Donald Trump, in a presidential campaign TV spot warned on Tuesday (February 21) that “World War III has never been closer than it is right now,” and blamed “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex.”
Special mention – rightly – was made of Victoria Nuland, the US deputy secretary of state for political affairs, who, said Trump, has been “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO.”
Trump accurately portrayed the current conjuncture. Pronouncements by US and NATO officials before and at the recent annual Munich Security Conference (Feb 17-19) can leave very little doubt that the US war aim in Ukraine is regime change in Russia and the decisive defeat of Russia to the point of de facto unconditional surrender.
Remembering the Munich “peace conference” of September 1938 and its consequences, one wonders if there’s something bad in the water in the Bavarian capital, but that’s another topic.
The fact is that at the famed Hotel Bayrischer Hof on February 18, US Vice President Kamala Harris was trotted out to declare that “The United States has formally determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity.”
How and by whom exactly that determination was made, she didn’t say. But crimes against humanity cannot be dealt with in a negotiation. This calls for total war “for as long as it takes.” Roosevelt made such a determination and declared the demand for unconditional surrender in WW2.
Russia, of course, duly noted.
President Putin declared among other things in his annual address to the nation on February 21 that Russia would pull back from New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the United States, saying inspection of Russian nuclear facilities as NATO is in effect going to war with Russia was an absurd proposition. He also reiterated the threat of the use of nuclear weapons if the integrity of the Russian state was under immediate threat.
So, there we now stand. How over the recent months did we get there? Let’s cut a long story short.
On February 13, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that Russia had started a new major offensive in Ukraine. Prior to that, Ukrainian President Zelensky and his officials (some no longer in office, having been expelled for corruption) had made similar declarations.
On February 14, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he expected Ukraine to launch its own offensive in the spring. In the same press conference with Austin, quite to the astonishment of reporters, US joint chiefs of staff head General Mark Milley said “In short, Russia has lost. They’ve lost strategically, operationally and tactically. And they are paying an enormous price on the battlefield.”
He later in the same press conference second-guessed himself, saying, “on the issue of the Russian offensive, this — this offensive that you see ongoing right now generally in the Bakhmut area, you know, from Kharkiv all the way down to Kherson the front line is quite stable, even though very violent and a lot of fighting. It’s relatively stable.
“Most of the dynamic movement back and forth is in — generally in the vicinity of Bakhmut. The Ukrainians are holding….. I would describe it as a very significant grinding battle of attrition with very high casualties, especially on the Russian side. There;s no fancy arts of maneuver going on here. This is frontal attacks, wave attacks, lots of artillery with extremely high levels of casualties in that particular area.”
That made a bit more sense than the initial assessment.
Then, on February 16, the State Department’s Nuland said that “Russia has declared that it is launching a new offensive. Well, if this is it, it is very pathetic.” She noted that the war is “grinding” in the east, at locations like the city of Bakhmut, where Russia is either inching forward or not gaining any territory at all.
That’s a worrying bit of confused or deliberately confusing statements from the highest US and NATO officials. Not to question their intelligence and basic levels of competence, let’s assume it’s deliberate. But any way you read it, the bottom line is the same: Most of NATO and the US see themselves now in a total war conflict and Russian President Putin has said loud and clear that he gets it.
The real situation on the ground in Ukraine, as Jim Davis writes, is a stalemate with neither Ukraine nor Russia at this point having the forces in place to launch a decisive offensive. But a war of attrition favors the demographically and industrially superior side – Russia.
General Milley knows that full well and has called for settlement negotiations. But he, of course, is abiding by the political prescriptions of President Biden and his dominant ideological warriors.
Milley and all realist observers know that without massive NATO aid and intervention on the ground, if need be, Russia will win. Russia will also now make every effort to cut supply lines from Poland and western Ukraine across the Dnepr River and to Ukrainian forces in the Donbass region.
Will Ukraine with US long-range artillery help attempt again to take down the Kerch Bridge and Russian land supplies to the southern theater? That is the escalation scenario that’s near-inevitable unless Washington comes to its senses and clearly assesses its strategic interests, which is a very long shot.