14.12.2023
Notes on the war
With the failure of Zelensky’s offensive there can be no doubt that there is a stalemate now. Perfect conditions for unofficial ceasefires and fraternisation, argues Jack Conrad
After nearly five months of desperate fighting, what has Volodymyr Zelensky’s offensive delivered? Well, predictably, precious little.1 Even Zelensky himself now admits it did not “achieve desired results”.2 Previously, he had, after all, torn a strip off Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, general Valery Zalzhny, for saying that the war has reached a “stalemate”.3 What with Gaza, an always fickle western media has largely lost interest and the danger, from Zelensky’s point of view, is that the GOP will eventually move to cut off supplies of money and arms entirely. The Senate has already voted 48 to 45 to block Joe Biden’s latest $61 billion funding package amid a grandstanding squabble over the Mexican border and US immigration policy.4
True, Ukrainian missile, UAV and sea drone attacks forced most of Russia’s Black Sea fleet to relocate away from Crimea to Novorossiysk. However, territorial gains have been minimal. There is the bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river near the village of Krynsky. But Ukrainian troops are boxed in and suffer relentless artillery bombardment. The poor sods complain of a “lack of drinking water” and being sent into the jaws of “hell”.5 The odds are that the Krynsky bridgehead will be abandoned some time soon - holding it over the winter months would be a miracle.
Note, the Dnipro does not freeze in the winter to the point of allowing lorries to safely cross, as with Leningrad’s 1941-43 Road of Life, but nor can boats normally operate due to shattering ice flows. Of course, the ultimate go-ahead to scuttle must come from Zelensky himself.
Meanwhile, on the main southern and eastern fronts, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers have been dying daily, leading, understandably, to an increasing reluctance of young men to serve in the military. More and more of them are “fleeing conscription”.6 Certainly, Ukraine cannot afford another such offensive: supplies of willing cannon fodder have all but been exhausted.
Incidentally, US and UK top brass were heavily involved in planning the failed offensive - the American hotheads wanting it to begin in April. They thought a single, determined southern thrust towards Melitopol, fronted by Ukraine’s newly acquired armour, would break through Russia’s defences. In the best-case scenario, the Pentagon’s wargamers envisaged the Ukrainian army reaching the Azov Sea, within “60-90 days”.7 Russian-held territory would thereby be sliced in two. A pipe dream.
CIA director William J Burns was sceptical and put the chances of a Ukrainian breakthrough at only 50:50. But even he and the so-called US ‘intelligence community’ must be disappointed with the negligible results on the ground. As for Ukrainian military officials, they feared suffering “catastrophic losses” and that indeed is what happened (though actual casualty figures are a state secret).8 Attacking in three prongs, the first contact with the enemy shattered any illusions of a breakthrough: Ukrainian troops were overwhelmed by artillery fire, and losses of men, fighting vehicles and tanks were, yes, “catastrophic”.9
But the Ukrainians had no choice in the matter. Promising a game-changing spring offensive, even if it only came in the summer, helped persuade the US and its allies into stumping up extra high end arms deliveries: Leopard 2 battle tanks, long-range Storm Shadow missiles and F-16s. Then there is the finance needed to pay for the salaries of Ukraine’s civil servants and politicians, keeping its banks afloat and its economy from tipping over into complete free fall.
Without a ‘big push’ there existed a real risk of public opinion in the west becoming disenchanted. Why do we suffer from falling real wages, increased taxes, deteriorating public services and job losses for what appears to an unwinnable proxy war against Russia? Indeed there are already signs that wide swathes of the population are arriving at such conclusions and not only in Germany - the “sick man of Europe,” which has, of course, taken the biggest economic hit, with Russian oil and gas being sanctioned.10
According to a recent Gallop poll, some 41% of Americans think the Biden administration is doing too much to help Ukraine - a rise from 24% in August 2022 and 29% in June 2023. Thirty-three percent (down from 43% in June) say the US is doing the right amount, while 25% believe it is not doing enough.11 So the shift in public opinion is palpable … and this will matter in November 2024, with a Donald Trump versus Joe Biden contest seemingly on the cards.
Leave aside the grossly undemocratic nature of the presidential election system - ie, the state-based electoral college - Trump has a clear lead in most opinion surveys. He promises not to be a dictator: “Except for day one”.12 Perhaps the military will intervene before that to save the US from Trump by imposing their own dictatorship - who knows? But the slide towards some form of Bonapartism is unmistakable.
Either way, hard-right Republicans - not the DSA’s Squad - are increasingly open about opposing Biden’s pledge to “stand with Ukraine as long as it needs, as long as it requires”. Trumpists care little about “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing” (Iran and China are, strangely, another matter).
Siege warfare
With the onset of winter and fierce Russian counterattacks, especially in the east around Avdiivka, Zelensky has urgently ordered the “construction of an extensive network of fortifications” - a clear sign that Ukraine has once again been thrown onto the defensive.
Building a Maginot line is, of course, exactly what Russia did in the winter-spring of 2022-23 along the 600-mile front and then arching up all along the internationally recognised border between the two countries. Typically, there are anti-tank ditches, followed by earth berms, three rows of dragons teeth and razor wire. Besides the network of trenches and bunkers sheltering Russian troops there are tightly packed anti-personnel, anti-vehicle mines. Attackers also face deadly fire raining in from well-protected artillery and howitzer positions placed in the rear. No wonder Ukrainian attempts to make a breakthrough came to nought.
Though it brings no pleasure, especially given the horrendous carnage, commentators, myself included, who pointed to the similarities with World War I have been more than vindicated. A sober-minded assessment already found in the Pentagon papers leaked back in April, which likewise spoke of static fronts and a “stalemate”.13 What we have in Ukraine therefore is World War I-type trench warfare, with the addition of drones and missiles. Tanks and manned fighter aircraft seem to have gone the way of the cavalry.
Successful surprise attacks are all but impossible. Instead we have siege warfare. In World War I the background to this is remarkably similar to Ukraine. Having been forced onto the defensive in 1915, the Germans responded by fortifying their front: lines of trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, concrete bunkers. To have any hope of breaching such awesome defences required the delivery, via rail and lorry, of huge quantities of artillery shells, prolonged bombardments and then hugely costly infantry assaults (artillery conquered and infantry held any territorial gains).
Trotsky, at the time, it should be noted, devoted several articles to trench warfare, including ‘The trenches’ (September 1915) and ‘Fortresses or trenches?’ (October 1915). Trotsky dismissed fortresses as anachronistic - artillery bombardment quickly reduced them to rubble. Hence, he declared, “trenches” had triumphed and to such an extent that both militarists and pacifists worshipped them.14 Deluded pacifists imagined that state borders protected by trenches could finally abolish war.
Certainly, as a “temporary sanctuary” trenches served as “decisive boundaries, the smallest crossing of which by either side is paid for with numerous victims”. But conditions in the trenches were terrible. Trotsky called them “disgusting dumps”. Alike German, Austrian, Italian, French and British troops found themselves crouching in mud, water and filth. They thought not about the grand plans of monarchs, ministers and generals. Nor did they think about killing the enemy. No, their overriding concern was getting a crust to eat - that and survival. Trotsky quotes testimony from men at the front about how they would enter into a silent agreement not to fire upon each other.15
However, fortress warfare continued, albeit in a different form. German chief of staff Erich von Falkenhayn promulgated a military doctrine that allowed for no retreat. As with a fortress under siege, the “standard response” was that any breach of the defences had to be met with swift counterattacks, no matter what the cost.16 Given that German forces had behind them a thousand square miles of captured French territory, such a doctrine was militarily unnecessary, but ensured that the final outcome ultimately depended on who could produce the most armaments and who could sustain the greatest losses in human life.
US and UK top brass wargamers - above all their masters in Washington and Whitehall - are quite prepared to let hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians die for the sake of their imperial ambitions: reining in France and Germany, degrading and dismembering the Russian Federation and strategically surrounding and strangling the People’s Republic of China.
German turn
Given the vantage of hindsight, it is now crystal-clear that the decision by Russia’s high command to withdraw from Kherson, Izyum, Lyman and the environs of Kharkiv in the autumn of 2022 was no rout, as claimed by a jubilant Zelensky, but, yes, a repositioning, a reset, to secure their forces behind the strongest, most advantageous lines of defence.
True, a hyperbolic storm of protest blasted out from Chechnya’s warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov and Yevgeny Prigozhin of Wagner. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu and top military commanders were branded cowards, traitors and incompetents, who deserved to be stripped of medals and sent barefoot into battle. Given that Russia had banned any criticism of the conduct of the Ukraine war by making it illegal to “discredit the armed forces”, such language was highly significant. The Wagner coup happened a few months later in June 2023 and shook the whole of Russia. Vladimir Putin was humiliated, but survived, and - surprise, surprise - has more than a chance of successfully winning a fifth presidential term in March 2024.
That aside, strategically, it is now perfectly clear that the Russian high command took a German turn in 2022-23. Instead of pursuing the quixotic aim of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, which I take as a euphemism for decapitating the Kyiv regime, it would appear that Putin has been forced to settle, at least for the moment, on keeping what Russia has got in Ukraine and pursuing a war of attrition. The final outcome will therefore depend on who can produce, or secure, the most artillery shells, drones, missiles and sustain the greatest losses ... and which side cracks first.
Note North Korea’s recent move to supply Russia with equipment and munitions on a large scale. Goods trains have been running round the clock. Meanwhile, Putin has ordered the mobilisation of an extra 170,000 men and his government is reorganising the country’s economy and putting it on a war footing (not a total war footing). Military spending has risen to nearly 6% of GDP - that after a 3.9% rise this year and a 2.7% rise in 2021.
Russia’s biggest weapons producer, the state-owned Rostec, announced recently that production volumes “had increased between two and 10 times”.17 Output of long-range missiles has gone from 40 to a “over 100 a month”, reports Jack Watling, senior research fellow for land warfare at the Rusi. His paper is ominously entitled ‘Ukraine must prepare for a hard winter’.18
There is, of course, the possibility of a frozen conflict. To this day, for example, the war on the Korean peninsula continues, but as a prolonged ceasefire - there is no peace treaty, no settlement. But that does not look like being on the cards any time soon, when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. Nor do peace negotiations.
True, the US paymaster told Zelensky to drop his intransigent position of ‘no negotiations till the last Russian soldier leaves the last piece of pre-2014 Ukrainian soil’. While Zelensky instantly fell into line, this owed more to public relations than moves towards a peace deal. Indeed there is plenty of evidence showing that the US and UK governments worked hard to prevent a settlement in the first months of Russia’s ‘special military operation’. The latest is from David Arakhamia, parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party.
Having led the Ukrainian delegation in talks with Moscow, he tells how Russia’s overriding aim was to push Kyiv into “neutrality” - meaning giving up on joining Nato. There were, he says, two main reasons why negotiations ultimately failed. Firstly, though surely not insurmountably, the “need to change the Ukrainian constitution” (amended in February 2019 to enshrine Nato aspirations); and, secondly, the fact that Boris Johnson came to Kyiv to inform Ukrainian officials that the “west wouldn’t sign any agreement with Moscow”, instead urging: “Let’s just fight.”19 Surely a clincher.
General Winter
Once again Russia’s high command seems to be banking on General Winter to break the will of Ukraine’s civilian population. That presumably explains the “second winter drone blitz on Ukraine’s power grid.”20 Doubtless millions will shiver, suffer frostbite and many - in particular the elderly and infirm - will die from hypothermia, as temperatures plunge to -20°C and even lower. But this is unlikely to weaken the “morale of the civilian population” sufficiently to see the Ukrainian army “either disbanded or surrendering”.21
No, ordinary Ukrainian-Ukrainians will not be clamouring for surrender. Instead they will store up food and water, wrap up warm, hunker down in air raid shelters, burn logs, hope that enough diesel and thermal generators can be supplied … and they will curse the name, ‘Vladimir Putin’. If need be they will learn to live without electricity. Whatever happens, they will demand revenge.
After 2014 and the Maidan Square coup, ethnic Russians were denied rights and treated as enemies within. Intolerance, bigotry and murder squads ruled. Breakaway republics, doubtless backed by Moscow, were inevitable. Around 14,000, mainly Russian-Ukrainians, died in what amounted to a civil war in the Donbass. But, given direct inter-state conflict and a Russian war against civilians, Ukrainian nationalism must become still more toxic.
Let us take a seemingly innocuous example. Earlier this year Zelensky “signed two laws” that “strictly reinforce his country’s national identity, banning Russian place names and making knowledge of Ukrainian language and history a requirement for citizenship”.22
This saw Leo Tolstoy Street in Kyiv become Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi Street. Everyone knows who Leo Tolstoy was, of course. But what of Pavlo Skoropadskyi? A reactionary tsarist general, he briefly seized power in Ukraine in 1918 with the help of the German army. Skoropadskyi brutally restored the landlords to their estates and assisted the German army with requisitioning. He also whipped up terrible anti-Jewish pogroms, whole villages were massacred.
Nor should we forget Stepan Bandera - the fascist and Nazi collaborator who independently oversaw mass slaughter, in particular of Poles (well over 100,000 died). True, Bandera temporarily fell out with the Nazis, but it is surely significant that the Kyiv government has voluntarily chosen to elevate Bandera into a national hero: there are statues, bridges, squares, postage stamps and an annual holiday in his honour. Zelensky himself has praised Bandera as one of Ukraine’s “indisputable heroes”.23
Such ideological trappings - and this is their true significance - prepare the ground for stripping Russian-Ukrainians of citizenship and ethnic cleansing. Zelensky has spoken of wanting his country to become a “big Israel” after the last orc has been driven out. Posting on his own official website, he states that his vision for Ukraine’s post-conflict future includes having armed forces everywhere: in “all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas, there will be people with weapons”.24 One only need look at the West Bank and Gaza to see what he has in mind.
There are those, such as Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitscho, who accuse Zelensky of having “authoritarian tendencies”.25 This has nothing to do with the suppression of opposition parties, restrictions on the Russian language and “removing Moscow priests from Ukrainian land” (ie, banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church). No, it is about who gets their hands on the spoils, when it comes to selling favours, black market trades and skimming percentages. Much attention has been paid to Zelensky’s ‘war on corruption’, including the arrest of his former sponsor, the oligarch, Ihor Kolomisky, over a $150 million fraud. However, Seymour Hersh quotes “analysts from the CIA”, who estimate that Zelinsky’s ministers, generals and his entourage of cronies embezzled some $400 million in 2022 alone from overcharged diesel payments.26 Ukraine is - no surprise - ranked by western sources as the second most corrupt country in Europe (after Russia).
Tacit truce
Strategists - professional and armchair - argued this time last year that winter will see “fighting at reduced tempo”.27 Both sides were assumed to be set on using the winter months to rest, rotate, retrain and re-equip troops. But, as we pointed out, it is the rainy season, the rasputitsa, which prevents fighting. Everything, especially lorries, gets bogged down in the deep, gooey, thick mud. Front lines find themselves running out of fuel, ammunition and food. A severe winter, on the other hand, allows manoeuvre. Tanks, howitzers and soldiers can move swiftly over solidly frozen ground.
Everyone now expects the fighting to continue ... at something like the present tempo over the winter months. Despite that, it is doubtful that anything decisive will happen. Certainly, if Putin is depending on anything in 2024, it will be Rostec churning out munitions on an ever increasing scale - that and America’s presidential election.
Meanwhile, trench warfare, because of its static nature, allows for - and encourages - fraternisation. Ordinary soldiers, especially those in non-elite units, dread the prospect of being ordered over the top. The chances of death are exceedingly high. Meanwhile, they endlessly wait and wait and do their best to reduce the discomfort, suffering, boredom and dangers. There is an obvious interest in not being sacrificed in useless military operations. Rank-and-file soldiers and their NCOs frequently take a common stand against the non-combatant officer class safely located in command posts. Men in the trenches bond, form a close-knit community. Staff officers are with very few exceptions held in utter contempt: out of touch, arrogant, corrupt and determined to save their children from the meat grinder.
Away from the most active fronts, with their fanatical stormtroopers, human waves and mass casualties, there is ‘live and let live’.28 If you do not shoot us when we are bucketing out our waterlogged trenches, we will not shoot you when you are bucketing out your waterlogged trenches. The same goes with the retrieval of the dead and the badly wounded from no-man’s land. A tacit, always illicit, truce is observed. The antithesis of the official ‘kill or be killed’. Veterans instruct newcomers in the arts of peace as well as of war.
Morally, there grows a recognition of mutual plight. The poor buggers on the other side endure the same cold, the same mud, the same infestations of rats, mice and lice as we do. They get to know their neighbours in the nearby trenches not only through the drones buzzing overhead, the shells whizzing in and the night raids. They hear the agonised screams, the curses, the familiar songs and the messages shouted in a closely related language. They also smell what the other side is cooking. Fellow feeling, empathy, can easily develop, as was the case with Christmas 1914 in World War I.
These were, though, argues Tony Ashworth, “neither the first nor the last instances of ‘live and let live’”.29 Perhaps things began with coinciding mealtimes, perhaps it was night sentries not firing upon each other. Whatever the exact case, on Christmas Day 1914 German troops began setting up Christmas trees above their parapets, lighting candles and singing carols. The Tommies joined in. A few brave souls ventured out of their trenches. They were met not with a hail of bullets. Instead, other brave souls joined them. Smiles, handshakes and hugs followed. Soon thousands were exchanging little gifts. On the British side packets of good cigarettes, on the German side good chocolate. Football matches are reported to have been played: with an improbable 3:2 average score in “favour of the Germans”!30 And such events were far from isolated. They happened here and there, dotted across at least half of the British-controlled western front. Some 100,000 men were involved. Naturally, the internationalist left - not least Lenin and the Bolsheviks - celebrated all such acts of fraternisation.
There can be no argument that one of the key preconditions to this and other spontaneous examples of fraternisation lies in the mass anti-war propaganda and agitation conducted by the parties of the Socialist (Second) International. Nevertheless, it is also worth pointing out that, while most British frontline troops came from a working class (ie, Labourite) background, that was not the case with German forces. Most came from rural areas and therefore peasant stock. They were not natural social democrats. However, the trenches themselves, the commonality imposed by life on the frontline, the technology of industrial warfare - proletarianised them.
The dangers of fraternisation were already all too apparent to the officer class. On December 5 1914, general Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, commander of one of the two corps which made up the British Expeditionary Force, issued these orders:
It is during this period that the greatest danger to the morale of troops exists. Experience of this and of every other war proves undoubtedly that troops in trenches in close proximity to the enemy slide very easily, if permitted to do so, into a ‘live and let live’ theory of life. Understandings - amounting almost to an unofficial armistice - grow up between our troops and the enemy, with a view to making life easier, until the sole object of war becomes obscured and officers and men sink into a military lethargy, from which it is difficult to arouse them when the moment for great sacrifices again arises. The attitude of our troops can be readily understood and to a certain extent commands sympathy. So long as they know that no general advance is intended, they fail to see any object in understanding small enterprises of no permanent utility, certain to result in some loss of life, and likely to provoke reprisals.
Such an attitude is, however, most dangerous, for it discourages initiative in commanders and destroys the offensive spirit in all ranks. The corps commander therefore directs divisional commanders to impress on subordinate commanders the absolute necessity of encouraging offensive spirit, while on the defensive, by every means in their power. Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices (eg, ‘We won’t fire if you don’t’, etc), however tempting and amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.31
But such orders were, of course, powerless to stop fraternisation. In subsequent years sentries were posted with instructions to shoot anyone tempted to repeat the Christmas truce.
A similar story could be told about French and German, Italian and Austrian, and Russian and German troops. High commands on both sides issued instructions forbidding the slightest manifestation of fraternisation. Those who disobeyed were to be treated as traitors. Nonetheless, life in the trenches creates a tendency towards fraternisation, even if it is at the level of ‘live and let live’.
The same is true with the Ukraine war. Anything smacking of fraternisation horrifies Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin alike. Not surprisingly, therefore, the authorities on both sides have imposed harsh media censorship and restricted access to the frontline. Ukraine has created three colour zones: red is completely out of bounds and yellow is accessible to accredited journalists, only if they are accompanied by press officers from the defence ministry; green zones are open to every journalist who has received special military accreditation, “which can be a long-winded process”.32
The claim is that such measures are imposed to counter disinformation. Total and absolute nonsense. No, it is obvious that both sides fear honest, objective, truthful reporting: the appalling conditions in the trenches, the squandering of human life in pointless military operations, the hostile feelings of rank-and-file soldiers towards their politicians and generals, and their fellow feeling for the grunts on the other side.
That is not something the social-imperialists want to hear. Instead of celebrating fraternisation, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, Anticapitalist Resistance, RS21, Labour Representation Committee and their like deny the self-evident fact that the US is fighting a proxy war, urge Ukraine’s oligarkhiya regime on to complete victory, oppose any talk of ceasefires and complain that the short-sighted west does not “provide enough weaponry.”33 For these traitors to socialism - and, whatever their centrist apologists say, that is what they are - the draft dodgers and above all the unofficial, tacit ceasefires on the frontline come as bad news. For them it is ‘Kill or be killed’.
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“Will the expected Ukrainian offensive result in a sensational breakthrough? Unlikely, even with Leopard, Challenger and Abrams tanks. Even if Ukraine was to be supplied with a thousand top-grade western battle tanks, even if it got a whole airforce of F-16s, everything points to a long, bitter, grinding war of attrition” (J Conrad, ‘Notes on the war’ Weekly Worker May 25 2023: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1444/notes-on-the-war).↩︎
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The Economist November 1 2023.↩︎
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Newsweek December 5 2023.↩︎
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www.dw.com/en/ukraine-to-shake-up-recruitment-as-troops-prove-scarce/a-67348780.↩︎
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The Washington Post December 4 2023.↩︎
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Ibid.↩︎
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By August US sources estimate the total number of Ukrainian casualties at 200,000, including 70,000 deaths (New York Times August 18 2023).↩︎
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With good reason Katja Hoyer calls Germany the “sick man of Europe” (The Daily Telegraph December 4 2023).↩︎
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news.gallup.com/poll/513680/american-views-ukraine-war-charts.aspx.↩︎
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The Washington Post December 6 2023.↩︎
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edition.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/pentagon-documents-ukraine-war-assessment/index.html.↩︎
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Mistranslated by Isaac Deutscher as “French” in The prophet armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921 Oxford 1979, p228n - see
ID Thatcher Leon Trotsky and World War One: August 1914-March 1917 Glasgow 1993, p34n.↩︎
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ID Thatcher Leon Trotsky and World War One: August 1914-March 1917 Glasgow 1993, p27-28.↩︎
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A Jones The art of war in the western world London 1988, p456.↩︎
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The Guardian October 27 2023.↩︎
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www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/ukraine-must-prepare-hard-winter.↩︎
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B Marcetic, ‘Did the west deliberately prolong the Ukraine war?’ Responsible Statecraft December 4 2023.↩︎
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Forbes December 8 2023.↩︎
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The contention of Giulio Douhet, the Italian general and pioneer of air-power theory, in his groundbreaking 1921 study - see G Douhet The command of the air Tuscaloosa AL 1942, p126. Though his book was the bible of warmongers, such as Walther Wever, William ‘Billy’ Mitchell and Sir Hugh ‘Boom’ Trenchard, World War II proved him wrong. Civilians cannot be bombed into submission.↩︎
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New York Times April 22 2023.↩︎
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www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/5/zelenskyy-says-wants-ukraine-to-become-a-big-israel.↩︎
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The Times December 4 2023.↩︎
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The Sunday Telegraph December 4 2022.↩︎
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The term can also be rendered as ‘rest and let rest’ or ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. During World War I such tacit truces developed into a widespread, unofficial, culture of minimising death, violence and suffering - see T Ashworth Trench warfare 1914-1918: the live and let system London 2000, p18.↩︎
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T Ashworth Trench warfare 1914-1918: the live and let system London 2000, p24.↩︎
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Quoted in A Richards The true story of the Christmas truce: British and German accounts of the First World War Barnsley 2001.↩︎
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www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-journalists-media-restrictions-self-censorship.↩︎
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Solidarity January 11 2023.↩︎