WeeklyWorker

10.10.2024
Pawns in the ‘great game’: Russian POWs

Notes on the war

It has, for the moment, become the forgotten war. Nonetheless, warns Jack Conrad, there is a distinct danger of escalation, even nuclear weapons, not least if the use of British Storm Shadows against Russia has been given the go-ahead

Humiliatingly - for Volodymyr Zelensky in particular - Ukrainian forces were ordered to withdraw from Vuhledar on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia border on October 1. Zelensky had, after all, just been touring the United States touting his ‘victory plan’ … and doing his best, meantime, to boost the chances of Kamala Harris in next month’s presidential election.

Reportedly Ukrainian forces in Vuhledar were outnumbered seven to one and new recruits ‘froze’ - faced, as they were, with successive human waves of Russian troops.1 Not that battles are decided by force ratios alone. Personnel numbers, food, fuel and ammunition supplies, and the quantity and quality of equipment all count, but so too do intangibles, such as imagination, chance and morale. A point emphasised again and again by the Prussian military philosopher, Carl von Clausewitz, in his classic 1832 study, Vom Kriege: “… in combat the loss of moral force is the chief cause of the decision.”2 Obviously, Ukraine has a big problem with personnel numbers, training its troops to sufficient competence before putting them into the field … and with morale.

Capturing Vuhledar came after two previous Russian attempts: October-November 2022 and January-February 2023. Both were costly failures. Russia lost many men and much equipment.3 Yet, while gaining Vuhleder is important - it is well fortified and sits on high ground overlooking the surrounding countryside - this is no more than a tactical victory. Hence, it is unlikely to fundamentally alter the situation in the western Donetsk oblast, where most of Russia’s efforts are directed at taking the strategically important town of Pokrovsk. Here is a vital rail and road hub and, if Russia manages to seize the town, it would severely disrupt Ukrainian supply lines on its eastern front - and perhaps even open the way for Russia to take the whole of the Donetsk oblast.

However, to meaningfully support any attempt to surround and take Pokrovsk by pushing north, Russian forces located in Vuhledar, would first have to advance over 23 kilometres of open land to reach highway H-15 (connecting the cities of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia by way of Novomykolaivka, Trudove and Andriivka). Then there would be the heavily fortified towns of Kostyantynivka, Selydove and Kramatorsk to contend with. So a tough operation to mount at any time of the year - except that now, of course, the rainy season, the rasputitsa, has begun in earnest.

This makes land warfare all but impossible. The ground, including the unpaved roads and dirt tracks - which Ukrainian forces used to escape from Vuhledar - turns to mud. Infantry slips, slides and quickly becomes exhausted. Lorries - vital for supplying the front line with rations, munitions, fuel and reinforcements - get bogged down too. Wheels uselessly spin, axles sink into the sticky mire. Nor can tanks easily move. It almost goes without saying that the rasputitsa is well known in military circles to confer a great defensive advantage in times of war. Common nicknames are General Mud or Marshal Mud.

Only with the winter freeze does full-scale offensive fighting become really feasible again. Tanks, howitzers, armoured personnel carriers, infantry and, crucially, lorries can move swiftly over solidly frozen ground and this allows for attack and manoeuvre. However, while the rains last, we should not expect any significant Russian breakthrough - unless, that is, Ukrainian morale completely collapses and its troops go Awol from their bunkers and trenches (by any serious account, not something to be immediately expected). Nonetheless, when it comes to the eastern front in the Donbas, it is clear that Ukraine is on the back foot and the momentum lies squarely with the Russians.

We might, therefore, expect a renewed Russian offensive towards the end of 2024. Vladimir Putin’s generals doubtless hanker after giving him Pokrovsk as a new year’s gift. They will certainly have drawn up detailed plans for taking the whole of the Donetsk oblast and then a concerted 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 and give Russia effective control over the entire northern Black Sea coastline.

However, at the present rate of advance that would take not a few short months of winter fighting, but years - many years. Meantime, even ruling out a more active Nato role and unexpected reverses, such as the Kursk incursion, the economic and social strains within Russia grow and grow in what is a war of attrition. The risk is that at some point the regime cracks and popular anger finds political expression (maybe in a well orchestrated colour revolution).

However, it works both ways. Last November, Mark Milley, former chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, infuriated Kyiv - as well as some more bellicose elements in the Biden administration - by comparing Ukraine to World War I and suggesting that a stalemate had been reached. An assessment long argued by myself in these pages, which also finds confirmation in the Pentagon papers leaked back in April 2023. They too spoke of “stalemate”.4

Public opinion

For Zelensky the immediate danger - apart from incremental reversals on the eastern front - is not public opinion at home: rather public opinion in the west. Why do we suffer stagnant real incomes, increased taxes, deteriorating public services and gig jobs for what appears to be an unwinnable proxy war against Russia? A widespread sentiment - and not only in Germany, the country which has taken the biggest economic hit, with Russian oil and gas being cut off (not least with Nord Stream 1 and 2 being put out of action by what we still must presume to be US sabotage).

Crucially, there is the good old US of A. According to a recent YouGov poll, 25% of Americans say that the US should increase military aid to Ukraine, 27% say current levels of military aid should be maintained, and 28% say the US should decrease aid. Put another way, 55% of Americans do not favour additional Ukraine funding.5 A similar poll conducted in the early days of the Russian invasion, in late February 2022, found 62% felt the US should be doing more. So the shift in public opinion is palpable … and this will matter on Tuesday November 5, with Donald Trump saying on his Truth Social account that, if he is not elected president, this “war will never end, and will phase into WORLD WAR III”.6 Discounting the idea of Trump as the benign bringer of peace, he is not wrong. Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine is phasing into a third world war.

Leaving that aside for the moment, there is a deep scepticism about Ukraine in Congress. Trumpist representatives and senators - sadly not the Democratic Socialists of America’s squad - pour scorn on Biden’s pledge to “stand with Ukraine as long as it needs, as long as it requires”. It seems that they care little to nothing about the Russo-Ukraine war and “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing” (Iran and China are, ominously, another matter entirely).

Trump boasts that he can settle the Ukraine war within 24 hours of being elected. That is some two months before being officially inaugurated and handed the nuclear code card (the so-called nuclear football). That deal would require, one presumes, a land-for-land swop between Ukraine and Russia, with Russia getting back Ukraine’s diminutive Kursk enclave, but Russia getting, in return, Crimea and maybe something like joint-sovereignty over four oblasts: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. A grossly unequal treaty that could easily see Zelensky ousted by an Azov regiment putsch. On the other hand, maybe Trump’s offer would find Russia feeling unsatisfied and therefore refusing the deal. Who knows. So, at least in my estimation, it could easily go all too horribly wrong.

We should certainly not be surprised by big geostrategic shifts - whether or not Trump gets re-elected. Aukus has already been established and Japan and South Korea have been bolted on. There will doubtless be further Russian attempts to cleave Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia away from Nato. An AfD government in Berlin would be a dream come true for Russia. India can perhaps be relied upon against China, but not Russia. Conceivably Russia could be dismembered following an economic collapse and a colour revolution. Then again, especially if it continues to better Ukraine, Russia could be offered entry into the lower ranks of the imperialist club in return for breaking its ‘no limits’ alliance with China. A Mao-Nixon rapprochement in reverse.

China would then be surrounded in an instant and either forced into accepting the status of a US neocolony, having its arms industry dramatically scaled down, its big banks and companies bought up on the cheap, etc - that or face strangulation and potential state collapse. Understandably, given the historic experience of its ‘long century’ of colonial oppression (1839-1949) seared into its collective memory, China might well choose to resist using whatever means it has at its disposal.

Bear in mind the ‘sleep walk’ towards World War I. There were dramatic shifts in perceptions and relationships. Enemies became friends and friends became enemies. As Britain stumbled in the second Boer War and came to see Prussia/Germany as a potential global rival, it abandoned its ‘splendid isolation’ from European continental concerns and instead embraced its old enemy, France. An arrangement cemented in 1904 with the Entente Cordiale. France’s 1892 alliance with tsarist Russia became, in due course, a triple alliance between Britain, France and Russia. Historic rivalry pitting Russia and Britain over southern Asia ended with various robber-deals, including dividing Persia into two zones of interest. Japan too was brought on board with a formal alliance, starting with Britain in 1902. Such grand realignments readied the conditions needed for defeating the central powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. True, the US eventually entered the war and tilted the balance and Russia was knocked out of the imperial system altogether by the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution.

But, in the end, Germany was much reduced, stripped of colonies, burdened with crippling reparation payments and forced to accept substantial territorial loses to the east and the west. As for the Austro-Hungarian empire, it was fragmented into a series of small, often rival, states. That included Austria. It was left as little more than a pocket-sized territory with an oversized imperial capital. And, apart from Turkey itself - ‘liberated’ by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - Anglo-French imperialism sliced and diced the Ottoman empire into neat colonial and semi-colonial administrative units.

Nonetheless, as things stand today, strategic thinkers in Washington must be more than satisfied with their Russo-Ukraine war. Far from Ukraine hitting the surrender button with Russia’s ‘special military operation’, it more than survived. Albeit with considerable western military, technical and financial aid, Ukraine has subsequently bogged Russia down in what is a 21st century version of the 1914-18 western front. A quagmire. No wonder there is excited talk of ending Putin’s siloviki regime and Balkanising the Russian Federation along the lines of 1918 Austria-Hungary.

The idea, common on the idiot left - including the pro-Kremlin Z left - that the Russian invasion is succeeding; that Ukraine is doing terribly badly; that the Kursk incursion was a dreadful blunder, a brilliant Putin trap that Zelensky fell headlong into; that the US has met its limits in Ukraine - all such nonsense testifies to a profound political myopia brought about by wishful thinking of the daftest kind. No-one - no-one who is serious, that is - expected Ukraine to defeat Russia and drive it back to the 1991 borders. That was never on the cards. Continued Ukrainian resistance is, in fact, a western victory in itself.

Most definitely, the US does not want a generalised nuclear exchange with Russia and therefore mutually assured destruction. Doubtless that is why everything is carefully calibrated. Ukraine is supplied with enough military hardware to check, drain and exhaust Russia, but nothing more than that … yet. A proxy war that lasts for years to come suits the strategic purposes of Washington and Whitehall to a tee.

Ukraine can do the fighting and the dying in order to keep Russia bogged down. An unwinnable war, which will, though, create the conditions (so goes the calculation) for regime change in Moscow. A rollback strategy proclaimed by Jimmy Carter in January 1980 that worked like a dream in Afghanistan (the Soviet Union scuttled in February 1989 and collapsed in December 1991).

Wartime economy

Russia has certainly thrown money at upping war production and adapted economically to the needs of a slow, grinding war. While western sanctions have had an effect, Russia has found other outlets for its oil and gas - most notably in China and India. Nonetheless, there are those who predict that Russia stands on the edge of an abyss, with inflation about to roar, reserves being run low and mounting debts. According to the Swedish neoliberal economist, Anders Åslund, this could “potentially force Vladimir Putin to stop waging war on Ukraine as early as next year”.7 Frankly, it is, though, hard to take such a prediction seriously.

That said, the brain drain of bright young men fleeing the country and mounting war losses has led to a labour shortage, not least when it comes to the war economy, and that in turn affects the ability of the state to raise more troops. Internal contradictions therefore mount.

Russia is due to spend an estimated $190 billion, or 10% of its GDP, on its armed forces this year. A lot, but nothing compared to the UK’s total war economy between 1939 and 1945: in GDP terms 15.3% in 1939, 43.8% in 1940, 52.7% in 1941, 55.3% in 1943 and 53.4% in 1944. Britain could achieve such spectacularly high levels of expenditure fundamentally because, firstly, it possessed a world empire and, secondly, it could rely on generous US support (in exchange for handing over world hegemony).

In six years of war, there was a net flow of £10 billion into Britain. Of this £1.1 billion came from the sale of assets; £3.5 billion was made up of new borrowing, of which £2.7 billion was contributed by the empire’s sterling area. Canada, for example, gave C$1 billion in gifts and loans on easy terms. Above all there was though American money, loans and Lend Lease grants worth £5.4 billion. This funded massive British purchases of munitions, food, oil, machinery and raw materials. There was no charge for Lend Lease supplies delivered during the war.8

Russia has no such options available to it. Ukraine does, but within definite limits. “Ukraine could win the war if it had an additional $50 billion per year, as well as a green light to bomb military targets inside Russia,” says Åslund. Note, as of June 2024 the US donated $55.5 billion in weapons and military equipment, followed by Germany’s $11 billion and the UK’s $9.6 billion.9

Ukraine might conceivably get Åslund’s additional $50 billion per year. But what about the green light to strike military targets within Russia? This is not, in fact, a “victory plan”, as vociferously claimed by Zelensky in the US. That said, there can be no doubt that hitting military targets with long-distance missiles and drones has made a material difference when it comes to the front line.

Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, colonel general Oleksandr Syrskyi, had been bitterly complaining about Russia having a 5:1 advantage, when it comes to artillery shells. Russia routinely fired 10,000 daily, whereas Ukraine could only manage 2,000. That very much matters. Neither strategic nor tactical advance is possible without massive artillery bombardment.

However, not only have the US, EU and Ukraine itself upped the production of artillery shells: Russian logistical facilities and ammunition depots have repeatedly been hit by drones and precision-guided missiles. In September facilities in the Tver and Krasnodar Krai regions of Russia were hit - an estimated 32,000 tonnes of munitions was destroyed. Such actions have, reportedly, helped reduce the gap between Russian and Ukrainian artillery fires to 2.5:1.10

If, as seems likely, Joe Biden has given the go-ahead for the Ukrainian use of British made Storm Shadows inside the 1991 Russian Federation, this will serve to narrow the fire gap still further. True, Russia has already moved its most important command posts, airforce bases and major storage facilities inside Russia, beyond their 155-mile range. In the process still further stretching Russia supply lines and thereby slowing down deliveries to the front line.

But, of course, the main importance of Storm Shadows is symbolic. Their use within Russian Federation borders is about escalation, dialling up Nato involvement. Not unexpectedly, this has seen Vladimir Putin warning about Nato being “at war with Russia”. There is undoubtedly some considerable truth involved here. Ukraine could not use such Nato-made missiles without Nato technical and military back-up - crucially US satellites. Dmitry Medvedev, former president and prime minister, has, for his part, bloodcurdlingly talked about reducing Kyiv to a “giant melted spot”,11 Sabre-rattling, perhaps - but, as we have said, “till the moment when it isn’t”.12

Such warning should act as an urgent wake-up call for all those who consider themselves part of the principled left. We have all, rightly, marched on each and every massive pro-Palestine national demonstration. But the war in Ukraine has largely been forgotten. Hence, when it comes to papers, websites, trade union resolutions and election manifestos, Ukraine is noticeable by its absence. Why? Perhaps, because, in Britain at least, Ukraine’s war against Russia remains a popular cause. Calling for an end to arms supplies, refusing to support neither reactionary Ukraine nor reactionary Russia, demanding the abolition of Nato and all standing armies - such a principled position would doubtless risk short-term opprobrium. But only if we take that risk, I would argue, do we have a chance of fulfilling our socialist mission and avoiding the real danger of World War III.

Social-imperialists

US unwillingness to do anything too overtly provocative, has, naturally, infuriated Zelensky’s social-imperialist cheerleaders. In the form of the Ukrainian Solidarity Campaign - supported by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Anticapitalist Resistance and the Labour Representation Committee13 - they demand “full sanctions” against Russian “imperialist aggression” (ie, siege warfare), claim that the Putin regime is “attacking democracy globally” and that Ukraine should get all the “arms necessary to liberate the country, from wherever possible and without conditions”.14

The internationalisation of ruling class ideology is unashamed and unmistakable. It is “Putin’s dictatorship” which is “linked to neo-fascist and authoritarian forces around the world”, not Zelensky and his Banderite Azov chums. It is Nato which is democratic and under threat. Despite that, moans the USC, “most western countries have been slow in providing arms”. Therefore the demand for supplying Ukraine with massively increased supplies of the most up-to-date fighter aircraft, tanks and missiles. A recipe for yet more slaughter and yes … phasing into World War III.

Effectively this ‘Arm, arm, arm Ukraine’ line poses a ‘guns or butter’ choice in Europe, with the social-imperialists demanding guns. Perhaps the best known use of this particular phrase was, of course, Joseph Goebbels in a speech on January 17, 1936. The Nazi propaganda chief stated: “We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.” Referencing the same concept, sometime later in the same year - another leading Nazi, this time Herman Göring - quipped: “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat” (as an aside he was rather on the stout side).15

Across Europe there is an aggressive drive by mainstream bourgeois politicians, opinion makers, arms manufacturers and the top brass alike to win an increasingly cautious public to accept ever bigger military budgets in the name of ‘not letting Russia win’. Already Poland spends 3.9% of its GDP on the military, Greece some 3% and the UK, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia and Romania around 2%.16 But the trend is upwards with all Nato members ... and between January 2022 and January 2024 a cool $165 billion has gone to prop-up, finance and arm Ukraine.17

The choice of guns over butter should be openly admitted by the social-imperialists. However, some prefer mealy-mouthed formulations: eg, Branko Marcetic, a Jacobin staff writer, opposes the delivery of “offensive weapons”.18 The more honest, the more brazen - eg, Stephen R Shalom of the Mandelite ‘Fourth International’ - rightly say that the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons is meaningless.19 By contrast, we stick with Wilhelm Liebknecht’s time-honoured slogan, “Not a man and not a penny for this system!”20 Socialists - genuine socialists, that is - take no responsibility for the ‘defence budget’ of capitalist governments. We maintain that position, it should be stressed, because of political principle, because we are a party of extreme opposition, not out of economic calculation.

After all, it is argued, that military expenditure (milex) stimulates economic activity - a line taken by military Keynesians and self-proclaimed Marxists such as Paul Baren, Paul Sweezy, Michael Kidron and Ernest Mandel. Doubtless the profits of the arms companies such as Britain’s BAE Systems are boosted with increased state orders for the means of destruction. However, the main burden is borne by taxpayers, not least other sections of the capitalist class. Dan Smith and Ron Smith conclude that the effects of milex are “complex and contradictory”: it maintains capitalism, but suppresses overall economic growth.21

What seems likely at the moment is that economic activity in Europe is being suppressed by the Ukraine war: eg, cutting off cheap Russian oil and gas supplies and the range of other costly sanctions. However, in the US, the world’s biggest arms manufacturer, Ukraine has probably acted as an economic stimulus.

The BBC headlined, in January 2023: “US weapons sales abroad hit record high in 2023, boosted by Ukraine war.” Overseas sales increased by 56%, compared with 2022, reaching a total of $238 billion.22 As for the US itself, the milex budget in 2023 amounted to $916 billion - dwarfing rivals such as China ($296 billion) and Russia ($109 billion).23 What is for sure is that the extra orders have been a goldmine for companies such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics. They are awash with money.

However, everything else being equal, increased milex means reduced local government grants, sickness benefits, transport projects, etc. The social-imperialists ought, therefore, to be made to take full responsibility for that choice next time they march with their Banderite friends. ‘Arm, arm, arm Ukraine’ should be accompanied with calls to ‘Cut, cut, cut … services and welfare’.

Naturally, the social-imperialists claim that support for Ukraine is no different from supporting Palestinian self-determination: “Being leftwing means being on the side of the oppressed, whether in Palestine, Kurdistan or Ukraine. That is why the EU must continue to supply weapons to Kyiv and allow attacks on Russian territory.” So says Die Linke MEP Carola Rackete.24 This is the sort of screwball logic that, during World War I, led the ‘father of British Marxism’, Henry Hyndman, to, on the one hand, “applaud those like Karl Liebknecht, Mehring, Ledebour, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bernstein, who have remained true to the faith” by opposing the German war effort, and, on the other hand, support Anglo-French imperialism - that though it had allied itself to “Muscovite tsarism”.25 Germany posed the greatest threat to democracy and socialism, he argued.

There is amongst the social-imperialists a wilful refusal to engage in joined-up thinking. Both Ukraine and Israel serve as US proxies. Imperialist support for Ukrainian self-determination cannot, for understandable reasons, therefore, be separated from other wars and conflicts, not least Israel’s genocidal denial of Palestinian self-determination.

The idea that the US, UK, Germany, France, etc, are supporting a “just war” in Ukraine and an “unjust war” in Gaza and the wider Middle East, is a stupid, hopelessly opportunist muddle, to say the least. States which are committed to anti-trade union laws, restrictions on civil rights and the continuation of class exploitation at home, pursue those same class interests by other, violent, means abroad. If a war is supported by our capitalist state, then it follows that such a war is a criminal war.

Sympathising with ordinary Ukrainians who have been killed, injured, lost love ones, fled abroad, etc, is perfectly natural. War is horrible. But for ‘socialists’ to call for Ukraine’s victory is not to see the wood for the trees. In Russia it might well be the case that we would ‘prefer to see a Russian defeat than its victory’. To state the obvious, however, we are not in Russia. No, here today, in countries such as the US, Britain, Germany and France, supporting ‘heroic Ukraine’ is akin to supporting ‘brave little Belgium’ and ‘plucky little Serbia’, while not acknowledging that what was going on between 1914 and 1918 was a bestial inter-imperialist struggle over global domination. It had nothing to do with protecting the rights of little nations. The great powers used all manner of excuses to alibi their right to rob, plunder and exploit the colonial and semi-colonial countries, where the vast majority of the world’s population lived.

Ukraine cannot be seen in isolation. Behind it there stands the unmatched might of the dominant imperialist bloc. The US violently yanked Ukraine out of the Russian orbit with the 2014 Maidan coup and then, step by step, established it as a pawn in the great game to dominate the Eurasian ‘world island’ and upend what Xi Jinping calls the “irreversible” rise of China.

The end result can either be socialism or barbarism.

  1. www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-outnumbered-outgunned-ground-down-by-relentless-russia-2024-02-21.↩︎

  2. C von Clausewitz On war Harmondsworth 1976, p310.↩︎

  3. www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-26-2023.↩︎

  4. edition.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/pentagon-documents-ukraine-war-assessment/index.html.↩︎

  5. today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50379-more-americans-think-ukraine-winning-russia-war.↩︎

  6. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7810y11dyjo.↩︎

  7. fortune.com/2024/10/06/russia-economy-outlook-ukraine-war-budget-deficit-military-spending-sanctions.↩︎

  8. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_home_front_during_World_War_II.↩︎

  9. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7810y11dyjo.↩︎

  10. www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/4/russia-takes-vuhledar-protecting-supply-line-ukraine-closes-firepower-gap.↩︎

  11. The Independent September 14 2024.↩︎

  12. PCC statement ‘Establishing a principled left’ Weekly Worker October 3 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1509/establishing-a-principled-left.↩︎

  13. Thankfully RS21 no longer seems to be an affiliate. Whether this is the result of lethargy, lack of finance or an internal political struggle is unknown to me. Perhaps readers who are in the know might care to tell us, either publicly or privately.↩︎

  14. ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/2024/09/11/ukraine-solidarity-conference-declaration.↩︎

  15. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model.↩︎

  16. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-44717074.↩︎

  17. Figure arrived at from www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-aid-to-ukraine.↩︎

  18. B Marcetic Jacobin March 27 2022.↩︎

  19. SR Shalom International Viewpoint April 22 2022.↩︎

  20. See Wilhelm Liebknecht’s November 30 1893 speech to the Reichstag during its debate on the imperial budget: www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-w/revolt/11-not-one-penny.html.↩︎

  21. D Smith and R Smith The economics of militarism London 1983, p100.↩︎

  22. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68136840.↩︎

  23. www.statista.com/statistics/262742/countries-with-the-highest-military-spending.↩︎

  24. ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/2024/10/04/being-left-means-being-on-the-side-of-the-oppressed.↩︎

  25. HM Hyndman The future of democracy London 1915, p20.↩︎