On Tuesday 6 August, Ukraine launched a surprise offensive into the Russian province of Kursk in what the Russian president Vladimir Putin characterised as a “large-scale provocation”. Moscow declared a federal-level state of emergency across the regions of Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod and moved quickly to mobilise supplementary forces to deal with the threat.
In the space of 24 hours, Ukraine lost up to 230 soldiers and 38 armoured vehicles, of which seven were tanks. Other losses at the time of writing included four field artillery systems, a Buk-M1 anti-aircraft missile system, three rocket launchers and an AN/MPQ-65 radar station of the Patriot air defence system.
The element of surprise enabled the Kiev regime’s offensive to make some headway early on, but Russian forces moved swiftly to stabilise the situation, backed up by Belarus. Fascist dreams of taking and holding Russian territory or seizing the Kursk nuclear power station came to nought. If the purpose of Kiev’s would-be offensive was to distract attention from the hammering the fascists are getting right across the frontline and in particular in Donbass, then it will achieve exactly the direct opposite.
History is repeating itself. The fascists are back on Kursk soil, where they will again face crushing defeat, and this time the devastating consequences for imperialism will be global in scale.
Grandmother’s footsteps
Oblivious to the scale of the disaster toward which the whole of the collective west is blindly steering, Britain’s new ‘socialist’ prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, egged on by Ukraine’s stooge actor-president Volodymyr Zelensky, still thinks he is playing grandmother’s footsteps, testing out how many ‘red lines’ imperialism can get away with crossing, or how many white lies it can tell about the intended targets with a straight face (ie, Russia).
Keir Starmer lost no time in ingratiating himself with the Ukrainian ‘president’ (a title to which Mr Zelensky has even less legal claim now that the agreed presidential election timetable has been quietly dropped), making haste to welcome the imposter into the Cabinet office and stagemanaging a standing ovation from all the assembled throng of newly minted ministers therein, all eager to thank him for his services to Nato imperialism.
On the ludicrous debate over what restrictions the collective west could or should set regarding the choice of targets the Kiev junta ought to be ‘allowed’ to hit once western weapons had been supplied, Zelensky put pressure on Starmer to drop all limits and persuade his colleagues in the collective west to follow suit.
“Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Sir Keir Starmer to ‘show your leadership’ by helping to remove restrictions on how Ukraine can use weapons supplied by its western allies.
“Addressing a meeting of the cabinet in Downing Street, Mr Zelensky said being able to hit Russian territory would help prevent attacks on residential areas in Ukraine.
“Pressed on the subject earlier, defence secretary John Healey said the UK’s provision of weapons to Ukraine ‘does not preclude them hitting targets in Russia’.
“However, he added that it ‘must be done by the Ukrainians and must be done within the parameters and the bounds of international humanitarian law’.” (Zelensky urges PM to help lift Ukraine weapon limits by Kate Whannel, BBC, 19 July 2024)
This would make a cat laugh. Are these ‘parameters and bounds of international humanitarian law’ the same ones that inspired Starmer to instruct his party to reject the demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, even as Israel was murdering Palestinians with British supplied weaponry?
The reality is that all these ‘red lines’ have been trampled over long since, and the collective west is indulging in an exercise of dangerous self-delusion and whistling in the dark.
While Starmer was busily assuring Zelensky that Britain will stand by Ukraine to the last drop of (Ukrainian) blood, and signing the latest defence export support treaty aimed at helping Ukrainian and British arms companies to invest in further military capabilities, out in the real world it was the collapse of Ukraine’s military in the Donbass that was sending shock waves across Capitol Hill, adding another layer of political hysteria to the run-up to the USA presidential elections in November.
Biden implodes
Once upon a time, US president Joe Biden was seen by many as a safe pair of hands, a promise of a more settled period after the excitements of the Donald Trump tenure and as the best hope of blocking a second Trump administration.
The reality has turned out to be quite different: the trouncing of the Ukrainian military and the disquieting tendency of western sanctions to boomerang back upon their originators. From being a safe pair of hands, President Biden revealed himself to be a massive liability whose own decay fully mirrored that of the class he served.
So Washington was stuck with a president who is clearly suffering from dementia, routinely making grotesque blunders (confusing Putin with Zelensky, for example), appearing to fall asleep mid-speech and rambling inconsequentially. The publicly-visible and audible degeneration of this man, nailed to the election bandwagon and sold as the only realistic hope of avoiding a Trump victory in November, was the most cruel and callous case of elder abuse imaginable. But the Democrats kept on flogging this dying horse, praying that he could be cranked up just long enough to hold Trump at bay.
Then, at the eleventh hour, the Democrat machine decided it was finally time to spit Biden out and replace him with his vice president Kamala Harris.
It is rather late in the day for the Democrat grandees to suddenly ‘discover’ that Kamala Harris, who had not till then made much of a splash in her VP role, was in fact top-class presidential material. Fans point to her work on women’s reproductive rights as an asset, and her showy endorsement by both halves of the Obama clan will impress some.
But all this sudden enthusiasm cannot hide the fundamental reality that Harris was chosen as a stop-gap measure to keep the Oval office seat warm for a more substantial incumbent further down the track. It is probable that some Democrats have already begun to regard another period of Trump tenure as hard to avoid.
Another straw in the wind is Trump’s choice of running mate, JD Vance, who does not hide his contempt for the whole Ukraine project. As long ago as 2022 Vance told an interviewer that “it’s ridiculous that we’re focused on this border in Ukraine … I gotta be honest with you: I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” More recently at the Munich security conference in February, Vance played down the threat posed by President Putin’s Russia and said that the USA could not manufacture the weapons needed to supply Ukraine to continue the war.
At the back of all this sound and fury from Republicans and Democrats alike is the torturing awareness that Nato is losing the proxy war against Russia and it is the multipolar world that is setting the agenda, not the unipolar. Recent developments in Hungary underline this truth.
Orban’s diplomacy
Viktor Orban, though prime minister of Hungary, a member of the European Union, has nevertheless not been shy to criticise that body’s policy on weapons sales to Ukraine, acting where possible to block or delay their supply.
Today, in the bracing new multipolar world society now in formation, a world in which everyone visits everyone else without having to check it out first with the US hegemon, Prime Minister Orban is not bashful when it comes to throwing his hat into the diplomatic ring.
Orban recently travelled to Ukraine, Russia and China, bringing with him his own idea of peace talks, centred on the principle that the EU’s Ukraine policy should shift “from pro-war to pro-people” and should recognise that the solution can be found at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield.
These sentiments, hardly controversial, are nonetheless like a red rag to the neutered bull of the collective west, still locked into the blind refusal to recognise that their proxy war has hit a brick wall – the only question remaining to be decided being how many more lives are to be squandered before this inevitable outcome is finally grasped.
Meanwhile, Kiev is still trying to compensate for its failures on the battlefield by playing games with the oil supply, and is currently blocking the transit across Ukraine of Russian oil destined for Hungary and Slovakia.
Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, has been blocked from passing through the stretch of the Druzhba pipeline network that crosses Ukraine. Druzhba, or Friendship, opened in 1964, in the days of the Soviet Union. It still carries Russian oil to Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
It is painful to record now how in happier days such engineering feats as the Druzhba pipeline stood as a symbol of what can be achieved by socialist planning, economic integration and fraternal relations. The Kiev junta, on the other hand, is more in the business of bombing pipelines than building them.
Happily, the Turkstream pipeline, which does not go anywhere near Ukraine soil, is taking up some of the slack, and long term the most likely outcome for Kiev’s spiteful interference will be to sour still further the junta’s relations with Budapest – and encourage Viktor Orban to strengthen his country’s relations with Moscow.
The more that imperialism strives to block the path to progress, the faster it alienates its former friends and satellites.
From apathy to anger
The increasingly desperate measures the Kiev junta has been taking to find enough new Ukrainian recruits to prop up Nato’s failing proxy war against Russia are causing some citizens to move from apathy and disaffection to acts of direct resistance against the draft.
Special outrage is reserved for recruiting sergeants who, like the bounty-hunters of yore, prowl the streets in search of suitable victims. Everyone has a tale to tell about neighbours or workmates seized in broad daylight, bundled into the back of a truck and driven off to fast-track recruitment hubs.
Sputnik records: “On the night of 16 July alone, a wave of arson attacks targeting the service and personal vehicles of Odessa’s territorial recruitment centre employees left five cars burned to a crisp. Similar incidents were reported in Vinnitsa, Rovno, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov the same night.
“Two more cars were burned in Odessa the next night, with the weekly total approaching a dozen. The situation has gotten so bad in some cities that servicemen have reportedly resorted to putting ‘NOT Territorial Recruitment Centre’ signs on their vehicles to avoid being targeted.” (Putin: US to force Kiev’s draft age down to 18 then remove Zelensky, Sputnik, 5 June 2024)
Needless to say, the knee-jerk response from the junta to the wave of arson attacks and the rocketing number of draft dodgers was to blame the Russians, claiming that soldiers were being bribed to quit by Russian agents. But this fairy tale cannot account for the fact that the vast majority of the draft dodgers hail from western regions.
It turns out that a disproportionate number of Ukrainian draft dodgers are actually found to come from areas with traditionally pro-western sympathies. Whereas draft dodging is less pronounced in places like Kiev (14,300 cases), Kharkov (4,500 cases) and Kherson (just 200 cases), in western regions the cases total as many as 334,200 at the last count.
Whilst the war in the east (that is to say, the fascist repression of Donbass which began in 2014) could be ignored by many in the western regions, shrugged off as a little local border dispute with some troublesome Russians, the threatened crushing of the liberated Donbass in 2022 and the swift Russian response to that threat changed the character of the war, and spread it far and wide. It was one thing to hear about bloodshed going on in the ‘far east’, but quite another to lay down one’s own life fighting Nato’s proxy war against an enemy that is well able to defend itself.
And so far from blaming the young men for their lack of ‘patriotism’, surveys show that very many people are broadly sympathetic to the dodgers.
“Shock polling this week by the Razumkov Centre, generally regarded as one of Ukraine’s most respected public policy think tanks, revealed that a whopping 46 percent of Ukrainians do not consider it ‘shameful’ to dodge mobilisation, with 29.1 percent saying it is shameful, and 24.8 percent finding it difficult to answer. Among respondents aged 18-29, 50 percent said it is not shameful.
“The same polling also found that 44 percent of respondents think the time has come for peace talks with Russia, with 35 percent against the idea, and 21 percent undecided.” (Sputnik, op cit)
It is the courage and steadfast resistance of the Russian army and people in the liberation war, a just war waged in response to the Nato/EU’s failing threat to force regime change on the Russians and break up their country into a number of weak statelets under the domination of imperialism, that is rattling the Capitol Hill cage. Let these imperialist windbags tie themselves into ever tighter knots trying in vain to find a new president to somehow magically mend US imperialist fortunes.
Glory to the Russian armed forces in their victorious antifascist war!
