Lectures: 8
Ukraine is losing the war. His counteroffensive is a failure. Western weapons and all the courage of their soldiers crash against the fact, pointed out by so many military observers, both in the United States and in Russia, of the crushing inferiority of artillery, aviation and personnel employed. Western-supplied weapons do not change the reality on the ground. This necessarily affects the morale of the troops and the population.
The news about desertions, forced recruitments and surrenders to the enemy of Ukrainian troops, news that our press, Spanish and European, does not give, but that does appear sporadically in the United States.
The media in Lviv (Lvov), in the most anti-Russian area of Ukraine, report a general evasion in recruitment operations: Only one in five mobilized goes to the recruitment centers in that city. See, for example, the statement of the head of said center, Oleksadr Tishchenko in: Only every fifth person voluntarily comes to the TCC in Lviv Oblast – That’s Lviv. (inlviv.in.ua) “If that is not remedied, the mobilization may be threatened,” says Tishchenko.
There is no mystery here, because what is happening is a full-blown carnage. The Russian defense minister handles shocking numbers of Ukrainian deaths in the counteroffensive. There is a horrible picture of dead and mutilated young men. Also on the Russian side, of course, but for the moment the Russians are on the defensive and the impression that it is the Ukrainians who are paying the worst price is strong. Does this mean that Russia is winning the war in Eastern Ukraine? I doubt it.
Matthew Hoh, an independent US analyst has described the situation very well:
Whoever “wins” in the EThis Ukraine will gain a depopulated land full of destroyed infrastructures. This land will be contaminated for generations by the military toxins of war and riddled with land mines and unexploded ordnance. Ukrainian mothers are likely to suffer the same as Iraqi, Afghan and Southeast Asian mothers, giving birth to children dead, deformed and diseased for generations due to the enduring toxic legacies of modern warfare. Children and their families will, decades from now, be punished for this madness in Ukraine, just as children and their families continue to be punished in all ‘post-conflict’ countries.
( In: Destroying Eastern Ukraine to Save It – CounterPunch.org )
Russia justified its invasion, among other things, by protecting the Russophile population of Donbas and by distancing NATO from its borders. The population of the Donbas – and part of that of the Russian border regions of Belgorod and others – now suffers much worse shelling and calamities than before the invasion. With respect to NATO, it has advanced its positions: only the incorporation of Finland contributes 1,300 km. more than direct border with NATO.
Russia mentions that beyond all this, there is a push to change the global correlation of forces to the benefit of the emerging powers and to the detriment of the “enlarged West”, and it is true that there is something of that. But for her, disasters are tangible and immediate, while the result of that higher pulse is a long historical process open to all kinds of uncertainties. Including the hypothesis of a third world war.
Even if Russia, which is now winning militarily, with a defensive strategy, switches to an offensive strategy and extends its occupation to all of southern Ukraine, reaching as far as Odessa and depriving Kiev of all access to the sea, one will have to wonder about stability. political and military of such an occupation.
Most likely, it will result in a generational cancer for Russia: an unstable situation for a long time in those territories. In the most optimistic hypothesis, the mandate of Putin, who one day will have to be replaced in power by another character, something complicated by the absence of succession rules and institutions characteristic of the autocratic regime, will become more social and more repressive. Meanwhile, what little remains of Ukraine will be fiercely anti-Russian territory for generations. The negative balance of this crazy adventure that borders on nuclear tension is unequivocal.
The second aspect that I want to evoke is that from the way in which a conflict is understood, the path for its solution is derived. And this conflict, particularly in Europe, is not understood, so we are doomed to a bad solution.
This war has three causes. First: the US strategy in Europe and its repeated and ignored rejection of Russian interests; a European security first without Russia and then against Russia, the last stage of which is the entry of NATO into Ukraine, regardless of whether it is part of the Alliance or not. The ultimate goal of this strategy is to maintain a divided and tense Europe to prevent the Eurasian integration encouraged by China with the participation of Russia, which would leave the United States out of the great continental mass. Numerous US strategists have spent decades announcing the devaluation of American power that would mean “losing Europe”.
Second: The refusal of the Russian capitalist elite to accept said American strategy, the evidence of which put an end to their initial illusion of being considered on an equal footing by their Western counterparts, in the common work of looting resources for the benefit of a social minority. From that naive illusion, which Putin fully shared at the beginning of the century, the Kremlin evolved to the current desire to break such a strategy, which they formulate as “getting respect” by the West. In this will they have the understanding of China, faced with a similar reality, and of a large part of the non-Western world historically subjected.
Third: the non-recognition by the Kiev government stemming from the 2014 winter Western-backed revolt/coup of the internal identity diversity of Ukrainians in their different regions, which led to both civilian and armed riots in the south and eastern Ukraine, as well as the Russian annexation of Crimea, without all of which the Russian military invasion of 2022 would have been very difficult, if not impossible.
These three causes are interrelated and it is necessary to act on them to resolve the conflict.
Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud is right when he says that “from the way in which a crisis is understood, the way to solve it emerges”.
In the United States the conflict is well understood. At the end of the day, it is in their interests and the responsibility for having unleashed it is largely theirs, even if the Russian and Ukrainian elites also bear their share of responsibility. From my point of view, and seen from a thirty-year perspective, 70% of the responsibility lies with the West and 30% with Russians and Ukrainians. Of course, this distribution is debatable and can and should be the subject of debate. What is inadmissible is that, instead of the three complex causes of this war, a children’s narrative is embraced in which everything is blamed on the whim of an autocratic Russian leader, presented as absolute evil. It would be fine for a Hollywood script, but not for serious analysis. The big problem is that this is the narrative that the European Union has endorsed. That is to say: the conflict is not understood, and since it is not understood we are doomed to a bad solution. Whatever that solution is, it is most likely that the European Union will be among the losers and losers.
Very briefly, I will conclude with the question that was the title of my speech: Why is peace a priority?
In the first place, because causing tension with a nuclear power is extremely dangerous. And that’s exactly what it’s about. It is what we have lived through thirty years; with the false end of the cold war, ignoring the promises made then, with the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the disarmament agreements and with the advance of NATO towards the East and the stationing there of military infrastructures of unequivocal purpose, among other things.
What was avoided by all means after the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, namely not provoking a nuclear power in its backyard, is now being done not only with Russia, but also with China. The United States is encircling its nuclear adversaries, deploying military infrastructure against them and organizing hostile military alliances along its borders.
That has nothing to do with international law, but with the dialectic between nuclear superpowers and their historical common sense! On this, see the last post on my blog by Caitlin Johnstone: John Bolton inadvertently explains why US policy on Russia and China is wrong – Rafael Poch de Feliu
Secondly – we have repeated it over and over again – when humanity urgently needs close international coordination to address the challenges of the century (global warming, the proliferation of resources of mass destruction and social and territorial inequalities, among others) that great powers get into a dynamic of war among themselves, it is pure insanity. We are wasting precious time. A time that we do not have as a species.
By Rafael Poch de Feliú
(Posted on Ctxt)
