“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened… History stopped in 1936”
– George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War
This week, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said that up to half-a-million Ukrainians were required to replenish his army forces fighting against Russia’s invasion. Many of Ukraine’s troops are exhausted, and volunteers to replace those killed or wounded are becoming rarer, military officials told AFP.
Estimates of military casualties on both sides of the conflict are generally unreliable, but were thought to number 500,000 in total by August of this year.
The past two years of the war between Russia and NATO in Ukraine have been Orwellian. At the outset of the war I commented on this platform on how much of what burst onto our news feeds would be either wrong or outright propaganda.
Two years later we can point to people whose claims should be taken with a several doses of salt in the future.
That includes everyone who told us that either Russia would win easily – Scott Ritter, Cln McGregor for instance – or that the same applied to Ukraine – Lt Gen Ben Hodges for instance.
The same can be said for anyone who predicted major battlefield developments which never materialized, such as the disastrous ‘great Ukrainian counteroffensive’ which changed the front lines between the adversaries by only infinitesimally small fractions.
But this doesn’t apply just to independent “expert” and bloggers. The mainstream media have been consistently inflating the “Russia is finished – any day soon” narrative for nigh on two nears now.
The rapid Russian advance on Kiev at the start of the war was not a strategic success. There was a lot of speculation about it. Was it an attempt to crush the capital; a feint; an attempt to scare the Kiev government into capitulation? Who can tell?
However, as we look back on it, it seems to have been a gamble for Russia, and one which was abandoned after the failed peace talks in March/April 2022. The only thing we can ascertain about Russian policy in this was that its abandonment signaled the beginning of phase II of the SMO (Special Military Operation –the diplomatically equivocate term Putin used for the war). To the rest of the world the SMO was, of course, an invasion.
Phase II, as is now obvious from over a year of intensive combined military operations on the contact lines of the Russian and Ukrainian armies, is the attrition phase of the war.
At this point, it seems to be the case that Russia has the production capacity and the manpower to stay this war of attrition. For example; even though it was assumed that Russia could not match the West for artillery and munitions, we now know that Russia is significantly out-producing the West in the crucial 155mm artillery shells. The West has depleted its stocks and it is now getting close to relying on what comes off the production lines.
A recent NBC News report claimed that: “Russia has ramped up production of artillery rounds, and, over the next couple years may be able to produce 2 million shells per year.” It quoted a source as saying that “Russia fired an estimated 10 million rounds in Ukraine last year.” To counter this, the USA presently has the capacity to produce 336,000 155mm rounds per year and may ramp up to 1.2 million by 2025. The US and allies together may be able to ramp up to 1 million this year.
American production capacity for missiles such as the Stinger and Javeline is far below adequate according to this well-referenced article by Adam Townsend. Michael Kofman, a military expert with the Carnegie Endowment told Associated Press this week that while Ukraine pioneered the use of drones, “Russia now has more of them and has an advantage in them.”
“While Ukraine held a strong edge in drones at the start of the war, Russian forces since then have matched and even overwhelmed Ukrainian troops in using short-range small drones, which are now so prolific that Moscow is even them against individual troops,” AP said.
War is a racket, and in the vast money laundering plot, everyone gets their cut. The American defense industry got billions in contracts, as did their Russian counterparts, and the censorship industrial complex pushed its ideology and upped their activity – which entails plenty of contracts and jobs for the ‘disinformation experts.’
Ukrainians on the battlefield paid the blood price, as did Russian soldiers.
Although none said this specifically at first, preferring to describe the whole enterprise as a “defense of democracy”; there was public acknowledgement that some in the West wanted this war as a means to degrade the rising power of Russia.
Minority speaker of the house, Mitch McConnell admitted it when he said it was a cheap way “to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States”
In another interview, he said US spending was “rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals.”
.@LeaderMcConnell says "a significant portion" of Ukraine aid from Congress is being spent in states to make weapons.
"We're rebuilding our industrial base. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that." pic.twitter.com/24janX3kbr
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) October 22, 2023
All the time, President Biden and many EU leaders made statements about supporting Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” making it clear that as long as Ukraine wanted to fight Russia, they would stand by them. President Biden, a long practiced rhetorician, called the the United States “The Arsenal of Democracy.”
But was this really a “defense of democracy”? The war hawks like to talk up democracy whenever a paycheck is dangled. “Democracy” is a word loaded with sentimental gravity for westerners, but perhaps “diplomacy” was the word we should have been using.
The history of the Minsk accords and their breaking; the Maidan coup; the ongoing US backed conflict in Eastern Ukraine; and the NATO agreements made to Russia about not moving beyond the pre fall-of-Berlin-wall borders, were known by all.
All of these breaches would be considered illegal according to concepts of international law. However, what should be clear to any watcher now is that “international law” is not a real institution. It’s the justification by the powerful to do whatever they want to do. For instance, when Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia, did he break international law?
As Thucydides wrote quoting the Athenian delegate to the Melians: “The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must”. This seems to describe what “international law” actually is, in practice
The Western strategy also relied on the belief that Russia would fold when the sanctions came. The EU got in on this by refusing to buy from Russia the one thing that it needed to keep the European (especially the German) economy going: energy.
Very little in the progress of the last two years indicates that the West were able to degrade Russia’s ability to wage war to any significant degree. In a war of attrition which relies on industrial production and logistical capabilities, it is a massive blunder to underestimate these factors.
The enthusiasm for squashing Putin was undoubtedly significant in scuppering the chances for peace in April last year when delegates from each side sat down in Istanbul.
Former White House Russia expert, Fiona Hill, admitted in 2022 that “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” It is claimed that then British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, behind closed doors, encourage Zelensky to reject peace talks. Was total war on Putin the only political policy countenanced by the West?
This is not the strategy of one who considers their adversary a threat. It is the strategy of one who is confident they will crush their enemy. It is an easy strategy to have when somebody else is doing the dying.
The US and its EU and NATO allies has been united in its talk of supporting Ukraine to defeat Russia for nearly two years, but recent rumours show that the era of “as long as it takes” – which was always dependent on the ability to pay – may be about to end. Ukraine may yet be shafted by the western elite who led it down the path to war.
A recent Time Magazine report recites a litany of woes that Ukraine face. Falling international support and aid; lack of gains on the battle field; corruption across the government and military; and most tellingly, the inability to replenish the ranks of their army.
“In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”
That assertion now seems to have been confirmed this week. This is the most critical military disadvantage Ukraine has. They have basically lost an army since the start of the war and now they have an army of conscripts and new recruits fighting against Russia.
Of course, Russia has had its own difficulties too: the Kremlin has been forced to raise the maximum age for its mandatory conscription, which requires men to serve in the military for a year, from 27 to 30; it has borne heavy losses and casualties in the field, and Putin called up more than 300,000 reservists to support the war – the first such call-up since the Second World War.
However, NBC reports that “U.S. and European officials have begun quietly talking to the Ukrainian government about what possible peace negotiations with Russia might entail to end the war.”
This is not a sudden humanitarian change of heart. It is tragic that these talks did not take place 18 months ago, as they are infinitely too late for the hundreds of thousands who have been killed or maimed for life in the bloody fields of Eastern Ukraine.