For most of the six months of last Autumn and Winter, we were fed a constant diet of propaganda promising a Spring Offensive by Ukraine that would throw Russian troops out of the breakaway Eastern Republics. During the same period, and even during last Summer, we were also told that Russia was about to run out of munitions, as though, with its vast resources, it could not simply produce more of them, or buy them, in exchange for oil, gas, gold or diamonds, all of which it has in abundance. This same hysterical, and self-defeating, propaganda was also accompanied by reports that Putin was himself weeks away from death from cancer, or else about to be removed in a palace coup. As Spring arrived, in the middle of March, however, the promised Spring Offensive failed to appear, and continued to do so as Spring turned to Summer. Eventually, as we move into Summer, we are told the counter-offensive has started. However, for the reasons I set out at Christmas, and that western military pundits now admit, its somewhat lacklustre.
As former NATO Secretary General, George Robertson admitted, NATO had goaded Russia into invading Ukraine. The hope was of bogging it down, and creating the conditions in which Putin could be removed. But, Russia did not follow the game plan that NATO had set out or it. As in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Crimea, Russia seized the majority ethnic Russian areas, in Eastern and South-Eastern Ukraine, and then stopped, securing its defensive positions. The NATO game plan required Russia to continue to advance into Ukraine, where it would suffer heavy losses, because of the 3:1 defenders advantage, especially as modern weapons enable advancing armour and aircraft to be taken down by shoulder launched, and ground based missiles. Indeed, as Russian tanks advanced into Ukrainian held territory they were shot to pieces, but a land assault still has little option but to accept such losses, because the alternative is a return to WWI or earlier infantry battles.
However, the shoe is now on the other foot. Having secured Eastern and South-Eastern Ukraine, Russia has had about nine months to harden all of its positions, as well as to replace hardware it lost in its own offensive. Tanks and aircraft are a wholly different matter when used defensively on your own territory. Its the oncoming armour that has to contend with defensive ditches, mines, and highly mobile infantry or irregulars, with lightweight, but lethal, missile launchers, and its attacking aircraft that have to contend with effective radar systems, ground based missiles and electronic jamming.
NATO, having goaded Russia into invading, has subsequently goaded its Ukrainian battering ram into engaging into an ill-advised counter-offensive. But, NATO needed it to do so. Having secured its positions, Russia sat back lobbing missiles at Ukrainian infrastructure, arms and fuel dumps, and command and control centres. The missile defence systems, such as Patriot, have been able to block much of that bombardment, but at great cost. To shoot down just one Russian hypersonic missile required Ukraine to fire 30 Patriot missiles in just a couple of minutes, the equivalent of 6% of Raytheon's annual production of them.
Instead of it being Russia being drawn into a lengthy and costly war, it is, instead, NATO in that position, with echoes of US imperialism's previous adventures in backing other unpopular and corrupt regimes, in South Korea, and South Vietnam, not to mention its recent defeat in Afghanistan. NATO, via the US, UK, and EU, has pumped billions of Dollars into Ukraine, as a bottomless pit, and needed to see something for it, as workers, in all those economies, have seen a cost of living crisis, as inflation soared, following the vast amounts of liquidity thrown into circulation, during lockdowns, and, as NATO's boycott of Russian food and energy exports caused global energy and food prices to rocket.
EU and UK workers have seen food prices rising by 20%, whilst gas prices rose by as much as 4,000%, as EU countries scrabbled to find alternatives for cheap Russian gas. They will not want to be facing the same again this Autumn and Winter, and yet, despite billions of their Dollars, Pounds and Euros having been used to finance the forever war in Ukraine, no results of it could be shown. So, NATO needed to push Ukraine into an ill-advised counter-offensive, in the hope of at least saving face, and that is all the more important given that those taxpayers have also financed these same expensive weapons systems for NATO itself, but which appear to have turned out not very effective.
Its not advisable to make assessments from a distance – though the pro-NATO “Left” have repeatedly swallowed Ukrainian propaganda on each occasion to do so – but it certainly looks from the video footage that the much hyped Leopard tanks, supplied to Ukraine, have already suffered significant losses, for the reasons set out earlier, and with some of them, along with US supplied Bradleys, also being captured.
With NATO having blown up the Nordstream pipelines – although its now blaming Ukraine for doing so – there is no possibility of EU countries resuming the same level of Russian gas imports this Autumn, and that, of course, was the US's aim in blowing them up. The UK and EU faces sharply rising energy costs, again, therefore, come the Autumn, at a time when workers are increasingly able to demand wages to cover price rises.
But, its not just in the EU and UK, and to a lesser extent the US, where that presents a problem. Ukrainian workers have suffered even more, and have to contend with a corrupt, right-wing regime that has already attacked their unions, and civil rights and freedoms, their socialist organisations, and even the media, in order to defend the billionaire oligarchs that stand behind Zelensky. In Russia, the First World War rumbled on for three years before the workers and peasants had had enough, and turned on their own corrupt regime, flocking towards the Bolsheviks that had opposed the war from the start.
If a Bolshevik party existed in Ukraine, today, it would be following the same course that Lenin and Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks did at that time. They would be opposing NATO/Zelensky's war, and seeking to unite with Russian workers in both recognising that their main enemy is at home, in the form of the ruling class, and its respective regimes of Zelensky and Putin. Bolshevik parties, in both Ukraine and Russia, would raise demands for immediate democratic reforms, opposing the corruption and illiberal and undemocratic nature of the governments in both countries.
They would begin to mobilise the workers around those demands, and for greater freedoms for unions and workers' organisations, to be able to fight for higher wages and better conditions, even if such a struggle weakened its respective government, and risked its military defeat. In order to fight for such democratic demands, the workers need to use their own strength, which comes from their role in production, meaning they need to establish workplace committees, and to begin to link these committees together to form a system of workers' councils.
The pro-NATO social imperialists lyingly claim that the war is being fought by Ukrainian workers, and the pro-Putin social imperialists make a similar claim that it is Russian workers fighting to oppose NATO imperialism. But, if those workers truly were fighting to defend their own interests, a fight that would first mean fighting against the oppression they face at the hands of their own rulers, they would need to be properly, independently armed and trained. However, as Trotsky points out, in relation to the demand for arming the Chinese workers, in 1927, such a demand implies the setting up of workers' militia, and revolutionary soviets.
Firstly, the bourgeoisie are not going to arm the revolutionary workers. They are not as deluded as the social-imperialists. To arm revolutionary workers, as Trotsky describes, requires that weapons be seized from the arms producers in the country, from arms dumps and so on. Organising all of that, Trotsky says, requires, first, that soviets have been created. Otherwise, demanding arming the workers is not only dangerous utopianism, but reactionary. Not all workers are revolutionary, particularly in such conditions. The last thing socialists want is for racist or fascist workers to be armed, yet its precisely those elements that the ruling class would arm!
The situation is not hopeless. In 1914, the mass socialist parties collapsed into the same kind of social patriotism seen today. The implantation in the class, and size of these parties, meant that they were a huge negative factor in the development of the class struggle. Yet, by 1917, the Bolsheviks had grown from very small numbers to become the leaders of the workers and peasants, and, across the globe, revolutionary cadres grew, following the same opposition to the policies of social chauvinism. That is the task that authentic Marxists face again today.
Workers of the world unite; the workers have no country; our main enemy is at home.
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