Moments of Multipolar Revelation
Ukraine defense minister Reznikov has been sacked/demoted (he has angrily declined alternative posts) in favor of Budanov (this has yet to be confirmed), who was formerly head of military intelligence. Although thought of as a hardliner, he is also closer to the US and this quality is what links him to others who are coming to the foreground following recent sackings and resignations that have supposedly occurred as a response to corruption charges. In a country where there is so much corruption virtually anybody can be felled by that axe. Even Zelenskiy and associates appeared in the Pandora Papers some time ago. The real narrative therefore is of a likely shift from the super-warlike lobby often linked to British intelligence, to a more realistic demographic linked to US intelligence, and which may be more malleable to growing US concern to bring the Ukraine crisis to an end before it becomes a debacle and so that the US can better prepare itself for war with China - or at least that will be Washington’s explanation in order to tide itself through the momentous soul-searching in which US elites must now engage as to the US future in a multipolar world, one that is beginning to realize there is a future beyond US dollar hegemony.
Given the west’s failure to deliver on Minsk in the space of 7 years and given its failure to carry through on The March 2022 negotiations in Istanbul, accompanied by the varsity shenanigans of the likes of Johnson and Budanov there is no good reason why Russia would credit the west with either the intelligence or the moral integrity to see through any kind of negotiations to a robust conclusion. And it could only have less trust in a vanity optics-driven den of corrupt Neonazis in Kiev.
Whether European elites think that a bid to escape their growing dependency on a weakened hegemon is something they can contemplate remains to be seen but I believe that Germany in particular is not totally immunized from such a moment of conversion to freedom. Unlikely an outcome though that may be, but if and when Germany finally accepts that it’s ‘ally’ blew up Germany’s future economic lifeline back to Russia, that it has enforced German dependence on US LNG and other alternative energy imports at much higher prices, that it has hastened deindustrialization as Germany comes under greater industrial competition with Asian competitors who buy cheap oil and gas direct from Russia carried on nonwestern tankers, and that its political elites are spineless neocon cutouts, expect trouble. They will look with increasing anguish at former Chancellor Merkel’s incompetence and unwillingness to pressure Ukraine into complying with the Minsk accords - even if it is not quite true that she herself considered these a scam to give Ukraine more time to prepare for war with Russia at Washington’s bequest. Reports that she intended for them to be a scam may be based on mistranslation. Had she really thought this at the time why would she have contributed to construction of Nord Stream?
For its own part in all this mischief, Boys Own obsessed Britain is a basket case.
In the meantime all indications from Russian, Ukrainian and western sources are that Russia is making steady progress in Bakhmut (its troops entering the center of the city from various directions and with only one route open for Ukrainian supplies, and even that route is under Russian shelling), and looks like it is advancing on Ivanovka, close to Bakhmut, and at parts of the Zelenskiy line at Sversk, Adviika, and Vuhledar. There rumors that Zelenskiy has begun to withdraw elite troops from Bakhmut, leaving less well trained or untrained soldiers to die in a Russian encircled city. One wonders if the price of the extreme neoliberal program of privatization that Zelenskiy has spearheaded, along with the annihilation of workers’ rights and the sale of Ukrainian land to foreign Big Ag interests, even needs Ukrainian citizens. Might citizens actually be an obstacle to the creation of the Ukrainian neoliberal paradise? In which case, why not feed them into the meat grinders, past, present and future, of Soledar, Bakhmut and Vuhledar? If there are costs, bill Washington and Brussels.