Pete Duncan says Ukraine’s fight for freedom is also our fight
The Ukrainians are currently in a rather desperate situation. Putin’s army is advancing slowly in the Donbas. It has occupied areas of Kharkiv oblast, where fighting has been taking place in a series of mini-Stalingrads, street-to-street and house-to-house. The aim is ultimately to take the city of Kharkiv, the second largest in Ukraine. If Russia captures Chasiv Iar and Kupiansk in Donetsk oblast and towns near the Russian border in Kharkiv oblast, it will be able to attack Kharkiv from two directions and seek to cut off numbers of Ukrainian soldiers.
Russia’s army now includes troops who have been attracted to serve by salaries sometimes three times the average in the regions they come from. Building up its forces, both inside Ukraine and across the border in Russia and Belarus, Russia can attack in different places, forcing the Ukrainians to disperse their troops, not knowing where the main Russian attack is coming from.
Since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainians could hope to defeat Russia, much larger military, economically and in population, only with the help of Western arms which were superior to the Russians’ equipment. With this, the Ukrainians were able to drive back the Russians in 2022 and make some advances in 2023. This year, the long delays in the US Congress to the aid which Joe Biden wished to send to Ukraine meant that the Ukrainians were outgunned by five or ten to one at the front.
Also, Ukraine was stymied by the American demand that US-supplied weapons could not be used to attack targets inside the Russian Federation. This meant that the Ukrainians could not retaliate against strikes from across the border into Ukraine. Biden has now relaxed this somewhat, saying that the Ukrainians can send US-supplied missiles across the border into Russia, but only near Kharkiv.
The supply of Patriot air defence systems has been delayed. As a result, Ukraine has lost half its electricity-generating capacity, making power cuts a normal feature of civilian life. Since the Ukrainian army is running out of men, civilian morale is further affected by the ubiquitous presence of groups of conscription agents, whose job it is to force unwilling men into service. After 45 days of training, these conscripts can be sent to fight.
Few Ukrainians believe that if Trump wins in November, he will be able to end the war in a day. Sufficient numbers of Ukrainians will go on fighting. But his victory would be likely to see reductions in the levels of American support. In Europe, the far-Right gains in the European Parliament elections were not as large as some feared, and one can hope that the EU will continue to actively oppose the Russian invasion. In the key European states of France and Germany, however, the advances of far-Right parties which oppose support for Ukraine present a threatening picture.
At the time of writing, it appears that Emmanuel Macron’s decision to hold early parliamentary elections in France (is Rishi Sunak his advisor on electoral strategy?) will see Marine le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National (RN) come into government. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland won second place in the EU parliamentary elections, behind the Christian Democrats, pushing the Social Democrats, who lead the coalition, into third place. The Greens, the most consistently anti-Putin party in Germany, suffered severe losses.
This weakening of the coalition in Germany, the coming into government of the RN in France, or both, is highly likely to lead to official talk that the time has come for the suffering of the people of Ukraine to end and for its government to negotiate. This mirrors the talk of some of the Left in Britain: we must “stop the war”. But while the Ukrainians still want to fight, this would be a gross betrayal of them.
Putin himself only pretends to want to negotiate with the Kyiv government, whom he lyingly calls “Nazis”. He insists on being given Crimea and the four oblasts he has illegally annexed, even though Russia doesn’t fully control any of these four, and a guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO. Such a compromise would allow him to restart the war soon afterwards, and this time threaten Moldova, Georgia and finally the Baltic States. War on the latter would lead to a direct conflict between Russia and NATO.
West Europeans, including the British, must understand that appeasement of a dictator such as Putin only increases his appetite for more territory. We must do much more to support the Ukrainians; they are fighting for our freedom as well as theirs. Russia is already launching cyberattacks on Britain. Labour should urgently raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, to help Ukraine and to begin to rebuild our defences, badly run down by the Tories. As Lenin said, “Procrastination means death”.
From reading this it does look like Duncan is keen to escalate the conflict without any consideration for the needs of the people of Donbas who’s polls commissioned prior to the 2014 coup by US backed NGO’s confirmed would prefer to be part of the Russian Federation, not part of Zelensky’s US proxy in Kiev. No doubt Duncan will happily see the confilct until the last Ukrainian has been sacrificed at the alter of US hegemony.