WeeklyWorker

08.09.2022

Notes on the war

With Kyiv’s counter-offensive, the third phase of the war has begun. While it is unlikely to be the much-touted ‘decisive’ turning point, Jack Conrad warns, we should expect the Tories to bring the war back home by playing the Ukraine card

A brief recap. Phase one of the Ukraine war began on February 24 2022. Everything tells us that Vladimir Putin and his advisors and generals expected a quick victory. A coup de main.

However, instead of Russian forces powering down upon Kyiv, surrounding the city within days, capturing, killing or forcing Volodymyr Zelensky into exile, a combination of stiff Ukrainian resistance and astounding Russian military incompetence saw a humiliating retreat. Thousands of Russian troops lay dead, hundreds of wrecked Russian T-72 and T-80 tanks littered Ukraine’s fields and highways, and Russia’s 29th, 35th, 36th, 41st combined-arms armies limped back north to be rested, reinforced, retrained and re-equipped.

All of a sudden Zelensky, the ‘lion of Ukraine’, now secure in his Kyiv bunker, was the man of the moment. Feted as a cross between Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill, he appeared on giant screens before parliaments, assemblies … and even pop music events. Politicians, from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss, from Antony Blinken to Emmanuel Macron, from Nancy Pelosi to Justin Trudeau, have gained much kudos after well publicised visits. No less to the point, the supply of arms coming from the west - crucially the US, but also Britain - turned from a trickle into a flood.

Phase two began in April 2022. According to the Russian ministry of defence, its four main objectives were: 1. Securing the whole of the Donbas; 2. Creating a land corridor from there to Crimea; 3. Blockading Ukrainian Black Sea ports; 4. Taking control of southern Ukraine all the way to Transnistria (the breakaway territory in Moldova).

On the eastern front Russian forces pushed towards Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv. On the southern front Russian forces moved from Crimea west toward Odessa, north toward Zaporizhzhia, and east toward Mariupol.

Phase two went far better for Russia than phase one. Not that this is saying much: advances were slow, grinding and costly in men and material. Though Kharkiv was successfully defended, most of the Donbas was taken (‘liberated’ if you like). Only a slowly shrinking rump of Donetsk remains in the hands of Ukraine’s eastern army. The land corridor joining Russia and Crimea was fully secured with the fall of Mariupol on May 20 2022. A largely undamaged Kherson was quickly taken and Ukraine’s remaining Black Sea ports have been successfully blockaded (though there has been a shaky agreement to allow outgoing grain shipments). However, Russian forces failed to get further west to Odessa, let alone beyond to Transnistria (and thereby leave Ukraine landlocked).

And now we have Ukraine’s counter-offensive - encircling the eastern town of Balakiia and bidding to cut off Russia’s estimated 20,000-strong army stationed on the west bank of the Dniper and force Russia to abandon Kherson in the south. This is Ukraine’s first attempt to shape the war and why it is right to call it phase three.

Much fanfared, the southern counter-offensive was long in coming and, frankly, though touted as a “decisive turning point”, it is unlikely to go beyond the symbolic. Not that symbolism is irrelevant - it is most certainly relevant. Ukraine’s surprise attacks on airbases in Crimea, taking out 14 Russian generals, holding the Azovstal iron and steelworks for three-long months and the simple fact of staging a counter-offensive on two fronts boosts Ukraine’s moral force (and standing with the west).

But a “decisive” breakthrough, while possible, is unlikely. Ukraine simply lacks the overwhelming, 3:1, manpower advantage, recommended by military theorists when it comes to war of the offensive, as opposed the defensive.1 The name of Frederick Lanchester (1868-1946) ought to be mentioned in this context: he produced a whole series of neat mathematical formulas.

The ratio on the Kherson front is, reports indicate, more like 1:1. Nor does Ukraine have the necessary planes, tanks and artillery pieces. True, a village here and a village there has been taken, but we should not expect the collapse of Russia’s armed forces any time soon. Indeed we should expect small-scale Russian counter-attacks and some of those same villages - now utterly wrecked and deserted - to be retaken.

Not that wars are decided by abstract formulas. Personnel strength, food and fuel supplies and the quality of equipment count, but so too do intangibles, such as imagination, chance and morale.

Either way - and this is the crucial point - everything shows, for the moment at least, that the war in Ukraine has reached a stalemate, both on the eastern and southern fronts. That is what Ukraine’s predictable determination to resist, plus the west’s Stingers, Nlaws, Switchblade drones and Himars, has achieved - that despite widespread initial expectations of an easy Russian victory (and not only in the Kremlin).

Protracted

A protracted war now looks to be on the cards - one year, two, three or more. Perhaps one side or the other will eventually break. Europe could easily prove to be the weak link. Soaring energy prices, due in great part to the Ukraine war, will undoubtedly cause severe socio-economic stresses and strains this winter in Italy, France, but especially in the German economic space (Germany plus the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic). Britain too. Energy rationing is almost certain. Moreover, ongoing strikes should be expected to grow in scope, duration and impact. We would be foolish, however, not to expect the Truss government going for more direct involvement in Ukraine: eg, putting army boots on the ground as advisors, and linking “defence of liberal democracy” with opposition to the strike wave. Trade union leaders will be accused of being Putin’s dupes. Narrow trade unionism is almost by definition ill-equipped to rebuff such attacks. But it is unlikely to work unless Truss eats her words about the small state and, instead, puts Britain on a ‘war footing’ and imposes controls over prices, profits, rents, etc.

On the other hand, it could be Russia which breaks first. McDonald’s, Visa, Coca-Cola, Ikea and other western companies have departed. Oligarchs have had properties, superyachts and bank accounts seized. But despite the G7 sanctions regime Russia’s GDP has barely been effected. The surge in oil and gas prices has seen to that. Nonetheless, strategically Russia is in a bad position.

Far from the eastward march of Nato being halted, Putin - the man who oversaw the defeat of Georgia in a mere five days, who reunited Crimea with mother Russia and who faced down the US over Syria - has seen France, Italy and above all Germany thoroughly subordinated to US strategic plans, Finland and Sweden apply for Nato membership and Ukraine act as a militarily effective proxy in what is a (Nato-armed) people’s war against the Russian invaders. That is why neither Joe Biden, Liz Truss nor Volodymyr Zelensky have been clamouring for a negotiated settlement. Quite the opposite. They are the war party.

Zelensky speaks of wanting “everything back”. This means the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk, Kherson, Mariupol and the Crimea too. In other words, total Russian defeat. An uncompromising stance, which owes less to Ukrainian military prowess and is more to do with the geo-strategic calculations being made in Washington and London. Zelensky is, after all, totally dependent on US-UK arms supplies, finance and diplomatic support (the UK being very much the junior partner). Whereas France, Italy, Germany … and Henry Kissinger, still hanker after a negotiated settlement, the US-UK axis - yes, emboldened by Ukraine’s unexpected military resilience - is quite prepared to sacrifice the core economies of the EU, countless Ukrainian lives and billions of dollars and pounds in paving the way for regime change in Moscow. Biden has been perfectly candid on this score: the “butcher” Putin, he said, cannot be allowed to “remain in power”.2

Whether Ukrainian forces are actually capable of driving Russia out of the Donbas and Crimea is militarily doubtful. Thwarting the attempt to take Kyiv, holding out in Mariupol for so long, saving Kharkiv from being encircled - all are real military achievements. Yet, despite massive western arms deliveries, poor Russian morale and huge losses of tanks, troop carriers and lorries, the odds remain overwhelming in Russia’s favour. It has more of everything - fighting in the field and ready in reserve.

So it is unlikely that the US-UK axis is banking on an outright Ukrainian military victory, but rather getting Russia bogged down in a quagmire - an unwinnable war - which will create the conditions for regime change in Moscow: through the siloviki retiring Putin to a sanatorium; a colour revolution; launching anti-Russian ‘national liberation wars’ in Belarus, Moldova and Georgia; promoting separatist movements within the Russia Federation itself - in particular amongst the Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis, Crimean Tatars, Yakuts and Volga Tatars (all options are surely under active consideration).

If the US state department could get its man into the Kremlin - say, the already presidential Alexei Navalny - Russia would be stripped of its high-end arms industry and reduced to an oil and gas-supplying neo-colony. There is already excited talk of demilitarising, denuclearising and decentralising a post-Putin Russia so as to “remove” it as a threat to world peace and make it safe for its neighbours.3 More sober voices are being raised, warning of a ‘Pax Sinica’: that is, a post-Putin Russia throwing itself into the arms of China and becoming its Austria-Hungary. Either way, the main strategic target remains China itself. The US has already set up Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjian for such purposes.

It is worth recalling Joe Biden addressing the regular Business Roundtable of top American CEOs back in March. He talked of instituting a “new world order”, led, of course, by the US.4 In such a new world order the US would, so he hopes, be able to “manage” the Eurasian world island - as envisaged by Zbigniew Brzezinski.5 The result would not, however, be a new age of democracy, peace and prosperity, as he promised: rather the imposition of breakdown, warlordism and social regression.

The declining US hegemon is the bringer, nowadays, not of new heights of (capitalist) civilisation: eg, the post-World War II social democratic settlement (in western Europe, Japan and, with a final flourish, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore). No, instead it brings barbarism (eg, the contras in Nicaragua, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, sectarian fragmentation in Iraq, civil war in Libya). Fear of the pending US new world order, surely, at least in part, explains why a whole raft of countries - and not only the ‘usual suspects’ (eg, Belarus, North Korea and China), but Iran, Iraq, Turkey, India, South Africa … even Saudi Arabia - have refused to join its anti-Russia crusade.

Imperialism

Mention ought to be made here of the debate on the left as to whether or not Russia is imperialist. Naturally, for the far right of the far left (eg, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign and its affiliates - Labour Representation Committee, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Anti-Capitalist Resistance, Emancipation and Liberation and RS21 - along with individual supporters such as John McDonnell, Paul Mason, Nadia Whittome and Gilbert Achcar), it is an open-and-shut case: Russia is conducting an imperialist war.

Of course, this is a rogues’ gallery of Stinger missile ‘socialists’ who side with the US hegemon, Nato and their ‘own’ state, in the name of defending the sovereignty of ‘plucky’ little Ukraine. Along with the US state department and UK foreign office, their slogans are: ‘Arm, arm, arm Ukraine’ and ‘Putin, out, out, out’. Naturally, despite proven CIA political links and financial connections, all this is couched in internationalist, socialist and anti-imperialist phrases.

Science though is entirely lacking. Imperialism is simply equated with territorial expansionism, even if it is defensive expansionism. Nato, though it is expanding, becomes a defensive organisation. The net result can only be social-imperialism.

But there is also Andrew Murray of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and Stop the War Coalition. Having returned to the ranks after his brief period of entry into the Labour Party, this self-declared Stalinist likewise insists that Russia must be classified as imperialist. Why? Because monopolies are the “essence” of imperialism and Russia, irrefutably, has its share of monopolies: eg, Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil and Sberbank.6 That, however, would make countries such as India, Brazil, South Africa and even Ukraine imperialist too. After all, each has its own batch of home-grown monopolies (ie, oligopolies, to use standard bourgeois economic jargon).

Clearly though, Russia does not exploit the world, or even its near abroad, in any meaningful way that could be described as imperialist. Despite its 150 million population it has a gross domestic product that ranks behind Germany, France, even Italy. Leave aside oil and gas, geographic size and nuclear weapons and it is most decidedly a second-rate, even a third-rate, economic power.

Murray could be echoing his friends in the Communist Party of Greece, who rightly adopt, albeit for the wrong reasons, a ‘plague on both houses’ approach to the Ukraine war (damn both Putin’s Russia and Nato’s proxy). But more likely he has fallen under the spell of John Rees and Lindsey German and their continued loyalty to Tony Cliff’s theory of bureaucratic state capitalism.

If Russia was to be classified as non-imperialist there is, remember, a left which believes that it is duty bound to offer ‘military’ support. Actually, this has nothing do with raising an international brigade or sending money to buy arms. No, of course, military support is political support, ie, articles in the press calling for ‘Russian victory’. However, if Russia is safely classified as imperialist, then StWC can carry on holding protests which feature ‘Russia out’ as the lead slogan.

Either way, Murray is opposed by a CPB majority that, while upholding the same social-pacifism as Murray, inclines in the direction of the pro-Kremlin left. Hence in Martin Levy’s latest edition of Communist Review we have Stewart McGill explaining why Russia cannot be counted as imperialist and Marc Vandepitte explaining the “real reason” why Russia invaded (it’s Nato expansionism).7

Surely the essence of modern imperialism is unequal exchange, the export of capital, and a global pecking order which allows the imperialist countries to exploit the non-imperialist countries. What Russia’s so-called oligarchs export - so-called because they do not rule - is money, not capital (ie, self-expanding value). Their wealth - well, until they were sanctioned - generally took the form of swollen offshore bank accounts, London and New York properties, English football clubs and luxury yachts.

China is another matter. It is no match for the US and main allies. Nonetheless, it can be classified as sub-imperialist, pre-imperialist, even fully imperialist, because it not only exports commodities, but capital. Not something that the prostituted CPB wants to investigate, naturally enough.

Corruption

Ukraine is very much an example of the US new world order. Just prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union life expectancy stood at 70.55 years (1988). By 2000 it had dropped to 67.39 years. For men the figures, for the same dates, are considerably worse: 66.40 and 62.19 years. Economically the country became a basket-case, GDP shrinking by between 9.7% and 22.7% in 1991-96. Living standards fell correspondingly. Population numbers shrank too, from 52 million to 46 million today, with the young, in particular the educated and ambitious leaving for western Europe.

Things picked up a little in the 2000s. Ukraine was able to take advantage of booming commodity prices. Cheap imports of Russian gas and oil allowed the metallurgy and chemical magnates to become super-rich by exporting to Europe and Asia at world prices. Agribusiness grew too: mainly grain and chickens. Nonetheless, Ukraine’s foreign debt ballooned and with the 2008 financial crisis things went from bad to worse. By December 2015 foreign debt reached a record high of 129.3% of nominal GDP.8

Corruption, lawlessness and thuggery have accompanied the so-called transition to a market economy at every step. State property was seized, often violently, in an orgy of privatisation. A few enriched themselves beyond the dreams of avarice. Not primitive capitalist accumulation - rather a decadent form of robbery. Huge sums of money were channelled abroad. Soviet-era enterprise managers, new capitalists and the mafia underworld formed a highly fractured ruling class. Behind the façade of an electoral democracy they, the oligarchy, vie, one bloc against the other, to exercise real power. Indeed politics and money chokingly intertwine. Oligarchs have occupied top political positions: president, prime minister, cabinet minister, regional governor, etc. In parallel prominent politicians have used their state positions to build their own fortunes.

Because of the lure, the chains, of cheap Russian gas and oil, because the US has sought to lever out Russian influence, because of the absence of the ‘rule of law’, because of the winner takes all politics, because the larger soft-left, centre, centre-right and far-right political parties are mere fronts for oligarchs, because the mass media is mainly owned by oligarchs, because MPs are transparently buyable, because of Ukraine’s multinational population, because of a contested history, the country has proved to be extraordinarily unstable.

Ukraine’s first president, Leonid Kravchuk, welcomed Nato expansion and presided over massive corruption and economic meltdown. His former prime minister, Leonid Kuchma, ran against him and was elected in July 1994. He was caught on tape in 2000 ordering the kidnapping and murder of the oppositional journalist, Georgiy Gongadze. Mass protests followed. Kuchma supported Viktor Yanukovych, candidate of the Party of Regions, in the 2004 elections. Yanukovych won, but was overthrown by the 2004 Orange revolution amid accusations of large-scale vote-rigging. Viktor Yushchenko became president. The new Anti-Crisis Coalition government, which included the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party, appointed Viktor Yanukovych prime minister in 2006.

In 2010 Yanukovych won the presidential election against the Orange revolution’s Yulia Tymoshenko. In 2011 she was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. In 2013 president Yanukovych held back from pursuing closer relations with the EU. Protests, led by organised fascist gangs, culminated in the Maidan coup. CIA fingerprints were all over the operation. The Rada voted to remove Yanukovych as president and replaced him with the Tymoshenko-backed Oleksandr Turchynov. Yanukovych fled to Russia and fighting erupted in the east and the south. Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. In June 2014 oligarch Petro Poroshenko successfully stood for president and in 2015 he signed a package of ‘decommunisation’ laws. On February 21 2019, Ukraine’s constitution was amended to leave no doubt about the intention to join Nato and the EU. However, the stench of corruption saw support steadily drain away.

Zelensky, of course, won the presidency in April 2019 after the second round, with 73% of the vote. He went on to call Rada elections in the name of putting an end to corruption. His newly created party, Servants of the People, secured an absolute majority - a first for Ukraine.

Zelensky was previously an actor and showman, famous for playing a naive anti-corruption president on a TV show called Servant of the people. So once again life imitates art. What is less well known though are Zelensky’s links with Ihor Kolomoisky, the broadcaster of Servant of the people, and Ukraine’s fourth richest oligarch. Interestingly, Kolomoisky was banned by the state department from entering the US in March 2021 due to his “significant corruption”.9 Reports are of $5.5 billion going missing. He is said to have used his wealth to finance the Azov, Dnipro 1, Dnipro 2, Aidar and Donbas volunteer battalions and fielded them, when the need arose, as private security to protect his business interests. Kholomoisky is also said to have financed Zelensky and his production company, Kvartai 95, via his Privatbank, the largest private bank in Ukraine, to the tune of $41 million through a web of offshore accounts. As a result Forbes magazine credits Zelensky with a net worth of $20-$30 million.10 Frankly, that is the sort of sum you might expect for a successful TV and screen actor, even in a relatively poor country such as Ukraine.

However, there are other reports of Zelensky being worth $596 million and enjoying all the trappings of the super-rich: three private planes, five yachts, eight luxury cars and 15 mansions and villas.11 With an official salary of just $780,000, surely, if those reports are reliable, there can only be one explanation: corruption on a grand scale.

Far right

Ideologically Zelensky walks a tightrope. On the one side are the dominant values of western capitalism - the free market and the rule of law, yes, but also anti-racism, women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, etc. On the other side though there is anti-communism, anti-Russianism and pandering to rightwing Ukrainian nationalism.

Already 11 parties have been banned, including the biggest opposition party, Platform for Life, others include Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party, and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc. Real or alleged pro-Russian TV stations and publications too. Workers’ rights have likewise suffered considerable restrictions. True, the far right is no longer represented in the Rada. Nonetheless, since 2014, in the form of the Azov battalion, it has constituted the fanatical spinal cord of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Doubtless there are full-blown, genuine Nazis in the Azov battalion. The symbols, the salutes, the banners are impossible to ignore (except when it comes to the western media). However, most consider themselves followers of Stepan Bandera - a Ukrainian fascist and, in the early 1940s, a Nazi collaborator who independently oversaw a horrendous series of pogroms, in particular against Poles (well over 100,000 died). True, Bandera temporarily fell out with the Nazis, but it is surely significant that Zelensky, a Jew, has praised Bandera as one of Ukraine’s “indisputable heroes”.12 There are statues, bridges, squares, postage stamps and an annual holiday in his honour.

What then about Russia’s supposed aim of ‘deNazification’? Take this first as code for ‘regime change in Kyiv’ (or maybe even code for the abolition of Ukraine itself as a separate country - a not unreasonable assumption). After all, Putin’s July 2021 essay, ‘On the historic unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, claims that Ukraine is an artificial entity and not a real nation “separate from Russia”. Lenin and the Bolsheviks are blamed for establishing “a federation of equal republics” and thereby planting a constitutional “time bomb” - a “time bomb” which finally exploded in 1991 in what Putin calls a “parade of sovereignties”.13

If the ‘special military operation’ was designed to restore the “historic unity” of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples in some brotherly neo-tsarist empire (along with, one presumes, White Russia), the opposite has, in fact, happened. National antagonisms within Ukraine have polarised, calcified, gone toxic. Reports occasionally emerge of pro-Russian ‘spies’ and ‘agents’ being denounced by neighbours, hunted down by Ukraine’s SSU security service or simply being shot by police units, military irregulars or officially sanctioned troops. As for the vast majority of Ukrainians (and perhaps not a few Russian Ukrainians), Putin’s invasion force represents death, destruction, robbery and rape. For them, there is nothing welcome about his ‘special military operation’.

DeNazification, of course, can be given a narrower meaning. It can be taken as a reference to the Ukrainian far right and organisations such as Svoboda, National Corps, Social National Party, Right Sector and, of course, the Azov battalion/movement.

How has the ‘special military operation’ gone in this respect? Has the Azov battalion/movement been exposed, discredited, isolated and neutralised? Hardly. No, the opposite has happened. Despite defeat in the battle for Mariupol, not least its last stand at the Azovstal iron and steelworks, the Azov battalion has become, in the Ukrainian nationalist imagination, something akin to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Mad, bad and extraordinarily dangerous for Russians, Tartars, leftwingers, lesbian and gay people … and, ironically, Jews - not least Ihor Kolomoisky and Volodymyr Zelensky. There is, yes, the distinct possibility, thanks to the ‘special military operation’, of the far right coming back from the political fringes and returning to the Rada maybe in commanding strength.

  1. PK Davies Aggregation, disaggregation and the 3:1 rule in ground warfare: www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2007/MR638.pdf.↩︎

  2. The Guardian March 26 2022.↩︎

  3. neweasterneurope.eu/2022/03/17/the-7d-plan-for-a-post-putin-russia-to-ensure-global-security.↩︎

  4. www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/21/remarks-by-president-biden-before-business-roundtables-ceo-quarterly-meeting.↩︎

  5. Z Brzezinski The grand chessboard New York 1997, p30.↩︎

  6. Letters Morning Star August 27-28 2022.↩︎

  7. Communist Review No104, summer 2022.↩︎

  8. www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/ukraine/external-debt--of-nominal-gdp.↩︎

  9. J Kuzmarov Covert Action Magazine July 20 2022.↩︎

  10. Forbes April 20 2022.↩︎

  11. caknowledge.com/zelenskyy-net-worth.↩︎

  12. www.xn--lecanardrpublicain-jwb.net/spip.php?article1006.↩︎

  13. www.en.kremlin.ru/misc/66181.↩︎