Why US Military Aid To Ukraine Will Make No Real Change

The US, desperate to provide even more military aid to its proxy, the Zionist state in Israel, to continue its genocide against Palestinians, has also, now, voted through a package of military aid to Ukraine that reactionary Republicans had been holding up, as they sought to tie it to closing the US border with Mexico. The US is not going to do the latter, because, faced with growing labour shortages, as the economy continues on a tear, it needs millions of migrant workers to stop US wages rising at an even faster pace than they are, squeezing US profit margins, and causing interest rates to rise further. The aid, amounting to $61 billion, will make no real difference to the proxy war being fought out on Ukraine's soil.

The reason for that is quite simple.  It is, now, Ukraine that is put in the position of being on the offensive, against a well entrenched Russian military. To overcome such defence, Ukraine needs at least a 4:1 advantage, and simply does not have it. It does not have it in military equipment, including munitions, and more importantly, it does not have it in soldiers, especially as, now, young Ukrainian workers are seeing what the war is about, and large numbers are seeking to escape, as Zelensky's corrupt regime tries to draft more of them into its imperialist war, on behalf of US imperialism.

The reason that the additional aid will make no significant difference is because the whole narrative of the war, presented by NATO, and by Zelensky, from the start, was false. The narrative was that Russia intended to annex the whole of Ukraine, as a taster, before, attacking other former parts of the USSR, in the Baltics, Poland and so on. Such a narrative was insane to begin with, and that was shown by the contradictions that emerged within it, not long after the war began.

We were told that Putin was driven by some kind of, Hilteresque megalomania, to want to restore the old USSR. Itself, such subjectivist explanations for war, which Paul Mason has promoted, in recent years, are highly suspect, and explain nothing. Marxists know that wars are motivated by underlying material interests, in short, economic interests, not the whims of individuals. Hitler did not seek to conquer Europe, because he was a megalomaniac, but, because Europe needed a large, single European market, to compete with US imperialism, and German imperialism, as the most powerful in Europe, sought to bring it about under its domination. It was simply a continuation of that from WWI.

Putin's war in Ukraine is, similarly, not driven by some kind of megalomania, or ethnic imperative, but by an understandable concern not to allow NATO imperialism to continue to expand up to Russia's borders, and from where it would continue to chip away at the various Russian Republics, stirring up ethnic tensions, as, for example, the US did by supporting the KLA to incite ethnic violence against Kosovan Serbs, so as to, at least, keep Russia busy fighting these insurgencies, if not to see its territory continually broken apart. As a former KGB operative, Putin knew that Russia could not hope to invade and annex the whole of Ukraine. It would have required vast amounts of resources and military manpower, for little real long-term advantage. Even if it could be done, it would have been impossible to hold on to, and would have economically destroyed Russia. NATO, also, no doubt, understood this, despite their narrative that this was Putin's plan.

They may have hoped to have goaded Putin into it, just as Blairite, former NATO Secretary-General, George Robertson admits, they goaded him into the invasion itself. More likely, they simply needed that narrative to get Ukrainian citizens to buy the argument, and put their lives on the line, for a war they could never actually win, as well as to sell workers, in other NATO countries, on the idea of providing vast amounts of money to finance such a war, at a time when they were being told they had to accept austerity, and pay cuts!

The reality was that Putin never had any intention of trying to invade the whole of Ukraine, or trying to annex it, any more than NATO intended to invade and occupy the whole of Serbia in order to separate off Kosovo from it. In fact, it would have been far easier for NATO to have invaded the whole of Serbia and occupied it than it would for Russia to invade and occupy the whole of Ukraine.

Having established the narrative that Russia intended to invade and annex the whole of Ukraine, a narrative that many on the Left, including those, like Eddie Ford of the CPGB, that do not support NATO, also bought,  the failure of Russia to do so means that it can be presented as a defeat for Russia, and only a matter of time before its sent packing. But, Russia never mobilised anything like the military forces and materiel required to invade, let alone occupy long-term, the whole of Ukraine. It put less forces in the field than Ukraine had mobilised, whereas military doctrine required it to have at least four times as many! Russia clearly intended only to invade and annex Eastern Ukraine, where the ethnic Russians form a majority, and that is what it has done, just as, in 2014, it annexed majority Russian Crimea.

Yes, of course, Russia attacked Kyiv and so on, but, when NATO sought to annex Kosovo, it also attacked Belgrade. In modern war, its necessary to destroy, or at least seriously degrade, command and control systems, and these are often centred on the political and administrative centres, as well as other transport and communications systems, such as energy supplies, airports and so on. As I wrote at the time, Russia, in its invasion of Eastern Ukraine, adopted the NATO play-book used in Kosovo etc. When Russia rolled its tanks into South Ossetia, in 2008, to similarly put an end to ethnic cleansing and genocide by the NATO backed Georgian government, it also rolled its tanks into the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, as it destroyed Georgian command and control. NATO and Georgia said it was going to annex the whole of Georgia, and, indeed, it easily could have done so, by that point. But, it didn't, pulling its military back into South Ossetia, once those objectives had been met. It did a similar thing in Abkhazia.

Russia could never have invaded or annexed the whole of Ukraine, by contrast. It is a vast country, and provided with huge resources from NATO. NATO may, indeed, have wanted to try to goad it into trying, so as to ruin Russia, itself, but there was no chance of it doing so. On the contrary, Russia can simply sit back in its bulwarks, now established, in Eastern Ukraine, drawing the Ukrainians on to its guns, and cutting them down likes poppies in the field, to coin a phrase. Young Ukrainian workers are simply the meat in a meat grinder perpetuated by NATO, and their Zelensky puppet, to keep Russia busy, but the cost of that, for NATO, is that it is now sucked into another forever war that is costing it far more financially to continue the military supplies than it is costing Russia, as the defender of territory, and which, with its backing from China, it is well placed to continue to do.

NATO may have fallen for its own propaganda about Russia seeking to invade the whole of Ukraine, in which case, the additional military aid would make a difference, but, given that the propaganda was itself nonsense to begin with it won't. The fact that it was simply propaganda can be seen from the contradiction inherent within it. On the one hand, it said, “Russia intends to invade the whole of Ukraine.” However, keen to emphasise its failure, and the supposed weakness of Putin, it pointed to the retreat from Kyiv, and so on. Yet, even as it was emphasising this military weakness of Russia, it continued to put out a parallel narrative that this weak Russian state, with its incompetent military brass, was, any day, also going to be posing a threat to the Baltics, Poland and Central and Eastern Europe!!!

Last year, we were told that all of the Leopard II tanks, and so on, provided by NATO to Ukraine, were going to finally see off the Russians. But, of course, as I had said at the time, it was never going to happen. Had the Russians have continued to try to invade the rest of Ukraine, as the NATO propaganda claimed they were going to do, then, yes, those tanks and other equipment would have made a difference, in the same way that such equipment made a difference in fighting against the initial Russian advance into Eastern Ukraine, and caused the Russians to lose large numbers of troops and equipment. But, so long as Russia stayed put and defended, having dug into defensive positions that was never going to be the case.

Tanks are great if they are taking part in tank battles against other tanks that are attacking your territory. You have defenders' advantage. However, if Ukraine, now, wants to take back Eastern Ukraine, it has to be the attacker. In the last year, as I had predicted, all of those hyped up NATO provided tanks proved useless, as they rolled on to Russian defensive positions, where they could be decimated by land mines, stuck in tank traps, as well as picked off by artillery, not to mention infantry using simple RPG's, drones and shoulder launched missiles that cost a fraction of a tank. The same is true of NATO provided jets. In short, this is lots of money, provided by taxpayers in NATO countries, that is basically going to finance war production in war production factories, and it is money that is going down a big hole simply to keep young Ukrainian workers – and young Russian workers on the other side – fighting in a war that is in none of their interests.