WE ARE NEAR THE END IN UKRAINE - BUT HOW MANY MORE ARE STILL TO DIE?

The final days of the conflict in Ukraine have arrived. The stakes are so high however that it is almost certain the western powers will seek one final devastating attack before seeking to negotiate.

There have been quite a few false dawns since February 24th 2022 when Russian armour and manpower crossed the Ukrainian border at multiple points. It is clear now that Putin and his military high command sent in the small force that crossed over with the intent to intimidate Zelensky into coming to his senses and finally implementing what he had signed up to in Minsk. He came very close to doing so in fact. If it was not for the interference in the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March and April 2022 all the signs are it would have been all over then and there.

But interfere Boris Johnson did and not without the acquiescence or command of Joe Biden and others. Putin’s hope to finally see the Minsk process through to a largely peaceful conclusion where a final resolution that suited both sides could be agree, was dashed. Even then Putin didn’t do more than progressively up the ante only to the degree that the Ukrainian regime and its sponsors did so. Apparently he could not bring himself to believe that they were willing to take this as fas as we now see it has come. It took Putin a long time to shed the gloves that kept casualties and damage to infrastructure to a minimum.

Putin does things by the book, by the law books he studied in St. Petersburg. He is a stickler for doing the right thing. However, betrayal does not sit well with him. Zelensky, Merkel, Hollande and Macron all acted a part in Minsk, all seeking to keep the sham peace process going while they readied the Ukrainian military for war. But even so, for Putin the Ukrainian people are dear Slavs, brothers and sisters to the Russian people. It also does not sit at all well with him to have to engage in this internecine strife. He sought a way out both in the initial weeks and then in the weeks that followed again in Minsk then in Istanbul. All to no avail. They would not engage him sincerely in his desire to seek a peaceful end to the years of conflict that began in 2014.

Now, two and a half years later and over half a million dead or injured we are at the place Putin know it would reach due to the unrelenting campaign the entire West had waged against him through the Ukrainian regime and its army. What other course could he have followed? To give up on Russia’s long term security, to allow NATO missiles within five minute range of the greater part of the Russian Federation, to leave tens of thousands of ultranationalists bearing swastika tattoos seeking Russian blood in the Donbass and even perhaps eying Russian lands across the border eventually. To leave Russia in a condition where order could be more easily subverted and chaos fomented from just across the border where the neoconservatives plotted the break up of his country? No. He had only one choice. Resist. 

To retreat from where Russia found itself in the spring of 2014 would have been folly. American officials had been among those who foisted an insurrection upon a democratically elected president and government, killing police, burning down government offices and seeking to pursue a many months long perpetual riot. What part did democracy play in this America? Precisely none. The vast majority of Ukrainians had no say in it. Especially not those in central and eastern Ukraine, the Russian-speakers who had voted in that president and that government, almost unanimously. Seek any map of the electoral results in any year before 2014 and you will see the truth of this.

So now it is almost all over. All that death. All that destruction. For what? For a plan concocted by Biden, Johnson and others to deliver Russia two knock-out punches to deliver it out of the league of the great powers. Sanctions and a treasury-draining war. Neither proved an effective means of subversion against Russia and indeed the whole plan has blown back severely into the faces of all its planners. Now, as we approach the inevitable end of a Russian victory, inevitable as the West’s sanctions failed along with its long-planned Ukrainian defenses and weapon deliveries. Yet the West may have one last “trick” up its sleeve. There is talk of one last devastating attack, most likely on Crimea and Kherson with a massive influx of weapons having been secretly supplied.

 Any new shock campaign by the Ukrainian regime will have to be devastating indeed if it is to change the calculation for the peace talks that must eventually begin. If it succeeds Russia may have to either revise its bargaining position or else continue to battle against whatever force the Ukrainians have hit it with. The latter is most likely. Russia will never easily give up the goals it has fought so long and hard for, no NATO membership for Ukraine, a neutral barrier between Russia and the western powers, de-militarisation of Ukraine, its de-Nazification and last but not least peace and security for the people of the Donbass and Crimea. The end is coming, that much is sure. But how many more will be added to the death toll before it does so? That remains to be seen and depends completely on those who have been seeking Russia’s end and have been opposing Russia’s vital need for security for ten long years now.