19.09.2024

Upping the ante

Vladimir Putin warns that we are on brink of nuclear war, writes Eddie Ford. Perhaps, not yet, but with the kabuki dance over Storm Shadows the evidence of ‘mission creep’ is unmistakable

Last week Sir Keir Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy visited Washington to meet Joe Biden and other officials from the US administration. This followed a week of diplomatic choreography between the British and Americans, culminating on September 11 - going for maximum symbolism - when both Lammy and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, travelled to Kyiv.

Now, we do not know exactly what was discussed at the White House. We read widely that they agreed a “strong position” over the Ukraine war, which everybody takes as a reference to British Storm Shadows - and other Nato-supplied medium ranged missiles that Volodymyr Zelensky wants to use to strike deep into the territory of the Russian Federation.

If that happens Vladmir Putin and a range of Kremlin insiders have warned that this would mean that Russia would be at war with Nato and all that that means in terms of nuclear weapons. Dmitry Medvedev, the former prime minister, has ominously talked of reducing Kyiv to a “giant melted spot.” Sabre-rattling - for the moment anyway.

Owing to the sensitivity and significance of giving the go-ahead for Ukrainian use of Storm Shadow and other such medium range missiles, there has been an elaborate kabuki dance going on. The Biden administration does not want to be seen to be taking the lead in upping the ante in Ukraine. So he calls in his favourite yap dog, the UK, to come to Washington to lobby him and then go off round Europe doing the same thing. We saw it with supplying main battle tanks, we saw it with F-16 fighter-bombers.

If others join the UK warmonger, as the US clearly wants, then not only will Kyiv be given permission to use Storm Shadows against Russia. France and crucially the US will follow suit in giving permission for the use of the missiles they have supplied: ie, France’s Scalps and America’s Himars and Atacms.

The lifting of western restrictions on the use of medium-range missiles inside Russia would mark a significant diplomatic development - if not a pivotal military moment. Storm Shadows are tactical, not strategic, weapons. They have a range of 155 miles, but, unlike drones, they move fast and low and carry enough of an explosive payload to penetrate bunkers or knock out command posts.

Impasse

Throughout the current conflict, the US and its allies have sought to strike a balance between giving Ukraine enough weapons to resist Russia on the one hand, and not doing anything too overtly provocative on the other. Naturally this has infuriated the Zelensky regime in Kyiv … and its social-imperialist cheerleaders such as the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, Anticapitalist Resistance and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. They plead for, demand, all the arms Ukraine needs and with no restrictions placed on their use. Effectively this bomb, bomb, bomb Russia line poses a ‘guns or butter’ choice in the west, with the social-imperialists demanding guns, ie, supplying Ukraine with massively increased supplies of modern fighter aircraft, tanks and missiles.

If, as looks likely, the US and the UK will give the go-ahead for the use of Storm Shadows against targets within the Russian Federation, does this mean we stand immediately on the threshold of nuclear war in Europe or a generalised nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States? This seems unlikely, as such a war would be unwinnable and spell disaster for humanity as a whole - but miscalculations can always happen.

Meanwhile the war of attrition continues. Clearly, as long argued in these pages, the military situation broadly resembles the western front during World War I - static lines with slow advances here or there, sometimes followed by a retreat, then a counter-offensive before it splutters out.

True, we have seen some dramatic Ukrainian advances - like the recent incursion into the Kursk oblast - but no decisive breakthroughs by either side, with no indication that we will see any such thing this year or the next or the next. Kursk is not going to lead to the collapse of the Russian army, nor is the Ukrainian army about to crumble, even if, as seems possible, Pokrovsk falls. Things will grind on for years and years, and precisely under those circumstances, there is on both sides an incentive to go in for what has been called ‘mission creep’.

Looking at the situation objectively, it is impossible to imagine Storm Shadows being a winner for Ukraine. Yes, they will make a marginal difference, but not turn the tide of the war. Russia has already moved its most important command posts, airforce bases and major storage facilities inside Russia beyond their range. But their importance lies in how everybody is turning up the dial over the conflict. For instance, the Polish foreign minister has been speculating about the possibility of Nato protecting Ukrainian nuclear facilities. But, of course, it is Ukrainian forces that have been recklessly shelling the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia power plant - not the other way round, as crazily suggested by large parts of the western media.

That alone is reason to worry. According to UN observers, with grossly “inadequate” staffing levels due to the war, this has “significantly increased the risk of a nuclear accident” in a country which already witnessed the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Zaporizhzhia is very unlikely to explode - it is under cold shutdown - but shelling or a missile strike could still release significant amounts of deadly radiation. Depending on the prevailing winds, this could badly effect people in neighbouring Turkey, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Clearly nuclear power is inherently dangerous and only a fool would urge on a capitalist government to build yet more of them in the name of saving the planet from climate disaster.

Strategic aim

We need to look at the bigger picture. This is not a war simply between a big Russian bear and poor little Ukraine, which is how it is near universally portrayed by mainstream bourgeois politicians and the social-imperialists. It has to be understood as a proxy war long envisaged by a declining US hegemon - one that does not face any sort of serious challenge from Russia, but does from China. From this perspective, Nato’s steady expansion to the east is fundamentally directed against China, not Russia.

As part of this anti-Beijing drive, it is important to reiterate that a crucial strategic aim of the United States through the war in Ukraine is to bring about regime change in Moscow, replacing Vladimir Putin with someone not unlike the first post-Soviet Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, or the now dead oppositionist, Alexei Navalny. Yet this runs the danger, as US leaders must know, of producing the very opposite of what they want - a super-aggressive alternative in the Kremlin willing to risk Götterdämmerung in the attempt to defend the honour of mother Russia. But the US is banking on Putin being shoved aside either in a palace coup or by a colour revolution which results in the break-up of the Russian Federation and a series of pliant neocolonies. A setup that would see China surrounded from the north by Russia and to the south by India, as well as to the east by the formidable American fleet - strangling China in the process.

America would then control Halford Mackinder’s ‘world island’ and could indisputably dominate the globe. A possibility that both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping clearly have every reason to resist.