As the diplomatic wrangling over Ukraine continues, facts on the ground are being made on multiple front lines as the liberation forces maintain their steady advance.
The most intense pressure from the Russian army is currently directed at the city of Konstantinovka. The Ukrainian troops who are supposed to be defending the city are now almost completely surrounded by the Russians, who have established a ten-mile-deep cordon sanitaire from the east, south and west.
Konstantinovka is very important: losing it to the liberation forces would likely spark the loss of a series of cities that pose the last serious obstacle to the liberation of the rest of Donetsk oblast. Ukrainian forces that venture into the cordon are met with a formidable barrage of drones.
Nato’s military maths doesn’t add up
The drones now in regular use by the liberation forces are an advance in both quantity and quality on earlier models, an evolution on the original Shahel design that originated in Iranian workshops. The new drones are larger, faster and carry twice the explosive tonnage.
And whilst Kiev is forced to beg US president Donald Trump for a handful of Patriot interceptor missiles, the Russians are able to unleash nearly a hundred long-range drones a day, mass produced in house. No less a person than Nato general secretary Mark Rutte has testified that Russia produces more weaponry in three months than the whole of the west does in a year.
And whereas the clueless neo-nazis blindly hurl all the billion dollars-worth of hi-tech they have squeezed out of the collective west straight into the same black hole (except when British or US logistics teams are guiding their hands), the liberation forces take care not to waste the people’s precious resources for arming this people’s liberation war.
An example of this is the regular tactic of sending cheap decoy drones up alongside the real ones to draw the fire of enemy air defences, allowing the potent drones to seek out and destroy the target as planned.
A favourite drone target is the recruitment offices whose job it is to ‘persuade’ young men to sacrifice their lives in a war that Ukraine cannot win. ‘Persuasion’ in practice frequently means coercion or kidnap, with ‘volunteers’ pressganged and sent to the front line to die pointlessly.
So hated are the pressgang thugs who comb the streets in search of more cannon fodder to feed the war machine that Ukrainian citizens have taken to posting the addresses of recruitment offices online as a helpful guide for incoming Russian drones.
Meanwhile, whilst President Trump plays his games, offering Patriot missiles one day and snatching them back the next, his regime’s actions weigh far more than his self-contradictory words. The reality is that demand for Patriot systems, many of which have already been fully engaged in the US support for zionist aggression against Iran, hugely outweighs supply, with some estimates suggesting that the USA has only about a quarter of the Patriot systems it needs to keep the Pentagon happy.
Critics point to the failure of the USA to ramp up its production of Patriots, bemoaning that the for-profit military-industrial complex produces only hundreds annually, when what is required is thousands.
As was noted by Responsible Statecraft last year: “Russia is outproducing all of Nato and the USA in terms of ammunition, rockets and tanks, despite having a 2023 defence budget of just $100bn and a GDP of $2tn. Compare this to the combined US/Nato defence budget of $1.47tn and a combined GDP of about $45tn.” (Why Russia is far outpacing US/Nato in weapons production by Mike Fredenburg, 14 August 2024)
And Business Insider in April this year reported that US general Christopher Cavoli, Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe, told the Senate armed services committee that Washington expects Russia to produce 250,000 artillery shells monthly, putting it on track to build a stockpile three times greater than that of the United States and Europe combined. (Matthew Loh, 4 April 2025)
Such is the anarchy of production under monopoly capitalist conditions that even the most pressing need to accelerate production to keep up with the demands of waging aggressive imperialist wars cannot overcome the endemic sclerosis of the dying system.
The same cannot be said of Russian munitions production, where essential aspects of the Soviet legacy of state planning appear to have survived the marketisation of the economy. Whilst British prime minister Keir Starmer’s promise to build six new munitions factories remains doodles on a drawing board, Russia has already long since switched to a war economy.
A similar flexibility was displayed in Russia’s response to the aggressive sanctions campaign by the collective west, taking the opportunity to diversify the economy, identify new markets and cultivate alternative trading partners.
Propaganda war coming unstuck as looming defeat creates dissension in the aggressors’ ranks
By pursuing its wretched proxy war against Russia, Anglo-American imperialism had hoped thereby to engineer its escape from the stifling consequences of its own overproduction crisis. In order to achieve this, it did not hesitate to blow on the embers of the crazed fascist tradition, which had previously flourished in Ukraine under the direct tutelage of the German nazis, knowing full well what a poisonous brew this was.
By means of the imperialist-backed Maidan putsch, the people were delivered into the hands of fascist leaders. Now that the plan to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia has failed in spectacular fashion, the historic dimensions of the crime that imperialism has committed against both the Russian and the Ukrainian people stand revealed to the whole world.
Throughout the war, every effort was made by the bourgeois scribblers to downplay the fascist character of the Kiev junta, pretending that this was a calumny against Ukraine and that whilst some more ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ elements might exist on the fringes of power, these were the exception rather than the rule. All the evidence to the contrary was denounced as ‘Russian propaganda’, and anyone who dared to suggest otherwise was fingered as a ‘Russian bot’.
With the imperialist media’s consistent framing of the war as one of ‘national defence’ against a ‘brutal aggressor’ firmly in place, the way was clear to call black white and white black to their hearts’ content. As Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously proposed, the bigger the lie, the harder it is to unpick. Even some who consider themselves ‘communist’ were moved to denounce the Russian special military operation as ‘imperialist’.
But now that the whole Ukrainian project has come to grief, with the crushing of the imperialist-backed Kiev forces on the field of battle and the growing difficulty of the collective west in agreeing on a common propaganda front, the real truth is starting to come out about how Anglo-American imperialism deliberately stoked up fascism in Ukraine – just as German imperialism had done in the forties.
The US imperialists and its collective west sidekicks had hoped to escape the consequences of their own crisis of overproduction by waging war against Russia. Instead, imperialism has picked up a rock, only to drop it on its own foot.
All the problems that it had hoped to overcome by making proxy war against Russia remain as before, only ten times worse now that its warmongering gamble has blown up in its face.
