Two years of Ukraine war, the West is losing the war and the narrative
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 rapid US withdrawal. Their business model rests on supplying logistics to troops in combat. To get back in business, a new war with the potential to expand was urgently needed. Politicians who understand contracts and future contracts, when they look at war, they have a different cost-benefit analysis. The hysteria about the war in Ukraine is not about protecting democracy or checkmating Russian President Vladimir Putin but largely for plain profiteering by defence contractors.
Run Up to the War
Now let’s look at the background to the Ukraine crisis. A US-sponsored Maidan Revolution in February 2014 witnessed violent clashes between protesters and state forces in Kyiv and culminated in the ousting of elected President Viktor Yanukovych and a return to the 2004 constitution. In response, Russia seized and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in southern Ukraine in 2014. The two Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 with France and Germany as guarantors obviously were signed in bad faith, not to be honoured.
Repeated pleadings by Putin about no further eastward expansion of Nato were derisively ignored. The horror of the World War II cost the Russian people an estimated 25 to 35 million lives. The threat to Russia had emanated from the heart of Europe, Nazi Germany. In addition to the unimaginable sea of blood from that war, Russians well remember the many other invasions that caused death, sorrow and brokenness for an incalculable number of their fellow citizens. Since the bombing of Serbia, the US and Nato’s participation in wars and the wilful wreckage of other countries such as Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and several countries in Africa, Central and South America, has not gone unnoticed by the Russian leadership. Now the US was pushing Nato to its borders.
Between 2014 and 2022, the Donbas region witnessed thousands of killings by neo-Nazi mercenaries backed by the US-installed Ukrainian state. At least two million people were forced to flee their homes. Russia has labelled this war as a security operation with its own justifications, right or wrong. In a way, this is the completion of ten years of the Ukraine war, raging since February 2014.
Putin made a series of demands to the West, including that Ukraine should never be allowed to join Nato. The US claimed that admitting Ukraine to Nato is not directed against Russia. The question arises, then against whom?
A new war zone was systematically manufactured and orchestrated with attention being focused on a threat to Ukraine from rival-turned-enemy, Russia. From 2014 and until the war broke out in 2022, Nato countries piled up arms and special operations trainers at the Russian borders in Ukraine. A war could also potentially scuttle the commissioning of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which the US feared would increase the Kremlin’s leverage over Europe and its energy markets. The US also wanted to increase its own LNG (liquified natural gas) exports and promote those from Qatar, a key ally. Ukraine was caught in this quagmire, a battleground for political expediency and corporate profiteering.
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