Sergey Poletayev: Here’s Russia’s plan for Ukraine for this summer
The cost to the West of supporting Kiev continues to rise, meaning Moscow’s best option is to wait

 

From time to time, people ask why Russia is not acting more decisively in Ukraine, and why it appears to be dragging its feet. Some say it’s out of weakness, others suspect some secret agreements with the West, and it seems there are theories to suit all tastes.

In reality, the answer is clear and transparent. This year and the next, Russia has budgeted about 5-6% of GDP on the Ukraine conflict, and the Kremlin’s task is to use these comparatively small resources as efficiently as possible. They intention is to achieve the goals of the military operation without a new mobilization, and to preserve not only a calm and functioning economy but also stability inside the country.

Although the front line has remained largely static since autumn 2022, the political situation and the circumstances in which the conflict will likely end are changing radically – in Russia’s favor. With little risk and at relatively small financial expense, President Vladimir Putin is slowly but surely getting his way. 

Not waiting, but preparing

There is increasing talk of an imminent Russian offensive. As with the Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’ a year ago, commentators claim to know exactly where it will take place (towards Kharkov or Sumy), when it will happen (in May or June), and are sure in advance that it will be decisive for the whole conflict, and so on.

But it seems to us that the Kremlin does not want a big march on Ukraine’s second city this summer, and here is why.

Firstly, there is a lack of experience. We are talking about an operation on the scale of the Eastern Front in the Second World War, and such endeavors have never been carried out during the current campaign. (February 22, 2022 doesn’t count, because the enemy wasn’t fully mobilized, and the front line didn’t really exist so there was no need to break through anything.)

In any conflict, the scale required for offensive battles increases steadily, and the appropriate tools, strategic and tactical techniques, officer and staff corps need to be formed. The leap required to go from a five-month operation to take Avdeevka to a rapid and successful occupation of Kharkov or Sumy seems unfathomable.

Also, the forces and means required are not yet in place. Yes, we have reserves of about 150,000-170,000 people. Yes, more people are signing up for military service every month than Ukraine is catching in taverns and on the streets, which means that the numbers are still growing. But a mass of soldiers is not an army. They need to be armed, equipped, trained, provided with experienced officers, staff capacity, equipment, shells, aircraft, and other things.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has said that the formation of two new general armies will be completed by the end of 2024. So the Russian Armed Forces will only reach their peak form in eight to nine months, and then the conditions for opening a second front should be apparent.

But what about this summer? Unless the Ukrainian front suddenly collapses, we are likely to see a slow and measured advance, with a fight for every field and village, combined with simultaneous air strikes deep inside the front and on the Ukrainian rear.

Despite increasingly sophisticated Ukrainian counterattacks, such a scenario will exhaust the enemy much faster than it exhausts us, which means that by the end of the year, or into next summer, the balance of forces will have shifted even more in our favor. In any case, this is the calculation of our general staff.

Meanwhile, if Ukraine’s forces suddenly falter in Donbass, Kharkov Region, or Zaporozhye, the reserves we already have in the zone will be sufficient to develop success.

At the same time, Russian offensive operations of operational (medium) scale are possible in the spring and summer, especially if Kiev’s army begins to bend more than it is now. This is not only a rehearsal and a way of gaining experience, but also, if successful, a demonstration to the enemy that we know how to launch an offensive, that we know exactly what to do, and that we will do it again if necessary.

Already the general opinion in the West is that Ukraine can’t win. Thus, the new debate is about whether to negotiate or directly join the fight (the latter seems unrealistic, but more on that below). And all this is mixed with a simultaneous general opinion that Putin cannot attack, that the Russian army is exhausted, and so on. 

When the formation of the new armies described above is completed and it’s decided to move them to the Ukrainian border, the second front will be suddenly trumpeted in Ukraine and in the West, and this in itself could be a decisive factor. Putin will thus offer the enemy a choice – either accept our terms (the disarmament and neutrality of Ukraine, as well as other control mechanisms) or prepare for a new round, for which we are much better prepared than you.

In other words, if you won’t do it nicely, we will take what we want by force.

When aspirations don’t match opportunities

Of course, the West does not want to sit idly by and wait for Russia to get its way without making any moves. But after the failure of last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive, no clear ideas have emerged about how to defeat Moscow.

Worse, from the perspective of Russia’s opponents, the political divide in Western countries has reached such proportions that it is time to talk not about the strategy of the bloc as a whole, but about the solidarity of the globalist elites, who are facing growing opposition both in their own countries and in the Global South. As a result, their aspirations are struggling to be realized.

What are we talking about? Last autumn it was decided that Ukraine’s task for 2024 is to hold, construct, and strike – that is, to maintain the front, build defenses, and bombard Russia as painfully as possible – while rebuilding the army and preparing for decisive victorious battles in 2025, after which an exhausted Putin will surely have to make peace.

The first part is still holding up (especially in view of the fact that Russia is not advancing anywhere), but the second is more difficult – due to political squabbling and a general shortage of weapons, supplies are insufficient even for the current needs of Kiev’s armed forces, and although the situation in Ukraine is not as catastrophic as the professional mourners in the Western press are claiming every day, it is slowly but surely deteriorating. In other words, so far, everything is going according to Putin’s plan rather than the West’s – gradually the Ukrainian army is getting weaker, not stronger.

In addition to the problems with Western weapons, there is another: Ukraine is running out of soldiers. According to various estimates, up to one and a half million people have passed through the Ukrainian armed forces during the conflict. Initially it was made up of those who wanted to fight, or at least were not against it.

However, now it’s not so easy. Attempts to increase enlistment in the Ukrainian army are being met with total sabotage, both by worried men who are running away en masse from military recruiters, and by MPs who dithered over a bill on extending mobilization since the autumn.

So the West, traumatized by Ukraine’s failures last year, is now reluctant to provide scarce weapons – and at the same time sees no motivation to provide more as long as the Ukrainians themselves are unwilling to fight. A vicious circle.

Against this background, the second part of the grandiose plan, the turning point next year, looks more like ‘I’ll start a new life on Monday’ style complacency. There is no talk of increasing Western supplies to Ukraine in 2025, and even maintaining current volumes and budget funding (around $40 billion a year) is in serious doubt.

The Kremlin is well aware of all this and is raising the costs for the West. As a result of strikes on the energy sector, Ukraine has gone from being a donor country to one that needs electricity supplies from the European Union and large investments to rebuild destroyed power plants – all at the West’s expense, of course. The strikes on gas storage facilities in western Ukraine increase the risk of disruption to the heating season next winter, and so on.

As we have said many times, the West is at a fork in the road – withdraw from the conflict and negotiate with Russia, or up the ante and go to war itself. Macron has floated a trial balloon, and the reaction both within France itself and among NATO members with at least some kind of functioning armies has shown that no, there will be no Western troops in Ukraine in any significant numbers for the foreseeable future.

Faced with a fork in the road, the West has been unable to choose one way or the other and has instead stood by and watched Ukraine slowly lose. It is now worth waiting to see whether any fundamental decisions will be taken at the NATO summit in July; whether the US Congress will be able to give Ukraine any money and, more importantly, whether this cash will actually help the country and not just prolong its agony. Not to mention whether Kiev can finally solve the problem of mobilization without causing riots in the rear. And above all, let’s see if the West can come up with a coherent plan that will force the Kremlin to take risks.

If not, if things continue as they are now, Russia can continue to sit back and wait for Ukraine to fall into its hands like an overripe fruit.

Moscow has at least a couple of years to do so. How long does Kiev have?

https://www.rt.com/russia/595831-heres-russias-plan-for-ukraine/

 

 

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‘To condemn NATO is to condemn the guarantee of democracy and security it brings.’

Those were the words of Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, writing in The Guardian in 2022. Starmer claimed that Nato is a ‘defensive alliance that has never provoked conflict’, ignoring the fact that Nato has taken military action in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Libya.

At the same time, it has continually expanded eastwards towards Russia, bringing its troops and military equipment to its very border. In 1999, former Warsaw Pact countries Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined Nato. In 2004, they were joined by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. All of this was in breach of a promise given to the final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, by the

U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, in 1990, that Nato would ‘not expand an inch’ eastward.

At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, Nato members agreed that Georgia and Ukraine would be allowed to join Nato in the future. They did this knowing Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had warned this was a red line for the Russians which should not be crossed; both states border Russia, both were former Soviet republics.

Encouraged by this, and by U.S. military support and assistance, four months later Georgia launched an invasion of South Ossetia, a territory it claimed but which had declared its independence with Russian support. Russian troops intervened and drove the Georgians back, entering Georgia itself and forcing its government to convene ceasefire negotiations.

What is Nato?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), is a collective security pact that was formed 75 years ago in 1949. Nato’s founding members were the United States, Canada, and ten states of Western Europe, including the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. The alliance’s first secretary general, Baron Hastings Ismay, described its purpose bluntly: ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.’

Britain, France and Belgium had already signed a similar pact, but even together they could not match Russia or, in the future, a resurgent Germany. Each a colonial empire, these declining powers needed an alliance with the USA, post-1945, the greatest world power, in order to retain their own status as world powers.

In the immediate aftermath of victory in World War Two, they were worried also that Washington wanted to strip away their colonial empires; the wartime administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt had used anti-colonial rhetoric and made open its support for Indian independence. Two things ensured that post-war, the new U.S. President, Harry Truman, would not follow through on that.

The first was that, through the Breton Woods Agreements, it got what it most desired: free trade (America could undercut any of its rivals). Britain, for instance, had to dismantle its Sterling Bloc, in which the UK, its Empire and Dominions and countries like Argentina had created a protected market, to the annoyance of the U.S. Free trade was guaranteed by new American-dominated institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and GATTs, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

The second change was the onset of the Cold War with Russia. At the Yalta and Potsdam summits in 1945, Europe had been partitioned between the U.S. and UK on the one hand and Russia on the other. In the Far East, the USA effectively kept both Britain and Russia out of its successful war with Japan, and took control of it after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the Russians had entered the Korean peninsula and Washington had to agree to its partition.

Tensions

Tensions soon grew. In 1948, the Russian dictator, Stalin, cut off road and rail access to U.S., UK and French-occupied West Berlin. The Western powers had to airlift in everything from flour to coal.

One of the USA’s wartime goals had been to open up China for free trade; previously, various European powers physically controlled its coastal cities. But the 1949, the Chinese Revolution ended that. Then in 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, starting a long, bloody war involving America and its allies and, after American armies reached the border with China, the People’s Army.

In Western Europe, Communist Parties had joined coalition governments in 1945 in France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. By 1947, the USA had run a successful campaign, orchestrated by the CIA, to get them out of office.

In order to prevent the supposed threat of Communist takeovers in Western Europe, Nato created, in 1949, a number of top-secret underground armies, the Gladio network, stay-behind cells which would keep fighting after a Russian invasion.

These were largely made up of far rightists who began targeting Communist Parties in countries like Italy. In the 1970s, as part of creating a ‘Strategy of Tension’ in Italy, they became involved in far-right bombings aiming at provoking a military coup. Earlier, the Greek Gladio and special-forces networks joined the 1967 Nato-backed coup that installed a military dictatorship. Meanwhile, in Malaya, Britain was fighting a vicious colonial war against Communist-led pro-independence guerrillas, as was France in Indochina.

The Truman administration became convinced Stalin was set on expanding his empire (actually he was satisfied with gaining Eastern Europe and was suspicious of the Chinese Communists). Washington also saw the British and French Empires as providing them with strategically important bases: Gibraltar, Cyprus and Diego Garcia today, for instance.

Against that background, Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary in the 1945-1951 Attlee government took the lead, sensing the shift in Washington. That government, lauded now for creating the NHS and the welfare state, was prepared to fight to maintain the Empire, and while, economically bankrupt, saw an alliance with the USA as the way to cling on to great-power status.

The U.S. realised that it did not have a single nuclear weapon that could reach the Soviet Union. It needed nuclear bases in Europe and Turkey. The creation of Nato, reflected by the Warsaw Pact signed in 1955 between Russia and its Eastern European satellites, led to the militarisation of Western Europe. The USA already had some 50,000 troops in Germany and the huge Ramstein air base there (used today to supply Ukraine and Israel).

With the creation of Nato, Washington secured nuclear bases in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey, today home of up to 200 U.S. B61 nuclear missiles. Britain had already signed a separate treaty granting the U.S. nuclear bases in the UK. Today, the alliance rejects a policy of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons. In other words, Nato would be prepared to use nuclear weapons in a first strike.

Nuclear Alliance

From the start, Nato was a nuclear alliance. At the 2018 Brussels Summit, Nato reaffirmed that the fundamental purpose of its nuclear forces is deterrence, and that, as long as nuclear weapons exist, Nato will remain a nuclear alliance.

At the Summit Declaration, Nato criticised the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), saying it ‘risks undermining the NPT (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons), and is inconsistent with the Alliance’s nuclear deterrence policy.’ That same year, in its Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump Administration reaffirmed its commitment to have ‘nuclear weapons forward-deployed to Europe, to the defence of NATO.’

Currently, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is modernising the non-strategic warheads deployed in European Nato countries. NNSA is refurbishing and replacing components of the aging B-61-3 and B-61-4 warheads, converting them into the updated B61-12 model, which are due to be deployed this year.

The Cold War ended with fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. That same year also saw the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. But the U.S. was determined to retain Nato.

Expansion

One reason was that it wanted to maintain its military presence in Europe via Nato, and was very distrustful of talk of the European Union creating an alternative military force. George H. W. Bush told French President François Mitterrand, in April 1990, that no organisation would ‘replace NATO as the guarantor of Western security and stability’.

Key to maintaining Nato was its expansion, as outlined above. The 2008 Bucharest Nato summit held out Nato membership to Ukraine and Georgia, with American and European leaders knowing this would provoke Russia.

In 2008, the CIA Director, William Burns, wrote to the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, saying:

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Nato’s 2016 Warsaw Summit Communique criticised Russia’s annexation of Crimea and reiterated the deterrence role of nuclear weapons. Nato also stated that its regrets that the prospects for disarmament are ‘not favourable today’.

Reports like Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, published in 2019 by the Rand Corporation, talked of halting Russia’s gas exports to Europe and arming Ukraine, to advancing regime change in Belarus and exacerbating tensions in the southern Caucasus. The report set out a raft of measures aimed at enforcing Western interests by coercion.

As I have argued elsewhere, the Russian invasion of Ukraine allowed the U.S. to impose its control on the European states, forcing them to prioritise Nato as key to their defence and forcing them to increase military spending. Germany was brought to heel and the emphasis on Nato allowed Britain to resume its role as the American watch dog in Europe.

Inflection point

U.S. president, Joe Biden, views the war as ‘an inflection point in the world’. Less than a month after the Russian invasion, he told a group of business leaders: ‘There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it’.

The U.S. sees the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to weaken Russia, and send a signal to China. In April 2022, U.S. defence secretary Lloyd Austin told a press conference in Kyiv, ‘We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.’ This means denying Russia ‘the capability to very quickly reproduce’ the military forces that it has lost so far.

Nato has also become a means of enforcing the global neoliberal template. On March 25, 1997, at a conference of the Euro-Atlantic Association held at Warsaw University, Joe Biden, then a senator, outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to Nato, stating:

All NATO member states have free-market economies with the private sector playing a leading role.

He then added:

The mass privatization plan represents a major step toward giving the Polish people a direct stake in the economic future of their country. But this is not the time to stop. I believe that large, state-owned enterprises should also be placed in the hands of private owners, so that they can be operated with economic, rather than political interests in mind … Businesses like banks, the energy sector, the state airline, the state copper producer, and the telecommunications monopoly will have to be privatized.

At the 2022 Nato Helsinki summit, the Swedish government was warned that their country would become less attractive for foreign capital if it remained ‘the only state in Northern Europe outside of NATO’. Swedish arms manufacturers welcomed its application to join Nato, as Lilly Lynch noted:

‘Swedish defence industry giant Saab is expecting major profits from NATO membership. The company … has seen its share price nearly double since the Russian invasion. Chief Executive Micael Johansson has said that Sweden’s NATO membership will open new possibilities for Saab in the areas of missile defence and surveillance. The company is expecting dramatic gains as European countries raise their defence spending, and first quarter reports reveal that operating profits have already risen 10% over last year, to $32 million.’

The 75th anniversary of Nato’s founding is unlikely to be cause for much celebration. The withdrawal from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover was a humiliation for the U.S. and Nato.

Today they are having to face up to the fact Ukraine cannot win against Russia, it simply does not have the manpower. Hopes of a Russian economic collapse have not just failed to materialise, but the Russian economy is performing well, and it has built up its arms industries to allow it to fight a war of attrition, in a way Ukraine and Nato cannot match.

When the war ends, we must remember it would never have occurred without Nato expansion further and further east.

https://mronline.org/2024/04/11/nato-75th-anniversary-a-guarantor-of-war/

 

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