Source: Medium.com
Events in Ukraine’s battle for existence are moving fast. The military situation is summarised by ISW:
- Russian forces are stalled outside Kyiv
- Up to 4,000 Wagner group operatives have been deployed into Kyiv to decapitate the government
- Mariupol is surrounded; Kharkiv was attacked but repulsed the offensive
- Russian territorial advances continue in the south, and on the Konotop-Kyiv axis.
- Russia conducted missile strikes out of Belarus, with Lukashenko indicating his troops may join the conflict
- An “operational pause” in response to the initial setbacks is expected to end today with a renewed offensive
But it’s on the diplomatic and geopolitical front that historic events are unfolding:
- The German Bundestag approved plans to re-arm, and to support Ukraine with arms, lifting the cap on government borrowing — as half a million people flooded the streets of Berlin to support Ukraine
- The European Union has agreed to supply, direct, fighter aircraft and other material to the Ukrainian government
- The EU has banned civil aviation overflight and will ban Russian state media RT and Sputnik
- In response to EU, US and British sanctions, the value of the rouble has collapsed by 30% against the US dollar, while trading on the Russian stock exchange has been suspended. A run on Rus
- Putin placed his nuclear forces on alert
Few expect today’s scheduled negotiations to buy anything other than a pause in hostilities. What began, last Tuesday, as a limited land-grab has turned not only into the conquest of a country but a systemic conflict between the Western democracies and the Russia dictatorship.
The stakes in that conflict were revealed in a Russian state media essay yesterday: the total destruction of Ukraine both as a sovereign nation and as a national identity, via its re-absorption unto Russia. In an essay published by RIA Novostii (but then hastily deleted), Petr Akopov, a right-wing nationalist defence expert, spelled out what Putin fears:
“the complex of a divided people, the complex of national humiliation — when the Russian house first lost part of its foundation (Kyiv), and then was forced to come to terms with the existence of two states, not one, but two peoples”.
If you are in any doubt as to the stakes in this war, read the whole thing. For Putin’s inner circle this is not even about security — the claimed problem of Ukraine being free one day to join NATO. It is about imposing “Little Russian” national identity on a people who want to be free, European and Western oriented. Akopov’s triumphalist essay was clearly written for the eventuality of a Ukrainian collapse, which has so far been avoided.
Russia’s proxy voices are protesting that the imposition of sanctions and military aid on this scale is “proxy war”. They are right. All sanctions are proxy war — and on Sunday both the EU, with the sudden conversion of the Federal Republic of Germany, effectively declared total proxy war on Russia. So concerned are Europe’s once pacifist and conciliatory leaders that they have, at the last moment, opted for the rapid paralysis and destruction of the Russian economy.
There is no going back. That is the penny that dropped for the European and US political class over the weekend. And that, in itself, for now is a defeat for Putin. That’s why he put his nuclear forces on alert.
His strategic aim, as I have said here before, is not about Ukraine but restoring Russia to the position of a superpower within a three-power, rules free game of “systemic competition” — where all conflict is about (a) who your country trades with and (b) what variety of nationally-defined human rights and state strucutres you get. A system where there is no recourse to the structures of international law or universal standards of human rights, or for that matter scientific truth.
Ukraine was supposed to be the stepping stone. But he has — so far — failed. Failed militarily, because in his haste to achieve a symbolic victory he skipped from stage to stage (bombardment, mobile war, siege) without really achieveing the objectives.
Failed politically, because there is no significant support for his project in Ukraine, and because the European and liberal North American elites finally realised the systemic nature of the conflict.
Three wars in one
This time last week I was in meeting senior Ukrainian defence officials. They told us “Putin has enough firepower to force us back and force us into negotiations” — and the facts have borne that out. But they said he does not have the forces to occupy Ukraine — and with EU arms and officially sanctioned volunteers now entering the West of the country, the stage is set for a longer and bloodier battle.
Putin has brought in Chechen mercenaries and thermobaric artillery. In response Ukrainians have mobilised with Molotov cocktails, vintage AK-47s and their grandad’s shotgun. They know that, unless those mercenaries are prepared to act like the Gestapo, razing villages and torturing resistance fighters, the invaders can be driven out in a long war of resistance, which will inevitably reach inside both Russia and Belarus.
What kind of war is this? A largely pacifist population in Europe is gradually coming to understand: it is three wars in one.
There is a clear “inter-imperialist” aspect to the conflict. The political and social elites of Europe, having tolerated Putin’s infiltration tactics and his energy diplomacy, realise this is a land-grab that will not stop. The military-security elites, who are to be handed massive amounts of money for re-armament, have achieved more in a week than in20 years. (For how that re-armament should go, see my essay in Futures of Work).
If and when Putin’s assault is defeated, I expect they will go straight for absorbtion of the Ukraine that emerges into both NATO and the EU. We need to anticipate and stop any attempt to re-run the 1990s, where Russia was economically humiliated by neoliberal colonisers. We need to take democratic control of NATO’s future “strategic concept”, to ensure it is a defensive alliance that operates only with the democratic consent of its peoples.
But this aspect of the war is, for me, subsumed within the bigger issues of national self defence and defence of democracy.
Ukraine is fighting a just war of self defence and national liberation. Every Ukrainan reading Akopov’s admission — that this is a war for “the solution of the Ukrainian question” knows what they are fighting for. Under international law Ukraine is fighting a just war of self-defence, and would be entitled to demand UN backing if the UN were not disabled by Russian veto.
Finally, this is also now a systemic conflict. The socio-economic system Putin wants to impose on Ukraine is that of a militarised, rent-seeking dictatorship. Anyone who was in Kyiv during the final days of peace knows it was not that. It was a flawed, fledgling democracy whose people would rather be governed by a mild, incompetent, Western oriented centrist party than a totalitarian one-party state.
What should the left do?
In such a conflict, the global left needs to take a side. The world has changed,. The post-war order in which all the other dreams of the left were formulated, has been destroyed. The route to climate justice, redistribution, the defeat of racism and misogyny lies through the defeat of Russia in Ukraine and the collapse of the regimes in Minsk and Moscow.
The emergence over the weekend of The Resistance Committee, a reportedly anarchist/Antifa unit in the Ukrainian territorial defence brigades, shows the transformative potential of this conflict.
What the comrades of Sotskalny Rukh said last Tuesday applies to the rest of Europe: only a socially just and democratic society can defeat oligarchic militarism. Only a rules-based order strengthened against corporate power can withstand the chaos system envisaged by Xi and Putin. To defeat Putin we have to end the system of financial rent-extraction and massive inequality here at home.
Ukraine’s struggle for existence is just. And Putin has declared war on the entire system in which our freedoms, our self-organisation and identity can be defended.
The molotovs being mixed by Ukrainian women may be puny but revolt is a weapon with a longer range than any missile.
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