The reactionary Russia-Ukraine/NATO war has entered a new phase. In recent months, it had ceased to be at the center of the news, largely overshadowed by Israel’s siege and genocide in Gaza and the first direct confrontation between the Zionist state and Iran. But on May 10, Russia made a major breakthrough, which, incredibly, no one on the Ukrainian side saw coming. Russia’s move is the most significant since the initial invasion in February 2022, and it may be a turning point in the dynamics of the conflict.
On the night of May 10, some 30,000 Russian troops and 400 tanks crossed the border and entered the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine, supported by air strikes with so-called glide bombs (FAB-1500). Converted from old Soviet-era guided bombs, these have proved an effective and inexpensive tactical weapon to decimate the positions and morale of the Ukrainian side.
In its advance, the Russian army broke the Ukrainian defense lines with almost no resistance and took about 12 small cities, among them Vovchansk. This forced the massive evacuation of civilians at a scale not seen since the beginning of the war.
There are several hypotheses about the strategic objective and the scope of this military offensive. According to Russian president Vladimir Putin himself, the objective is not to occupy the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which before the war had a population of 1 million people. It is, rather, to push back the Ukrainian lines about 10 kilometers. This would create a “buffer zone” to prevent attacks against Russian residential border areas, such as the city Belgorod, that are within range of Ukraine’s drones.
Without ruling out this “defensive” objective, some military analysts maintain that the Russia’s move may be part of a diversionary maneuver to force Ukraine to divide its already-decimated forces on two fronts and to neglect the Donbas, which would remain Russia’s priority. Others suggest that the offensive that began on May 10 is the first stage of a renewed “summer offensive.”
Beyond the “fog of war,” thickened by political maneuvers and military schemes, given the size of the force used, the occupation of a large city like Kharkiv does not seem like a realistic goal.
The key to the Russian offensive’s success was not “strategic surprise,” since Ukrainian intelligence had been warning that a major attack was being prepared, almost in broad daylight. Rather, the determining factor remains the weakness of the Ukrainian army and the strategic crisis of the United States and the European powers that direct Ukraine through NATO.
Long before Russia launched this offensive, Ukrainian forces were already under heavy pressure along the more than 1,100 kilometers of the front line. Even Ukraine’s defensive capabilities have been receding since the failed counteroffensive in the spring of 2023. It does not have enough ammunition, weapons, soldiers, or even engineers to develop the trench system that would enable it to resist the Russian offensive.
These vulnerabilities had already been exploited by Russia to seize the initiative and break the stalemate. As a result of this change in the war terrain, the Russian army took the industrial city of Avdiivka in February, a military but above all a moral and operational trophy that makes it easier for Moscow to deal with the Donbas.
There are at least two reasons for Ukraine’s vulnerable situation, especially since the country’s survival remains absolutely dependent on armaments and financing from Western powers.
The first is the delay in the arrival of ammunition and armaments from the United States, given that the Biden administration succeeded only at the end of April in to get congressional approval for the $61 billion military aid package, after months of dispute with Republicans.
In fact, Ukraine cannot use the weapons provided by the United States to attack Russian sovereign territory, given that Biden’s strategy is to avoid any eventuality leading to a direct confrontation with Russia, a “red line” that so far U.S. imperialism is unwilling to cross. This gave U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — who had indulged himself by playing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” in a Kyiv bar — a hard time when he had to endure the public complaints of the Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba at a press conference.
The second reason for Ukraine’s weak position is the shortage of soldiers due to casualties in a war that has been going on for more than two years. The country is facing a recruitment crisis — the average age of soldiers is 40 — a crisis that Zelenskyy’s government and the parliament intend to overcome with two new laws that lower the age of conscription from 27 to 25, increase the fines for those who avoid enlistment, and allow convicts to join combat.
The setbacks on the military front have translated into political misfortunes for Zelenskyy, who has fired large parts of his war cabinet. With his popularity on the decline and growing internal challenges, his presidential term ended on May 20, but under martial law there will be no elections. Discontent, war fatigue, and corruption scandals have already led to the removal of several ministers and officials, and they are growing. In this tense climate, the intelligence services claimed to have stopped an assassination attempt against the president, for which they arrested high-ranking presidential security officers accused of plotting with Russia.
This is not to say that Putin is without weaknesses and contradictions. But by comparison, he has, at least at this stage of the war, gained a head start. He modernized military production and receives assistance and know-how from China, Iran, and North Korea. The United States and European powers’ policy to isolate Russia by imposing harsh economic and financial sanctions did not have the expected results — largely thanks to the alliance that Putin sealed with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on the eve of the war.
Of course, the war is not innocuous. Russia has given up important energy markets, such as Germany, and the state-owned gas giant Gazprom has reported losses for the first time in 20 years. But Russia has conquered new markets, such as India and Africa, and the reconversion to a “war economy” has allowed it to maintain some growth, against all odds.
Perhaps the turning point in the crisis that the Russian government went through, especially in the first year of the war, was Putin’s decision to liquidate the Wagner Group and eliminate its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had taken up arms against his authority. From that moment on, Putin regained his authority and disciplined the various cliques of the political bureaucracy and the military command.
Putin won reelection by dint of authoritarianism and repression and by taking opponents out of the game (Alexei Navalny died in prison in more than suspicious circumstances). At the beginning of May, the Russian president inaugurated his fifth term with feverish political activity, in addition to having ordered the advance on Kharkiv.
On May 9, the Russian president participated in the traditional “Victory Day” parade commemorating the triumph over the Nazis, which this year was a display of Russia’s renewed military might. Putin reconfigured his government by replacing the minister of defense, General Sergei Shoigu, with Andrei Belousov, a civilian economist trained in the old Soviet school who has been in the Kremlin for years. The political reading of Belousov’s unexpected appointment is that Putin is preparing for a long conflict, both in Ukraine and against the West, so the new minister would have the mission of generating and managing the resources of the whole economy to modernize and sustain his war machine (the defense budget amounts to 8 percent of GDP), reduce the growing dependence on China, and, at the same time, prevent the war from bankrupting the country.
Apart from the domestic front, Putin’s most relevant activity was his trip to China, where he met with President Xi, the 43rd meeting between the two heads of state since 2013. Putin and Xi reaffirmed the “no-limits friendship,” that is, the emerging alliance between China and Russia that was sealed on the eve of the war. This alliance has the now-explicit goal of “founding a democratic and multipolar international order” as an alternative to the neoliberal order led by the United States, which has entered an accelerated process of decline.
It is impossible now to foresee the strategic significance of the incursion into Kharkiv. Time will tell whether it is a tactical advance — that is, a Russian maneuver to take advantage of Ukraine’s weaknesses to retake territory and reposition itself before the arrival of U.S. weapons, but which in itself does not change the fact that this has conflict become a war of attrition — or whether it will accelerate the war’s ultimate outcome. If the latter, the maneuver could lead to direct confrontation between Russia, associated with China, and the Western imperialist powers of NATO, which would almost immediately extend the theater of operations to Europe.
Thus far, the U.S. strategy has been to take advantage of a proxy war by using Ukraine to weaken Russia (and in the process reinforce leadership over the European Union) without putting a single American soldier on the ground. But this strategy appears to be finding its own limits.
Biden faces an increasingly acute dilemma, because maintaining his “red lines” — that is, arming Ukraine to hold out but not to attack Russia — may lead to nothing less than a defeat for the Western side. But the alternative is to escalate into a direct NATO war with Russia (and China).
Aware of this trap, representatives of the “conservative realist” wing of the U.S. establishment, such as diplomat Richard Haass, advise persuading Zelenskyy to take a defensive position and negotiate a cession of territory with Russia, which would freeze the conflict and allow time to rearm the decimated Ukrainian army.
The specter of Ukraine’s defeat, an improbable but not impossible nightmare scenario, haunts the United States and its European allies, forcing them to reevaluate their strategies, once again exposing the cracks that divide the Western powers.
In this tinderbox situation, the militaristic and warlike tendencies are deepening. This is clearly on the rise in Europe, which sees the Ukrainian debacle as bringing the continent face to face with Russia. Norway, which is a member of NATO but not of the European Union, announced a 12-year military expansion plan, implying that by 2036 it will have doubled its defense budget and tripled its army brigades. The unpopular British prime minister, the Conservative Rishi Sunak, has committed to significant boosting defense spending to put the country “on a war footing.” The German government, headed by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, is considering reinstating compulsory military service, as are other EU countries.
Perhaps the most extreme position was that of French president Emmanuel Macron, who did not rule out sending troops to Ukraine, an idea deeply unpopular and also rejected by the rest of the European powers and the United States, but echoed by other countries that are enemies of Russia, such as Lithuania. In a recent interview with The Economist, Macron advocated for the deterrent use of nuclear weaponry and insisted on his proposal for the EU’s “sovereign autonomy” vis-à-vis the United States. Not coincidentally, France was the only western European country that President Xi visited during his European tour.
The neoliberal order, commanded by the United States’ unquestioned leadership in the immediate post–Cold War period, is probably in a terminal crisis. The “globalized” world directed from Washington is giving way to a new “pre-1914” configuration. Within this framework of a degradation of liberal democracies and “Caesarist” attempts, protectionist tendencies have returned to the scene in imperialist countries (e.g., Biden’s 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles), as have rivalries between the great powers and the war in the heart of Europe. This has combined with another war with international significance in the Middle East. We are not yet at the beginning of the “third world war” — that is to say, in an open military dispute for world hegemony — but a dangerous interregnum has opened up.
Part of this epochal climate is the attempted assassination of Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico, a populist who returned to power in 2023 on the basis of demagogic promises to the popular sectors and of opposing the war in Ukraine.
The climate of political polarization is made even more tense by the prospect of Donald Trump’s returning to the White House, and the rise of the extreme Right, which may have a strong showing in the upcoming European parliamentary elections and which came to power in Argentina with Javier Milei.
The countertrend is the emergence of a powerful movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the governments that collaborate with the massacre perpetrated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The emergence of this global movement, which has faced strong state repression, particularly at universities, is one of the most significant events of the international class struggle. This youth vanguard has an incipient anti-imperialist consciousness, similar to the radicalized movements of the 1960s against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. Meanwhile, we are seeing the advance of other profound processes of struggle against exploitation and colonial oppression, such as the Palestinian struggle itself against Israeli oppression and the current revolt in New Caledonia against French imperialism. The great lesson of the 20th century is that only the development of this class struggle, leading to workers’ revolutions, will be able to stop imperialism’s tendency to crisis and war.
Originally published in Spanish on May 19 in La Izquierda Diario.
Translation by Otto Fors
Originally Published: 2024-05-21 13:16:05
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