The Madness of Escalation

Tit-for-Tat From a Position of Weakness

Just as Washington says that it is not going to give Ukraine permission to use Western long range missiles on targets in mainland Russia, Ukraine magically conjures up its (supposedly) own long-range missiles and drones.

These are certainly having an impact including, perhaps most dramatically, a drone hit and associated blaze on an oil refinery only 15 kilometers from the Kremlin. More routinely, Ukraine appears to be targeting civilian structures in Briansk, Belgorod and Kursk, including a kindergarten in Belgorod.

I don’t for one moment believe that Russia has been a saint in the matter of civilian targets (and what, after all, are strikes on energy facilities if they are not civilian as well as military targets?), but I do gain the impression that Ukraine demonstrates more recklessness in this matter than does Russia, at least up to the present time.

Notwithstanding what I have always regarded as the fundamental righteousness of Russia’s position in this war and of its SMO, the tit-for-tat strikes are predictable, understandable and vicious. They increase the economic, social and psychological cost of the war to Russia which has until recently behaved as though it had a carte blanche to wreak devastation on Ukraine but that it was somehow scandalous if Ukraine and its sponsors should want to do the same in Russia.

But against that consideration is the thought that the conflict is not really between Ukraine and Russia at all, but between the entirety of NATO and Russia (not to mention, as I have previously insisted, between the West and the Global South), an entirely different thing, and that the only factor that has made it impossible for Russia to successfully drive its point home to Ukraine (as early as March 2022, in Istanbul when an agreement was sabotaged by Johnson, acting for NATO) is the extent of NATO sponsorship of Ukraine.

Given that the extraordinary damage caused by Russia to Ukrainian energy, power and transport infrastructure over the past two years of blanket Russian missile and drone attacks has not actually succeeded in ending the war, it would seem to me to follow that Ukrainian (NATO) efforts to inflict comparable pain on the far vaster geography of the Russsan Federation will be relatively futile, but that they have the capacity of extending the war a good deal beyond its current 30 month life and perhsaps up until the West itself is entirely attrited.

But I also notice that the longer that the war proceeds, the more miserable the European Union and NATO appear to be, split between the likes of Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia, on the one hand, and the rest. And now, even the “rest” are fragmenting internally.

In France, Macron refuses to appoint a prime minister who could stand for the policies of the electoral bloc that actually won the most recent election. He refuses even to appoint a prime minister whose policies look a lot closer to Macron’s than to the Melonchon front.

This is symptomatic of the collapse of Western electoral politics into something far more sinister and authoritarian, and the collapse of popular support for a government that prefers to give its wealth away to Ukraine and that is more prepared to see dead French soldiers on the battlefield in a totally fake mission to “protect” Europe from a supposedly aggressive Russia than it cares about improving the lives of the French people.

Macron and the Left have joined forces to keep from power what is actually the party that the people most want, and one of the reasons why they want it is because Marine Le Pen does not share the same fake narrative about Russia and Ukraine. Her party is gleefully smeared as “far right” in an effort to obscure who is the real “far right” at a time when these political labels have been misshapen into mere balls of dung that the different parties throw at one another to disguise the fact that they actually mean less and less.

The same is true of the AfD in Germany which has just won one State election and is likely to win another and whose disillusionment with the whole Russia-Ukraine narrative and its ensuing de-industrialization of Germany is the key reason why the traditional parties are closing ranks in an effort to keep AfD out of the federal power structure. (Afd has won over 30% of the vote in Saxony and Thuringisa).

Meanwhile, European economies falter and sag. And their credibilility in the eyes of the Global South has simply evaporated.

Much the same can be said of the new British Labor government in the UK which holds fast to its policy of support for Ukraine even as it tells its people that they will have to endure ten years of austerity. They forget to mention that the UK’s chronic budgetary crisis is in large measure a result of its knee-jerk support for Ukraine (not to mention the result of Britain’s self-inflicted blow following its withdrawal from the EU).

This is a country that has spent $10 billion in cash for Ukraine, $8 billion on weapons and has provided loan guarantees for billions of dollars that Ukraine, bankrupt, will never be able to repay. It has an army that is a mere fraction of Ukraine’s not to mention Russia’s.

In order to pursue its lunatic agenda this former imperial power, that has garlended itself as the fountain of freedom of expression, clamps down on dissident speech and arrests its perpetrators who always turn out, it seems, to be “far right.”

It is very difficult to explain such collective madness other than in terms of self-delusion, conjured by the myths of its own creation: the myth of a benign Royalty; of a “democratic” Parliament that can always be trusted to run the nation’s affairs for business and the rich (15 of whose candidates in the recent election were funded by pro-Israel lobby groups), and of a war warrior, Churchill, who was a grotesque scourge of the Empire’s “natives” and a pawn for Washington.

The Ugliness of Israeli Genocide and its Fellow-Travellers

In the Middle East the Biden Admininistration and the Democrat’s presidential candidate, Kamela Harris, have exploited the deaths of 6 Israeli hostages to continue their flow of arms to Israel, claiming on the basis of insufficient evidence that these are the fault of Hamas and that they justify a continuing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank that has so far caused the deaths of some 200,000 people who would be alive were it not for the genocide. I fully expect that claims that at least one of the hostages was shot by Hamas will soon be debunked. For the World Socialist Web Site, Kevin Reed writes:

“The killing of the six hostages dominated US news media coverage all day on Sunday, the same media that largely ignores the far greater daily death toll from Israeli war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. These reports uncritically echoed the statements of the Israeli military about the details of the deaths, although such statements have repeatedly been proven false in the past.”

The deaths are being used by Netanyahu as a further justificastion for his criminal inability to agree a ceasefire, his unwillingness to protect the lives of Palestinians, his continuing manouvers to trap the USA into a war with Iran that he wants the US to fight on behalf of Isrsel, and his disregard for the anger of that half of his own people that wants the remaining hostages safely home, and a robust ceasefire that can secure their freedom. These are today on national strike and protesting in the streets. 500,000 gathered last night outside of Netanyahu’s office.

The Arab and Islamic Worlds continue to skulk in the shadows, shamed by their cowardly inability to come to the defense of the Palestinians against Israel and its Western sponsors. That the US has signed off on another $20 billion in support of mass murder is shocking enough. But in some ways that Turkey, for all its flashy rhetoric, is still a major player in the flow of oil for Israel, and clamps down on pro-Palestinians demonstrations in Turkey, is even more shocking.

Writing for the World Social Web Site, Barış Demir reports that a Palestinian university student was detained on Tuesday after protesting Turkey’s mediation of oil supplies from Azerbaijan to Israel during a panel discussion on Palestine organised by the state-owned English language broadcaster TRT World. On Thursday, three other people, including a Palestinian, were reportedly detained in connection with the incident.

Many countries, notes Demir, including signatories to the Geneva Conventions on genocide, have supplied oil for the tanks and planes used by Israel in the Gaza genocide and are complicit in crimes against the Palestinian people.

“A total of 4.1 million tonnes of crude oil have been shipped to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza, and these shipments have continued uninterrupted since the International Court of Justice rulings. Israel imports almost 99 per cent of the oil it uses. According to the report, Azerbaijan is the main supplier, providing 28 per cent of the crude oil going to Israel. Azerbaijan is followed by Kazakhstan and the African country Gabon with 22 per cent. These three countries meet three-quarters of Israel’s oil needs. Turkey, Italy, Cyprus and Greece play a key role in providing transshipment services to Israel. As the terminus of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Turkey ranks first in terms of volume, accounting for 26 per cent of shipments to Israel. Cyprus follows Turkey with 21 per cent.

“The main reason for the Erdoğan government’s continued feeding of the Israeli war machine is the ruling class’s close military-strategic ties with US-NATO imperialism”.

The Battlefields

In the past 24 hours, Russia has launched a full-scale offensive on the city of Vuhledar in the south of Donbass, together with the coal mine to its north east, and has also attacked and entered a Ukrainian held village to the west – Prechystrivka (north of Novomaiorske) which will likely push Ukrainian forces to Zolotsa Nyva further west.

Vuhledar and settlements north of Vuhledar such as Vodiane and Boholsilenksa are under very heavy Russian fire if they have not already been taken. Russian forces are encircling Vuhledar.

In Pokrovsk, Russian forces have taken the village of Lisrika, south of Memryk and have launched a full scale offensive on the settlement of Ukrainsk to the west. They have captured the south of Selydove and are battling for coal mines and landfills south of Selydove. They are likely to venture furher south still, towards to the resevoir of Kurakhova. This will put Russia in a position to encircle Ukrainian positions from Bereslky to Krasnohoriivka and north and south of this line.

There have been small Russian advances in Chasiv Yar and Siversk areas. Russia is reported to have completely secured Kleshchiivka and all positions east of the Kanal (something I had thought had been accomplished weeks ago, but such is the nature of war and of war reporting). In Siversk, Russia is well poised to move on Siversk from both the Yrimka direction in the south and from the east. Further north, near Kupyansk much the same could be said of the function of Russian consolidation of control over Sinkivka and the surrounding forests.

In Sumy Russia has destroyed three HIMARS systems and two Buk-MIs.

In Kursk, Russia appears to have consolidated its hold on Koreveno to the west and, to the east, a stretch of road from Martynivka to Bol’shoye Soldatskoye, but Ukrainian forces are pushing up north towards Durovo-Bobrik and Volokonsky, more or a less on the same level as Russoe to the west but still well south of the new lines of Russian fortification.