15 months have passed since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and still the war drags on. Hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, is that enough? No, it is not enough. Not for the capitalists of both sides in the conflict, locked in their power plays, callously sending the children of the working class to the killing fields while checking their overseas bank accounts.

There is no end in sight to this war. Both sides prepare a spring offensive. It seems the slaughter can only end when one or both warring parties run out of cannon fodder. That is becoming a problem for them. Hundreds of thousands have fled both countries to avoid being forcibly enlisted. In Ukraine there are special apps circulating which send warnings on where the recruiters are on the prowl. Russia still has hundreds of thousands of soldiers in reserve but the Kremlin doesn’t trust them. Why else is it not sending them to the battle? Or is it to maintain the illusion that this is not a war, just a “special military operation”? Instead of using these trained battalions, the prisons are skimmed and all those willing to join the mercenaries and the young recruits (most from distant provinces) at the front, get a ‘get out of jail free card’. Prison or the front? What would you pick? It’s a new way to play Russian roulette. Given the conditions in the Russian prisons, there are many who take the chance.

The enthusiasm for the war on the part of the population has cooled considerably. It was already low in Russia but now in Ukraine as well there are increasing signs of disaffection. But that is not enough to stop this madness. The fact that the working class in both countries still accepts that so many of its sons and daughters are being sacrificed on the altar of national pride for the determination of the borders between the hunting grounds of their rulers, is hardly reassuring.

Desertion is mounting, despite the risks. Both Russia’s and Ukraine’s parliaments have democratically approved harsh punishments for deserters, up to 12 years in Ukraine and life in prison in Russia. And then there are the extra-legal punishments, because, “a la guerre comme a la guerre”, war has its own rules. A deserter of the Wagner brigade was executed with sledgehammers. Still many keep fleeing. But the desertion and the resistance against the recruiters are not yet massive collective acts which is why they are so vulnerable to the ferocious state repression and not preventing the continuation of the war. Both in Russia and in Ukraine the working class keeps working, churning out weapons and whatever else their bosses can sell at a profit. Unemployment is high, inflation rises fast while wages stagnate and fear rules.

Despite all the death and destruction, this is not yet total war. Russia is still trying to wage it in a way that limits its impact on the majority of its population. The US and its Nato allies have stepped up their weapons deliveries to Ukraine, making its army arguably the most potent terrestrial army in Europe, but they have not given them weapons such as long range missiles and fighter jets which could expand the war into Russian territory. While in Europe the prospect of an endless war on its eastern flank is starting to raise some doubts in the ruling class, for US capitalism, this is just what the doctor ordered. The US secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin openly stated that the US’s goal in the war is to weaken Russia as a military power and the longer the war lasts, the more that succeeds.

They are thinking already about the next war. In Washington, Democrats and Republicans, bickering about everything, are solidly united in jacking up the hostility level against China, the main foe (with rising hate crimes against Asian-Americans as a side-effect). The US military budget is expected to pass the cape of one trillion dollars this year, dwarfing the expenditures of all other countries, with the possibility of war with China in mind. China too is accelerating its military spending (although still less than a quarter of that of the US). “Ukraine has offered us a new understanding of a future possible world war”, general Meng Xiangqing , the deputy director of the army’s Strategic Research Institute wrote in the Guangming daily newspaper. He noted that Russia’s nuclear arsenal had restrained the US’s intervention in the war and called for a faster buildup of China’s nuclear capacity, as well as for more satellites for intelligence gathering and scores of other expenditures. Which is what is happening. In Europe too, and around the world: everywhere the ruling class is increasing military spending, preparing for more war. And everywhere it wants the working class to pay for it. Austerity is the watchword. Working longer, for wages eroded by inflation and less benefits is what your country needs. Hunger, deteriorating health care, insecurity, war and climate disasters is what capitalism has in store for you and me.

But the working class, the vast majority of the population whose interests clash with those of capital, are not flocks of sheep kept easily in line by barking dogs. The current wave of struggles in the UK and France testifies to that. The latter especially shows a radicalization¹, a growing understanding that the enemy is not just Macron or the boss but the capitalist social order itself.

* * * *

We publish below an article by Raoul Victor on the war in Ukraine which appeared earlier in French on the site Spartacus. Not because we agree with every sentence² but because it is an excellent overview of the genesis of the war and a clear demystification of the lies that are told about it. It shows how capitalism and war are inseparable. It points out the growing weight of the “military industrial complex” on the course of capitalism and the continuity of the interimperialist struggle. The cold war never really ended. One cannot understand this war if one thinks that it began in 2022.

One thing it does not emphasize however, is the link between this war and the present crisis of capitalism. As we have argued before, it is not a coincidence that war has broken out in Europe, that the tensions between the West and China seem to have reached pre-war levels (still tempered though by their economic interdependence), and that the capitalist system has reached a crisis point with no escape routes in sight. Another orgy of money creation to gain some time, as has been done since 2008, is, given the inflationary climate, impossible. Though it will be used again if must, to defend the belief in the value of money, in the value of capital, despite all the fictitious capital that has been added to the total pot of purchasing power. In this crisis context, imposing austerity on the working class is what all states do, one way or another. And the lure of war becomes stronger. War over possession of capital, resources, power, which all translates into profit, which is what it’s all about, as the text below eloquently shows.

INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE

Notes:

1 An interesting report on the struggle in France can be found here. Some quotes: “ The alternative—to face up and fight back–seems unavoidable to many. A situation of conflict between social forces, against the capitalist class, is coming into being, even among those who for a long time have preferred the easier path of reform. his particular situation has brought to the fore a sensibility that was formerly underground, shining a new light on the absurdity of the condition of wage labor, now seen in the perspective of the ravaged condition of the world and the difficulties of life. Work has become for many synonymous with precarity, a violent life, impoverishment, the destruction of beings. So to work “two more years” to guarantee an end to this life without human meaning—No! It’s enough to report the innumerable individual placards and slogans of the French demonstrations, with their wealth of imagination, to grasp the general sentiment of rejection of this state of affairs. These are no longer only union demonstrations demanding negotiations in the framework of a reform, they are also demonstrations against the way the economy works and the intentions of the world’s masters, against a vision of the world.(….) It is significant that the mood in the continuous demonstrations expresses the idea that we may lose this battle but we have created a force and there will be another future. (…) t is a mobilization whose principal motor is a qualitative desire to change the order of things, to call into question the deadly logic of capitalism. ”Capitalism should retire,” read a placard carried on February 7.

2 We disagree for instance, with his claim that the COVID health operation has helped to address the global economic crisis. On the contrary, it has worsened the crisis. But that’s another debate.

 

 

Capitalism and war: the case of Ukraine

Along with death, famine and conquest, war was one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. They heralded the end of a world… and the coming of a new one.

—–

Humans, like other great apes, carry an inherent ‘survival drive’ in their DNA that compels them to cooperate with other members of their group. We are born with the reflexes that allow us to desire and practice cooperation and mutual aid. These are seeds that only develop in contact with the rest of the community, but which are biologically present. So why have there been so many wars, why has there been so much murderous violence between humans for thousands of years? Why have we come to develop the material means for the warlike self-destruction of our species?

Part of the answer lies in our tendency to cooperate only on the small scale of our most immediate, closest groups: the family, the people, the clan, the religious community, the ethnic group, the homeland, the social class, etc. Humans who belong to other groups can be considered as ‘outsiders’, possibly as enemies, even non-humans. Paradoxically, war, which is the product of antagonism between communities, is at the same time a factor of unity for each of them. Unity is essential for fighting.

The objects of conflict are innumerable. As with many animals, defence and the desire to expand one’s ‘vital’ territory is one of the main sources of belligerence, but it is far from being the only one. Questions of power, the subjugation of other human groups for profit, rivalries between leaders and groups of the dominant classes, conflicts over dynasties, religions or other reasons, often underpinned, consciously or unconsciously, by economic issues, are all causes of confrontation.

In this respect, we are closer to the bellicose chimpanzee than to the relatively peaceful bonobo.

From the point of view of humanity as a whole and not of a particular group of humans, there is something inhuman, self-destructive and absurd about all wars as a means of settling disputes. Overcoming these atavisms and learning to govern ourselves as a world unit, as a self-conscious species, knowing how to manage our differences without killing each other, is of course the only and necessary solution.

Often considered as utopian, a teenager’s dream, it has nevertheless been advocated and announced for a long time.

Two of the world’s best-known songs speak passionately for this: the Internationale (1871) and Imagine (1971). The chorus of the Internationale, long considered a kind of anthem of the workers’ movement, calls on us repeatedly: ‘Let us gather together, and tomorrow / The Internationale / Will be the human race’.¹

Exactly a century later John Lennon in 1971 created the song Imagine, one of the most famous songs of the 20th century, in the midst of the Vietnam War. ‘Imagine there’s no countries… Imagine all the people sharing all the world… And the world will live as one’.²

Why bring this up? Because the war in Ukraine has the specificity of occurring at a time when humanity possesses, as never before, the material means necessary for the ‘dream’ to become reality. Sharing means first of all communicating. Every Internet user today objectively possesses the means to communicate with billions of other humans, in the four corners of the planet. Even the difficulties caused by language differences are increasingly being overcome by the development of automatic translators thanks to the ever increasing speed of computers. The first quarter of the 21st century has seen an unprecedented expansion in the coverage of the Internet around the world, both in extent and density. The estimated number of Internet users worldwide has grown from 360 million in 2000 to 5.3 billion in 2021. Capitalism has stimulated this spectacular deployment as an instrument of the ‘globalisation’ of its economy, more aberrant and planetary than ever, but also as an exceptional means of control and manipulation of the population in advertising, marketing, ideology and politics. Every owner of a mobile phone carries in his pocket a secret agent of Big Brother who spies on and influences him. But however harmful and aberrant the governments’ use of this reality may be, it is nonetheless a material basis that can be, through a global revolution that wrests these structures from the power of the ruling classes, a means of ensuring that ‘the world will live as one’.

In this respect, the world in which this war is taking place is not the same as the world in which the capitalist wars of the past were fought. And this is no small difference, if we want to imagine outcomes other than the current nightmare.

On a more immediate level, the war in Ukraine is a war like so many other wars ever since society was divided into classes, with all the horrors that this barbarity entails. A butchery where men, most of them very young, are sent to kill each other in a merciless bloodbath, where the civilian population is subjected to murderous bombardments, to exactions and deprivations without limits, where the most repulsive aspects of human nature come to the surface: cruelty, a taste for murder, blind submission to hierarchies, destructive irrationality, rallying to the ‘masters’ who rule rather than fraternising with the soldiers one is charged with murdering.

As the poet Paul Valéry said: ‘War is a massacre between people who do not know each other, for the benefit of people who know each other but do not massacre each other’.³

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in April 2022, in Borodianka, 50 kilometres from Kiev, in front of the rubble left by Russian bombing: ‘There is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century.’⁴ But that’s probably not because he imagined a world without countries or wars. Guterres is playing out the UN’s eternal ritual: that of an organisation created at the end of the Second World War to ‘maintain international peace and security’. Is he unaware that the UN’s ‘blue helmets’ have often been involved in the conflicts they were supposed to ‘pacify’ (Korean War, 1950-1953; Yugoslavian wars, 1991-2001…)?

Does Guterres forget that he is at the head of a capitalist organisation, bringing together nations governed by the logic of a system that was born in war and has always lived in symbiosis with a powerful military sector and the prospect of war? Were the wars of the twentieth century, in which more than 230 million people died, any less absurd than those of the twenty-first century?⁵ In the twentieth century, the most deadly in history, this logic led to humanity developing the ability to destroy itself.

War and capitalism

‘Just as black clouds bear the storm, so capitalism bears war’

Is the famous sentence pronounced by the French socialist Jean Jaurès in his speech of 25 July 1914, a few days before his assassination and the beginning of the First World War, still valid?

At its birth, within feudalism, one of the main sources of capitalism’s development was the production and commerce of arms. In feudal society the dominant class, the nobility, was defined by its warrior function. The nobles did not pay certain taxes because they paid the ‘blood tax’. The need for weapons and means of warfare in general was naturally great.

The emerging bourgeoisie provided them not only by producing them materially but also by creating the financial instruments that allowed the concentration of the necessary mass of capital. The Venetian arsenal built in 1104 is a good illustration of this. In 1204, the arsenal built the ships carrying the knights of the Fourth Crusade. In 1297 the merchants, in order to finance the construction of ships and the undertaking of commercial voyages, resorted to a system of auctions, the ‘Incanto of trading galleys’, a true forerunner of the joint stock company. At its peak, in the early 17th century, the Arsenal employed up to 16,000 people, some of whom worked on the assembly line, and was able to produce a ship a day if necessary. These were not only commercial ships, but also military ones, as some commercial ships could be quickly converted into warships.

With the decline of Venice, the Arsenal lost its importance and it was not until the 19th century that such production conditions were restored. But it is a good example of how capitalism has been intimately linked to production for war since its birth.

Since then, capitalist nations have maintained considerable armies on a permanent basis. The most powerful of them have developed important sectors of military production, part of which is destined for countries that do not have the means to produce them.⁶

Is militarism an ‘unproductive’ expense for capitalism?

Production for military purposes is, in some respects, contradictory to capitalist economic logic. This logic, that of the accumulation of capital, requires that the profit obtained in a production cycle be subsequently employed in new means of production: on the one hand, in machines, raw materials, energy, and on the other hand, in consumer goods and the means of life of the employees and the owners of capital. But weapons and means of war cannot, by their nature, satisfy these needs. A battle tank cannot be transformed into new means of production or new means of consumption. Unless it is sold to an outsider, it is an unproductive expense, a sterile burden.

The case of Germany and Japan after the Second World War illustrates this reality. Because they were defeated in that war, both countries were condemned to have no significant military forces in the aftermath. This contributed greatly to their reconstruction and to their quickly becoming two major industrial powers again.

The irrationality of war and militarism from the strictly economic point of view of capitalist growth was theorised at the beginning of the 20th century by Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of German Social Democracy at the time, who is often referred to as the ‘Pope of Marxism’. An advocate of a ‘bourgeois’ pacifism, within the framework of a reformed capitalism, he wrote:

It is through peaceful democracy, and not through the violent methods of imperialism, that the expansionist tendencies of capital can best be promoted. (…) Capitalist industry is threatened by conflicts between different governments. Every conscious capitalist should appeal to his fellow men: Capitalists of all countries, unite!⁷

The same kind of illusions flourished at the end of the 20th century. Following the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, global military spending declined relatively in the 1990s. Many believed that we were heading for disarmament, that capitalism did not carry militarism and wars in its belly. The illusions were short-lived. Since the beginning of the 21st century, military budgets have been on the rise again, particularly in China, which has become the world’s second largest economy. (See graph below). The war in Ukraine, as it has been developing since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is in the process of making them increase colossally. More on this later.

                                           

The capitalist economy is based on property, and this property includes in particular the possession of the natural wealth of countries. It is capitalism that has created modern nations, nations that are competitive, with relationships based on power relations. Individual capitals are clustered around their national states which are the main instrument for managing these relations at the international level.

A fundamental contradiction of capitalism

This is one of the major contradictions of capitalism, already pointed out by Marx in the 19th century: on the one hand, capitalism tends to create a world market, production carried out and consumed on a global scale. But on the other hand, capitalism can escape neither its organisational framework in nations nor the competition between them.

Today’s powerful and omnipresent multinationals are a vivid manifestation of what is called ‘globalisation’. However, these companies have a nationality: the GAFAM⁸ are American, Toyota is Japanese, Total is French, Samsung is South Korean, Huawei is Chinese, etc.

Capitalists, especially those who operate internationally, are aware of this. They do everything to defend and extend their international ‘influence’ against other nations. This requires economic, logistical and diplomatic means. The current ‘New Silk Roads’ strategy of the Chinese state is a perfect example. But it also requires more brutal means, military means. The spectacular development of Chinese armaments, particularly since the beginning of the 21st century, illustrates this reality.

‘Globalisation’ has not mitigated the contradiction between the global nature of capitalist production and the national, state character of its ownership and management. It has only exacerbated it. Without an upheaval of social relations at the global level, it can only lead to new wars.

Capitalism has completely changed the way war is waged

This transformation began to take shape in the second half of the 19th century. Even at the beginning of the 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars, for example, although they mobilised more than 8 million soldiers and resulted in the death of nearly 2.5 million civilians and soldiers, were fought with methods and weapons that did not differ much from previous wars. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the first ‘modern’ war, in the sense that the weaponry and the way it was used underwent major changes through industrialisation and the use of science in military production. The First World War, half a century later, and the Second World War, two decades after that, were ‘total’ wars. The entire economy of society was mobilised for war. Human slaughter was carried out with the latest science and technology. The warring powers set up special agencies to monitor scientific research in all fields and to stimulate research that suits their war needs. Weapons became increasingly complex. Their production required ever greater scientific and industrial means (aviation, artillery, tanks, submarines, gas, wireless communication means, for example, during the First World War; radar, rocket launchers, jets, missiles, aircraft carriers, computers, the atomic bomb, etc. during the Second World War). Capitalism has transformed war and war has transformed capitalism. All means are good to create means to kill and destroy. Many of the inventions that are transforming people’s lifestyles have their origins in military research and development: airliners and nuclear power, laser scanners and computers, microwave ovens (derived from radar) and the Internet…

For all these reasons, the ‘military-industrial’ sector has become a decisive part of the economy and politics of the major powers since the First World War. Its importance has been growing ever since. The term “military-industrial complex” was used by US President Eisenhower in his speech at the end of his two terms in January 1961. He warned of the power that this sector could play in the running of the country:

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions (…) In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist…

History has not belied his warning. The influence of the military-industrial complex is all the more important in some countries because the export of military equipment is an important aspect of their economy. This is a privilege of the few countries that dominate the sector. Over the period 2017-2021, for example, five countries account for almost 80% of arms exports: the United States (39%), Russia (19%), France (11%), China (4.6%) and Germany (4.5%).⁹ But countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Israel, South Korea and Italy should also be included in this club.

Both Putin’s and Biden’s power is largely the result of their good relations with their respective military-industrial complexes. Putin, as soon as he came to power in 2000, oversaw a restructuring and modernisation of this sector. As for Biden, throughout his political career he has been a hawk and on very good terms with the military sector. The CEO of Raytheon, one of the latter’s most important companies, declared on the eve of Biden’s election: ‘Defense has always been a bipartisan issue and when Biden was vice president, and previously as senator, I think he had a pretty good approach to national defense. He understood the need to work both sides of the aisle and to provide for the national defense.’¹⁰

In the same sense of this interpenetration between economic-political capitalism and its military sector, more and more evidence now shows that during the COVID crisis, the Pentagon in the US was at the forefront of its management.

The greed, the interests of the military-industrial complex, especially the American and Russian, are not enough to explain the current war in Ukraine. But they are part of the reality that bears this war… ‘just as black clouds bear the storm’.

The case of Ukraine

‘Truth is always the first casualty in war’¹¹

Rarely has this well-known saying been truer than today, when ‘public relations’, in fact the manipulation of populations by governments, commands unprecedented material resources, including specialised companies at an international level employing tens of thousands of people, such as McKinsey (38,000 employees by 2021).

Before addressing the issues of geopolitics and the lies that warring governments use at this level to justify their crimes, I would like to make a few remarks on the deceptive, corrupt, poisonous atmosphere that reigns in the circles where decisions concerning the conflict are taken.

At this level, the opposing sides victimise the truth with two types of lies ‘by omission’. The first concerns the bloody reality of the war. The images of mass graves of dead or wounded soldiers, in the prime of life, torn apart by increasingly deadly munitions, sometimes abandoned without even being buried, registered as ‘missing’ in the statistics,¹² the corpses of civilians who have fallen victim to the bombardments, all this reality of the ongoing butchery is hidden, or barely shown, in the ‘news’ spewed out by the televised media under the strict control of the governments and the staffs. This is illustrated by the opacity of the casualty figures.¹³ Instead, images of fire-breathing cannons, different types of tanks, missiles and other ultra-modern weapons proliferate, their effectiveness proven by images of material damage, for example, of disabled tanks, preferably those of the enemy army. Showing blood, the truth of human slaughter, the anguish of 18-year-old soldiers forced to go to the front, would weaken the effectiveness of war propaganda.

Both in Russia and Ukraine new laws have recently been enacted to punish even more severely those who spread ‘false information’, i.e. those who show what this war is really about.

The second type of lie ‘by omission’ concerns the reality of the ruling classes that are fomenting this war. Both in Russia and in Ukraine there is the specific feature of the presence of ‘oligarchs’, billionaires who made their fortune in the years following the collapse of the USSR, to which both countries belonged, thanks to the ‘privatisation’ of entire sectors of the economy. Corruption, which was already chronic in the former regime, has assumed unprecedented proportions, intertwined with the progressively privatised military-industrial complexes, with the participation of Western companies, especially in Ukraine.

Without going into detail, a few facts illustrate this unsavoury reality.

Let’s take the example of the new Ukrainian hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, president of the country since May 2019, who has become a star in the Western media and places of power, where he regularly appears to ask the Western powers for more and more weapons and promises in exchange the fresh cannon fodder of his country’s youth. When he addressed the US Congress in December 2022, his speech was interrupted 18 times by standing ovations. This former comedian came to power under the guidance of one of the country’s richest and ‘shadiest’ oligarchs, Ihor Kolomoysky. The latter was later suspected by the US administration of money laundering, accused of ‘aggravated corruption’ and banned, along with his family, from entering the US. For form’s sake, in July 2022 Zelensky was obliged to strip him of his Ukrainian nationality. It should be remembered that Zelensky himself was implicated in the autumn of 2021 by the Pandora Papers, a year-long study by 600 journalists that revealed the corruption of 35 current and former world leaders and 300 senior officials in 90 countries.¹⁴

Corruption in the Ukrainian political caste is such that the European Union has had to make the fight against it a condition for Ukraine’s potential membership and the payment of massive aid for the war in that country. It is common to find handguns given to Ukraine for the war on sale in Marseille, or part of the funds donated by the EU directly deposited in private accounts in Switzerland. Thus, at the end of January 2023, on the eve of a meeting with EU representatives, Zelensky proceeded to dramatically sack some members of his government. Ironically, at the same time, the EU was facing corruption scandals in its parliament, the so-called ‘Qatargate’ and ‘Moroccogate’, revealing that the institution is itself deeply plagued by this characteristic evil of capitalism. (It is estimated that there are more than 30,000 lobbyists in Brussels responsible for these practices).

Finally, this brief overview of the lies of omission on the moral qualities of those who orchestrate the massacre in the Western camp would be incomplete without recalling that the main actor, the United States, is headed by Joe Biden, who was for 36 years the senator of the State of Delaware, one of the main, if not the main, ‘tax haven’ on the planet.¹⁵

The atmosphere is no less poisonous in Russia, among the so-called ‘elites’. Since the beginning of 2022 and the ‘special military operation’, important oligarchs and businessmen have disappeared, victims of strange ‘accidental’ deaths. An English website has listed 25 such disappearances during 2022. Some of them are members of Putin’s party, some of them having been critical of the war in Ukraine, such as Pavel Antov, who was found on Christmas Day in a pool of blood at the foot of the hotel where he was staying on holiday in India. Another, Pavel Pchelnikov, is said to have committed suicide on the balcony of his flat, another, Grigory Kochenov, is said to have fallen from his balcony while his flat was being searched…¹⁶

Another particularly significant example of the atmosphere in which war decisions are taken is the character of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a ‘businessman’, close to Putin, head of the now famous Wagner group, founded in 2014, and counting 50,000 mercenaries. Prigozhin, sentenced ‘in 1981, caught stealing, and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment for robbery, fraud, and involving teenagers in crime’, then released in 1990, has become an influential figure in the Kremlin, hailed as a patriot with a brutal and expeditious but particularly effective manner. He is known for his recruitment methods, offering to acquit common prisoners of their sentences, whatever they may be, in exchange for six months’ participation in the war in Ukraine. Mercenary soldiering is illegal in Russia and acquitting prisoners requires complex legal requirements. But Prigozhin can get past all that. And it works.¹⁷

The geopolitics of war and the lies that accompany it

Now to the discourse that is supposed to ‘justify’ the carnage.

Propaganda from the Ukrainian side

The authorities repeat a simple discourse to be ‘understandable by all’, in particular by those who will have to go to the front. It can be summarised as follows:

On 24 February 2022 Russian troops entered Ukraine with hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers armed to the teeth, supported by air and sea assets. They obey the orders of a character, Vladimir Putin, who dreams of being the tsar, or Stalin depending on the version, of a reconstituted Russian empire. It is normal that Ukraine should defend itself. It is natural that the countries of the European Union and the United States should come to its aid because they are ‘democratic’ countries like Ukraine. It is a question of defending common values against the will of a character who has suddenly become the equivalent of a modern Hitler.

This is more or less the essence of the propaganda. The reality is obviously much more complex, and the aggressions are just as complex.

The current war in Ukraine can only be understood as a continuation of the events triggered by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Since then, the policy of Western countries, led by the United States and the European Union, has been to extend their influence over the many republics whose independence Russia had to recognise. Thus, in 18 years, NATO, the military organisation under the control of the United States, has integrated 13 of these countries. In 1999: Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic; in 2009: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia; in 2009: Albania and Croatia; in 2017: Montenegro.

Russia is practically surrounded on its western front. It is only ‘protected’ from the NATO bloc by Belarus and Ukraine.

Ukraine is particularly important militarily for Russia (and consequently for NATO countries):

• Ukraine has a military industry that was previously integrated into the military-industrial complex of the USSR and then of Russia;
• Ukraine was Russia’s main access to the warm seas, in particular the naval base of Sevastopol in Crimea;
• with its 1580 km border with Russia, Ukraine offers a dangerous access to its territory.

For Russia, its integration into NATO has rightly been seen as a ‘red line’ not to be crossed; it has made this clear since 1991, and more specifically after the annual NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, where a text was adopted declaring that Ukraine and Georgia ‘would become members’.

But it is not only the military aspect. Ukraine is also a country rich in metals.

The country’s subsoil contains considerable deposits estimated by the Ukrainian geological services to be worth $7.5 trillion. Ukraine is ranked fifth in the world for its reserves of iron, graphite and manganese – two critical elements for the production of electric batteries. It is also the world’s sixth largest producer of titanium, a strategic metal for aircraft production, and has large deposits of lithium, copper, cobalt and rare earths, which are used in energy as well as in electronics and defence. (….) In 2010, large deposits of shale gas were discovered in the Kharkiv region in Yuzivska (…) Off the coast of Crimea, at the same time, large oil and gas deposits were discovered in the Black Sea.¹⁸

The development of these mineral riches has allowed the United States, as well as countries in its sphere of influence including the European Union but also countries such as Australia, to undertake a kind of ‘colonisation’ of Ukraine from within. Aided by the greed of the oligarchs and the prevailing corruption,¹⁹ they have systematically taken part in more and more projects to exploit Ukraine’s mineral and oil resources, especially since 2014, when the last pro-Russian president (Viktor Yanukovych) was deposed in favour of a ‘pro-Western’ president, Petro Poroshenko.²⁰

In reality, since its ‘independence’, Ukraine has been the theatre of a permanent confrontation between the pro-Russian and pro-Western factions, each receiving material aid and advice from its favourites. Without going into detail, we can point out some particularly striking moments in the evolution of the balance of power. The ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004 led to the difficult victory of a pro-Western candidate in 2005, Viktor Yushchenko, despite his poisoning during the election campaign (never clarified). In 2010, the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych won the presidential elections and remained in power until 2014. At the end of 2013, he renounced the signing of an association agreement with the European Union and announced that he would relaunch a dialogue with Russia. This triggered a series of pro-European demonstrations in Kiev involving hundreds of thousands of people. This is the so-called ‘Maidan Revolution’. A violent crackdown left 75 demonstrators shot dead on Thursday 20 February 2014. On 22 February the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, voted to remove Yanukovych from office. Russia spoke of a fascist coup. In fact, it was practically a declaration of war against Russia.

Russia immediately responded by occupying Crimea and sending soldiers to the Ukrainian border and inside south-eastern Ukraine to support the separatist forces. At first these were Russian soldiers ‘without insignia’. In June 2014 a new president was elected, Petro Poroshenko, one of the richest oligarchs in the country, openly pro-Western.

This is the real beginning of the war in Ukraine, known as the Donbass War. ‘The war before the war’. For eight years the population of eastern Ukraine has endured a so-called ‘hybrid war’ which, according to the United Nations, has resulted in more than 14,000 deaths, including 3,400 civilians, 4,600 Ukrainian forces, 6,500 separatist forces and 500 Russian soldiers.²¹ Nearly one and a half million people were displaced.

In May 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine in the circumstances mentioned above. His policy continued and intensified the war against the autonomists and separatists. In 2021, tensions with Russia intensified and the latter strengthened its military presence on the border with Ukraine, in Belarus and in Crimea. On 21 February 2022, Russia recognised the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Three days later it invaded Ukraine.

As we can see, if it is indeed a decision by Putin, its origin is not in the brain or the megalomaniac madness of an individual, but in the evolution of a balance of power that has been evolving for three decades and constitutes a real provocation. A balance of power whose initiators and builders have been, for the past thirty years, the United States and, more or less behind them, the NATO countries.

The balance of power within NATO

Before addressing the arguments of Russian propaganda, it is worth digressing here to consider what has happened and is happening between the great powers within NATO.

To understand the relations between the capitalist governments, it is useful to have in mind the images of the Chicago gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s. Between capitalist powers, anyone can be an ally or a rival at any given time, brute force, without scruples, as with the Mafia, is the general rule.

The war in Ukraine provides a good example of this, but not only at the level of the countries that confront each other militarily. It is also the case within NATO. The way the United States has behaved and is behaving with some of its major ‘allies’, Germany and France in particular, is a good example.

In recent years, there have been increasing tendencies to question the global dominance of the number one ‘godfather’, the United States: the world’s leading economic power, the largest producer and exporter of arms, the only country with 800 military bases on the planet, the only one to issue a currency that is generally accepted on all markets and remains the most important for international trade and reserves… With the spectacular economic and military development of China, with the tendency of European countries to become more independent and to assert their own projects, the terms “multilateralism” or “multipolarity” have become fashionable as a kind of claim to be fulfilled.

In November 2019, Macron declared in an interview with The Economist, ‘What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.’ He argued for the need to build ‘Firstly, European defence – Europe must become autonomous in terms of military strategy and capability.’ He advocated ‘secondly, we need to reopen a strategic dialogue, without being naive and which will take time, with Russia’.²² For its part, Germany continued to develop its policy of cooperation with Russia, which had been underway since the late 1990s. During his two terms in office (1998-2005) Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had even developed a certain ‘friendship’ with Putin. In 1997, the project for a gas pipeline (Nord Stream) was launched, with work starting at the end of 2005 for effective commissioning in 2012. Then the Nord Stream 2 project was launched.

The US government opposed it in 2017. In 2018, at the NATO summit, President Trump warned Germany that it was becoming too dependent on Russia.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has allowed the United States to reassert its power and crush the will for independence in NATO. The European allies have been brought back into line. Germany must accept the destruction of Nord Stream 2 without flinching. Cynically, Biden had announced that during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz a few days before Russia invaded Ukraine.²³ The US has not stopped there. It supports sanctions imposing an embargo on Russian oil and gas, and then offers its oil to Europeans, but at prices that are four times higher, as EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton complained on French television.²⁴

In France, the former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces (2014-2017), General Pierre de Villiers, declared in November 2022: ‘The war in Ukraine is not in the interest of European countries… Certainly not for France, perhaps for the Americans’.²⁵

End of the digression. Let us return to the arguments used by the belligerents to justify the ongoing butchery.

Russia’s propaganda

The main justifications of the Russian authorities for the intervention in Ukraine focus on two axes:

1. the protection of the Russian-speaking population, which would be systematically “discriminated against” and militarily attacked by the Ukrainian governments, which would forbid the use of the Russian language;
2. the ‘denazification’ of the country, which would otherwise be in thrall to ultra-nationalist “Nazi” forces.

As for the first explanation, we should remember the reality: Ukrainian is Ukraine’s official language, but Russian is the native language of nearly 20 per cent of the population. This is even the case for Volodymyr Zelensky, who used to do most of his comedy shows in Russian. It is said that he had to take lessons to correct his Russian accent during his election campaign in Ukrainian. Russian is very close to Ukrainian and many Ukrainians speak it fluently. It has never been banned in Ukraine. It was only following Russia’s occupation of Crimea and its intervention in the Donbass, where it armed and supported the separatists, that a more discriminatory attitude towards pro-Russians was encouraged.

The second justification, ‘denazification’, is based on a degree of reality. It is true that there are ultra-nationalist, para-military movements in Ukraine, some of which do not hesitate to claim neo-Nazi values. This is the case of the famous Azov Battalion, best known for its action during the Maidan events and its ‘martyrdom’ during the conquest of the Azovstal factory in Mariupol by the Russian army. Since then, it has been integrated into the national army and has had to change its flag, which looked too much like a swastika. Another example is the rehabilitation after 2014 of the historical figure Stepan Bandera and his movement the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), who were presented as heroes and precursors of Ukrainian nationalism against the USSR, but who had during the Second World War cooperated for a period with Nazi Germany and its anti-Semitic practices. But whatever the influence of the ultra-nationalist currents, the Russian propaganda about the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine is grimly absurd.

This is the “pot calling the kettle black”, as Russia’s political regime is itself not so different from Nazi Germany in terms of civil liberties. As for the values of the Wagner mercenary group, they are not dissimilar to those of the Azov Battalion, including the sympathies within them for Nazi ideals. Finally, Putin’s recent celebration of the 80th anniversary of the victory of Stalingrad, the deadliest battle of the 20th century, with nearly two million dead, with a lot of military parades and the inauguration in Volgograd (the new name of Stalingrad) of a new bust of Stalin, the man who in 1932 and 1933 orchestrated the Holodomor, the great famine in Ukraine, which resulted in nearly 5 million deaths, is a grim illustration of the dreams of the psychopaths who are leading this new hecatomb.

What are the prospects?

Government announcements

Statements from the various sides clearly suggest that the war will be a long one. Putin, speaking to a high-level military audience in Moscow in December 2022, made it clear that the war in Ukraine would change dimension. He said that the entire West was fighting a proxy war in Ukraine and that Russia’s response would rise to the challenge. ‘The country, the government will give everything that the army asks for. Everything!’ At the same meeting Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said it was necessary to increase the size of the armed forces to 1.5 million, including 695,000 contracted personnel. The age limit for military service will be raised.²⁶

It is true that it is practically ‘the whole of the West’ that is in one way or another waging a ‘proxy’ war in Ukraine, i.e. using only Ukrainian cannon fodder. Wikipedia provides a (very long) list of countries providing ‘aid’ to Ukraine and the content of this ‘aid’ to the ongoing carnage. A war is not only fought with weapons, it also requires enormous logistics, including materiel, medical and financial resources, etc. This list, which is not exhaustive, begins in 2014.²⁷

The Western camp is also preparing for a prolonged war. At the meeting in Ramstein, in the largest US military structure in Europe, in January 2023, bringing together the defence ministers of Kiev’s allies (about fifty) around the US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, an attempt was made to agree (not without difficulty) on the new resources to be provided to Ukraine. Here too it was clear that the conflict would not end immediately. Lloyd Austin, for example, said that it would be ‘very difficult’ to dislodge the Russian army from Ukrainian territory before the end of this year. It was stressed that a Russian army counter-offensive was imminent and would be costly in terms of material goods and human lives, hence the urgent need to speed up the delivery of new assets, in particular new, more powerful, longer-range weapons, etc.

The support is already enormous: $47 billion from the United States, including $26 billion in arms, and €18 billion from the European Union. But we are far from the end. The war in Ukraine, as we have already said, is causing a veritable explosion in military budgets in most countries. In the wake of this, Germany and France are discussing the possibility of reintroducing compulsory military service. In Denmark they want to extend it to women.

For the military-industrial complex this is a welcome boon. The dream and prophecy in January 2022 of Gregory Hayes, the CEO of Raytheon (him again), is coming true:

I think again recognizing we are there to defend democracy and the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the business over time. Everything that’s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at DoD or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business over the next coming years.²⁸

After the billions of dollars that COVID’s health operation brought into the global economy, helping to address the global economic crisis that has been brewing since the late 2010s, the military windfall is taking over.

What prospects for those who are subjected to it?

Unlike the beginning of the First World War in France, where soldiers went to war proudly and ‘with a flourish’, when conscription for the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, patriotic enthusiasm did not prevail in either Russia or Ukraine. The borders of the countries bordering Russia and Ukraine saw an influx of hundreds of thousands of men trying to escape conscription. Some estimates put the figure for Russia at over a million. Those who could afford it did not hesitate to offer thousands of dollars to border officials, especially in Georgia and Moldova, to escape patriotic duty. For a few days the price of air tickets to cities like Istanbul, for example, when there were any left, reached astronomical sums. The poorest were bitterly resigned.

In Russia, the call for the mobilisation of 300,000 men was made on 21 September 2022. Spontaneous demonstrations broke out in Moscow and in 32 cities in the provinces. Women were particularly active: ‘Our children are not fertiliser’, ‘No to war’. Military recruitment offices were set on fire in several towns. The repression was not long in coming. From 22 September at least 1,300 Russians were arrested, according to the NGO OVD-Info26. During the year 2022, the Russian parliament, the Duma, multiplied laws, most of them repressive. ‘The largest number of laws in the history of the parliament, a record since the end of the Soviet Union’, its president boasted. The newspaper Le Monde wrote: ‘On 21 December, for example, a law was adopted punishing incitement to sabotage with prison sentences of up to life – a tailor-made text to combat the incessant burning of military recruitment offices’.²⁹ A law provides for ten years’ imprisonment for citizens who do not respond to the mobilisation order, and the same sentence for those who surrender without fighting.

In Ukraine, martial law was imposed on 22 February, calling in all conscripts and reservists for a period of 90 days. It will be regularly extended thereafter. All men aged between 18 and 60 were forbidden to leave the territory. The army’s conscription services collect men from their homes manu militari.³⁰

Ukrainian law has punished desertion and disobedience in the army from the start. But in January 2023 Zelensky felt the need to make these laws even more severe and enacted a law, which was contested by NGOs: ‘Twelve years in prison for desertion, up to ten years for disobedience or refusal to fight and up to seven years for threatening a superior officer.’³¹ Are Ukrainian soldiers starting to have doubts?

Both sides accuse the enemy of using units to shoot at retreating soldiers. In the Russian camp the task is attributed to Wagner’s mercenaries or to the ‘kadyrovtsy’ of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, known for his cruelty and loyalty to Putin.

Winter in Ukraine is long. From December to February the average temperature is – 2°. It can reach -20°, as a Ukrainian soldier interviewed in a television report complained from the bottom of a trench. The fighting is particularly hard and deadly.

The civilian population is often deprived of electricity and water as a result of the Russian army’s shelling of infrastructure. In both camps, military cemeteries are multiplying.

***

In the wars between capitalist nations there is not only war between nations. Within each nation there is also a class war, the war that forces the most numerous classes, the classes that have the least means to escape conscription, to pay the ‘blood tax’. The war that forces the most deprived civilian population to suffer most cruelly the disasters caused by the barbarity of a system that ‘bears war as black clouds bear the storm’.

At the beginning of this text I mentioned two songs, the Internationale and Lennon’s Imagine.

In conclusion, I would like to quote two excerpts from them here:

The kings make us drunk with their fumes,
Peace among ourselves, war to the tyrants!
Let the armies go on strike,
Guns in the air, and break ranks
If these cannibals insist
In making heroes of us,
Soon they will know our bullets
Are for our generals

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one

Raoul Victor, 10 February 2023

Notes:

1The Internationale was originally a poem written by Eugène Pottier in June 1871 in Paris, in the midst of the repression of the Paris Commune (20,000 communards executed), after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 (almost 200,000 dead). The music was composed by the Belgian Pierre Degeyter in Lille in 1888.

2Lennon is supposed to have said of the song that it was ‘Anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted…’, and in an open letter to Paul MacCartney he wrote that Imagine was ‘ “Working Class Hero” with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself’.

3‘La guerre, c’est le massacre de gens qui ne se connaissent pas, au profit de gens qui se connaissent et ne se massacrent pas’. Paul Valéry was a French poet who died in 1945.

4https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/28/un-secretary-general-describes-war-in-ukraine-as-absurdity-in-21st-century

5http://meridien.canalblog.com/archives/2006/10/05/2837833.html

6In 2010, out of more than 190 countries, about 30 states have no army. But with the exception of Costa Rica and Panama, with populations of 5 and 4 million respectively, all other countries have populations of less than 500,000. In general, they have a “defence agreement” with a military power.

7 https://wikirouge.net/Super-impérialisme

All the deputies of the German Social Democracy nevertheless voted for war credits in 1914. Only a radical minority, the future Spartakists, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, violently rejected this “treason”. As early as 1911 Rosa Luxemburg wrote: ‘militarism can only be abolished from the world with the destruction of the capitalist class state (…) militarism in both its forms – as war and as armed peace – is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism’ (Peace Utopias).

8 GAFAM is an acronym for Google , Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (translator’s note)

9https://www.amnesty.fr/controle-des-armes/actualites/2021-5-plus-gros-marchands-armes

10https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/27/raytheon-ceo-its-ridiculous-to-think-biden-may-cut-defense-spending.html

11This quote is variously attributed, amongst others to Arthur Ponsonby, one of the rare British MPs to vote against entry into World War I and (in 1928) author of Falsehood in War-Time, an investigation into the falsehoods circulated by British propaganda during the war.

12A must read in this respect: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64446436

13The casualty figures since the invasion of Ukraine are therefore very rarely quoted in the media. The authorities of the belligerent countries always tend to overestimate the figures for the enemy side and underestimate those of their own side. In Wikipedia in French or English, one can find different estimates from different sources and covering periods that are not always comparable. But we can deduce an order of magnitude for the first 11 months since 24 February 2022, the date of the invasion of Ukraine. They give an idea of the scale of the massacre already carried out: around 100,000 dead and wounded on each side and almost 40,000 victims among the civilian population. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War

14See the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/03/revealed-anti-oligarch-ukrainian-president-offshore-connections-volodymyr-zelenskiy

15https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2022/06/delaware-is-everywhere-how-a-little-known-tax-haven-made-the-rules-for-corporate-america/

http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/Archive2009/FSI-2009/FSI%20-%20Rankings%20-%202009.pdf

16See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_businessmen_mystery_deaths

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64101437

17https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin

18https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_production_in_Ukraine

http://spartacus1918.canalblog.com/archives/2022/12/22/39754428.html

19According to Transparency International’s corruption index of 180 countries, Ukraine ranked 122nd in 2021, while Russia ranked 136th. See https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021

20In April 2014, Jo Biden, then Obama’s vice president, came to Ukraine on an official visit to show US support for the country’s ‘territorial integrity’. In June 2014, Hunter Biden, his son, joined the board of Burisma, an oil exploration and exploitation company, headed by the oligarch Mykola Zlotchevsky. The company is based in Kiev but registered in Limassol, Cyprus, a tax haven popular with Russian oligarchs and others. It then became one of the main shareholdings of Sunrise Energy Resources, a company under the general regime of Delaware, the American State whose connection to the Biden family we have already mentioned.
In June 2021, the European Union set up a ‘Strategic Partnership between the EU and Ukraine’ for the exploitation and production of raw materials and batteries. See https://eitrawmaterials.eu/eit-rawmaterials-and-erma-join-the-high-level-conference-on-the-strategic-partnership-between-the-eu-and-ukraine-on-critical-raw-materials-and-batteries/

21https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War

22https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/emmanuel-macron-in-his-own-words-english

23https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8

24https://www.francesoir.fr/politique-monde/les-pays-europeens-accusent-les-etats-unis-de-profiter-guerre-ukraine

25https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/la-guerre-en-ukraine-n-est-pas-dans-l-interet-des-pays-europeens-estime-le-general-pierre-de-villiers-20221110

26https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/21/vladimir-putin-promises-army-anything-it-asks-for-as-invasion-enters-11th-month

27https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign_aid_to_Ukraine_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War

The list exists in several languages, including Chinese, but the English one seems to be the most complete and the least outdated.

28https://hbr.org/2022/03/raytheon-ceo-gregory-hayes-how-ukraine-has-highlighted-gaps-in-us-defense-technologies

29 Le Monde, 31 December 2022

30 ‘Ukraine has visibly stepped up mobilisation activities in the first two months of this year. There have been reports of draft notices issued (and sometimes violently enforced) at military funerals in Lviv, checkpoints in Kharkiv, shopping centres in Kyiv and on street corners in Odessa. Popular ski resorts lie deserted despite the first proper snows of the winter: footage of military officials snooping around on the slopes was enough to keep the crowds away. In every town and city across the country social-media channels share information about where recruitment officers may be lurking.’ (The Economist, 26 February 2023), https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy

31 https://www.kyivpost.com/post/11498