One of the biggest, and bloodiest, diplomatic blunders since World War I.

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Though it’s slipped out of the headlines since Israel’s barbaric campaign against Gaza, the Russian-Ukraine war is as bloody as ever, bloodier if the most recent casualty numbers are to be believed. The British military claims Russia has suffered more dead and wounded troops over the last six weeks than almost any other period of the war so far. According to the Ministry of Defense status report released on Monday: “Previously, the deadliest reported month for Russia was March 2023 with an average of 776 losses per day, at the height of Russia’s assault on Bakhmut…Throughout November 2023, Russian casualties, as reported by the Ukrainian General Staff, are running at a daily average of 931 per day.”

Meanwhile, last weekend Russia unleashed a 75-drone attack on targets in Kyiv, the largest since the invasion began almost two years ago. According to CNN: “The attack on Kyiv left 77 residential buildings and 120 establishments in the city center temporarily without power Saturday, before supply was restored later in the day.”

Though the war remains locked in what seems to be a perpetual stalemate, Russia’s ambitions don’t seem to have diminished, at least rhetorically. During his speech at the World Russian People’s Council, Vladimir Putin, battling growing discontent with the war at home, continued to call for the annexation of all Ukraine, declaring its citizens should be part of a single “Russian nation” and a wider “Russian world” including other non-East Slavic ethnicities in both Russia and the former territories of the Soviet Union and Russian Empire.

The Ukraine war is one of the first drone-on-drone conflicts, with Russia set to deploy a new drone boat  “equipped with grenade launchers and machine guns, and can potentially serve as an attacking [unmanned surface vessel], counter-Ukrainian USV drone, or an ISR or port defense platform” and Ukraine is allegedly now using remote-controlled ground robots to penetrate Russian combat lines.

Much of this senseless carnage can be laid at the feet of former British PM, Boris Johnson, according to Davyd Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s ”Servant of the People” Party, who led the Ukrainian delegation at peace talks with the Russians in Belarus and Türkiye in 2022, a few weeks into the war. In a recent interview, Arakhamia claims that: “[Russia] really hoped almost to the last moment that they would force us to sign such an agreement [not to join NATO] so that we would take neutrality. It was the most important thing for them. They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to, – as Finland once did, – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO. In fact, this was the key point. Everything else was simply rhetoric and political ‘seasoning’ about denazification, the Russian-speaking population and blah-blah-blah….When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” If what Arakhamia says is accurate, Johnson pushed Ukraine to reject an agreement that would have left the country largely intact and saved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. It would go down as one of the biggest, and bloodiest, diplomatic blunders since World War I.