Russian Tensions
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I’ve been watching video interviews with military experts and specialists on the Russian economy. Here are the main points I picked up.
The war is now one of attrition between artillery, with high casualties on both sides. Russia has the advantage in terms of the power and range of its artillery. The Ukrainians are able to impede Russian advances with local counteroffensives but unable to recover lost territory — something close to a stalemate. The West has promised to supply the Ukrainians with more powerful and longer-range rockets to nullify the Russian advantage and hopefully enable them to retake lost territory, but only a trickle of these new weapons has been entering Ukraine so far (not clear why or whether that will change).
The sanctions are doing enormous damage to the Russian economy. One aspect that was new to me concerns Russia’s railways, which are its only efficient transport system. A few years ago the railways switched to the use of ‘cassettes’ to carry freight, but these cassettes are available only from two Western companies, so sanctions will gradually mess up rail transport.
Regional authorities are stocking up on basic supplies to protect their people from shortages. This may lead to controls on the movement of goods across regional boundaries (as in the 1990s) or even a quiet disintegration of the country. Some Western leaders may view this as a desirable outcome, but what happens to the nukes?
Lesser know article by Eugene Debs on socialists and war
https://jacobin.com/2022/05/eugene-v-debs-socialist-internationalism-capitalist-nationalism
“…THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT IF IT STANDS AT ALL MUST STAND UNFLINCHINGLY AND UNCOMPROMISINGLY FOR SOCIALIST INTERNATIONALISM VERSUS CAPITALIST NATIONALISM!…”
Danger: Nasty Nationalists At Work. If any other state passed a blatantly discriminatory law like this against a minority group within it, liberals would be denouncing it as undemocratic. But because Ukraine is, apparently, fighting for “Western values” and even for “Good against Evil” we don’t hear a squeak from them. I suppose they might protest if these books were burnt in public.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61864049
EU accuse Russia of war crime in blockading wheat exports.
Yet several days ago, the complaint was that Russia was exporting Ukraine wheat via Turkey.
Is the real concern for the food insecurity of the millions?
The fact is that Ukraine can earn foreign exchange to continue the war by selling its wheat and Russia can overcome the financial consequence of sanctions by selling Ukraine crops.
The needs of the hungry poor was always secondary
To be honest, I was unaware of the Kaliningrad enclave until a few months ago.
It has now become subject to sanctions – siege- and very possibly lead to Russia attacking the Baltic countries to relief it.
Despite politicians and the generals war tends to have unintended consequences and acquire a life of its own. A serious escalation could occur.
Rare story of the Ukrainian oligarchs
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/22/will-the-war-with-russia-rein-in-ukraines-oligarchs
Slavoj Žižek saying a lot to justify support for Ukraine
Critisticuffs (the German group “Against Capital and Nation) have produced a detailed analysis of the current conflict between Russia and the US.
https://critisticuffs.org/texts/ukraine-russia-usa
Here is the conclusion, the last paragraph of which can serve as a fitting riposte to Zizek:
“For Russia and the US, what they are and claim to be as nations is at stake: for the one, its “historical future as a nation”, its status as a great power and respected subject in the world of states; for the other, its “unrivalled power”, its unrestricted world domination. Their positions are irreconcilable. They do not tolerate any relativisation, because that would be tantamount to abandoning their posited standpoint.
For both sides, the assertion of their own position, therefore, has the quality of an existential question that must be brought to a decision, a “matter of life and death” and or a matter of the highest principles – “prosperity and security” – respectively.
And so they go at each other. They both use deterrence and threats to impress the other side into accepting their demands and escalate the use of their means of destruction when this fails. They know full well what destruction the other side can bring to the battlefield, and how widely it can define this battlefield. They both insist on their dominance of escalation, their ability to up the ante in response to an escalation of the other side. For now, Russia made the transition to an all out war against Ukraine and kills people in that country to preserve its status as a great power. The superior American side, for now, does not want to get directly involved with its military – indeed it seems increasingly frustrated that it has to take attention away from its rising (economic and thus future military) rival China. For now, America is content with letting Ukrainians fight and die – for their fatherland and the rule-based order that the US implemented after the Second World War. But America’s restraint is nothing but the decision to postpone an escalation to the point when it feels its status as the one superpower in the world is sufficiently threatened.
Only an idiot would support either of these programmes.”
This war is similar to the ambush that was done to Saddan Hussein in Kuwait during the gulf war, and Putin bit the bullet. Since the very beginning Russia was not going to invade Ukraine they were just showing their own military force to the other side, but they were provoked and fell in the trap. The real purpose of the USA is to finish the job that they started in 1989 and to dismantle Russia completely and bring them to their own spheres of influence, the real and powerful enemy of the USA ruling class is China. In a few weeks more than 34,000 Russians ( or mercenaries ) have been killed and they are using old Soviet equipments, in a conventional war they can not fight with the NATO forces. The USA left Afghanistan because they job other military objective, and that objective was Ukraine and Eastern Europe, it was not because they were defeated or because Ronald Trump was a pacifist. Donald Trump did not start a new war because the real conditions did not exist yet, his followers do not understand the real causes of wars
I get some relevant papers through academia.edu. Sociologists investigating Ukrainians’ attitudes to European integration find that only 18% “feel a positive effect from Ukraine’s rapprochement with the EU” and in East Ukraine the figure is only 9%.
Workers at the Urals Compressor Plant in Yekaterinburg are on strike because their wages have not been paid for months. The plant director attributed the delay to the war in Ukraine.
World War III
London will be bombed first in World War Three, Putin ally claims
A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that London will be the first city to be bombed in the event of another world war.“The first to be hit will be London.
“It’s crystal clear that the threat to the world comes from the Anglo-Saxons.”Link go to Key points 2nd…on the list
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-news-live-russian-pilot-captured-as-ukrainian-forces-have-to-be-withdrawn-from-severodonetsk-12541713?postid=4069892#liveblog-bodyAs above. Russia, or rather Putin, wants to cause global starvation*.
So according to those who say Capitalism has bought billions of people out of poverty (ignoring all the evidence to the contrary) do they suggest we wait for this to happen…?
Begging the question in the first place that this is even remotely possible*?
1.4bn face food insecurity… the market dictates no profit no production.
*She said the hunger crisis was building “like a life-threatening wave before us” but it was Russia’s war that had “made a tsunami out of this wave”, and she said Russia was using hunger as a weapon of war.
They have banned some Russian musicians and directors of Symphonies . The German Nazis liked classical music, ballet, operas and arts
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