Dividing Ukraine, Dividing Syria

Scope for Peace

Over recent weeks there have been important conversations involving US President-elect Donald Trump, his choice as national security advisor Mike Waltz, Trump adviser (and slayer of public institutions) Elon Musk (whose wealth is now approaching half a trillion dollars), President Viktor Orban of Hungary (who is in his final days as chair of the European Council) and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Trump team’s analysis of the Ukrainian crisis sees it as one for which NATO is primarily responsible. In short, it seems to me, they in large measure buy into the Russian explanation for its SMO. Recent exploratory talks (and President Orban deserves special praise for standing against all the authoritarian liberal bullshit of Europe’s other leaders and finding a way to talk sensibly to actual Russians) are promising indications of some kind of positive outcome (for immediate peace) early on in the Trump presidency.

I have argued in a recent post the reasons why I am concerned that Russia, under multiple sources of threat, may settle for solutions that align with its narrow national interests at the possible expense of broader geopolitical goals for the end of US hegemony, the rise of a non-dollarized BRICS-led Global South, and the abandonment of the West’s arbitary “rules-based order” in favor of a return to a system of international law presided over by a reformed UN. These broader, some would say idealistic, goals are now threatened by Western efforts at push-back and tensions internal to the BRICS.

Paying for Ukraine

Mike Walz has publicly stated his hostility to the US signing a blank cheque to Ukraine and the comments both of Trump and of Waltz are building the expectation for a radically different settlement to the one that the outgoing Biden regime still appears to want (which, incredibly, seems to be a Western “victory” secured by global nuclear war!).

A Trump negotiating team would likely start from acknowledging the obvious reality that Putin doesn’t want all of Ukraine or Poland or anywhere else. Putin just wants to be sure that Ukraine is neutral and that it does not host to US hypersonic missiles (an objective that Biden appeared to concede to Putin towards the end of 2021 but then simply forgot about, thereby helping provoke the SMO).

There are other things that Putin will need to see, as well, including the departure of the illegal “President” Zelenskiy (who Ray McGovern predicts today will be gone two weeks into Trump’s presidency), and the denazification of Ukraine. In other words, we cannot expect to see Putin negotiate with any Banderite stand-in for Zelenskiy. Amid some signs that Trump will go a long way to secure a quick end to the conflict, Russia might try offering to formally abandon some of its objectives that have never been explicit stated but have certainly been on the table of possibilities that are open to Russia if the West cannot find a way of stalling its advances. One of these may be Kiev, another may be Kharkiv, and another, Odessa.

In the meantime, of course, the Biden administration, following its defeat at the polls - a defeat that it suffered in part because of Biden’s squandering of US national wealth on a silly, unnecessary and very bloody war in defense of Biden’s friends in Ukraine - is doing everything in its power to escalate the conflict. Not inconceivably, in a good-cop / bad-cop routine, Trump (even as he publicly chastises the Biden regime for its decision to greenlight US, UK, and French deployment of precision cruise missiles against Russian targets in Russia) may see this as working in his favor if the result is that Russia is therefore more likely to make concessions.

In addition to the greenlighting of cruise missiles, Biden, in his final days as President, is also rushing whatever arms and cash he can to Ukraine. Some of this is the $7 billion remnant of the $61 billion authorized by Congress back in March. It appears that a $20 billion “loan” has been transferred by the Treasury to Ukraine which is supposedly going to be paid back from the interest payable on seized Russian assets. Particularly given that most of these assets are actually held in Europe, it is far from clear that the interest will possibly be sufficient to pay for this loan.

Even though the US taxpayer will likely end up paying for the loan, this measure has not had the approval of Congress. Congressional reluctance to consider more money for Ukraine has been demonstrated by the refusal of House Speaker Mike Johnson to bring to the floor a White House request for the transfer of $24 billion to Ukraine.

Other sources of continuing aid to Ukraine include previously-agreed tranches of money going to Ukraine from the EU which is also progressing, through the G7, its own scheme for a loan of $30 billion which, like the US loan, is to be secured on seized Russian assets. This loan, if it happens, is also likely to end up being paid for by increasingly reluctant EU taxpayers.

“Extending” Russia on the Battlefield

For the moment it does seem that there has been a spike in new weapons for Ukraine and that these seem to be behind recent Ukrainian counter-offensives on the battlefield in places like Kursk, Siversk and Pokrovsk although it is too soon to say that any of these have actually been successful.

In Siversk it seems likely that Russia did sustain unusually large losses in an offensive that it attempted over the weekend (but bear in mind that Ukraine has lost 25,000 soldiers in the past month), even as it probably succeeded in breaking through Ukrainian defenses. In Pokrovsk, Ukrainian forces successfully pushed back Russians at the western end of Shevchenko. A Ukrainian counter-offensive on Novotroitske, also close to Pokrovsk, failed. It has been reported, incidentally, that 1,000 Ukrainian troops defected from the French-trained 155th Brigade in this area.

In Chasiv Yar, Ukrainians have reportedly taken back control over the industrial area. Further north, although Russia has scored a number of successes in securing a footprint on the west bank of the river Oskil, Ukraine claims to have pushed the Russians out of a forested area on the eastern bank. Newly arriving weapons may also provide the muscle for a further Ukrainian advance in the Cherniv and Sumy areas, west of Kursk, with a view to seizing an oil line between Bryansk and Momett that feeds oil to Belarus and then to Europe.

Europe, Savior of Europe

Trump’s stated doubts about the war, go along with his threats to make Europe pay more for the costs of NATO and even to withdraw the US from NATO. Perhaps salivating at the thought of seized Russian assets, EU and NATO leaders nonetheless continue to behave as though Europe will take full responsibility for continuing the war if they must. At the very least, as they publicly acknowledge, this will require increases in taxation and cuts in social welfare. In short, it is not difficult to see that such a trajectory will generate enormous resistance from long-abused European citizens, already anxious about steeply rising fuel costs and grocery prices.

The French government is now so unstable, even under the newly appointed prime minister Bayrou, that it is unlikely to be able to carry forward any meaningful legislation that supports the neocon interests of President Macron or perhaps tries to do anything at all.

If this situation persists to a point of absolute crisis then we could see a collapse of the current politicsl status quo and a taking of power from Macron by Marine Le Pen’s party, National Rally, which is opposed to French participation in the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Germany, in the wake of a no-confidence vote today (December 16) in the ruling coalition, goes to the polls on February 23rd. Its likely new chancellor will be Friedrich Merz (CDU), although the (likely) outgoing chancellor, Scholz, is expected to be in post until a new coalition is formed in March or April. It is possible that the new coalition will have to include the AfD (which currently polls at around 18% of the electorate, ahead of the SDU which polls at 17%). So the pro-war policy of Merz (who wants to see Taurus missiles being fired on Russia from Ukraine) may yet be constrained by an anti-war AfD. The behavior of its leftist equivalent, SWA, in endorsing the austerity policy of its coalition partners in the two main states of the former East Germany, however, does not augur well for its ability to resist pro-war pressures.

Other pressures on Russia from the Biden administration, apart from reckless ATACMS attacks to provoke Russia into massive over-reaction, include (1) measures to impose further sanctions on those entities that cooperate with the distribution of Russian oil and gas (as in the case of the so-called Russian “shadow fleet,” that is, tankers who do not insure their ships in London’s insurance market); (2) pressure on HTS in Syria to push Russia from their bases in Latakia (although, for the moment, HTS is respecting Turkey’s reluctance to inflict further damage on Russian interests); (3)muse of the Syrian crisis - for which the US is mainly responsible - as a way of promoting the Eastern Mediterranean as a relatively new source of oil and gas that will damage Russia by liberating the West from dependence on Russian energy supplies; (4) incitement to civil war in both Georgia and Romania by attempts to undermine the electoral success of people that Washingto does not like; and (6) support for a proposed French-Polish and, possibly, German force on the ground in Ukraine.

This last might serve as (1) a doubtlessly ineffective and far too small a deterrence against further Russian advances, or (2) a NATO force to police a buffer zone between Russian forces and the rest of Ukraine, or even (3) a mopping-up device to help divide up a rump Ukraine among any European countries with some kind of historical claim on the territories of Ukraine, or perhaps with none at all.

Manpower Shortages and North Koreans

The Washington neocon cabal is pinning the blame for their hubristic inability to staunch the Russian advance on Ukraine’s insufficient manpower, which is why they are demanding that Ukraine reduce the age of mobilization to 18. As Ray McGovern says today, the trouble with that prescription is that there are not that many 18-year olds left in Ukraine. So far, Zelenskiy has refrained from taking that route, although he is talking about compulsory military training for this younger cohort.

Russia too has its manpower problems. Its military needs compete with its needs for workers to power a growing industrial base. Western media are making a lot of this supposed Russian demograpic deficit, although it seems obvious that Russia would have no shortage of trained manpower from allies such as China, North Korea, Iran or even the Indian sub-continent. Nonetheless media exuberance about such a deficit links to the narrative about North Korean troops in Russia, not just training, as one might expect, but in combat.

Dima of the Military Summary Channel has been more convinced of this narrative than many comparable commentators and the other day even cited Russian sources in support. However I notice that today and yesterday he expressed an element of doubt, even as he relayed the story of a Russian-North Korean offensive in Kursk in which he reports that 24 soldiers, possibly North Koreans, were killed. The Independent, incidentally, carries a story today of a small group of North Koreans who were killed, supposedly, by friendly fire arising from language difficulties.

Carving Up Syria

Syria may now be regarded as being carved up by differing and competing occupation forces including HTS (a relatively small force that is a proxy for Turkey), Turkish forces, the US, the Kurds, Israel and, also, the Russians. Although the Russians are said to have acquired some bases abandoned by the Syrian army, and although they remain, for the time being, in Tartus and Khmeimem in Latakia, Russians have departed from some smaller bases that they controlled close to the Turkish border in otherwise Kurdish territory and which have now been taken over by US troops. Russia may currently be thought of as controlling an area of formerly pro-Assad territory in and around Latakia and the eastern Mediterranean.

Sunni Sectarianism

On the subject of sectarianism, I have previously argued that the Assad state was fundamentally secular, albeit one in which a scion of Shiite Islam, the Alwaites, exercised disproportionate influence. Alawite influence - that grew out of a local military proficiency against French colonial control following World War One - offered a kind of protection for all minorities from the danger of an otherwise peaceful Sunni majority that nonetheless harbored extremist jihadi Sunni groups, some of them actually foreign to Syria. The Assad regimes took pride in what for long periods of time was a state of reasonable tranquility between numerous very different and sometimes not-so-different sects.

The Sunni majority is not homogenous, and the militia that have either emerged indigenously from that majority or, just as much, that have been exported into Syria (principally by Turkey) are often just as much at loggerheads with one another as they are with militia representing other groups in Syria. Many Kurds are Sunni. In Idlib, HTS struggled for supremacy over other Sunni extremists. Its Sunni identity does not confer automatic unity between HTS and other Sunni militia in Syria. Its radical Islamic beliefs do not make it the automatic enemy, either, of Israel, for whom HTS leader Julani even professes love. Recall that Israel gave practical medical and other support to Al-Nusra and even ISIS fighters from Isrseli-controlled Golan Heights during the 2011-2020 phase of the ongoing Western war for regime change in Damascus. Why did it do this? Because Israel has always preferred a divided Syria.

If HTS was truly a radical Sunni jihadi force (and not a Turkish proxy assembled from far and wide including Uyghurs from China), it would not simply be hostile to Israel, but it would be a friend of Palestine (mainly Sunni), and Palestine’s political arms Hamas (particularly) and Fatah. But HTS and Turkey are dismantling bases of the various Palestinian factions that took refuge in Syria following the Israeli Nakba massacre and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. They are certainly no friends of Palestine. It has been said that without Syria there is no Palestine, and HTS appears anxious to prove the point

HTS has said that Israel’s presence in Syria is no longer necessary because Syria no longer poses a threat to Israel. Of course, Israel will not listen, since the main “threat” that concerns Israel is Iran and Israel sees its invasion of Israel as a means of taking advantage with a view to an upcoming war with Iran.

Should HTS - a minor military force that no longer has access to the arms of the defeated Syrian army, since these have nearly all been bombed by Israel and Turkey - dare fight Israel, Israel will use this as a pretext for invading further into Syria. Israel’s occupation now extends well beyond the Golan Heights (where it may or may not be true that Israel has found a proxy in the Druze community) taking the settlements of Beit Jann, Daraaa, and many villages, on the way to Sweida.

As for Iran, Israel is now saying publicly that its destruction of Syrian air defenses makes it easier for Israel to wage more devastating attacks on Iran. And Trump comments suggest he is in fully sympathy.

Turkish forces or their proxies are aggressively pushing the Kurds further east and, in doing so, risk direct confrontation with the US and US proxies.