The Russian March

Maj. Gen. Atanu K Pattanaik (retd)

February 24 marks the completion of two years since the war began in Ukraine, in the middle of a pandemic. Ukraine today is a country in ruins; devastated, atomised and crumbling, its cities mangled masses of concrete and rubble, suffering widespread power outages, students out of schools and universities for two years, their future bleak. Yet President Zelensky fights on regardless. Even if it meant sacking his saner and sensible commander-in-chief, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi who had dared to utter the bitter truth, that the summer offensive of last year had hit a ‘stalemate’.

Lies of we’re winning must be repeated ad nauseam, no matter the ground situation. Approximately 18 per cent of Ukrainian territory is effectively ‘liberated’ and under Russian occupation. Remember how the United States (US) was ‘winning’ all that while in Afghanistan and ‘democracy was on the march’ till the humiliating withdrawal in August 2021?

This is a tragic war, tragic for the over ten million who have fled Ukraine and taken refuge in the neighbourhood. Russia houses about three million Russian-speaking migrants and another 8-9 million are spread over Europe, including 1.5 million in Poland and 1.1 million in Germany. One question must arise uppermost in all sane minds. Who benefits from this war?

Cui bono?

First the principals. President Joe Biden’s approval rating as president of the United States was at an all-time low after the chaotic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. On the pandemic front, Biden fought Republicans as well as the US Supreme Court. Biden has been a supporter of the US’s regime-change wars. As a senator, he voted for the 2003 Iraq invasion, premised on the lies of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). He was vice president in the Obama administration that invaded Libya in 2011. Deep state players—government elites such as Victoria Nuland, the intelligence community and the military establishment—spent decades threatening and provoking Russia by pushing Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) up against their border.

The United Kingdom (UK) is another western power that has been most vocal about Putin’s war intentions. Then Prime Minister Boris Johnson was facing mounting pressure to quit after revelations about boozy gatherings held at Downing Street while the rest of the country was under a strict coronavirus lockdown in May 2020. He badly needed an escape chute. War in another land was a good distraction.

About profits then. American companies account for almost 60 per cent of total arms sales by the world’s 100 largest defence contractors. An investigation by the watchdog Project on Government Oversight found that between 2008 and 2018 around 380 high-ranking officials and officers had become government lobbyists, defence contractor consultants, or board members and executives within two years of leaving the military. The Pentagon’s ‘revolving door’ between the security establishment, Congress and corporate America only perpetuates the war machine, allowing a multitude of parties to feed at the Pentagon’s bloated war chest trough.

A majority of the nearly USD 5 trillion spent on the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq was transferred to military contractors, whose workers outnumbered soldiers in Afghanistan three to one. The war effort in Afghanistan was effectively a privatised endeavour, with the US military relying on private security contractors to power the logistics of America’s ‘forever war’. Many foreign contractors were stranded in places like Dubai following the rapi