This article appears in the June 16, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Why Western Governments and Media
No Longer Speak of a Ukrainian Victory
[Print version of this article]
Pino Arlacchi is a full professor of Sociology at the University of Sassari. The following article was published June 1 in the Italian daily, Il Fatto Quotidiano. With permission of Prof. Arlacchi, EIR republishes it here in English translation. Subheads have been added.
June 1—The conflict in Ukraine is often described as trench warfare, more akin to World War I than World War II. Trench warfare is distinguished by its brutality, where what weighs on the outcome are the number of battlefield casualties caused primarily by the power of the king of carnage, artillery.
The factors that matter in trench wars are not the armaments available at the beginning of the confrontation, but what are called the capabilities of the contenders: population, territory, industrial apparatus, energy sources, and natural resources. That is, the hardware that allows a country’s resources to be mobilized toward the war effort.
This is why there is no real game in the confrontation between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, even though the Euro-American West has lined up behind the latter. Arms supplies from NATO will never be enough to bridge a gap in Russia’s favor that ranges from two to one in battle losses, one to five in population, seven to ten in artillery, and sixteen to fifty in the rest of the capabilities.
It is true that one can hold immense resources without being able or willing to use them, but this is not the case with Russia today. It shares with Ukraine the conviction that it is fighting against a threat to its own existence that requires it to put all of its forces on the line. But, unlike Ukraine, Russia is a great power with a deadly nuclear arsenal, an unparalleled degree of economic self-sufficiency (it holds more than 20 percent of the planet’s natural resources), and a tradition of invincibility that dates back to the 18th century and that enabled it to rip apart invaders of the caliber of Napoleon and Hitler.
Western Powers Fail To Break Russia
Threatening it up to its borders, as the United States did after the end of the USSR through NATO expansion, was not a good idea, but a recipe for the current disaster, which the most influential Western leaders from the Cold War era had warned against. The current confrontation is not between Russia and Ukraine. If it were, it would have ended long ago or never come to military confrontation. No Ukrainian government would have dared to provoke Russia by massacring ethnic Russians in the Donbass and then conclude a fake agreement in Minsk guaranteed by the European powers, if the latter had not pushed it in that direction. This is what was candidly revealed by [former German Chancellor] Angela Merkel, [former French President] François Hollande, and others: We lied to Putin by signing an agreement we had no intention of keeping, with the sole purpose of buying time to arm Ukraine.
Russia’s armed reaction was certainly an excess of self-defense that played into the hands of Western antagonists in a sense, but it is difficult to speculate, under the circumstances, on an alternative path for Putin. After February of last year, in fact, the three basic objectives of the United States, to be pursued with or without the consent of the allies, gradually came to light: the defeat of Russia in the territory of a Ukraine to be transformed into a Western bastion; the ruin of the Russian economy through sanctions and confiscation of assets held abroad; and the expulsion of the Russian Federation from the ranks of the great powers.
Fifteen months into the war, it is clear that the second and third of these goals have proved impossible to achieve. The Russian economy has endured without much effort, and it is Europe that has suffered the own-goal of giving up Russian gas. Russia’s standing among three-quarters of the world has remained as it is or strengthened, along with its friendship with China. After the conscription of 300,000 troops and the improvement of Russian war tactics during this year, and after the taking of the symbolic city of Bahkmut by Russian contractors (without significant help of the regular army), Moscow’s defeat in Ukraine also turned out to be a chimera.
It is clear that Ukraine has reached and surpassed the peak in mobilizing its capabilities, especially in terms of population and number of fighters, while Russia is only at the beginning of a strengthening trend.
The Reality of a Ukrainian Military Defeat
The U.S. military has already been advising for months to follow alternative paths to military victory, because at this point it can no longer be ruled out that the opposite of what Western media and governments desire is likely to happen: a continuation in [Ukraine and] Russia of the U.S. fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Western governments and media are no longer talking about Ukrainian victory. Washington has recently begun to spread the idea of a cessation of hostilities without a peace agreement, without diplomatic negotiations: a Korea-type frozen conflict that can drag on indefinitely, leaving the current spaces in the hands of those who control them.
This means that Russia can incorporate the four provinces it already occupies, amounting to 23% of Ukrainian territory, plus the four more to the west of those already occupied which Russia may attempt to conquer in the coming months, before agreeing to a cease-fire.
Were that to happen, 46% of Ukrainian territory—about the entire Russian-speaking area—will then belong to Russia. Ukraine will become a dismembered state on the verge of bankruptcy, kept alive by money and weapons from the West. Russia will have to endure Ukraine’s entry into NATO and the continuing risk of a resumption of hostilities, as is precisely the case in frozen conflicts. And Europe will continue to pay the price for its descent into the grave of an American empire buried by a world that has now in fact become multipolar.
