained, into the army and sending them to the front lines. Many of them see their own government as simply sending them to their death. They do not believe that by going to fight they are saving democracy, which is what the U.S. government and corporate media tell Americans.

The Biden administration has defended the war by describing it as a “good deal” for Americans. The huge military budget, the Biden administration has said, will create many jobs here at home for people making weapons. When Americans start to die in Ukraine on the battlefield, the “good deal” argument will likely become a lot less convincing.

The other lie Americans have been told is that by pouring tens of millions of dollars into the proxy war in Ukraine, Russia will likely go down to defeat at the hands of Ukrainians determined to save their homeland. The recent advances by Russian forces in the east and the deteriorating position of the Ukrainian military undermine that argument.

Visitors take photos of a U.S.-made M1A1 Abrams tank, foreground, hit and captured by Russian troops during the fighting in Ukraine. The tank, along with other NATO-supplied weapons, were put on display in Moscow on May 1, 2024. | Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP

“We’ll get there eventually”

The Ukrainian government says it needs at least 150,000 new troops on its northern borders.

When asked if NATO troops could fill that gap, Pentagon Gen. Brown’s answer of “We’ll get there eventually” signals plans are in the works for a major escalation of U.S. involvement. Even just sending in only NATO trainers or advisers would create new U.S. obligations under the NATO treaty.

If those trainers were attacked by Russians, the U.S. would have to come to their “defense.” It could provide a justification for sending in U.S. warplanes, for example. Brown admitted that this was the case and said the U.S. would always abide by its NATO treaty obligations.

Even as Brown was making a promise of greater involvement, the Biden administration was reiterating its official position Thursday that no U.S. troops would go to die in Ukraine. The top U.S. general and the White House thus appear to be taking two positions simultaneously on the issue—the U.S. government supposedly opposes sending troops but also says they will get their eventually. That kind of duplicity is, in itself, dangerous.

Adding to the dangerous situation is the continued insistence by French President Emmanuel Macron that “nothing” should be ruled out when it comes to NATO intervention in Ukraine. Remarks like his give cover to the U.S., which can always claim it was not the first to move in this new dangerous direction but that it was following the wishes of its NATO allies. Macron first announced his position in February.

The U.S. has frequently said it did not want to dispatch certain weapons to Ukraine but then changed its mind after allies made the first move.

The right-wing government of Estonia has chimed in, as well, saying it might send troops into western Ukraine. Lithuania’s foreign minister said his country would join in, too, and last week, bragged in an interview with The Guardian that his country had troops in Ukraine even before the war began.

As for Germany, its support for the war effort brings back memories of times past. The New York Times Friday published a photo showing a long line of German tanks rumbling along a highway, heading toward Poland. In the caption, the editors failed to mention it was one of many west-to-east highways originally constructed by Hitler in the 1930s specifically for the purpose of moving tanks and troops into position to invade the Soviet Union.

U.S. military leaders continue to argue that placement of NATO trainers in Ukraine comes with benefits because it would enable the U.S. to better assess for the Ukrainians “enemy” positions and plans.

Washington war hawks

But the loudest voices calling for an escalation of NATO’s direct involvement continue to come from Washington.

Another war hawk not heard from lately re-surfaced just this week. Evelyn Farkas, formerly the top Pentagon official for Ukraine under the Obama administration, reiterated her support Thursday for NATO troops going into Ukraine and admitted that U.S. troops were actually in the country years ago before the Russians moved into Crimea.

“Remember, when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, we sent increased (many were already there) numbers of troops. We kept rotating them in all the way to 2012 when we got spooked and withdrew them. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that now with troop shortages, NATO has to consider sending in troops,” Farkas said.

Alexander Vindman, the well-known retired U.S. army colonel and native of the Soviet Union, added his voice to the war party. He said it was “malpractice” to send Ukraine large amounts of arms but not the personnel needed to use them properly.

If it all results in World War III, Vindman, Farkas, Brown, and the rest may not be in a position to comment further.

As with all op-ed and news-analytical articles published by People’s World, the views above are those of the author.

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John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.

A new letter from prison / by Boris Kagarlitsky

Image credit: Canadian Dimension

Renowned dissident and sociologist, now imprisoned by the Russian state, on why we should continue to find Lenin interesting

Reposted from Canadian Dimension

In his latest letter from a Russian prison, Boris Kagarlitsky addresses why, in 2024, we should continue to find Lenin interesting.

Help the campaign to free Kagarlitsky by sharing this letter along with the petition calling for his release and all other anti-war political prisoners.

The letter was translated from the original Russian version by Renfrey Clarke for LINKS. Clarke also translated Kagarlitsky’s latest book, The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left, available now for pre-order from Pluto Press.

Articles on Lenin are supposed to be written and published at least once a year, to mark the date of his birth on April 22, and sometimes in January as well, as one or another anniversary of his death approaches. It would not be hard to compile a multi-volume collection of such texts, and indeed, I can no longer remember how many articles I have written personally to commemorate dates of this kind. Does this mean there is nothing left to be said or published?

If we dispense with the obligatory anniversary raptures and (just as obligatory) ritual curses, all of which are now so deathly-dull to reread and repeat, there is one question that remains: why should we now, in 2024, find Lenin interesting? The obvious answer has to do with the texts that the Bolshevik leader wrote 110 years ago in opposition to World War I, texts that are now supremely relevant.

As we know, most of the social democrats in the various belligerent countries were united in supporting their governments and “their” bourgeoisies, in coming up with all sorts of justifications for the war, and in explaining that “their” countries were in no way guilty of aggression, but had been forced to take up arms and were fighting against injustice and the imperial ambitions of others. At first, the logic of “supporting our troops” was effective enough. On whichever side of the lines, the propaganda was always the same: “we” were in the right, while “they” were not, and whatever “we” did, we were merely defending ourselves. Whatever might happen, “they” were to blame for everything. Yesterday’s associates were presented as the embodiments of all evil, at the same time as patently obvious villains were suddenly declared good fellows.

In fairness, it should be said that it was far simpler and less dangerous for Lenin, at this time in emigration, to criticize the military efforts of the Russian authorities than it was for his co-thinkers who were still in Russia. For all that, the situation had its oddities, and Lenin was nonetheless arrested; in Cracow, where he and Krupskaya had settled in order to be closer to Russia, the Austro-Hungarian officials came close to mistaking the Bolshevik leader for an agent of the tsarist government (there is a wonderful Soviet film, entitled Lenin in Poland, dealing with these events). Soon, it is true, the Austrians let him go, and allowed him to move to neutral Switzerland. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik deputies to the State Duma were jailed for their anti-war position.

Nevertheless, it took courage to speak out against the war, and not just personal courage, but political courage as well. With hindsight, we can see just how effective the position Lenin took was in political terms. The fact that he and his supporters were an obvious minority meant that they stood out sharply against the general background. Then when circumstances changed, when the patriotic outpourings about “war until victory” were replaced by weariness, disillusionment, and a grasp of the absurdity of what was occurring, and when three years of bloodshed had created a powerful demand for change, it was to Lenin and the Bolsheviks that millions of people turned their gaze (and not only in Russia). The wheel of fortune had turned, with the result that the Bolsheviks and the government authorities had changed places. The previous handful of radical socialists, whom not even the leaders of the main social-democratic parties had taken seriously, had suddenly appeared at the head of a mass movement. Lenin during the first half of 1917 had been slandered as a foreign agent, but before the year was out he was to emerge in Petrograd as the head of a revolutionary government.

This story needs to be remembered not for the reason that such turnabouts occur from time to time; to hold out hopes of another such development would be premature and rash. Far more important is to understand why Lenin took such a position and made such a choice, which at first turned him into a marginal political figure even within the social-democratic forces, though it was later to raise him to the heights of power. Playing a considerable role here were, of course, his revolutionary principles. The position he took was in line with the philosophy of Marxist socialism and with the decisions that the Second International had taken earlier—decisions that the leaders of the largest parties of the International had since hastily repudiated. This, however, was not the only thing. Ultimately, the Bolshevik leader could have expressed himself in less radical terms, avoiding an acute conflict with more influential politicians in the social-democratic majority (this was the course chosen by many other left-wing figures). At the heart of Lenin’s position was not simply ideology; also in play were political analysis, calculations of cause and effect, and a sense of where history was headed. It was no coincidence that Lenin conducted his research on the nature of imperialism precisely during the period of World War I, or that he included his well-known formula on the revolutionary situation in his article on the collapse of the Second International.

None of this was abstract theorizing. The Bolshevik leader analyzed the political situation and sought to predict how it would develop. It was clear to him that the authorities of the Russian Empire had not just involved the country in a war that was completely unnecessary to its people, but that they had done this for reasons that included Russia’s internal political situation. War had been regarded as an antidote to revolution, and against political change in general. Unfortunately, the country’s failures in the war would themselves act as a trigger for revolution. In denouncing the war, Lenin, unlike the various pacifist currents, was not merely staking out a moral and ideological position, but was also seizing a political bridgehead for participation in future revolutionary events. His belief in the imminence of revolution was not based on faith or conviction, but on his analysis of the social contradictions that, as they developed, would inevitably blow the system apart. This confidence, it would seem, was shaken only once, at the very beginning of 1917, when he uttered his famous words, “We shall not live to see the revolution.” Indeed, it seemed at that point that the system in some mysterious fashion was coping with all the problems and even with its own failures, while the Russian people were enduring, with astonishing patience, everything the regime was doing to them. This, however, was in the darkest hour just before the dawn. The contradictions were soon to burst forth, in such a fashion that we are still to this day hearing the echoes of that explosion.

The point, however, does not have to do only with the accuracy of Lenin’s forecast or with his understanding of the inevitability of the revolution. By no means all of his predictions came to pass, and his analysis of situations was not always correct. The most important thing was that his most important prediction hit the mark—that his forecast was borne out, even if later than expected, and that his analysis was confirmed. It was thanks to this that Lenin, from being a revolutionary theorist, became a politician. Or more precisely, that he had the opportunity to realize his potential as a political actor, something that he had, in fact, always been.

The problem for today’s left is that while reasoning philosophically, while pondering philosophical questions and arguing about who is the most authentic Marxist and which formula is most correct from the point of view of abstract ideology, we lack the skills and readiness to be politicians. This is understandable: we have no such thing as a serious, vital body of political practice. There is nothing for us to train ourselves on.

Lenin in 1917 coped with this problem. Will we cope, if we suddenly get the chance?

Boris Kagarlitsky is a professor at the Moscow Higher School for Social and Economic Sciences. He is the editor of the online journal and YouTube channel Rabkor. In 1982 he was imprisoned for dissident activities under Brezhnev and later faced arrests both under Yeltsin in 1993 and under Putin in 2021. In 2023 the authorities declared him a “foreign agent” but refused to leave the country, unlike many other critics of the regime. His books in English translation include Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (Pluto Press 2007), From Empires to Imperialism: the State and the Rise of Bourgeois Civilisation (Routledge 2014), and Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism (Routledge, 2020).

France sends combat troops to Ukraine battlefront / by Stephen Bryen

An honor guard from the French army’s 6th Battalion stands at attention as they await the arrival of Lt. Gen. Khalid Bin Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz, commander of Joint Forces in Saudi Arabia, during Operation Desert Shield. The soldier in front is holding a 5.56mm FA MAS rifle, equipped with a bayonet | via asiatimes.com

Will the deployment of a Foreign Legion unit commanded by French officers trigger a wider European war?

Reposted from Asia Times

France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk. The French soldiers are drawn from France’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is one of the main elements of France’s Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère).

In 2022 France had a number of Ukrainians and Russians in the Foreign Legion. They were allowed to leave the Legion and, in the case of the Ukrainians, return to Ukraine to join Ukrainian forces. It isn’t clear if the Russians returned home.

The Legion today is run by French officers but the rank and file are all foreigners. Under the curren anonymat (being anonymous) a volunteer who joins the Legion can decide whether to keep his given name or adopt a new one. Legionnaires serve for three year terms, after which they can ask for French citizenship. If a legionnaire is wounded, he is entitled to gain French citizenship without any waiting period. There are no women in the Foreign Legion.

The initial group of French troops numbers around 100. This is just the first tranche of around 1,500 French Foreign Legion soldiers scheduled to arrive in Ukraine.

These troops are being posted directly in a hot combat area and are intended to help the Ukrainians resist Russian advances in Donbas. The first 100 are artillery and surveillance specialists.

For months French President Emanuel Macron has been threatening to send French troops to Ukraine. He has found little or no support from NATO countries outside of support from Poland and the Baltic States. Allegedly the US opposes sending NATO soldiers to Ukraine (other than as advisors).

One of the questions to immediately arise from France’s decision to send soldiers from its 3rd Infantry Regiment is whether this crosses the Russian red line on NATO involvement in Ukraine? Will the Russians see this as initiating a wider war beyond Ukraine’s borders?

France itself does not have many troops to put on Ukraine’s battlelines, should the French government want to do so. According to reports, today France cannot support an overseas deployment of a full division and won’t have this capability until 2027 at the earliest.

The decision to send Foreign Legionnaires is, itself, a peculiar French compromise. France is not deploying its home army and, besides the small number of officers, the men sent are not French citizens.

France’s decision has two meanings, beyond the obvious one of potentially triggering a pan-European war.

First of all, it allows Macron to send troops to Ukraine and act like a tough guy without encountering much home opposition. That’s because no French army soldiers are being sent and there is no consequent conscription or other measures in the offing. This clearly reduces the potential fury of Macron’s political opponents.

The second reason is Macron’s anger at seeing French troops, almost all from the Legion, getting kicked out of Sahelian Africa and replaced by Russians. Control of Francophone Africa, and the riches it provides to French politicians, has been broken by the revolt and revolution in Africa and a decisive tilt to Russia – either directly or through PMC Wagner (the Wagner Group). now clearly under Vladimir Putin’s direct control.

This “humiliation” is felt in the Élysée Palace and particularly by Macron who, his opponents say, has lost France’s influence and harmed France’s overseas mining and business interests.

A particular blow is in Niger, an important supplier of uranium to France. France gets 70 percent of its electrical power from nuclear power generators. Global uranium supplies are tightening and prices rising. With Russia and Kazakhstan, along with Niger, on the top of the heap in terms of supplying uranium for nuclear reactors, France has a home economic security problem. The US decision to ban Russian uranium (but probably not realistically, in the next few years) the Russians could deal a serious blow to France and the United States by cutting off supplies.

Given the risk of losing access to uranium, or at least enough of it to supply France’s reactors, Macron has to hope that his troop deployments to Ukraine won’t trigger a Russian embargo on sales to France.

It isn’t clear how the Legionnaires can help the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians know how to operate artillery, and they have sophisticated intelligence support, some of it generated by their own FPV drones and spies and some of it thanks to US and other NATO intelligence and surveillance assets supporting Ukraine.

Anyway, the Ukrainian issue is not about how to use artillery but where the ammunition is supposed to come from. Ukraine continues to complain it lacks adequate supplies for 155mm howitzers.

The decision to put the Legion soldiers in Slavyansk is extremely provocative and goes against statements from the French side, including Macron, to the effect that if France sent troops they would replace Ukrainian army units in western Ukraine who could, therefore, be moved eastward to fight the Russians. As Slavyansk is on the front line, this French image of a soft deployment is turning into a war with Russia directly.

A key question is how NATO will react to the French decision to deploy. As France is acting on its own without NATO’s backing, the French cannot claim support from NATO under its famous Article 5, the collective security component of the NATO Treaty.

Should the Russians attack French troops outside of Ukraine it would be justified because France has decided to be a combatant, and forcing an Article 5 vote would seem to be difficult if not impossible.

Of course, NATO members individually could support the French, either by sending their own forces or by backstopping the French logistically and in communications. For example, there is no way Foreign Legion soldiers can go to Ukraine without passing through Poland. Will the Russians see this as evidence they are at war both with France and Poland?

Right now no one can answer any of these questions with any degree of certainty. It is unlikely the Russians will long tolerate a buildup of French army troops, even if they are Foreign Legion soldiers. What Russia will do in response is not certain.

Stephen Bryen served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. 

This article was first published on his Weapons and Strategy Substack and is republished with permission.

Stephen Bryen is a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense and is a leading expert in security strategy and technology. Bryen writes for Asia Times, American Thinker, Epoch Times, Newsweek, Washington Times, the Jewish Policy Center and others.

Cynical and murderous Western policy on Ukraine is failing / by Chris Bambery 

Ukraine: Battle for Bakhmut turns into a ‘meat grinder’ for Russian and Ukrainian armies | Photo credit: EL PAÍS English

Despite the passage of new support for Ukraine in the US Congress, Ukraine has no prospect of winning the war with Russia, argues Chris Bambery

Reposted from Counterfire

The United States House of Representatives has finally approved a $95 billion package of aid for Ukraine, which also includes further military support for Israel and Taiwan. The supply of US weapons to Ukraine dried up in early 2024, because the bill to grant more aid was delayed in Congress.

President Biden said after the vote that the US can now start sending armaments ‘right away’.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the commitment ‘reinforces America’s role as a beacon of democracy and leader of the free world.’ However, the bulk of this new money will go to US multinationals to produce weaponry which will take months to come off stretched production lines.

In February, the EU agreed a further €50bn (£42bn; $54bn) aid package for Ukraine, but the EU failed to meet its target of sending one million shells to Ukraine by the beginning of March. Consequently, the Czech Republic stepped in and agreed a $1.5bn deal for a group of 18 Nato and EU countries to buy 800,000 rounds – both 155mm and 122mm calibre – from outside the EU.

Money doesn’t fix it

But increasingly, mainstream military and diplomatic analysts are arguing Ukraine cannot win despite this money. Money cannot solve the fundamental problems undermining Ukraine’s capacity to wage war. Writing in the Financial Times, historian Lawrence Freedman pointed out:

‘It will take time to recover from the difficult first months of this year, and then more before Ukraine starts to benefit fully from new supplies of equipment and from increased European and US production of artillery shells. Fresh units need to be trained and there are still command issues left over from last year’s disappointing counteroffensive, notably about how to co-ordinate large-scale operations.’

The US has warned that Ukraine’s military is running short on munitions, and morale is low. Early in April, a Nato official warned CNN that the Ukrainian military is ‘experiencing shortages in air defense munitions, mostly in the medium to long range. It’s not just that we know that. It’s that Russia knows that. So, Russia is using drones and missiles in ways that are really explicitly designed to deplete Ukrainian air defense systems.’ The same Nato official also warned that Russia maintains a ‘significant quantitative advantage’ over Ukraine in terms of munitions, manpower, and equipment, and is likely recruiting roughly 30,000 additional personnel per month.

The same CNN article notes: ‘Ukraine has been rationing its air defences for about a month now, said another person familiar with western intelligence. The Ukrainians had limited systems to start with, including the US and German-provided Patriot systems around Kyiv, some S-200 and S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, and some older, retrofitted Soviet launchers that they have been using to fire western missiles like Sidewinders, this person said.’

Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has called the situation on the front line for Ukraine ‘difficult’ and ‘serious’. Biden is talking about supplying Patriot air-defence missiles to prevent Russia carrying such air attacks, but it has to have those built and it has to supply them to Israel too.

Russia is carrying out repeated air attacks on Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkiv, which is near the Russian border. The commander of Ukraine’s National Guard, Oleksandr Pivnenko, warns that Russian forces may start to advance on the city. The Ukrainians desperately need artillery shells in what has become a gruesome war of attrition, but the Americans and Europeans simply do not have sufficient capacity to replenish Ukrainian stocks.

In March, CNN reported that Russia is producing about 250,000 artillery munitions per month, or about three million a year, according to Nato intelligence estimates of Russian defence production. Together, the US and Europe have the capacity to generate only about 1.2 million munitions annually to send to Kyiv, a senior European intelligence official told CNN. ‘What we are in now is a production war,’ the senior Nato official stated, ‘The outcome in Ukraine depends on how each side is equipped to conduct this war.’

According to the UK-based think tank, the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), Ukrainian armed forces have been limited to firing 2,000 shells a day. In contrast, Rusi says, Russian forces have been firing up to 10,000 shells a day. It said Russia gets almost three-million shells a year from its own factories and from North Korea.

In testimony before Congress in April, General Christopher G. Cavoli, the top American military commander in Europe, provided a blunt assessment of Ukraine’s dire shortage of ammunition. He pointed out: ‘If one side can shoot and the other side can’t shoot back, the side that can’t shoot back loses.’ Ukraine has lost 583 square kilometres (225 square miles) of territory in the east of the country to Russian forces since October 2023, largely because of a lack of artillery. The Ukrainian high command blamed shortages for the loss of the town of Avdiivka in February. Between Avdiivka and the River Dnieper, Ukraine has few fixed, well-defended positions.

Manpower

The Kyiv Independent reported thus on the fall of Avdiivka: ‘The price of the last-minute evacuation was heavy. The soldiers had to withdraw through a poorly prepared thin path with mines lying around and under heavy shelling west of the city. Some soldiers were given the order to withdraw at any cost, leaving the wounded and fallen comrades behind.’

At certain points, a war of attrition between well-defended positions can change into mobile warfare when the balance shifts in favour of one side. The advantage lies with Russia. To state that is not to side with Russia, whose invasion of Ukraine was criminal and who fought a brutal war – as indeed the Ukrainians have. The same Nato official who spoke to CNN said that the war has absolutely ‘transformed’ Russia’s economy, when oil was the leading sector. Now, the arms industry is the largest sector of the Russian economy, and oil is paying for it. ‘In the short term — say, the next 18 months or so — it may be unsophisticated, but it’s a durable economy,’ the Nato official said.

Even if the West could wave a magic wand and somehow supply all the weaponry Ukraine so badly needs, Ukraine is running out of troops. In April, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law lowering the conscription age to 25. Prior to the vote, General Yuriy Sodol, who commands troops in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions and was one of more than a dozen commanders present in parliament for the vote, told deputies it was crucial the law be passed. ‘We are maintaining our defences with our last strength,’ he said, adding that Russian forces outnumber Ukraine’s up to ten-fold on the battlefield in the east.

The Ukrainians are having to rely on infantry to hold their positions without much artillery, armoured or aerial support against waves of Russian infantry attacks. A squad of eight to ten soldiers is typically tasked with defending 100 meters of land, General Sodol said, but Ukraine cannot always field full squads. Faced with a shortage of troops, Ukraine has turned to what amounts to the press gang; forced conscription has already become a scourge all over Ukraine.

Al Jazeera reports: ‘In many rural areas, most men of fighting age have been drafted, while in urban centres potential soldiers avoid showing up in public places or using public transportation because of patrols of conscription officials and police officers. Some men are urged to go to conscription offices to simply clarify their personal details – but never come out in their civilian clothes.’ Some four-million people have fled Ukraine, including 800,000 liable for conscription. Ukraine has announced that unless they return, they will be denied consular support.

Last Autumn, the Warsaw-based Center for Eastern Studies (CES) reported on the growing troop shortage: ‘This shortage is exacerbated by the exhaustion of the troops deployed over the past two years, who, without relief, are staying longer and longer on the front. It is not uncommon for platoons to be made up of just a few soldiers and companies of less than 50 (which is less than half of their full line-up). According to regulations, this should result in their automatic withdrawal to the rear. In the current situation on the front, such sub-units usually cannot be relieved. Moreover, their defense sections are not reduced in proportion to their losses. The commanders are thus forced to require their subordinates to serve longer, which in turn reduces the time available for sleep, meals and basic hygiene.’

Another problem is the age of many Ukrainian troops: ‘Meanwhile, it is not uncommon for infantry companies in which the soldiers’ average age is 45–50 years to be dispatched to fight on the most difficult sections of the front, for example near Avdiivka and Bakhmut. The service of older soldiers on the first line of the front in a situation of prolonged trench warfare generates numerous problems, as these individuals are more prone to disease, less able to withstand physical strain, have slower reaction times and are more vulnerable to apathy and panic than younger soldiers.’

General Valery Zaluzhny, the country’s former commander in chief, had said Ukraine needed to call up as many as 500,000 fresh troops to counter Russia’s superior number of forces. It’s hard to see how that can be achieved. The Centre for Eastern Studies reported in February that ‘… 2023 saw a gradual decline in public sentiment regarding military service. Considering the present stabilisation of the front, the opportunities for a quick replenishment of the units with a large number of volunteers have become exhausted because the most recent inflow of volunteers occurred last year, as part of the enlistment campaign ahead of the summer offensive. Also, a sizeable group of citizens is reluctant to support the mobilisation, as they are aware of the magnitude of the losses and have been discouraged by reports of irregularities in the military, which are frequently exaggerated on social media.’

Western policy

There are Western claims that Russia wants to conquer all of Ukraine and to push on into the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. In fact, if the Russians reach the River Dnieper they will have achieved their aim. The mainstream US media is now full of reports arguing Ukraine can no longer win and that Russia is not going to hand back territory it has conquered or, like Crimea, annexed. The more optimistic argue Ukraine can sustain a war of attrition and eventually win. Most disagree. But even if we were to accept that forecast, it is a dreadful picture reminiscent of Verdun and the Somme in 1916.

Writing in Time magazine, Anatol Lieven, co-author of The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine, points out: ‘For Ukrainians to stand a chance, military history suggests that they would need a 3-to-2 advantage in manpower and considerably more firepower. Ukraine enjoyed these advantages in the first year of the war, but they now lie with Russia, and it is very difficult to see how Ukraine can recover them.’

Writing on Politico, Jamie Dettfield states: ‘Without a major step-change in the supply of advanced Western weapons and cash, Ukraine won’t be able to liberate the territories Putin’s forces now hold. That will leave Putin free to gnaw on the wounded country in the months or years ahead. Even if Russia can’t finish Ukraine off, a partial victory will leave Kyiv’s hopes of joining the EU and NATO stuck in limbo.’

This is not a good scenario in that it sets the stage for a future war, particularly if Ukraine was able to rebuild its economy and military. Within the Biden administration, there is growing scepticism about Ukraine’s ability to win its two-year war with Russia.

The Biden administration believes $60 billion will see Ukraine able to resist Russian advances through to the Presidential election in November. If – and it’s a big if – Biden is re-elected, it would be difficult to get a Republican-controlled Congress and Senate to pass a similar aid package. If Trump were to win, that could be a game changer in the US attitude to the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Surely it would be best to get peace talks going before that might happen. But Washington, London and Berlin are ruling this out. They will keep on doling out military aid, not in hope of Ukrainian victory, but to keep a war of attrition going and to feed more Ukrainians and Russians into the meat grinder, safe in the knowledge Americans, Britons and Germans will not be dying. It is a cynical and murderous policy.

Chris Bambery is an author, political activist and commentator, and a supporter of Rise, the radical left wing coalition in Scotland. His books include A People’s History of Scotland and The Second World War: A Marxist Analysis.

Capitalism is the single greatest source of violence / by Jason Hickel

Tank between stacks of coins as a symbol of high armament expenditure | Image source: Pearls & Irritations

Reposted from MR Online

What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core.

This remains the primary objective of Western aggression today. And it is the single greatest source of violence, war and instability in the world system.

The reason Western powers went after socialist movements across the global South during the “Cold War” (Cuba, China, the incineration of Vietnam and North Korea, etc) was because they knew socialism would enable the South to regain control over their own productive capacities—their labour and resources and factories—and organise them around local needs and national development.

When this happens—when people in the global South start producing and consuming for themselves—it means that those resources are no longer cheaply available to service consumption and accumulation in the core, thus disrupting the imperial arrangement on which Western capitalism has always relied (cheap labour, cheap resources, control over productive capacities, markets on tap). Remember, roughly 50% of all material consumption in the core is net-appropriated from the global South. This is what they are trying to defend.

But it wasn’t only socialist governments that pursued economic sovereignty. After political decolonisation, a wide range of movements and states across the South also sought economic liberation and sovereign industrial development. And Western powers attacked them with equal brutality (Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, the DRC…).

This is the key reason that Western powers supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, and it is why they support the Israeli regime today… as Western settler-colonial outposts that can be used to attack and destabilise regional movements seeking socialism or any form of real economic sovereignty, whether in Angola or Mozambique or Zimbabwe or any of the Arab nationalist or socialist movements in North Africa and the Middle East.

Iran has always been central to this story. Western states orchestrated a coup against the extremely popular prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. He was a left-leaning nationalist, not a socialist. But he wanted Iran to have control over its own resources (notably, oil), and for the U.S. and Britain this was unacceptable. Mossadegh was replaced by a brutal Western-backed dictatorship. The revolution that finally overthrew the dictatorship in 1979—and constituted the current government—wasn’t even left-leaning, much less socialist. But they want national economic self-determination and that is sin enough. They are a target for the exact same reasons that Iraq and Libya were targets.

The same goes for China. China’s path toward sovereign industrialisation—whether socialist or not—means that it is no longer an easy source of cheap labour for Western capital. And as the supply price increases so too does the sabre-rattling from Western states and media.

So this is the situation we are in. The Western ruling classes are backing obscene violence and plausible genocide in Gaza, against overwhelming international condemnation, because they must shore up their regional outpost at virtually any cost.

The vast majority of the world supports Palestinian liberation, but Palestinian liberation would constrain Israeli power and open the way to regional liberation movements, and this is strongly antithetical to the interests of Western capital. And now they are provoking war with Iran, risking regional conflagration, while at the same time encircling China with military bases, ramping up sanctions on Cuba, trying to contain progressive governments in Latin America, threatening invasion of the Sahel states…

It is intolerable and it cannot continue. The violence they perpetrate, the instability, the constant wars against a long historical procession of peoples and movements in the global South who yearn for freedom and self-determination… the whole world is dragged into this horrifying nightmare. They are willing to inflict enormous suffering and misery on hundreds of millions of people in order to preserve existing dynamics of capital accumulation.

We will not have peace until this arrangement is overcome and post-capitalist transformations are achieved.

Originally published: Pearls and Irritations

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Virginia, and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics. He serves on the Labour Party task force on international development, works as Policy Director for /The Rules collective, sits on the Executive Board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) and recently joined the International Editorial Advisory Board of Third World Quarterly.

Ten-year anniversary of the anti-coup rebellion eastern Ukraine, as Russian forces advance in Donetsk / by Dmitri Kovalevich

A papier-mâché figure in the shape of a NATO officer sits in a trash can, followed by a top-hatted capitalist and an Uncle Sam, during an anti-war march in Munich, Germany. | Matthias Balk / dpa via AP

Reposted from MR Online

April 2014 was a pivotal month for the people of the Donbass region in what was then still part of Ukraine. It was then that the governing regime was newly installed in Kiev by a coup d’état on February 20/21embarked on military hostilities against the people of the region. The coup overthrew Ukraine’s elected president and legislature. It sparked rebellion in Crimea, Donbass (Lugansk and Donetsk), and in towns and cities in other regions of eastern and southern Ukraine.

The coup installed a pro-Western, anti-Russia government. Police actions by the new regime to suppress opposition to the coup only deepened the rebellions, whose consequences are still felt today.

On April 10, 2014, a group of communists in the city of Lugansk seized the local headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the national police agency of Ukraine. They issued demands for the release of opponents of the U.S.-supported coup who had been jailed for upholding Ukraine’s shaky constitutional foundation and opposing the coup, whose epicenter was Maidan Square in central Kiev.

Uprisings against the coup government quickly spread throughout southern and eastern Ukraine, including in Crimea, the two Donbass oblasts (provinces) of Lugansk and Donetsk, and, to a lesser degree, in Odessa and other cities and towns.

No one could have imagined in Lugansk in early April 2014 that hostilities could end in full-scale warfare by Kiev with essential political and military backing by the United States and the NATO military alliance it leads. But that is exactly what unfolded. The attempt by Kiev to suppress opposition to the coup in Donbass soon escalated into an eight-year war by Kiev. In early 2022, that war escalated into today’s large-scale conflict with Russia.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, the people of Crimea avoided war by voting on March 16 to secede from the coup Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. The people of Odessa city were not so lucky. On May 2, a day of anti-coup protest in the city ended in tragedy when right-wing paramilitaries who had traveled to the city from elsewhere in Ukraine for the purpose of violent provocations set fire to the large building in the center of the city where protesters had taken refuge from paramilitary violence. More than 45 protesters died.

The hypocrisy of democracy—some are allowed to have it, others not so

On April 10 in Lugansk, hundreds of local residents took up the call of the local Communist Party activists. One of the main arguments for storming the SBU building was the example set by coup fomenters in late 2013 and early 2014 in seizing police stations (and their arsenals of weapons) in western Ukraine, for example in the city of Lviv, the sixth largest city in Ukraine at the time, with a population of some 750,000. The communists in Lugansk argued that opponents of the coup should take similar actions to those of the coup makers months earlier.

The Western powers were watching events very closely. For them, violence and the seizure of weapons by some groups (right-wing paramilitaries) was justified, while for others (anti-coup protesters) it was totally ‘illegal’. This policy of double standards was on full display as the violent assault by Kiev against the population of Donbass began in earnest in April 2014. Locals became all the more convinced that all the talk coming from Western leaders and institutions about ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’ for Ukraine was nothing more than empty words.

Goal was autonomy; the accusations of ‘separatism’ were false

As rebellion quickly grew in Donbass, far-right paramilitary formations which were already formed in the west of the country to carry out the coup, or which rapidly developed following it, threatened violent, armed actions to suppress the developing protests in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Zaporizhzhya oblasts and in other locations in the south and east. But the paramilitaries were only partly ‘successful’ (for example, one month later in Odessa).

In Lugansk and Donetsk cities, the local police offered little or no resistance to the anti-coup rebellions. This was parallel to how police in the western regions of Ukraine had largely stood by as the coming coup gained momentum in late 2013. As it turned out, much of the existing police and army personnel in Lugansk and Donetsk crossed over to the side of anti-coup protests, bringing their weapons with them. This was a major blow to Kiev and the West. Additionally, the soldiers of the Ukraine army as a whole were proving to be reluctant to follow orders to fire on anti-coup protesters. The paramilitaries responded to this by forming their own, military battalions, while the coup regime in Kiev embarked on a transformation of army personnel as a whole. In the coming years, the paramilitary formations would receive official status as autonomous constituents of the army and national police.

The BBC’ s Ukraine service reported on the seizure of the SBU headquarters in Lugansk on April 10, 2014, writing,

The police did not interfere with the takeover and left the building to the applause of pro-Russian [sic] activists who had gathered in the square. The crowd chanted ‘Russia’ and ‘referendum’.

The BBC report went on to cite the broadcast of a leader of the anti-coup protests in Lugansk, Vyacheslav Petrov, who appealed to the population. “I ask you not to panic. Everything will be fine. We are preparing for a referendum, which will take place on May 11. For that, everyone must think and make a choice.” The BBC continued,

The demands [of the anti-coup protest in Lugnsk] included an amnesty for all political prisoners, a referendum [on autonomy], the abolition of price and tariff increases, and giving the Russian language an official status of state language.1

‘Pro-Russian’ or anti-coup?

Anti-coup protesters in Donbass wanted a referendum to decide the future of the territory. They were inspired by the events taking place in Crimea. There, the government of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (ARC) responded promptly to the threats by Ukraine authorities and paramilitaries to invade the territory and suppress opposition to the coup. With the cooperation of Russian leaders in Moscow and Russian armed forces long established in Crimea by a 1997 ‘treaty of friendship’ (Wikipedia) between Russia and Ukraine, the ARC government held a referendum on March 16, 2014, on the future status of the territory. An overwhelming majority voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Polling showed that even a majority of ethnic Ukrainians residing in the peninsula voted in favor.

Thus ended Ukraine’s unpopular and unconstitutional governance of Crimea, ‘bestowed’ upon Ukraine by the leaders of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1954, albeit with no vote offered to the local population. Crimea was the only region of Ukraine to have a regional, autonomous government. This meant that the very strong anti-coup sentiment in early 2014 had an immediate solution in the form of a referendum organized by the ARC, which was a fully constitutional entity of Ukraine.

Unfortunately, no such quick and democratic option was available to the other anti-coup regions of Ukraine, notably in Donbass. That’s because these regions lacked any strong forms of local or regional government that could step into the breach once the elected and constitutional government in Kiev was overthrown. It was also because the existing political parties in the anti-coup regions, as in the rest of Ukraine, largely represented only the economic elites.2

‘Separatism’ or political autonomy?

Western governments and media responded to the anti-coup protests in central and eastern Ukraine with epithets, calling them ‘separatist’. This was utterly false. The republics of Lugansk and Donetsk are, indeed, today constituents of the Russian Federation. The reason for this is the obstinance of Ukraine’s coup leaders. Following its military defeat in Donbass in early 2015, the Kiev regime signed the ‘Minsk 2’ peace agreement of February 12, 2015 (text here). It contained sweeping autonomy measures for Lugansk and Donetsk. The UN Security Council endorsed the agreement unanimously a short five days later. But as subsequent events proved, Kiev and its foreign backers, notably France and Germany who, like Russia, co-signed Minsk 2 as ‘guarantors’. But unlike Russia, the two EU powers never intended to implement it. As subsequent revelations showed, Kiev and its EU ‘co-signers’ never intended to implement Minsk 2; they signed it in order to ‘buy time’ for Ukraine’s army and paramilitaries to regroup and re-arm.

The claim that the ‘pro-autonomy movement’ in Donbass, to give it its proper name, was ‘pro-Russian’ was another of the Ukrainian and Western epithets. Of course, there was widespread pro-Russian sentiment in Donbass. Historically, the region had always been Russian in its ethnic composition. It always had positive economic relations with the Russian Federation and the Russian Soviet Republic before that. Where was the crime in that? But for the rulers of Ukraine and the West, this was, indeed, a ‘crime’ because they were embarked on a course to weaken Russia and to displace it entirely from Donbass and other regions of Ukraine. They wanted Ukraine to totally uproot its economic relations with Russia and become an economic subordinate to the EU and the United States.

Battle for Chasov Yar

After ten years, the territory of Lugansk is fully under the control of the Lugansk People’s Republic and it is a constituent of the Russian Federation. Next door in Donetsk, a battle is taking place in and around the town of Chasov Yar, app. 100 kilometers north of Donetsk city. This follows the capture by Russian forces of the city of Avdeevka several weeks ago, barely 20 km north of Donetsk, and the capture of the larger city of Artemivsk (called ‘Bakhmut’ in Ukraine, also app. 100 km north of Donetsk) in May 2023.

The tactics being used by the Russian Armed Forces at Chasov Yar (pre-war population 12,000) are similar to those at Avdeevka (barely 20 km north of Donetsk) and Artemivsk. Ukrainian troop positions are hit with heavy aerial bombs that destroy underground fortifications. Assault groups then surround the city from three sides, leaving only one way out: retreat westward toward Ukraine.

The ‘Kholodnyi Yar’ telegram channel of the 93rd Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is circulating a video in which a resident of Chasov Yar says he is waiting hopefully for the Russians to come.

He says that he is waiting for Russia and that he has relatives who live there. He says he cannot leave the town because our soldiers shoot all those wanting to cross over to territory held by the Russians.

The liberation of Chasov Yar by the Russian army may become a turning point in the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) overall. It certainly opens highly unpredictable scenarios in the entire conflict. Russian military correspondent Alexander Sladkov believes that from Chasov Yar, the Russian offensive will advance in a straight line to the major industrial cities of Kramatorsk, a key railway junction 45 kilometers further east with a pre-war population of 160,000, and nearby Sloviansk. “Kramatorsk is the next city of Donbass that we will liberate,” he predicts.

Forcing Ukrainians to fight for NATO

In this context, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Kiev regime to conduct its forced military conscription. The most common practice by Ukrainian men of military age 3 to avoid military recruiters is to hide in their homes or in ruins and wait for a chance to surrender to Russian forces. The Strana online news outlet in Ukraine published a report on April 2 by an officer of the AFU under the nickname ‘Night Stalker’ describing common methods used by the Ukraine army to pressure its soldiers who are reluctant to fight (and quite possibly die). It wrote,

How to motivate a recruit to fight who would otherwise choose to lie down in the trench on his belly and wait to surrender? The officer replied that ‘a conversation is enough for some. For others, a beating by the company officer or shooting over the soldier’s head may be needed.

The officer noted that there are also harsher methods of influence, but the report did not elaborate.

As more and more AFU soldiers are forcibly conscripted (abducted) from their homes or from streets or shops, the number of ‘refuseniks’—soldiers who refuse to go into combat—is growing in Ukrainian units. As a rule, refuseniks are arrested and then held in cramped, damp cages. The Ukrainian Telegram channel ‘Legitimny’ writes that according to its sources, rising numbers of Ukrainian soldiers are refusing to fight because that “no one wants to fight for the governing regime in Kiev and its leaders since it treats its people as slaves.”

In early April, the German state news outlet Deutsche Welle published a video report from Luzanivka in the Cherkasy region (central Ukraine), explaining there are no men left of military service age in the village. “If someone happens to die, there is no one left here to dig their grave,” says village council chairman Serhiy Nikolaenko. DW reports that about 50 men have been conscripted from the village of 400 people.

Strana cites Deutsche Welle in reporting from the village of Valentina. A resident explains, “In our small village, there are already so many missing and dead. Imagine for the whole of Ukraine!” The resident says both of his sons have been conscripted into the army.

Despite all this, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government continue to try and ‘sell’ to Western media and politicians that a new ‘counteroffensive’ by the AFU may be launched. This is at a time when the human resources to replace the soldiers being lost to death, injury, or desertion are all but exhausted. “Yes, we have a plan for a counteroffensive. We will definitely win; we have no other alternative. But I can’t promise it and I can’t name a date,” Zelensky stressed in an interview with Germany’s BILD daily newspaper on April 9.

Oleksandr Dubinsky, a former MP from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, adds that as long as the Ukrainian army is in retreat, it will be difficult to negotiate financial aid. In other words, the Ukraine regime plans to throw yet more Ukrainians into the slaughter so that the Ukrainian elite can maintain its economic ties with the West and continue to receive funding from it.

How neoliberalism has undermined Western hegemony

Another reason for the impossibility of an AFU ‘counteroffensive’ is the shortage of ammunition, which neither the West nor Ukraine are able to replenish. In Ukraine and the West, deindustrialization processes have undermined the ability to quickly organize production facilities.

Russian political scientist Malek Dudakov writes that it is extremely difficult for European Union countries to now boost their production of armaments. The EU countries today buy 80 percent of their armaments from outside their borders; 60 percent of that comes from the United States. “Euro bureaucrats miraculously want to reduce dependence on armaments imports to 50 percent by 2030. This is in the context of a severe crisis already happening in the European economy, due largely to deindustrialization. Even the production of shells faces problems because of the shortages of nitrocellulose (also known as ‘guncotton’) and other cotton products purchased from China,” he writes.

In early April, police searches were conducted in Ukraine and Poland amidst investigations by the Ukraine Defense Ministry of overpriced arms purchases. In 2022, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry signed several contracts with the Polish-registered firm Alfa for the supply of ammunition worth tens of millions of euros. Despite the fact that the firm failed to fulfill the terms of the first several contracts, the Ministry continued to cooperate with it. As of the beginning of 2023, Alfa owed the Defense Ministry more than 3.5 billion hryvnias (US$89 million) for arms purchases never received.

In late February, Zelensky claimed that global prices for artillery shells have increased five times (500%) since the start of the war with the Russian Federation. “Because of the war in Ukraine, even an ordinary artillery shell which cost $1500 at the beginning of the war can cost $4000 to $8000 today. So much for the war. For some it is a war, while for others it is just big business”, he said.

The Wall Street Journal reported on April 10 that U.S. drones produced in California’s Silicon Valley have not performed well in Ukraine.

U.S.-made UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] tend to be expensive, faulty and complicated to repair, say drone company executives, Ukrainians on the front lines, Ukrainian government officials, and some former U.S. military officials.

In general, the entire Western world is oriented to produce small numbers of expensive products, with high involvement of private middlemen. This model turns out to be highly ineffective in modern military conflicts, which require cheap and quick production on a mass scale. The only two ways, then, for Western firms to compete is to exploit the countries of the Global South for cheap production or to lower their own production standards.

Russia, meanwhile, has been undergoing processes of de-privatization, that is the return of manufacturing by private enterprises to state ownership. This helps to eliminate middlemen and make production cheaper. Since 2020, the number of cases in which the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has challenged the legalities of privatizations during the privatization wave of the 1990s has grown eight times, according to the Russian TV channel RTVI.

The chief of Sweden’s SAAB arms producer, Micael Johansson, recently told the Financial Times that shortages of nitrocellulose were an example of why companies producing armaments need to build new supply chains in today’s “multipolar world” where “not only the Western,’ rules-based order’ will be present”. He added:

We have to think about like-minded countries who we can trust and with whom we can work with in the long term.

Reading between the lines, the SAAB official’s words mean increased pressure by Western countries on the Global South to locate more and more production there on the cheap. Effectively, it means a continuation of colonialist practices against smaller and less developed countries.

It has been fashionable in recent years for capitalist ideologues and commentators in the imperialist countries to criticize and even condemn the ‘offshoring’ of their manufacturing to China and other countries. But the drive to maximize profits takes precedence, and so offshoring remains an attractive practice. The capitalist system of production serves private interests, not public needs. Thus it has always been and will always remain.

Originally published: Al Mayadeen

Notes:

  1. ↩ In post-Soviet Ukraine, there was and remains only one official language: Ukrainian. This was even true in Crimea where ethnic Ukrainians composed only some 15% of the population. In today’s Crimea (Russian Federation), there are three official languages: Russian, Crimean Tatar, and Ukrainian.
  2. ↩ Crimea’s autonomous status dates back to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which implemented sweeping forms of political self-determination for the many nationalities that comprised the pre-Revolution Russian Empire. This was and remains the origin of independent Ukraine. ‘Soviet’ Ukraine was formed during the harsh years of civil war from 1918 to 1920. It went on to become a founding constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. Officials of Soviet Ukraine led a secession from the USSR in 1990/1991. The country had already won its independence 70 years earlier.
  3. ↩ Military registration is obligatory in Ukraine for all men between the ages of 18 and 65. The age of military service (conscription) is 25 to 60 (recently reduced from 27).

Dmitri Kovalevich is the special correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English. He writes military-political situation reports from there.

$95 billion weapons bills will prolong deadly wars in Ukraine and Gaza / by C.J. Atkins

Bombs for Ukraine: Ukrainian soldiers unload a shipment of U.S. weapons at an airport outside Kiev. | Efrem Lukatsky / AP

Reposted from Peoples World

WASHINGTON—Splitting President Joe Biden’s bonus war budget bill into several pieces proved to be the winning formula to getting (most of) it passed in the House after months of trying to clear the package as a whole repeatedly hit a wall.

In a series of five separate votes over the weekend, the House approved a total of $95 billion in fresh military funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, along with new sanctions on Iran and steps toward banning social media app TikTok, a GOP pet cause.

The extra weapons money comes on top of the nearly $900-billion-dollar 2024 Pentagon budget, bringing total U.S. military spending for the year to nearly a trillion dollars.

The White House celebrated the new armaments spending extravaganza, with Biden saying the legislation “put our national security first.” But by pumping more cash into the combat zones of Ukraine and Gaza, the bills actually weaken security around the world, guarantee the prolongation of two deadly conflicts, and pad the profit margins of the country’s biggest weapons makers.

Biden’s bonus war budget

While all four parts of the bill passed by wide margins, the Ukraine and Israel components each met with notable opposition—by Republicans when it came to Ukraine and progressive Democrats on Israel.

Proud warriors: Israeli soldiers pose for a selfie amidst a backdrop of total destruction in the Gaza Strip, Feb. 19, 2024. | Tsafrir Abayov / AP

Shoehorning Israel’s war against the Palestinian people and the Ukraine-Russia war together in his October speech requesting the funds, Biden deployed a narrative that equated “terrorists like Hamas” with “tyrants like Putin.”

Biden hoped linking the two fights would make it easier to secure the money. Any background context to the two wars—75 years of Palestinian dispossession in the first case and a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 or an eastward-encroaching NATO military alliance in the second—was absent from his speech.

His focus was solely on protecting the State of Israel and shielding Ukraine from Russian aggression. No mention was made of the need to seek a ceasefire and negotiations for a lasting peace in either conflict.

Though the Senate eventually passed a package containing most of what Biden requested, the House balked, with Speaker Mike Johnson equivocating for months. After seeing his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy booted from his seat by the right-wing Freedom Caucus for working to pass a budget measure together with the Democrats, Johnson was reluctant to be seen as cooperating with the opposition.

Iran’s military strikes against Israel last week in retaliation for Netanyahu’s bombing of its embassy in Syria, however, appeared to have moved Johnson to action. Determined to rush more arms to Israel, he advanced the package as a chopped-up collection of bills, allowing him to pass all the pieces without risking his far-right allies sinking the whole thing.

Prolonging the war in the east

Democrats unanimously approved the $61 billion Ukraine bill, waving blue and yellow flags as they cast their votes. President Volodymyr Zelensky will now get a backlog of equipment he’s been demanding, including artillery shells, air defense missile systems, and deep-strike rockets capable of hitting far inside Russian territory.

A large chunk of the money—at least $23 billion—goes almost immediately to U.S. weapons corporations like Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. That portion of the funds will be spent “restocking” U.S. arsenals that have already been emptied out and sent to Ukraine.

This subsidy to arms companies was billed as a “smart investment” by Biden when he made the pitch in October. He argued that prolonged war was a job creator and good for the American economy.

“We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores…with new equipment…made in America,” Biden said at the time.

Reflecting the long bipartisan pro-NATO consensus in Washington, most so-called “mainstream” Republicans joined the Democrats in passing the Ukraine weapons bill.

Dissenting were 40 members of the MAGA faction, the House Freedom Caucus. Much of the liberal corporate media rushed to characterize their “no” votes as proof of the affinity for Vladimir Putin that they supposedly share with Donald Trump.

In truth, however, with a close election coming, the Freedom Caucus is more likely attempting to opportunistically take advantage of widespread anti-war sentiment in the country and the reluctance many American voters feel when it comes to spending billions on overseas wars.

Some 55% of Americans in one recent poll—including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans—oppose allocating money for more weapons in the Ukraine war. Nearly 80% fear the war will drag on for years if there are no serious moves toward a ceasefire and peace negotiations.

“The days are over of the old Republican Party that wants to fund foreign wars and murder people in foreign lands while they stab the American people in their face and refuse to protect Americans and fix our problems,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene declared Saturday.

Her isolationist populism is crafted to appeal to voters weary of war, but it is never paired with a critique of U.S. imperialism generally or any analysis of the profiteers who benefit from war. Instead, she tries to manipulate anti-war Americans into supporting the far-right’s fascist agenda.

Going nuclear in Poland

Meanwhile, as the Freedom Caucus uses Ukraine as a political prop, behind the scenes, Trump is already laying the groundwork to also extend the Ukraine-Russia war if he recaptures the White House.

Trump did not oppose the Ukraine weapons bill; instead, he asked why Europe wasn’t spending more on the effort. He met with Poland’s far-right President Andrzej Duda in New York last week. Seeking to wring more money out of the U.S. and Europe, Duda has been constantly amping up the conflict between the West and Russia.

He has claimed, without proof, that there is a “high probability” of Russia attacking other countries in Europe and has pushed NATO alliance members to increase their war preparations. His government already spends more than 4% of its GDP on the military, most of that going toward the purchase of weapons from U.S. arms companies.

Duda announced Monday morning that he now wants Poland to host U.S. nuclear weapons aimed at Russia. He revealed that talks have been underway with Washington since 2022 to move U.S. nukes onto Polish territory and compared it to the stationing of Russian weapons in Belarus.

Russia warned that the risk of a “direct military clash” between it and Western nuclear powers is rising rapidly.

Subsidizing genocide

Right after voting to extend the Ukraine-Russia war, the U.S. House approved another tranche of weaponry for Israel, even as the IDF was raining down bombs on the al-Maghazi Refugee Camp in Gaza. A total of $26.38 billion of U.S. funds will pay for replenishing Israel’s bomb and missile stockpiles and buying new advanced weapons systems.

A skull is seen at a Palestinian cemetery in Khan Younis, Gaza, Jan. 27, 2024. The Israeli military dug out the graveyard and left remains exposed after claiming they discovered a tunnel underneath it. | Sam McNeil / AP

Republicans were almost unanimous in backing the Israel aid portion, while a strong contingent of 37 Democrats voted no. Ceasefire advocates like Rashida Tlaib, Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman were the leading opponents, but they were joined by senior Dems like Jamie Raskin and Maxine Waters, as well.

Following the vote, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and 19 other lawmakers issued a statement accusing the Biden administration of violating U.S. law by arming Israel.

“U.S. law demands that we withhold weapons to anyone who frustrates the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid, and President Biden’s own recent National Security Memorandum requires countries that use U.S.-provided weapons to adhere to U.S. and international law regarding the protection of civilians,” the statement said. “To date, Netanyahu has failed to comply. It’s time for President Biden to use our leverage to demand change.”

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said taxpayers should “not be funding unconditional military weapons to a conflict that has created a catastrophic humanitarian disaster.” The death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza has now passed 34,000, with countless more Palestinians believed to be buried under the rubble.

Profit blowout

When added to the $8.12 billion allocated for new missiles targeting China that will be placed in Taiwan, the set of war spending bills passed this weekend adds up to a profit blowout for the major U.S. weapons corporations.

While many media outlets characterized the package as “aid” for foreign governments, in reality, the bills are a subsidy for the bottom line of the arms makers. They will benefit in the form of either direct U.S. government purchases to refill bomb supplies given to the allies of U.S. imperialism or via weapons purchase vouchers given to other governments and paid for with U.S. taxpayer cash.

On the stock market for the last two years, shares of the biggest defense companies have easily beat the benchmark numbers for other major capitalist firms on indexes like the S&P 500. But with wars and the potential for future wars heating up, 2024 is turning out to be an even bigger bonanza than expected.

Demand for U.S. government purchases was already expected to be strong for the year thanks to what Eric Fanning, chief executive of the U.S. Aerospace Industries Association, called “Chinese aggression” and “Russian aggression.” But “support for allies in the Middle East”—i.e. Israel—now figures much larger in the profit forecasts than it did before Oct. 7.

The quickest and easiest moneymaking comes from ramping up production of already-existing weapons systems, like the 2000-lb. bombs Israel has used to slaughter Palestinians and the rockets Ukraine uses in its fight against Russia.

Industry analysts interviewed by Reuters confirmed it: Stronger demand for these systems “will quickly flow to the corporate bottom line.”

The final steps required to get the money flowing into the arms companies’ bank accounts are approval of the new bills by the U.S. Senate and the signature of Biden. He promised to put pen to paper as soon as the laws arrive on his desk.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!

C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.

Who Is to Blame for the War in Ukraine? / by Donald A. Smith

Anti-war protesters gather in front of the White House to demonstrate against escalating tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine on January 27, 2022, in Washington, D.C. | Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

NATO expansion provoked the very conflict that is now being touted as justification for said expansion.

Reposted from Common Dreams

This article orginally appeared in Common Dreams

Here are four views about the war in Ukraine, listed in order of increasing cynicism about U.S. culpability for the crisis:

  1. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was totally unprovoked, and the U.S. response was a noble defense of democracy and of the rules-based international order. Ukraine had a right to ally with the West and had a legitimate fear of Russian aggression (as do Poland and Czechoslovakia, for example).
  2. NATO expansion into Ukraine and other countries near Russia was reckless, because Russia had made it clear to diplomats that it considered Ukraine off-limits to NATO. America bears some responsibility for provoking the crisis, because it should have been obvious to policymakers that their trying to expand NATO into Ukraine would lead to a war. But the Ukrainians had the desire and the right to align with the West, and so U.S. intentions were noble.
  3. The U.S. and NATO failed to respect the divisions in Ukraine between pro-Western and pro-Russian provinces and groups, and the U.S. failed to respect Russia’s legitimate security concerns—e.g., not to have a hostile country along its borders that was attacking Russian speakers in the East. But the U.S. did not want a war.
  4. The U.S. exploited divisions in Ukraine, launched a regime change operation, and armed anti-Russian militias in order to intentionally provoke a war. The aim was to weaken Russia, increase European dependence on the U.S. (both militarily and economically), and enrich U.S. arms and energy industries. The U.S. couldn’t care less about Ukrainian (or Russian) lives lost.

I devised these four views during discussions with my member of Congress, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash., no relation), who is the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee and former chair. He, of course, believes view #1 and thinks that NATO expansion was needed to deter Russian aggression. But he told me that view No. 2 is plausible though wrong.

If you believe the official narrative coming out of D.C. and out of most of mainstream media, you too will think that view No. 1 is correct and that the U.S. is as innocent in the crisis as a newborn baby.

Given the history of U.S. lies and aggression with respect to foreign policy and with respect to overseas interventions, one would have to be naive indeed to believe view No. 1.

I believe the evidence points to view No. 4 being correct: The U.S. intentionally provoked a war. But it is possible that view No. 3 is closer to the truth, and that ideological fervor led the architects of U.S. policy in Ukraine to be blinded to the obvious likely results of their policies; however, that seem unlikely, because both diplomats and the RAND Corporation had told policymakers that trying to expand NATO into Ukraine would lead to war.

My reasons for holding view No. 4 are documented in “Senior U.S. diplomats, Journalists, Academics, and Secretaries of Defense say: The U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine.” In short:

  • There were stark divisions within Ukraine between pro-Western and pro-Russian provinces and groups—divisions that the U.S. exploited to provoke a crisis.
  • The U.S. aided the 2014 government overthrow in Ukraine that replaced a Russia-friendly government with one subservient to the West. Former U.S. Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, and lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, says the U.S. “engineered” the 2014 coup.
  • The U.S. allied with and armed far-right, anti-Russian militias Azov, Sovboda, and Right Sektor that were attacking Russian speakers in the East and that had been widely condemned in U.S. media and by Congress prior to 2022.
  • The CIA was deeply involved (see this and this) and worked hard to hide its tracks (a broad “effort, around the time of the invasion, to close off many ‘sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters’”).
  • Senior U.S. diplomats warned that NATO expansion into Ukraine and other former Soviet block countries was unnecessary and risky.
  • The U.S. stymied peace deals between Russia and Ukraine that could have prevented or ended the war. See also this and this.
  • The U.S. has a history of launching regime change operations, via both economic and military means, throughout the world, but in particular against Russian allies (e.g., Afghanistan, Serbia, Syria, and Libya). Russia’s invasion was along its borders and involved a country with deep historical and linguistic ties to Russia. The U.S. often allies with terrorist groups to achieve its aims. The U.S. currently occupies one-third of the sovereign nation of Syria with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces. We were told that the U.S. invasion in Yugoslavia was a noble defense of innocent people. It has since been revealed (see this and this) that the Kosovo Liberation Army was, basically, a terrorist organization armed by the CIA. When the Serbians tried to defend themselves, the U.S. accused them of engaging in war crimes. Some U.S. allies in the Kosovo war were later convicted of war crimes.

In the view of Rep. Smith, NATO expansion was necessary to prevent Russia from taking over not only Ukraine but also the Baltic states. (Likewise, he thinks that U.S. military actions near China are needed to deter Chinese aggression in Taiwan.) My view is that NATO expansion provoked the very war that is now being touted as justification for said expansion.

Despite the CIA’s valiant efforts, many of the facts about what happened in Ukraine are available to the public. It’s quite amazing that—so soon after the ignoble end to the disastrous 20-year war in Afghanistan—mainstream media, Congress, and most of the public have been so easily bamboozled by government propaganda into supporting yet another disastrous, avoidable war. The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people; displaced millions of people from their homes; devastated Ukrainian infrastructure; greatly increased military budgets in Europe, the U.S., and Russia (money sorely needed for climate mitigation and other urgent exigencies); increased inflation and shortages worldwide; and increased the risk of World War III and nuclear annihilation. Moreover, it’s a war that Russia is now winning—a fact that increases the risk of escalation.

A negotiated end to the war in Ukraine is urgently needed.

Donald A. Smith is a writer, a peace activist working with CodePink, a Democratic Precinct Committee officer, the editor of http://waliberals.org, and the creator of https://progressivememes.org. He lives in Bellevue, Washington, and has a PhD in Computer Science.

Russia and China veto US resolution on Gaza over failure to explicitly demand ceasefire / by Tanupriya Singh

UNSC. Photo: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

As Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Rafah, the US-authored resolution presented to the UN Security Council merely noted an “imperative” for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Algeria, Russia, and China rejected the resolution, stating that it had failed to deliver on the core demand for a ceasefire.

Reposted from People’s Dispatch

Russia and China vetoed a US-authored resolution in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on March 22 on the situation in Gaza. The text “determines the imperative for an immediate and sustained ceasefire” stopping short of an explicit call for a halt to Israel’s six-month long attack on besieged Gaza that has killed almost 32,000 Palestinians.

The US authored the resolution after vetoing three successive UNSC resolutions on Gaza, including a February 20 resolution presented by Algeria that had called for an immediate ceasefire.

Absent an explicit call for a ceasefire, the text presented by the US mentioned allowing for the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance, “alleviate humanitarian suffering and towards that end unequivocally supports ongoing international diplomatic efforts to secure such a cease-fire in connection [emphasis added] with the release of all remaining hostages,” according to a draft circulated in the news media on Thursday.

This unilateral demand for the release of Israeli hostages—without a mention of a reciprocal release of the thousands of Palestinians Israel has imprisoned and tortured— has been inserted by the US in UNSC discussions of a ceasefire. This is all while Israel has continued to bomb Gaza and rejected comprehensive ceasefire proposals presented by the Palestinian resistance. Friday’s vote in the Security Council was held amid ongoing negotiations in Qatar.

The US continued to make this link perhaps not “as firmly”, during the Council on Friday, with Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield speaking of an “immediate and sustained ceasefire as part of a deal that leads to the release of all hostages being held by Hamas and other groups that will help us address the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza”. She added that adopting the resolution would “put pressure on Hamas to accept the deal on the table”. 

The US resolution received 11 votes in favor, and three votes against, with Algeria joining Russia and China who cast the deciding vetoes. Guyana was the sole abstention, reiterating the lack of a call for an immediate ceasefire.

US resolution a “hypocritical spectacle”

Addressing the Council ahead of the vote, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused the US of presenting a “hypocritical spectacle” wrapped up in a ceasefire, that the US had been trying to “sell a product” to the international community. He added that the language of an “imperative” was not enough to save the lives of the Palestinians and was not stipulated in the mandate of the UNSC, which is vested with a mechanism to “demand a ceasefire and where necessary, to compel compliance”.

“The American product is exceedingly politicized, the sole purpose of which is to help to play to the voters, to throw them a bone in the form of some kind of a mention of a ceasefire in Gaza” and would make the UNSC “instrument in the advancement of Washington’s destructive policy in the Middle East”, and “to ensure the impunity of Israel whose crimes in the draft are not even assessed.”

“The US draft contains an effective green light for Israel to mount a military operation in Rafah”, adding that the text’s authors had tried to make it that “nothing would prevent” Israel from “continuing their brutal cleansing of the south of the Gaza Strip”.

Algerian Ambassador Amar Bendjama stated that the adoption of the February ceasefire resolution could have saved thousands of lives, adding that the present resolution had fallen short “due to the absence of a clear demand for a ceasefire those who believe that the Israeli occupying power will choose to uphold its international legal obligation are mistaken, they must abandon this fiction”.

He stated that the US draft resolution had been circulated a month ago following which Algeria had made proposed edits to “achieve a more balanced and acceptable text”, however, finally, the draft fell short as “core concerns remained unaddressed”.

Addressing the Council on Friday, China’s Ambassador Zhang Jun explained the country’s veto, stating that despite the urgent need and demand for an immediate, unconditional, and sustained ceasefire, “the Council had dragged its feet and wasted too much time”.

He added that the US-authored draft had “always evaded and dodged the most central issue- that of a ceasefire. The final text remains ambiguous and does not call for an immediate ceasefire, nor does it even provide an answer to the question of realizing a ceasefire in the short-term”.

Zhang further stated that an immediate ceasefire was a “fundamental prerequisite” for “saving lives, expanding humanitarian access and preventing greater conflicts. The US draft on the contrary sets up preconditions for a ceasefire which is no different from giving a green light to continued killings which is unacceptable.”

He noted that the draft was “very imbalanced” particularly in regard to Israel’s plans to invade Rafah. “The draft does not clearly and unequivocally state its opposition which would send an utterly wrong signal and lead to severe consequences.”

His Algerian counterpart, Bendjama, had similarly stated that the text “does not convey a clear message of peace. It tacitly allows continuing civilian casualties and lacks clear safeguards to prevent further escalation. It is a laissez-passer to continue killing the Palestinian civilians. The emphasis on ‘measures to reduce civilian harm from ongoing and future operations’ implies a license for continuing bloodshed,” Bendjama added, highlighting Israel’s looming invasion of Rafah.

Rafah invasion still on the table despite international outcry

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reiterated the Occupation’s plan to launch a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, where 1.5 million people forcibly displaced by Israeli attacks on other parts of Gaza are currently trapped.

While the US continues to make a display of its supposed efforts to halt the looming invasion, Netanyahu has declared that Israel is “rejecting” growing international pressure “in order to achieve the goals of the war”. Following a phone call with President Joe Biden, Netanyahu stated that he “made it as clear as possible” that there was no way around a ground incursion.

“We see no way to eliminate Hamas militarily without destroying these remaining battalions. We are determined to do this”, he said. Netanyahu reiterated this in a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, saying on Friday, “I told him that I hope we will do it with the support of the US, but if we have to— we will do it alone”.

“A major military ground operation is not the way to do it”, Blinken told reporters, then going on to say, “We’re determined that Israel succeed in defending itself and becomes integrated into the region with its security.”

Meanwhile, the ten elected, non-permanent members (E-10) of the Security Council have drafted a separate resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, “leading to a permanent sustainable ceasefire”.

It also demands “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”, without linking it to the ceasefire, and stresses the need to protect civilians in Gaza and provide humanitarian assistance. France has also stated that it will be drafting a separate resolution.

A vote on the E-10 text is reportedly expected to take place later on Friday or Saturday morning.

Tanupriya Singh is a writer at Peoples Dispatch.

The Urgency of Diplomacy / by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Stop the War protesters demonstrate against the threat of nuclear war in North East Asia, near Downing Street on September 28, 2017 in London, England | Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images

Now is the time for talks that will bring us closer to peace and away from a deadly and destructive war with no end in sight.

Reposted from Common Dreams

There has been a complete collapse of diplomacy between the US and Russia, and a near-total collapse between the US and China. Europe, which has made itself far too dependent on the US for its own good, simply follows the Washington line. The absence of diplomacy creates a dynamic of escalation that can lead to nuclear war. The highest priority for global peace is to re-establish US diplomacy with Russia and China.

The state of affairs is encapsulated by President Joe Biden’s incessant personal insults of his Russian and Chinese counterparts. Instead of focusing on policy, Biden focuses on the personal vis-à-vis President Vladimir Putin. Recently, he referred to President Putin as “a crazy SOB.” In March 2022, he stated that “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Just after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last fall, Biden called him a “dictator.”

This crude personalization of complex superpower relations is inimical to peace and problem solving. Moreover, the crudity of this rhetoric and absence of serious diplomacy has opened the floodgates of shocking rhetorical irresponsibility. The President of Latvia recently tweeted “Russia delenda est” (“Russia must be destroyed”), paraphrasing the ancient refrain of Cato the Elder in calling for the destruction of Carthage by Rome prior to the Third Punic War.

At one level, these utterly puerile statements all recall the admonition of President John F. Kennedy, who drew the most important lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis as the need to avoid humiliating a nuclear-armed adversary: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

But there is an even deeper problem at hand. All of US foreign policy is currently based on asserting the motives of the counterparts rather than actually negotiating with them. The US refrain is that the other side can’t be trusted to negotiate, so that it’s not worth trying.

Negotiations today are denounced as pointless, untimely, and a show of weakness. We are repeatedly told that Britain’s Neville Chamberlain tried to negotiate with Hitler in 1938, but that Hitler tricked him, and that the very same would happen with negotiations today. To underscore the point, every US adversary is branded as a new Hitler — Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and others – so any negotiation would be in vain.

The problem is that this trivialization of history and of today’s conflicts is leading us to the brink of nuclear war. The world is closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever before – 90 seconds to midnight according to the Doomsday Clock – because the nuclear superpowers aren’t negotiating. And the US has actually become the least diplomatic of all UN member states, comparing the states according to adherence to the UN Charter.

Diplomacy is vital because most conflicts are what game theorists call “strategic dilemmas.” A strategic dilemma is a situation in which peace (or, more generally, cooperation) is better for both adversaries but in which each side has the incentive to cheat on a peace agreement in order to take advantage of the foe. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, peace was better for both the US and the Soviet Union than nuclear war, but each side feared that if it agreed to a peaceful outcome, the other side would cheat – for example through a nuclear first-strike.

The keys to peace in such cases are mechanisms for compliance. Or as President Ronald Reagan said of negotiating with the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, repeating an old Russian maxim, “Trust but verify.”

There are many mechanisms for building trust. At a basic level, the two sides can remind each other that they are in a “repeated game,” meaning that strategic dilemmas are regularly arising between them. If one side cheats today, that kills the chance for cooperation in the future. But there are many additional mechanisms for enforcement: formal treaties, third-party guarantees, systematic monitoring, phased agreements, and the like.

JFK was confident that the agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis that he negotiated with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 would stick – and it did. He was later confident that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that he negotiated with Khrushchev in July 1963 would also stick – and it did. As JFK noted about such agreements, they depend on negotiating an agreement that is in the mutual interest of both parties: “Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours — and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.”

Game theorists have studied strategic dilemmas for more than 70 years now, most famously the Prisoner’s Dilemma. They have repeatedly found that a key path to cooperation in a strategic dilemma is through dialogue, even non-binding dialogue. The human interaction dramatically raises the likelihood of mutually beneficial cooperation.

Was Chamberlain wrong to negotiate with Hitler in Munich in 1938? No. He was wrong on the specifics, reaching an ill-advised agreement that Hitler did not intend to honor and then naively proclaiming “peace for our time.” Yet even so, Chamberlain’s negotiation with Hitler ultimately contributed to Hitler’s defeat. By plainly exposing Hitler’s perfidy to the world, the failed Munich agreement paved the way for a resolute Winston Churchill to take power in Britain, with deep vindication and with deep wellsprings of public support in Britain and worldwide, and then ultimately for the UK-US-Soviet alliance to defeat Hitler.

The repeated analogy to 1938 is in any event utterly simplistic, and in some ways even backward. The war in Ukraine requires real negotiation among the parties – Russia, Ukraine, and the US – to address issues such as NATO enlargement and mutual security of all parties to the conflict. These issues pose true strategic dilemmas, meaning that all parties – the US, Russia, and Ukraine — can come out ahead by ending the war and reaching a mutually satisfactory outcome.

Moreover, it has been the US and its allies that have broken agreements and refused diplomacy. The US violated its solemn pledges to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward. The US cheated by supporting the violent coup in Kiev that toppled Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. The US, Germany, France, and the UK, duplicitously refused to back the Minsk II agreement. The US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and from the Intermediate Force Agreement in 2019. The US refused to negotiate when Putin proposed a draft Russia-US Treaty on Security Guarantees on December 15, 2021.

There has in fact been no direct diplomacy between Biden and Putin since the beginning of 2022. And when Russia and Ukraine negotiated directly in March 2022, the UK and US stepped in to block an agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Putin reiterated Russia’s openness to negotiations in his interview with Tucker Carlson last month and did so again more recently.

The war rages on, with hundreds of thousands dead and with hundreds of billions of dollars of destruction. We are coming closer to the nuclear abyss. It’s time to talk.In the immortal words and wisdom of JFK in his Inaugural Address, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Ten years since the Euromaidan in Ukraine: Revolution or foreign-backed Coup? / by Nikos Mottas

Photo via IDC

Reposted from In Defense of Communism

This February marked the tenth anniversary since the so-called “Euromaidan” events in Ukraine and the subsequent coup d’ etat which, backed by the US and the EU, led to the overthrow of the then pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. 

Apart from the rise of far-right, reactionary forces in Ukraine’s political leadership, the 2014 coup became the starting point for the 2022 Russian military invasion and the ongoing imperialist war. 

The Euro-Atlantic forces have since tried to present the 2014 events in Ukraine as a “democratic revolution” against Yanukovich government. Officially the then events are called as “Revolution of Dignity”. However all facts point that Euromaidan was nothing but a flagrant intervention of the US, NATO and EU in Ukraine’s internal affairs, as a part of their broader inter-imperialist competition with capitalist Russia. This intervention was the spark that ignited a chain of events that led to the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and the so-called “Special Military Operation” in February 2022.

The background and the coup

Socialist Ukraine, formally the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. Since then, the emerging bourgeoisie, made up by capitalists, neo-oligarchs and various counterrevolutionaries, was divided into two major sections: One part linked its interests with the Euro-Atlantic bloc while another one decided to side with capitalist Russia.

This intra-bourgeois competition, which escalated through the 1990s and 2000s, reached a peak in November 2013 when pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych withdrew from signing the association agreement with the EU and instead accepted a trade and bailout deal with Russia. Back then, the pro-western opposition political forces, led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko – who had been prosecuted for corruption, bribery and misuse of public finances – reacted fiercely demanding the immediate resignation of the President.

The situation was an ideal opportunity for the EU and the US to interfere more actively in Ukraine’s internal affairs in order to serve their own geo-strategic interests in the region. The Euro-Atlantic intervention followed the known pattern of the so-called “Colour Revolutions” and the “Arab Spring”, covered behind supposedly “spontaneous”, but in fact very well elaborated, protests which subsequently turned violent. The center of these protests was Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s Independence Square. 

Euromaidan protests became the stage of activity for fascist and neo-Nazi groups (e.g “Right Sector”, “Ukrainian National Assembly”, “Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists”, Banderites, etc) and was openly endorsed by NATO and EU member-states’ embassies. US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador in Kyiv Geoffrey Pyatt played a key role in supporting the Euromaidan coup on behalf of the Obama administration. The desire of the US government to have full and unchallenged control of the situation created by Euromaidan was perfectly captured in Nuland’s words during a phone conversation with Pyatt: “You know, fuck the EU”.

Fascist groups in the streets of Kyiv

On 21 February 2024, following days of violent clashes, over 100 deaths and the mediation of European governments, mainly France and Germany, Yanukovych government and the leaders of the opposition signed an agreement which, among others, promised return to the 2004 constitution, early elections and withdrawal of security forces from the center of Kyiv. The negotiation process as well as the agreement were closely witnessed by the Russian government as well. Nonetheless, things didn’t go as President Yanukovych expected. He was overthrown while he was on a planned trip to Eastern Ukraine and the new temporary coup government under Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was immediately recognized by the EU and the US.

Yanukovych found refuge in Russia and, at the same time, pro-Russian protests erupted across Ukraine, especially in the south and eastern parts of the country, including Crimea. Armed fascist and nationalist paramilitary gangs undertook the responsibility to suppress the riots by unleashing a wave of violence against the pro-Russian population. Within their terrorist activity, on 2 May 2014 Ukrainian fascists committed a horrendous crime in Odessa, burning alive more than 100 protesters in the Trade Unions House.

The Minsk agreements

Despite the orgy of violence and terrorism exercised by Ukrainian fascist paramilitaries, the Russian-speaking population in Crimea and the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk (that is the majority of the people in the Donbass region) refused to accept the new coup government formed in Kyiv. Under the pretext of protecting the Russian-speaking population from an imminent extermination, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula and then annexed it. At the same time, following weeks of clashes with Ukrainian state and paramilitary forces, pro-Russian separatists in Donbass proclaimed the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic as “independent states”.

In order to avoid any further escalation in Donbass, France, Germany and Belarus initiated a round of negotiations which led to the signing of the so-called Minsk Agreements, the first on 5 September 2014 and the second on 12 February 2015. The agreements consisted of a package of measures, including ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, release of prisoners of war and constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government – not independence though – to specific areas of Donbass.

Massacre in Odessa, 2 May 2014

The Ukrainian government failed to implement its own commitments and, on the other hand, Moscow used Russian separatists as a “trojan horse” for the promotion of its influence in the region. In fact, none of the two parties really wanted the implementation of the Minsk Agreements but, instead, they pushed their own agendas on the expense of the working people.

The failure of the Minsk Agreements was accompanied by a ferocious military assault of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and fascist paramilitaries (e.g neo-Nazi Azov battalion) against the people of Donbass. This attempted genocide, which had the silent approval of the West, namely NATO and the EU, provided to Putin administration the necessary pretext in order to launch the “Special Military Operation (SMO)” and the invasion that took place two years ago, on February 2022.

Ten years later…

Ten years since the Euromaidan events and two years after the Russian invasion, a full-scale disastrous war is being waged against the people of Ukraine and Russia. As we have stressed out in the past, It is a war that takes place between two adversary imperialist blocs, the Euro-Atlantic one (USA, NATO, EU) and the emerging Eurasian bloc led by China and Russia. The division of mineral wealth, energy, territories, labour force, pipelines, transport routes of commodities, geopolitical footholds and market shares lie at the heart of the military conflict.

The reactionary government of Volodymir Zelenskiy has been used as a pawn on the chessboard of this inter-imperialist rivalry and, sooner or later, will be thrown in the dustbin of political history by its own masters.

The peoples of Russia and Ukraine, who had been living in peace and prospered together under the Soviet Union, have no interest in siding with one imperialist or another, with one alliance or another that serves the interests of the monopolies.

The interest of the working class and the popular strata in every country requires to chart their own independent path against monopolies and bourgeois classes, for the overthrow of capitalism, for the strengthening of the class struggle against imperialist war, for socialism which remains as timely and necessary as ever before.

Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism. 

An endgame in Ukraine may be fast approaching / by Paul Robinson

The military situation today is very different from that of a year ago when commentators were predicting that final victory was within Ukraine’s grasp. Photo courtesy the 148th Separate Artillery Brigade/Armed Forces of Ukraine/X.

After two years of war, an increasingly sombre mood has swept over Ukraine and its supporters in the West.

Reposted from Canadian Dimension

It is probably fair to say that nobody has done a very good job of predicting the ups and downs of the war in Ukraine, which this week marks its second anniversary. Initially, analysts overestimated the power of the Russian army, believing that it would quickly defeat Ukraine. When that turned out to be untrue, they then made the mistake of underestimating Russia, believing that Ukraine was bound to triumph. Now, the circle is turning again, and a spell of gloom is falling down over the West, as it faces the reality that Russia has not collapsed under the weight of sanctions, that the Russian army is showing no signs of disintegration, and that it is Ukraine that seems to be coming off worse in recent battles. The question we now face, therefore, is whether the current gloom is justified or is yet another misperception of reality.

The evidence would suggest that the former is possibly more likely than the latter, although we can’t be entirely certain. The military situation today is very different from that of a year ago when military commentators were confidently predicting that final victory was within Ukraine’s grasp. Huge hopes were placed in an offensive operation planned for the spring and summer of 2023. Its direction was widely known—too widely known, in fact, as it gave the Russians lots of time to prepare. The Ukrainians were to strike southwards in Zaporozhe province in order to reach the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, cutting Crimea off from Russia, and isolating it from resupply. Russia, it was believed, would then be forced to concede defeat, and Putin might even be ousted from power by disgruntled Russian elites, determined to save what they could from the debacle.

While some military analysts thought that this objective might be a bit much for Ukraine, they nonetheless expected the Ukrainians to make some notable advances. Optimism ran high. It continued even when the much-advertised offensive ran immediately into major difficulties after it began in early June. The narrative changed. Pundits now argued that capturing territory was not important. What mattered was destroying the enemy’s army, and that the Russians were supposedly suffering far greater casualties than the Ukrainians (a claim for which no strong evidence was ever produced). The calculus of attrition favoured Ukraine, went the argument. Backed by the massive economic power of the West, Ukraine could not but triumph over the much weaker Russia.

It was not to be. By the start of October, the Ukrainian army had abandoned its offensive, having advanced at most about 10 kilometres in a couple of small sectors of the front. The massive stocks of ammunition that had been piled up for the offensive had been expended. Meanwhile, the Russian army, far from losing the attritional battle, had become stronger than before. Buoyed by large numbers of new recruits, increased military industrial production, and weapons supplies from Iran and North Korea, by mid-October the Russians were attacking along the approximately 1,000 kilometre long front line. Last week their attacks finally bore major fruit in the form of the capture of one of the most strongly fortified of all Ukrainian positions, the town of Avdiivka. Further Russian advances are now widely expected.

Coming on top of the failure of the Ukrainian summer offensive, the capture of Avdiivka has reinforced an increasingly sombre mood among pro-Ukrainian politicians and commentators in the West. Talk of a Ukrainian victory has almost entirely disappeared. Even the most optimistic analysts speak only of Ukraine holding the line in 2024 and going back onto the attack in 2025. Even that, though, is dependent on the West increasing its supplies of weapons to Ukraine, as well as on the Ukrainians themselves sorting out their manpower problems. At present, though, the flow of weapons is slower than it was a year ago, while the Ukrainian army is struggling to conscript an adequate number of its citizens. Military recruiters have been recorded admitting that they have fallen far short of their conscription targets. Those that they do round up are often aged and, as even pro-Ukrainian commentators admit, “are in poor physical shape and have health issues that limit their ability to fight.” A new conscription law is currently going through the Ukrainian parliament, but even if it passes, it will take months for its effects to be felt, and there is no guarantee that it will succeed in enabling the Ukrainian state to drag more of its reluctant population into military service. American military analyst Rob Lee comments that “Ukraine faces two acute issues right now: a lack of ammunition and a lack of infantry.” That’s pretty much the definition of an army that is losing.

On the other side, Russia also has problems. Its losses are heavy, and while it has demonstrated an ability to win local tactical victories, it has yet to prove that it can convert these into broader operational success. Meanwhile, it continues to use up supplies at a faster rate than it produces them, a process that cannot last forever, as eventually stocks will become exhausted. While Russia fires many more artillery shells than Ukraine, it doesn’t fire as many as it used to. This leads some to argue that “Russia’s domestic ammunition production capabilities are currently insufficient for meeting the needs of the Ukraine conflict.”

Nevertheless, increases in Russian arms production mean that Russian industry is currently outproducing the entirety of NATO in most crucial areas, such as artillery ammunition, tanks, and drones. There is no sign as yet of any substantial reduction in Russian firepower. Although Russian artillery has indeed become somewhat less active, it remains powerful, and the reduced activity has been more than compensated for by increased use of drones and large air-launched “glide bombs,” such as the 500 and 1,500 kilogram FAB bombs, scores of which were being dropped every day on Avdiivka during the final days of the battle there. At present, Russia substantially outguns Ukraine, and even if Western aid to Ukraine were suddenly to grow, it seems unlikely that it could grow so much as to bring parity, let alone the large advantage required for a military breakthrough.

Beyond that, Russia also enjoys a significant manpower advantage. Not only is its population much bigger than Ukraine’s, but it is also proving able to recruit large numbers of volunteers. According to the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, Russia is recruiting about 30,000 volunteers a month, a figure that roughly coincides with official Russian claims of around 400,000 volunteers a year. By contrast, in the past 12 months, Ukraine has proven unable to gather even half that many recruits through conscription (volunteers for the Ukrainian army are nowadays few and far between). Western analysts have long claimed that one of Ukraine’s biggest advantages over Russia was a greater willingness to fight. If that ever was the case, it doesn’t seem to be so any more.

All this makes the prospects of a decisive Ukrainian victory seem very slim. Even if Ukraine can somehow regain the initiative, it seems very doubtful that it could ever gain the degree of military superiority that it would need to achieve its stated political objective of restoring its 1991 borders. It would be unwise to say that that is impossible, but at present it’s very hard indeed to imagine how it could be done. Furthermore, even if it could, it would take very many years, at the end of which one might wonder what would be left of Ukraine and its population.

Given this reality, talk is now increasingly shifting from how to help Ukraine win to how to help Ukraine to force Russia to abandon its more extreme political objectives (neutrality and demilitarization of Ukraine) and accept a more limited outcome. This might involve Russia keeping whatever territories it should happen to control at the time of a ceasefire, while allowing Ukraine to keep open the option of eventually joining NATO. This is a more plausible objective for Ukraine than restoring its previous borders. But it must be noted that even this would require years more fighting, so as to convince the Russian leadership that it can’t achieve anything greater and to cash in what winnings it has. Again, the price that Ukraine would have to pay for such a prolonged war would be enormous. One has to wonder if it would be worth it.

As things stand, two years into the conflict, the war’s outcome remains uncertain, although some things are becoming clearer. The chances of a decisive Ukrainian victory now seem very low. What remains less sure is whether Russia has the ability to win such a victory itself. There is little indication of a sudden breakthrough of the Ukrainian line and a return to rapid maneuver warfare. There is, though, some chance that continued pressure over the next few months may cause something somewhere to break on the Ukrainian side. But there is also a possibility that the Ukrainians will somehow cling on, and that a combination of renewed Western aid and a successful mobilization of Ukrainian manpower will then enable the Ukrainians to restore a degree of military balance, producing a long-lasting stalemate.

The next few months are of decisive importance, as they are likely to determine down which of these paths the war is headed. In the meantime, some long and bloody fighting lies ahead.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.