Ukraine - West continues to escalate war
by John Moore
Ukraine’s attack on Russia in early August – confirmed as a western operation by Ukrainian official Mikhailo Podolyak and many other sources – is designed to prolong the war by showing that Ukraine can “achieve results”, as Zelensky put it. It crosses a red line, the first major western attack on Russian territory since the Nazis, and shows clearly the West’s belligerent intent. President Putin called the move a “large scale provocation” and said it removed any “taboos” in terms of Russia’s response.
DANGEROUS MOVE
Months of training in Britain went into preparing the attacking force. British weapons used openly inside Russia “on a scale matched by no other country”, according to the Times, as well as ‘mercenary’ troops on the ground from several NATO countries, signal a major escalation and attempt to lock any future US administration into pursuing the war. (1)
The advance into Kursk hit principally civilian targets. Videos show civilian cars and ambulances carrying wounded being shot at by Ukrainian troops, drones destroying apartments and churches, and chemical weapons being used.
Most western military analysts agree that this is a desperate symbolic throw of the dice which is questionable militarily and hugely wasteful of lives. Across the 700-mile frontline in Ukraine, Russia is pushing back Ukrainian forces relentlessly. It has maintained superiority in air defence throughout the war, according to the US journal Business Insider, and also a 10-to-1 advantage in artillery shells with the world’s biggest production of munitions. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian advance into Russia is a highly dangerous move in terms of escalation, and one that potentially threatens the Kursk nuclear power station, which has already come under fire. The head of Russia’s nuclear agency has warned the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the dangers, and the IAEA called for “maximum restraint”.
Since the failure of its counter-offensive last year and its ongoing retreat, with losses estimated at five times those of Russia, the attack is a continuation on a much bigger scale of Ukraine’s focus on striking civilians and infrastructure inside Russia. In June, a cluster-bomb attack aimed at a nearby military target hit a beach in Sevastopol, Crimea, while on the same day in Dagestan, radical Islamists launched another attack, echoing the ISIS Crocus concert hall killings in Moscow earlier in the year. Oil refineries, shipping, bridges and shopping malls have all been targeted regularly and increasingly.
Russia’s response to this opening up of a second front appears composed, moving reserves forward to contain the invasion, without deviating from making important strategic gains in the Donbass.
REASONS FOR ESCALATION
Ukraine’s Kursk advance comes at a time when western support for NATO’s war has been flagging in the face of Russia’s resilience to western sanctions and its slow but steady advance (deliberately slow in most areas, in order to reduce casualties). It shows the clear intention of the dominant ruling circles to keep Russia tied down in a long costly European war as they prepare for their bigger conflict against China. The war also cements US domination over the EU its rival as well as ally, which has been one of the chief consequences of its provocation of Russia from the start.
There are other reasons for prolonging the war – the huge profits to be made, not only from arms sales. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset fund manager, is leveraging Ukraine’s enormous debts to profit from the postwar reconstruction, estimated at up to $750 billion. Meanwhile, almost a third of Ukraine’s rich agricultural land is already concentrated in foreign corporate hands. Lithium and other rare earth deposits in the Donbas and central Ukraine are another rich resource. Germany in particular, searching for lithium for electric car production and green energy technology, is pressing for the war to continue in order to ensure and restore control over these territories. Ukraine’s biggest titanium producer is also up for privatization as part of the latest massive sell-off of state assets.
CALLS FOR TALKS
Despite the two-year-long campaign of vilification of Russia and the championing of Ukraine in the West, a major opinion poll conducted in the US and Europe published this summer by the New York-based Institute for Global Affairs revealed that there is “broad transatlantic support for urging a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine.” 94% of American respondents said they wanted a negotiated end to the bloodshed, even if it meant Ukraine ceding territory and 88% of Europeans said the same.
In terms of diplomatic efforts for peace, China and Brazil have called jointly for an international peace conference that includes both Russia and Ukraine, following on from China’s 12-point peace plan put forward in February. Both initiatives were dismissed by the western powers.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban, as the current rotating EU president, has met Putin, Zelensky and Xi in a push for peace, for which he’s been demonised as an “appeaser” by EU hawks such as Ursula von der Leyen, who called for Hungary’s EU voting rights to be suspended as punishment. Hungary was also “stripped of the right” to host an EU foreign and defence ministers meeting in late August. But Orban is not alone among European politicians urging talks. The leader of the conservative opposition CDU in Germany, Friedrich Merz, has also called for negotiations, while simultaneously urging Germany to supply Ukraine with warplanes, as have the CDU prime ministers of Saxony and Thuringia. The far right AfD which did well in the latest regional elections, has also called for peace talks, as has the leftwing anti-war party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Many Germans fear being dragged into a war. Meanwhile, the Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, having narrowly survived an assassination attempt, has re-emphasised his party’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO, because it would lead to World War 3, and Italy has reiterated its refusal to allow Ukraine to use its weapons to strike Russian territory.
Liberal voices have also called for peace. A letter in the Financial Times (10/7/24) from distinguished former ambassadors to Russia and the USSR as well as establishment academics such as Lord Skidelsky, Richard Sakwa and Anatol Lieven, suggested talks were needed given the inevitability of a territorial division of Ukraine. The letter went viral.
Within Ukraine, there has been a steep falling off in support for the war - 44% of the population now favour a diplomatic solution. This feeling is strongest among those living close to the frontlines. (2) Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen, and a large section of Ukrainian people reject mobilisation. For instance, 11,000 Ukrainian men have crossed illegally into northern Romania to escape the regime’s military pressgangs and others are escaping elsewhere or paying a $10-20,000 bribe. Truckers blocked a main highway near Odessa in May against a new mobilisation law, and a month later military vehicles belonging to military enlistment offices were set alight in protest against the draft.
This anti-war sentiment goes back over thirty years. Between 1991 and 2014, every opinion poll showed that the majority of Ukrainians consistently opposed joining NATO. Despite the brute force of the Maidan coup in 2014, which pushed Ukrainians into line, 75% of them voted for a peace ticket in 2019 promised them by Zelensky. A poll by the Kiev International Institute for Sociology conducted just before Russia’s intervention showed that only 16% of Ukrainians were willing to take up arms to defend their country.
NATO ENCROACHMENT
The US knew all along that no Russian government of whatever stripe would accept Ukraine joining NATO, according to a series of newly declassified documents. (3) In 2008, William Burns, then US ambassador to Moscow, now head of the CIA, advised Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice that, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” This was also the shared opinion of 50 prominent foreign policy experts in an open letter to President Clinton in 1997, who wrote: “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions” which would “unsettle European stability”.
To try to secure a peaceful solution, Russia signed the Minsk agreement in 2014, which agreed autonomous powers for the Donbas within Ukraine, a deal unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council. But Angela Merkel, one of the key guarantors of the agreement, later admitted in Die Zeit that it had simply been a holding operation to buy time for the West to re-arm Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Donbas was bombarded by Ukrainian forces for seven years, killing 14,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and in 2021 Ukraine announced its intention to tear up the Budapest Memorandum and acquire nuclear weapons. When the shelling of Donbas increased exponentially in early 2022, Russia was forced into launching its ‘Special Military Operation’, a pre-emptive strike to prevent unrelenting NATO-backed aggression.
In response to Russia’s successful defensive military operation, NATO has been escalating the war, proving right all Russia’s security fears, with the aim of raising the cost to Russia as far as possible and destabilising the government, though the reality is overwhelming support for the war among the Russian population.
Russia will now face US Tomahawk and SM-6 hypersonic long-range missiles based in Germany, capable of hitting many of Russia’s major cities. These missiles were banned under the 1988 INF treaty, which the US abrogated in 2019 in preparation for the current war. Placing long-range missiles in Germany – a decision made without Bundestag consultation – makes Germany a potential target. Russia said the missiles represent a “security threat” to its territory.
Another threat to Russia is the F-16s now permitted to take off from Poland, along with F-16s from Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands recently supplied to Ukraine. Russia has warned that any airfields from which planes take off for bombing missions against Russia will become legitimate targets, no matter what country they are in. One F-16 has already been destroyed. A further threat is the British Storm Shadow missiles, which Sir Keir Starmer says should be used to strike military targets deep inside Russia. President Biden had already secretly told Ukraine to do the same, but Starmer’s “bombastic” warmongering, as The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins (15/7/24) called it, prompted criticism from British military sources for being too naked. In addition, France is deploying military ‘trainers’ to Ukraine, alongside the NATO special forces already there, and Kaja Kallas, the Atlanticist prime minister of Estonia and now in effect the EU’s foreign minister, has called openly for the dismemberment of Russia.
Meanwhile, Poland, which has become NATO’s main stronghold, with the biggest land army in Europe and a new US ballistic missile site and command base on its soil, has declared that it will intervene directly in the war if Ukraine were in danger of losing. It has recently signed a treaty with Ukraine that includes rounding up Ukrainian exiles in Poland into a ‘volunteer’ Ukraine Legion operating from Polish territory.
NATO’s new control centre inside Ukraine itself, and its new military HQ in Wiesbaden, Germany with 700 staff, are all part of a strategic shift towards direct NATO engagement with Russia, in which Europe takes a more central role. This US switch to place Europe on the frontline of the war is to be underpinned by the establishment of a European Defence Union over the next five years, and a new missile project – the European Long-Range Strike Approach – to be produced jointly by Germany, France, Italy and Poland.
Europe’s obedience to US orders means it could find itself running the war alone and preparations are already underway. In Scandinavia and the Baltics, and in other EU countries, conscription is being introduced. NATO is creating an army of 300,000 troops which can be ready within 30 days, in addition to its troops already deployed on Russia's borders in the Baltic countries. It is also building Europe’s largest NATO military base in Romania, bigger than Ramstein in Germany, and much further east, only 250 miles from Russia’s Crimea and 186 miles from the strategically important port of Odessa.
In a further aggressive move, NATO has accused China of being a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Outgoing NATO chief Stoltenberg said China had incited the “largest military conflict in Europe since World War Two”, a charge China rejected angrily. It produced evidence that in fact over 60% of Russia’s imported military components and dual-use items come from the US and other Western countries, not China. The true face of China was seen at a meeting in late July between the Ukrainian and Chinese foreign ministers, at which Ukraine announced that it was “ready for constructive negotiations with Russia to achieve peace” – showing China working for a diplomatic solution.
PEACE NOT ARMS
Despite Putin’s warning that if western escalation continues the war could reach a “point of no return”, the western war party keeps up its provocations. Ignoring the real danger of world war breaking out, influential voices on the British left have persisted throughout the war in calling for more arms to Ukraine. For example, in July 2024 the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign issued a bulletin titled ‘Time to help Ukraine win’ calling on the government to give Ukraine “all the weapons needed to enable Ukrainians to free the entire country and end the occupation”, and to seize all Russian state assets in the West - worth $300 billion. Signatories to this call include trade unionists and MPs who should be at the forefront of a campaign for peace. This ‘solidarity’ campaign overlooks the murder of at least 48 trade unionists burned alive in a neo-Nazi attack in Odessa after the Maidan coup – an attack which sparked the Donbas rebellion against the Russophobic coup regime. The call for more arms shores up support for the Keir Starmer’s pledge of £3.6 billion a year to Ukraine “for as long as it takes”.
The same political weakness was seen at last year’s TUC conference when the GMB and ASLEF proposed and seconded a motion calling for “practical aid” and “whatever means available” to guarantee “the territorial integrity of Ukraine”. It was supported by the NUM, PCS and other unions. Our response should be to expose NATO’s aggressive war aims more widely and effectively. All channels we have access to must be used to clarify what the mainstream media is at pains to conceal – that Russia has throughout acted in order to defend itself against NATO expansion and does not threaten Europe. It is the western elite that is intent on intensifying the war as evidenced by the crossing of the red line into Russian territory.
Keir Starmer’s £64.6 billion defence spending this year makes a mockery of the £22 billion ‘black hole’ in Britain’s finances which the government insists on plugging through the “difficult choice” of austerity measures.
(1) https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/britains-kursk-invasion-backfires
(2) https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/06/ukraine-public-opinion-russia-war?lang=en,
F16 fighter aircraft. photo by Andy Dunaway
Ursula von der Leyen, EU hawk. photo by Christophe Licoppe
