22.08.2024

Notes on the war

Ukraine’s surprise attack on the Kursk oblast is a daring move, a military gamble, says Jack Conrad. It certainly exposes the one-dimensional thinking of Russia’s high command

My last ‘Notes on the war’ article was written back in April.¹ Why the four-month gap? Well, frankly, till now nothing unexpected, nothing significant, has happened ... except, of course, the continuation of grief, death and hell. Russia’s widely predicted summer offensive geared up on schedule as the heavy spring rains came to an end and the ground began to dry out under the warm sunshine. But there were no big breakthroughs, no strategic gains. Instead, Russia’s forces pulverised their way forward, inch by inch and village by village, on both the southern and eastern fronts. Slivers of territory, even on large-scale maps.

Millions of artillery shells have been fired off, along with tens of thousands of glide bombs, missiles and kamikaze drones. That and mines and human-wave tactics have sent who knows how many more to an early grave in the name of ‘Glory to Ukraine’ on the one side and ‘All glory to Russia’ on the other. Estimates are that to date around 500,000 have died.² Such is the cess of war.

Now, though, we have Ukraine’s Kursk offensive. Preliminary softening-up operations seem to have begun in late July with airstrikes. But the decisive move happened on August 6, with Ukrainian armoured brigades smashing through the border and then, backed by auxiliary units, advancing deep into Russian territory at speed. We are told that around 1,200 square kilometres and 92 settlements have been taken. Ukraine also boasts of holding 2,000 Russian POWs, knocking out arms dumps and destroying three key bridges … thus hampering any incoming Russian reinforcements.

Vladimir Putin has appointed Alexei Dyumin to head what he calls Russia’s “counter-terrorist” response. This is important for three very different reasons. Firstly, while Dyumin has a military background, he also served in security, briefly acting as Putin’s chief bodyguard, and as of now he is the secretary of the state council. Secondly, this could be the making or breaking of Dyumin as a potential successor to the president. Thirdly, there is still no official admission that Russia is fighting an actual war with Ukraine.

Putin is probably right not to trust the judgment of his top military staff. When Ukraine’s Kursk offensive began and succeeded with such rapidity, I readily admit to being more than taken aback. Since the second phase of the war - that is, after the failure to capture Kyiv - Russia has been digging tank traps and trenches, putting in place dragon’s teeth and minefields and fighting from incredibly well defended positions. Indeed, not least having looked at the open-source satellite pictures, I wrote of multiple Russian layers of fortifications, running 1,000 kilometres along the whole of the southern and eastern fronts, the Surovikin line … but from there onwards, up the entire Russian-Ukrainian border all the way to the north and Belarus.

Was I wrong? No, definitely not. Consulting the daily reports issued by the hawkish, though usually reliable, Institute for the Study of War think tank, I find two lines of Russian “field fortifications” clearly marked on their Kursk maps, but, when it comes to Ukraine’s salient, they are now, of course, way behind the combat zone.

So how come Ukraine’s forces could break through in the north-east in the summer of 2024, when they abysmally failed to do the same in the south during the summer of 2023? The main answer probably lies in military incompetence. There was no way Ukraine was going to break through the Surovikin line in a frontal attack. No, not even with those newly delivered Abrams, Leopard and Challenger tanks. As I wrote at the time, the idea of Ukrainian troops pushing south all the way down to the warm waters of the Azov Sea was always a complete non-starter.

Now, though, the military incompetence is entirely on the Russian side. After success in capturing Bakhmut and Avdiivka and the grinding forward momentum on the southern and eastern fronts, the Russian high command seems to have succumbed to ‘victory disease’. Months of constant Ukrainian retreats have led them to “arrogance” and a belief that they, the Russians, are “nearly invincible”.³ The idea that the Ukrainians could do anything daring, anything unexpected, simply did not occur.

Victory disease

Hence, because of victory disease, Russian forces manning the north-eastern defence lines consisted of nothing more than poorly equipped FSB border troops, barely trained conscripts and a few Chechen odds and sods. Here was Russia’s soft underbelly - an opportunity for the taking. All Ukraine’s generals - and their western advisors - had to do was to carefully arrange for the inconspicuous movement of men and material, impose a strict regime of silence and pick their moment. On August 6 plans turned into action.

Nonetheless, how Ukraine almost effortlessly carved through Russian defence lines still remains something of a mystery for me. I have found no worthwhile military or journalistic accounts about the initial operation, apart from the build-up and the surprise element. Mostly there is pap and crap about Ukrainian forces ‘walking in’ and Russian forces ‘running away’. What we do know, however, is the speed and depth of Ukrainian advances then on after.

Why did Volodymyr Zelensky give the green light to the Kursk operation? He certainly wants to divert Russian forces from the southern and eastern fronts, where Ukraine is undoubtedly on the back foot. In particular, Russian troops are moving to take Toretsk and Pokrovsk - “two of the hubs” of the Donetsk oblast.⁴ After securing the small town of Nui-York they are now just six miles from the outskirts of Pokrovsk. If the whole of the Donetsk oblast can be secured in 2024, then in 2025 we might well see a determined Russian push towards Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in the north-east and/or Odessa in the south-west. Taking Odessa would all but landlock Ukraine, meaning a strategic victory for Russia by giving it effective control over the entire northern Black Sea coastline. But, at the present snail’s pace advance of Russian forces, that could quite conceivably take the war not into 2025, but into the next decade.

Of course, Kyiv had to divert its own troops with the Kursk operation. In this case 10,000 men in elite mechanised brigades, along with artillery, air defence and drone and reconnaissance support. Hence various commentators, including Russian media outlets, and their claims about Ukraine falling into a “trap” set by Putin, risking precious personnel and resources and overextending supply lines.⁵ The idea of a trap appears to be complete nonsense as far as I am concerned. Putin is no military genius. What has happened is altogether more prosaic. Ukraine’s war of position momentarily went over to a war of manoeuvre, and then, it seems, almost instantly flipped back again. A feature of the closing phase of World War I and mechanisation, and the use of tanks and aircraft.

Because there is no sign of large numbers of fresh Russian troops arriving in Kursk as reinforcements, at least at the moment, there arises the possibility, for Zelensky, of trading land for land in a future peace deal … if the land can be held and if Donald Trump wins in November. Admittedly both big ‘ifs’.

Note, Ukrainian forces are already busily digging trenches - the Russians too. Industrial excavators are being used on both sides. Russian workers are reportedly being offered a daily pay rate ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 roubles (£45 to £60). When asked, recruiters readily “acknowledged the hazardous nature of the work”.⁶ There will be incoming artillery shells and drones hovering overhead ready for the kill. It will be the same with Ukrainian workers.

Putting in place strong defences would, however, allow Ukraine to radically reduce its force commitment in Kursk and return to siege warfare … this time, though, within the sacred territory of mother Russia itself. A huge blow to Putin’s prestige, an outrage for Russian nationalists of all stripes and a tremendous morale boost for Ukrainian-Ukrainians.

True, Ukraine’s units could advance much further into Kursk - but that seems unlikely. Then again, while the trench network remains incomplete, while that window of opportunity lasts, Russia could strike back in the next couple of weeks and send the Ukrainians packing … back ten miles to the international border and perhaps beyond into the Sumy oblast (over which Russia has no territorial claim). However, the more trenches and tank traps that are dug and the more minefields and dragon’s teeth put in place, the less likely is such an outcome. Instead, as with other fronts, Russia will have to grind forward and suffer significant losses.

Defeat disease

Inevitably, in the west, there has been much excited hot air spouted by establishment outlets - announcing that Kursk marks a “turning point”⁷, that the Russian army is “on the brink, as discipline crumbles”⁸ and that Putin’s regime is “on notice”.⁹ News management, doubtless, but not without effect. Within Russia there are rumblings. Some pro-war public figures openly worry about failure in Ukraine: “We could lose if such blunders continue,” said filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov, appearing on the Rossiya 1 TV station. “This isn’t scaremongering. It’s just an absolute understanding of the price that we and our motherland will have to pay,” he concluded.¹⁰ There are many others suffering from ‘defeat disease’.

My expectation, for what it is worth, is that the Russo-Ukrainian war has a long way to run. It is a war of attrition and neither Russia nor Ukraine show any sign of scoring a military victory or suffering a military collapse. A Trump victory might change things; on the other hand, it might not. It is not hard to imagine Trump and Putin failing to clinch the deal. There will be advances and reversals, towns will be lost and regained, land taken and retaken. Russia has every reason not to surrender though - and that is what Ukraine and its Nato backers are demanding (ie, Russia gives up every inch of territory, including the strategically important port city of Sevastopol in Crimea). Nor would an Alexei Dyumin, or a Dmitry Mironov, or an Andrei Belousov replacing Putin change things. Putin is not the regime, he fronts the regime.

So what are Russia’s war aims? ‘DeNazifying Ukraine’ was always a chimera. There are outright Nazis in Ukraine and plenty of fascists too - not least the Banderites, who are now thoroughly incorporated into its armed forces: eg, the Azov Brigade. But neither it nor the broader Azov movement dominate the commanding heights of the army, of politics, the bureaucracy or the economy. And there are, of course, not a few fascists, red-brown nationalists and occult nutters on Putin’s side too.¹¹

Nor is the claim that Putin acted to save the Russian national minority in Ukraine from genocide in any way convincing. Yes, before February 24 2022, there was increased Ukrainian shelling along the line of control in the Donbas and discrimination against Russian speakers - even cases of savage persecution and murder. But talk of genocide in Ukraine has as much truth to it as talk of genocide against the Uyghur population in China.

Then there is the stuff about Ukraine not being a ‘real’ nation. A claim regularly trotted out by Putin and other Kremlin insiders: “Ukrainian identity does not exist and never has” (former president and prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev¹²).

Perhaps the original Slavic root of the term, ‘Ukraine’, meant ‘borderlands’ - interesting, but nothing more. Marxists will investigate the Norse origins of the Kievan and Muscovite Rus states, the religious-ideological influence of the Byzantine empire, the impact of the Mongol invasion, the expansionism of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Brest-Litovsk treaty, etc. However, what really matters, is not cod Russian history: rather what the mass of Ukrainians actually think today - and they surely think of themselves as fervently Ukrainian. That for us is what decides whether or not there is a Ukrainian nation - a historically constituted people, which occupies a common territory, speaks a common language and is united by a common economic life.

So what were and what are Russia’s real war aims?

We take seriously enough the goal of “decommunisation”, which, presumably, means rejecting the Bolshevik commitment to national self-determination and federalism that gave birth to modern Ukraine. Instead of using salami tactics and slowly extending direct Russian power over the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk, establishing a Kharkiv people’s republic, etc, Putin ordered a full-scale military invasion. Whether that was intended to capture Kyiv and put in place a puppet regime, achieve the unity of all the peoples of medieval Rus by taking the entire country, or forcing negotiations which would end with a much diminished, neutral Ukraine and a Greater Russia, is an open question.

As the old saying goes, all initial military plans are abandoned with the “the first encounter with the enemy’s main force” (Helmuth von Moltke¹³). So, whatever the original intentions, Putin now has his Greater Russia, but hardly a neutral Ukraine. Shorn of nearly a fifth of its territory, Ukraine is a heavily armed candidate member of an expanded Nato (now including Finland and Sweden).

Self-determination

Strangely, given the overt anti-communism of the Putin/FSB regime, there is a pro-Kremlin left. Without doubt the most prominent organisation here is George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain - now amicably divorced from the Brarite CPGB (Marxist-Leninist). Others in the same camp include the New Communist Party and, presumably, the equally near moribund Socialist Labour Party (still formally led by that sad ghost from the past, Arthur Scargill). Besides them there are various and many micro-Trotskyite groups, including groups of one, who likewise paint Putin as some kind of an anti-imperialist champion.

Naturally, since the initial phase of the ‘special military operation’ there has been more or less constant talk from amongst this bloc of a pending Russian victory and Ukraine’s army being on the verge of defeat. The reasoning is simple - too simple. Ukraine does not have enough men of fighting age, its army has been denuded by death and injury, and patriotic young men no longer rush to join the ranks.

There is, admittedly, an element of truth here. However, what the pro-Kremlin left wilfully avoids, downplays and ignores is Ukrainian national sentiments, even Ukrainian national fanaticism. War has a psychological element, which, given the right conditions, can prove to be the main determinant.

Surely, Ukrainian-Ukrainians were never going to meekly accept the invasion of their country. Say, if Kyiv had fallen in the spring of 2022, there was always going to be a determined, bitter, unrelenting struggle against foreign domination. There would have been plenty of volunteers too.

As might be expected, the legitimacy of Ukraine as a nation goes denied or is dismissed with philistine contempt. But, if Putin is right about anything, it was, yes, Lenin and the Bolsheviks who gave birth to modern Ukraine.

So, let us put the record straight, beginning with a brief quote from Christian Rakovsky, chair of the council of people’s commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic between 1919 and 1923. Paying tribute to Lenin in 1924, following his untimely death, Rakovsky said this about him:

He was the most ardent adherent to the real equality of nations, not only during his pre-revolutionary activities, but also during his work as head of the Soviet government. It is due to his firm leadership that the old Russian empire, which was previously strangling scores of nationalities, has now been transformed into the Union of independent autonomous republics.¹⁴

Next an extract from the November 21 1919 draft resolution of the central committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) written by Lenin: ‘On Soviet rule in the Ukraine’ (agreed by the central committee and later endorsed by the 8th All-Russia party conference).

1. The CC, RCP(B), having discussed the question of relations with the working people of the Ukraine now being liberated from the temporary conquest of Denikin’s bands, is pursuing persistently the principle of the self-determination of nations and deems it essential to again affirm that the RCP holds consistently to the view that the independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic be recognised ….

3. In view of the fact that Ukrainian culture (language, school, etc) has been suppressed for centuries by Russian tsarism and the exploiting classes, the CC RCP makes it incumbent upon all party members to use every means to help remove all barriers in the way of the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture. Since the many centuries of oppression have given rise to nationalist tendencies among the backward sections of the population, RCP members must exercise the greatest caution in respect of those tendencies and must oppose them with words of comradely explanation concerning the identity of interests of the working people of the Ukraine and Russia. RCP members on Ukrainian territory must put into practice the right of the working people to study in the Ukrainian language and to speak their native language in all Soviet institutions; they must in every way counteract attempts at Russification that push the Ukrainian language into the background and must convert that language into an instrument for the communist education of the working people. Steps must be taken immediately to ensure that in all Soviet institutions there are sufficient Ukrainian-speaking employees and that in the future all employees are able to speak Ukrainian ….

Regarding it as beyond dispute for every communist and for every politically conscious worker that the closest alliance of all Soviet republics in their struggle against the menacing forces of world imperialism is essential, the RCP maintains that the form of that alliance must be finally determined by the Ukrainian workers and labouring peasants themselves.¹⁵

Great Russians

Finally, another excerpt, this time from Lenin’s ‘Letter to the workers and peasants of the Ukraine apropos of the victories over Denikin’ published in Pravda on January 4 1920:

… we Great-Russian communists must repress with the utmost severity the slightest manifestation in our midst of Great-Russian nationalism, for such manifestations, which are a betrayal of communism in general, cause the gravest harm by dividing us from our Ukrainian comrades …

And what the bourgeoisie of all countries, and all manner of petty bourgeois parties - ie, “compromising” parties which permit alliance with the bourgeoisie against the workers - try most of all to accomplish is to disunite the workers of different nationalities, to evoke distrust, and to disrupt a close international alliance and international brotherhood of the workers. Whenever the bourgeoisie succeeds in this, the cause of the workers is lost. The communists of Russia and the Ukraine must therefore by patient, persistent, stubborn and concerted effort foil the nationalist machinations of the bourgeoisie and vanquish nationalist prejudices of every kind, and set the working people of the world an example of a really solid alliance of the workers and peasants of different nations in the fight for Soviet power, for the overthrow of the yoke of the landowners and capitalists, and for a world federal Soviet republic.¹⁶

Grand strategy

Were we wrong, when it came to originally assessing the likelihood of an invasion? Yes, of course. But we have never claimed any unique insight into Kremlin thinking. And, quite rightly, along with countless others, we do not trust the US and UK governments. Truth is the first casualty - even before the outbreak of war. No-one should forget the lies told about there being no Anglo-French collusion with Israel after the 1956 attack on Egypt; the US lies about the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which sparked the Vietnam war; the lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003; the lies about how Muammar Gaddafi’s army was about to slaughter the entire half-million population of Benghazi in 2011. Etc, etc. It is certainly more than right to maintain a sceptical attitude to the dominant narrative (even if particular claims turn out to be true).

No less to the point, why did we doubt the claims coming from the Pentagon of an imminent full-scale Russian invasion? Because militarily, while it was quite conceivable that the Russian army could successfully drive all the way to Kyiv, we doubted that Ukraine could be taken or held in submission. Ukraine 2022 was no Czechoslovakia 1968 or even Hungary 1956. If an analogy is to be drawn, it would be with Afghanistan 1979. Even then the Soviet Union had the Afghan government, army and ruling party onside (well, that is after executing Hafizullah Amin and 97 other leading Khalq cadre). Hardly the case with Ukraine. Economically and socially it is much more advanced than Afghanistan, but the mass of the population - the 18% Russian minority aside - seems equally resolved to resist the invaders.

Surely Putin’s generals would have told him what to expect, and that explains why we thought - and still think - that a full-scale invasion risked creating a quagmire and potentially a regime collapse in Russia. So why did Putin give the go-ahead? The answer lies in US grand strategy.

Ever since the February 2014 Maidan coup successfully overthrew the elected president (the ‘neutral’ Viktor Yanukovych) and installed a pro-western regime, Ukraine has been firmly placed in the American orbit. Constitutionally Ukraine is now committed to Nato and the European Union. Through a membership action plan it is an associate Nato member, it is armed by Nato and, in effect, acts as a Nato proxy. But, quid pro quo, as a result of the Maidan coup there were widespread disturbances in the Russian-inhabited south and east of Ukraine, and the Kremlin swiftly moved to annex Crimea and back the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaways.

Levering Ukraine into the so-called ‘western camp’ neatly fitted into a US grand strategy that can be dated back to Jimmy Carter’s 1977-81 administration. In place of the cold war policy of ‘containing communism’ there came the doctrine of ‘rollback’, mapped out by his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Ideologically this went hand-in-hand with ‘human rights’ and spreading ‘democracy’. Not insignificantly, Brzezinski’s famous book, The great chessboard, envisaged a “loosely confederated Russia - composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic”.¹⁷ In short, three pliant US neocolonies.

What Carter began, Ronald Reagan completed. After the 1989-91 collapse, both Nato and the EU were pushed further and further to the east, all the way to the borders of Russia itself. Joe Biden’s flat rejection of Putin’s call for a Nato reset and the Finlandisation of Ukraine doubtless made up Putin’s mind about staging a full-scale invasion. So did warnings that any Russian military actions on Ukrainian territory would trigger crippling western sanctions - after all, Russia was already in occupation of Crimea and backed the Donetsk and Luhansk semi-states. In effect Putin was given an impossible choice. Either humiliatingly withdraw Russian forces from all of Ukraine or face sanctions. Boxed in, Putin went for broke.

However, in terms of grand strategy, February 24 2022 played directly into US hands ... championing Ukraine should certainly be seen as a continuation of Carter’s rollback doctrine. Ukraine serves as the equivalent of ‘poor little Belgium’ or ‘plucky little Serbia’ in World War I. Not only could warmongers - Biden, Harris, Blinken, Stoltenberg, Von der Leyen, Johnson and the rest - front the widespread moral outrage over Ukraine (part real, part manufactured): at a stroke, the US made Italy, France and crucially Germany dependent on oil and gas supplies, over which it, the US, exercises ultimate control. Any idea of a Franco-German united Europe vanished with February 24 and the subsequent sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Baltic pipelines in September 2022 (the recent WSJ report claiming that the whole operation was concocted on a “drunken” night out by a “handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen” and then carried out from a small rented yacht seems highly improbable to me - yet another attempt at deception¹⁸).

If he is elected, if he is not stopped by Kamala Harris - or, failing that, a Democrat-army-deep state coup – Trump could easily decide to continue the proxy war in Ukraine as part of the drive to block America’s only full-spectrum challenger for world hegemony: ie, the People’s Republic of China. After all, with the ‘no limits’ alliance, Putin has effectively constituted Russia as China’s Austria-Hungary.

Either way, the US project of rebooting its imperial hegemony through surrounding and strangling China remains one of the few bipartisan areas of agreement in Washington DC.

1. J Conrad, ‘Notes on the war’ Weekly Worker April 4 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1485/notes-on-the-war.↩︎

2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War.↩︎

3. T Karcher Understanding the ‘victory disease’: from the Little Bighorn to Mogadishu and beyond Fort Leavenworth KA 2015, p3.↩︎

4. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c79wqpqp297o.↩︎

5. Newsweek August 16 2024.↩︎

6. The Moscow Times August 15 2024.↩︎

7. Foreign Policy August 14 2024.↩︎

8. Daily Express August 12 2024.↩︎

9. The Daily Telegraph August 12 2024.↩︎

10. The Washington Post August 18 2024.↩︎

11. E Griffiths Aleksandr Prokhanov and post-Soviet esotericism Oxford 2023.↩︎

12. www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2022-04-05/medvedev-escalates-anti-ukrainian-rhetoric.↩︎

13. quoteinvestigator.com/2021/05/04/no-plan.↩︎

14. G Fagan (ed) Christian Rosovsky: selected writings on opposition in the USSR 1923-30 London 1980, pp106-07.↩︎

15. VI Lenin CW Vol 30, Moscow 1977, pp163-66.↩︎

16. Ibid pp296-97.↩︎

17. Z Brzezinski The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives New York NY 1997, p202.↩︎

18. The Wall Street Journal August 14 2024.↩︎