collective on foreign affairs
12th January 2024
1] INTRODUCTI0N
While there was no media presentations nor news publications in the United Kingdom on 8 January 2024 regarding Ukraine by the BBC, Financial Times and Guardian – this may be said as having no news is good news. However, situational events in Ukraine are still evolving rather at a quickening pace.
On the 29th of December Russia had launched swarms of drones and missiles against Ukrainian weapon factories and depots.
Ukraine responded on new year’s eve with a missile attack against the Russian city of Belgorod. The attack led to a number of civilian casualties whereon Russia responded with attacks on Kharkiv where a hotel frequently used by western personnel was destroyed.
On new year’s eve Ukraine also fired missiles into the center of Donetzk city; Russia then launched a few dozens of drones towards Odessa. In both cities several people were killed and wounded.
Jaquese Baud, in an excerpt from his new book published by Postil, points to Russia’s inherent advantage on this continuing warfare:
The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas outsiders tend to see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We have had ignored the contexts that both in waging conflicts that we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars ……
This needs to be understood in the context that at the start of the war in Ukraine, the government of President Zelenski monopolised all television news:
Since the days of Russia’s transborder special military operation, the people of Ukraine have had access to a single source of television news: the Telemarathon United News which has been a major tool of Ukraine’s information war deluding many an Ukrainian into believing that the country can win the war……..
However, in Lies Do Not Win Wars – Ukrainian propaganda, with support from western media, the neoconservative ISW and the disinformation branch of Britain’s Ministry of Defense, has been full of lies and exaggerations.
2] ANALYSES
Since the real war is lost on the ground and, over time, its reality is beginning to seep in – as even acknowledged by western media (see csloh, Ukraine Unwavering Unmasked) and
Chas Freeman in Unheard on The propaganda that damned Ukraine, it is said that often it’s western betrayal of the worst type: not throwing in an once-adopted-ally under any bus wheels, but preferably meshed by a Humvee or better an Abram’s M1.
In a new piece by Gordon Hahn describing the atmosphere in Ukraine as pre-revolutionary:
Kiev is now gripped by crisis politics. With the Ukraine’s defense lines and army in slow-motion collapse and extreme discontent among top military commanders and across the political elite, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy is fighting for his political and personal survival. More importantly, the stakes could not be higher for the Maidan regime’s coalition of nationalists, neofascist, corruptionaires, new oligarchs, and the occasional republican. Meanwhile, the young Ukrainian state, based on still poorly consolidated quasi-republican institutions and a nationalist ideology, is at risk of disintegration, dissolution, and even disappearance. It surrounded by growing threats: the Russian army, angry Ukrainian soldiers and commanders, Kiev’s financial and economic insolvency and dissipation, popular desperation, and the risk of palace or military coups, even a new ‘Galician’ civil war.
Panic among Western analysts about Ukraine’s looming defeat has escalated.
Robert Clark, on the other hand, writing in the U.K. Telegraph, wailed his lamentation in an op-ed titled, Ukraine’s new year may end with a brutal Western betrayal. Clark blames Western leaders for Ukraine’s debacle:
The mood in 2024 is very different. The counter-offensive failed to deliver a decisive blow to Putin’s forces in the south. Russia’s economy has withstood Western sanctions, rapidly militarising to provide an ongoing stream of munitions to the front. Ukraine, meanwhile, is undergoing one of the largest aerial bombardments since the war began, and its united front is beginning to fray as conscription takes its toll. . . .
To turn our backs now on the Ukrainian people, so swiftly after months of brutal fighting, is morally bankrupt and strategically negligent.
It is understandable, if not forgivable, that governments have begun questioning their levels of commitment to a deeply destructive war with no end in sight. At best there now appears to be a likely short to medium term stalemate across much of the 1,000 kilometre front line.
Meanwhile, Western economies and budgets are still grappling with recovery from the pandemic and last year’s energy shock. Global supply chains are still in flux, and as the Middle East flares up the Houthis are increasingly able to dictate the terms of trade and passage in the Red Sea, delivering another blow to a fragile global economy.
And the proverbial elephant in the Ukraine war room – a Republican administration potentially returning to the White House in twelve months-time – raises the spectre of a sudden stop to American funding. Even the current Biden administration has struggled with a mutinous Congress. In the EU, meanwhile, Viktor Orbán has been blocking the transfer of funds.
Meanwhile, Colonel Jacque Baud, a Swiss officer, a strategic intelligence and a former head of the United Nations peace operations doctrine, is not saddled with the analytical deficiencies of Mr. Clark. Baud is author of a new book, The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat, and presents a detailed breakdown of Ukraine’s hopeless task. He summarizes the problem succinctly:
The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem. . . .
The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars……
It can be expressed that it does not matter if the United States Congress decides to pour another $60 billion dollars into the yawning maw that is Ukraine. Money cannot buy Kiev trained soldiers. Money cannot buy Kiev an effective air defense to stop the Russian onslaught of hypersonic missiles. That is what Jacque Baud gets and Robert Clark misses.
Another way looking at the trans-border special military operation by interpreting the Russian incursion of Ukraine has sharpened the commitment of Western governments to a liberal vision of international order. However, countries in the Global South shall regard the rules-based order as non-existence or applicable but an artificial Western construct, (Bobo Lo, Lowy Institute).
3] CONCLUSION
Hahn’s conclusion [where his full essay is archived HERE] is that regardless of who engineers a coup or undertakes a revolutionary regime transformation, the outcome of any such initiative may not be controllable. Whoever might succeed in rising to and consolidating power will be in question for some time, and it is unclear whether any united state organization can be established by one or several allied forces in the event. Some force or coalition might be able to dismantle the Zelenskiy government or the entire Maidan regime, but they might not be capable of consolidating power and building integrated authority. Chaos and social or state collapse cannot be excluded.
Firestorms 