The Fog of War

Tanks!” Tanks! Send us tanks! We are winning … kinda.

It was February 2022 that I penned the essay ‘The Right to Lie’ (see link below) on the invasion of the Ukraine. I posted other observations later, and some from knowledgeable experts. This was followed by a video of a lecture Ukraine: A History Lesson, given by the distinguished Professor John J Mearsheimer, of Chicago University. He pretty well says similar things to my own overview but from an American patriotic academic’s long-term study, giving his version greater veracity than I will be accorded. Since then predicable propagandists dashed into action deploying misinformation and fabrications all over the Internet.

The media offer nightly updates, and President Putin and President Zelensky trade insults and threats, but again, it’s hard to ascertain what is truth, what is hope, and what is rumour. Standing back, at my safe distance, I think it’s fair to conclude the fog of war has not lifted and lies thick on the battlefield, lies being the operative word.

Since then, if the subject arises on the Grouse Beater Twitter site it’s swiftly hit by automatic right-wing bots primed to suggest any sympathy for the Russian argument denotes a commie lover. The descredited US senator Joseph McCarthy would give a sardonic ‘you betcha’ to that. And on that issue, because the West has blocked or buried news from Russia, I get most of my information from statements made by or from the White House, the president’s staff and generals, political commentators on the right and left, the Washington Post, and academics such as Mearsheimer.

We are now months on from what is a proxy war where no American will die, but the common man and woman will pay dearly, and those far away from the conflict see rising taxation to send weapons of war to the Ukraine. War affects us all. As things stand, folks in the West are finding food prises rising because Ukraine is the ‘bread basket of Europe‘, to quote the same politicians who told us we can grow our own food (forgetting poor weather conditions) saying the EU is a nasty place, very unBritish. They overlook bad harvests in the UK and farm produce unpicked for lack of EU seasonal migrant workers.

This update comes with my customary caution. Like so many commentating on the conflict, I am not a specialist nor an expert. I try to put two and two together to make four and if it does not, I look at the available evidence another way. I regard myself as Mr No Credentials but informed. Readers are free to check facts if sceptical of mine.

QUESTION: What do you mean the battlefield is shrouded in fog?

On the battlefield prospects, there are confident and sharply conflicting claims by military experts. One must regard all reports coming from Ukraine as suspect or tainted. In less than a week of the invasion there was a tale of Russian soldiers raping women, yet few Russians had reached a city or village. Later, there was a ‘fresh’ graveyard discovered where, for some odd reason, retreating Russian soldiers had taken respectful time to bury their victims and not tried to hide the alleged massacre, but instead placed gravemarkers with names on the graves. No validation followed the claim.

There are conflicting claims that Putin is an out-of-control madman on the loose, and the contrary, that he is a calculating dictator. Which is it? The Russian army is subjected to the same two-sides: the power of Russia will crush Ukraine, and lately, the Russian army is weak and poorly led.

Every day someone writes in the press that Russia is losing, is beaten, and tired. Zelensky encourages this lie. However, we do know what the U.S. position is, or at least was last April at the Ramstein Air Base conference of NATO powers and other military leaders that the U.S. organized: “Ukraine clearly believes it can win and so does everyone here.” To me, that was the excuse to send more arms and money to the Ukraine. Whether it was actually believed Russia was so weak it would give up, I have no way of authenticating. But I know this, Ukraine is not winning, not by any yardstick. Why does President Zelensky plead for more and more weapons if they are winning? Matters are much more finely balanced than Zelensky or the US propaganda machine would have us believe. Unless Russia walks away from the conflict, winning against Russia is almost impossible. The US knows this, but hopes to impoverish Russia in a protracted war.

QUESTION: You and other writers described the invasion as a criminal act of aggression and compared it to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. If Putin thought the incursion would drag on and on, would he have invaded?

Ah, tea leaf time. Reading Putin’s mind has become the way to the lazy pundit’s latest newspaper column and fee. Nicola Sturgeon dishes out the same exaggerations, an irrational hatred of Russia and Russians – supported by here lamentable colleague Stewart McDonald MP – no substantial facts to put forward they indulge in vapid conjecture, and so on, and so forth. Westminster doesn’t like Russia, so Scotland must be heard to agree. Scotland’s main national party chooses to send tens of millions of Scotland’s limited funds to Ukraine to help free it, but not retain £20 million for Scotland’s freedom.

On Putin, I have some guesses, but they are not based on better evidence from other writers and bloggers. I think Putin’s advisers believed American anxieties. Those in the West goading Putin said if Russia invaded Ukraine the conquest of Kyiv and installing a puppet government – as opposed to the one headed by Zelensky and installed by the US in 2014 – would be an easy task, not the mishmash of blunders we now see. I well recall the screams of alarm on Day One over the invasion from intelligent people wailing that within a week Putin would own Ukraine. It has not happened.

What seems to be happening, adduced from with the ebb and flow of attack and withdrawal, is Russia trying to establish control over Crimea and the passage to Russia, and to take over the Donbas region. But all that is now complicated by the strong will of Ukranian soldiers to resist more invasions on more fronts, and do it by deploying sophisticated weapons donated from the U.S.

QUESTION: So what should Putin have done?

Had Russian intelligence been better informed, and the knowledge Ukranian fighters are tough, I think he would have annexed the Crimea and Donbas sooner.

Possibly, benefitting from better intelligence, Putin might have had the wisdom to respond seriously to the tentative initiatives of France’s President Macron for a negotiated settlement that would have avoided the war, and might have even proceeded to Europe-Russia accommodation along the lines of proposals by de Gaulle and Gorbachev. (I’m old enough to know about that proposal.) The former Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, has admitted recently, openly, that the Minsk Agreements accepted by Russia (see NOTES) were only a breathing space to allow NATO time to organise itself and move east. No wonder Russia does not trust us.

All we know is that the initiatives were ultimately ignored, dismissed with contempt, at great cost, not least to Russia. Instead, Putin launched a murderous war of aggression which ranks with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland.

QUESTION: You have said Russia felt threatened by NATO expansion to the East. Still true?

My view is now common currency. Bush II is the villain. He invited Ukraine to become a NATO member against all advice, encouraged by US hawks. The current CIA director William Burns warned:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests. NATO expansion into Eastern Europe is premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst. If the expansion reached Ukraine there is no doubt that Putin will fight back hard.”

Secretary of Defence Robert Gates recognised that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching, recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.” And we can add to that, that President Biden’s ability to avert a prolonged war are severely lame, which I guess is an understatement.

QUESTION: Has Russian demands changed?

No. To answer that, I hand you over to Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov:

“We have goals: to demilitarise Ukraine (there should be no weapons threatening Russia on its territory); to restore the rights of the Russian people in line with the Constitution of Ukraine (the Kiev regime violated it by adopting anti-Russia laws) and the conventions (in which Ukraine takes part); and to denazify Ukraine. Nazi and neo-Nazi theory and practice have deeply permeated daily life in Ukraine and are codified in its laws.”

For Russia ‘the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.’ But the U.S. kept undermining negotiations and still does, turning a blind eye to Russia’s demands of not integrating Ukraine into the NATO military command, making it a “de facto” member of NATO. Goaded into invasion, the West can claim Russia’s aggression is ‘unprovoked’.

QUESTION: Is Russia now a pariah state?

Some qualifications are in order. It is surely becoming a pariah state in Europe and the Anglosphere, to an extent that has amazed even seasoned cold warrior operators, such as Graham Fuller:

“I don’t think that I’ve ever seen—in my entire life—such a dominant American media blitz as what we’re seeing regarding Ukraine today. The U.S. isn’t only pressing its interpretation of events – the U.S. is also engaging in full-scale demonization of Russia as a state, as a society, and as a culture. The bias is extraordinary – I never saw anything like this when I was involved in Russian affairs during the Cold War.

Most of the world, however, continues to stand aloof, condemning the aggression but maintaining normal relations with Russia, just as we did with the U.S. after their invasion of Iraq.”

QUESTION: Russia claims that the US is directly involved in the Ukraine war.

True. That it is fighting a proxy war is widely held outside of the Europe-Anglosphere domain. It is not hard to see why. Official U.S. policy, open and public, is that the war must go on until Russia is so severely weakened that it cannot undertake further aggression. The goal is the eradication of Russia. Next comes China, Taiwan the contrived excuse.

We are told the West is in a fight between democracy and totalitarianism, between good and evil. If so, what does that mean? Taken literally, official policy entails Russia must receive harsher punishment than Germany and the Nazi after the First and Second World Wars – the ccomplete annihilation of all Russia and its federal states. ‘Proxy war” seems a fair term to me. All we demanded of Germany in 1945 was the death or imprisonment of Nazi leaders and no German army.

QUESTION: What of censorship – on both sides?

In Russia, I think it draconian but confined to Leningrad and Moscow. (I have asked Russian friends.) I mean, who goes to the expense to send volunteers to leaflet remote communities and hamlets in a continent so vast it has eleven time zones? It was different in my youth when I was becoming politically aware. I obtained copies of Soviet Weekly with ease. Russians got their news of the West in the old Soviet period by television, radio and books. Gorbachev opened the then USSR to all the West’s news.

The results indicated that despite the rigid censorship, a remarkably high percentage of Russians were accessing such sources as BBC, and may well have been better informed than Americans. In this opinion I am supported by eminent American politics watchers, including Noam Chomsky. (Hard to believe, but there are people who think Chomsky and other academics are the anti-Christ.) We impose censorship at our peril – knowledge can help stop wars.

As for the West, I have already said information is easy to obtain from the US because of its openness laws, but harder here in the UK. We shut down Russian Television in the UK immediately after the invasion, an excuse the right-wing had sought since the broadcaster’s inception. George Orwell wrote in 1945 in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm, the “sinister fact” about free societies is that censorship is “largely voluntary. So, in our part of the planet unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” generally a more effective means of thought control than overt force.

The situation is the same for Scotland. England and its watchdogs in Scotland bombard Scotland with black propaganda daily, as one would expect from a colonial neighbour intent on plundering a country it has invaded for its wealth, but England needs no tanks in the streets because it has already colonised the main institutions, newspapers and broadcasters. The British State controls our economy by domination and unrepresented taxation. When a Tory tells us the Scottish health service is falling apart he need only offer one mild example of a waiting list for an A&E in one hospital and his exaggeration is complete. We retain in our memory only the headline.

It’s the same for the war on union membership and strikes happening in the UK now. You can shut your ears and your mouth and live a quiet life. When Sunak’s government brings in draconian laws to limit union freedoms more than in the past, only unions will protest. No one dies, no one is hustled to jail. Only the poor suffer, in poverty without food or heating. Then you become a statistic, an unperson.

Our own nationalist party, the SNP, emulates Westminster’s dislike of Russia (oligarchs excepted, they have investment monet, and are rewarded by election to the House of Lords) and yet no one in Scotland was ever confronted with an SNP manifesto that stated, Scotland will become antagonistic to all things Russian, ban Russian immigrants and Russian artistes from work.

When did the electorate give them approval for that? We are not yet a nation state, we have no right to a foreign policy, thus our first minister is only exercising her prejudices.

QUESTION: So, where are we now?

Putin has asked for negotiations a few times, hoping, no doubt, a Russian army inside Ukraine was all the pressure needed to bring Zelensky to the negotiating table. Zelensky bats off the requests knowing a settlement might upset the US, cause the US to remove their generous gifts of money and armaments to prolong the war and bankrupt Russia.

There was a week’s ceasefire but neither side respected it. So we keep sending more weapons. Again, using the cover of the fog of communication, one reads that money does not always reach its destination, that is, the rebuilding of bombed infrastructure and rehousing families. It goes into the pockets of Ukranian criminals. Calling for more and more weapons from the U.S. including rockets that can reach Russian territory, is not confining the war, but spreading it.

QUESTION: What about peace?

Russia wants to enforce peace on its own terms. We know deals mean both sides offer something in return for a settled peace. A negotiated diplomatic settlement is one that each side tolerates while relinquishing some of its own demands.

There’s only one way to find out whether Russia is serious about negotiations: negotiate. There must be an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine followed by a Russian troop withdrawal and agreement between Russia and Ukraine on future security arrangements. All wars end in a negotiation of some sort.

Those who prefer more deaths and destruction will say Russia won’t stop at the Ukraine. They are liars and sadists. That was America’s justification for carpet bombing Vietnam, they had to ‘stop the commies reaching the West’. The war will drag on, its intensity increase.

Sociopaths enjoy war, especially because they are not doing the fighting. Some of them are politicians, but we know we are governed by dangerous fools. One understands why the Nazis found psycopathic helpers so quickly, people happy to choose who should die, and who should run the death camps.

NOTES:

Original GB essay: Ukraine – The Right to Tell Lies: https://wp.me/p4fd9j-riD Mearsheimer lecture: Ukraine – A History Lesson: https://wp.me/p4fd9j-rkn

The Minsk Agreements: The agreements were a series of international agreements which sought to end the Donbas war fought between armed Russian separatist groups and Armed Forces of Ukraine, with Russian regular forces playing a central part. The first, known as the Minsk Protocol, was drafted in 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format. After extensive talks in Minsk, Belarus, the agreement was signed on 5 September 2014 by representatives of the Trilateral Contact Group and, without recognition of their status, by the then-leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR). This agreement followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the region and aimed to implement an immediate ceasefire. The agreement failed to stop fighting, and was thus followed with a revised and updated agreement, Minsk II, which was signed on 12 February 2015. This agreement consisted of a package of measures, including a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government. While fighting subsided following the agreement’s signing, it never ended completely, and the agreement’s provisions were never fully implemented. (Wikipedia)

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