This Upside-Down World

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey St. Clair:

+ In this upside-down world, the Pentagon is pushing diplomacy and the State Dept war. Here we have General Mark Milley throwing some ice-cold water on the wide-spread notion that Ukraine is close to winning the war and suggesting once again that this is a fruitful moment for a negotiated settlement.

A Ukrainian military victory—defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they define, well, what they claim, is Crimea—the probability of that happening anytime soon is not high.

They do currently occupy about 20% of…Ukraine. So they occupy a piece of ground that’s about 900 kilometers long and, I don’t know, probably about 75 or 80 kilometers deep. So it’s not a small piece of ground. And they invaded this country with upwards of 170, 180,000 troops. They had multiple field armies, combined-arms armies, and they have suffered a tremendous amount of casualties. But [Putin] has also done this mobilization to call up additional people. So the Russians have reinforced. They…still have significant Russian combat power inside Ukraine.

You want to negotiate from a position of strength. Russia right now is on its back. The Russian military is suffering tremendously.

+ General Milley seems to understand what joystick bombardiers like Victoria Nuland and Tony Blinken don’t: that the only predictable event in war is that something unpredictable will happen to dramatically change its course, usually for the worse. We’ve seen several of these unanticipated turning points already in Ukraine: the thwarted run on Kyiv, the butchery at Bucca, the annexation of the four oblasts, the sabotage of the Crimean bridge and Nordstream pipelines, Putin’s nuclear threats, Zelensky’s belligerence, the resistance to Putin’s draft orders, the retreats from Kharkiv and Kherson, the attacks on Ukrainian civilian power plants, which have left upwards of 10 million people without electricity as winter sets in. This week we narrowly avoided another, when a grain facility in eastern Poland was struck by an errant Ukrainian missile, killing two people and threatening to detonate a chain of events that would have dangerously escalated the war, putting NATO on a direct nuclear collision course with Russia.

+ After nine months of bloodshed, it should be clear by now that this is a war which both sides could lose but neither can win. But with each massacre, the grievances on both sides deepen, almost to the point of becoming intractable. The precipitating causes of the war have now been eclipsed by dozens of other atrocities that are fresh in the mind and vivid in the memory. The Minsk Accords seem like ancient history now.

+ In his account of the war between Sparta and Athens, Thucydides used the term “stasis” to describe civil war as a form of internecine strife that yields nothing but bloodshed and enmity between neighboring states–a war where all parties end up losing ground. In today’s Greece, stasis is the term used for bus stops. It’s time to hop on board the one bound for Geneva or wherever they’ve put the old peace talks table, even if Biden has to hold Zelensky’s hand all the way there.

 

COUNTERPUNCH