Thickening Gloom for the West
Palestine
Hamas has indicated that it may be willing to reach a deal with Israel that would not commit Israel to an immediate permanent ceasefire but would commit both sides to a temporary ceasefire pending final agreement on a final ceasefire, hostage exchange, an Israeli commitment to withdraw from Gaza and not to invite or to allow the presence in Gaza of any foreign forces, among other conditions. Israel has indicated that it is prepared to talk with Hamas and has reentered negotiations.
This might confirm a prevailing impression among many commentators, including Israel itself, that it is running low on munitions. Israel is unwilling to contemplate a continuing occupation of Gaza. Yet it has failed to find bourgeois or complicit Palestinian families, or to convince the youth movement, Fatah, to take over from Hamas. And it has resisted all talk of the involvement of the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority (500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, incidentally, in addition to the genocide of 38,000 in Gaza, together with over 80,000 wounded).
Yet, up to this moment in time, Netanyahu has put forward no plan for how Israel might extract its forces from Gaza. It is still encountering energetic resistance from Hamas fighters in Israel even in areas like Rafah and the east of Gaza city that it previously claimed to have cleared. It is encountering demoralization among IDF reserve troops who are fed up with constantly being called up. Israel’s Supreme Court has allowed for the mobilization of ultra-orthodox Jews, many of whom are hostile to Zionism and the occupation of Gaza.
Israel may be hesitating to proceed towards a direct conflict with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Another recent Israeli assassination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon provoked a new, major Hezbollah attack on Israel, with hundreds of rockets and drones fired on the north of Israel. While it is certain that this would be a protracted and bloody war, one which the IDF almost certainly would prefer not to risk, there are pro-Israeli elements in Lebanon that might be induced to back Israel in such a conflict. The same happened in 2006, but Hezbollah beat back Israel in any case. The chances of Iranian engagement in the event of an Israeli invasion are extremely high and Iran, and at the same time, possibly Yemen, would most likely benefit from the supply of advanced missiles, including hypersonic missiles, from Russia. This would be Russian retaliation for Western greenlighting of the use of advanced missiles, supposedly by Ukraine, against Russian assets in Russian territory.
Multipolarity
The upcoming NATO summit (July 9-11) is not the only summit of consequence in this month of July. Gilbert Doctorow today reports on a meeting of eight of the nine members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Astana, Kazakhstan (India’s President Modi did not attend but will be meeting Putin in Moscow next week). India and Pakistan joined in 2017; Iran in 2023. This year, Belarus has been admitted to full membership of the SCO. Turkey is another country that is seeking membership. In addition, President Xi Jinping has announced that China will back Kazakhstan’s bid to join BRICS in an indication, says Doctorow, (1) that the SCO is increasingly a contender for the role of security provider to the Eurasian continent; (2) that the SCO may merge with BRICS before 2030; and (3) Western efforts to lure Central Asian states away from Russia and China have failed and that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan remain in the Russian-Chinese spheres of influence. The final Astana communique calls for all foreign forces to withdraw from Eurasia. On a sidenote, discussions between Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan appear to suggest that the two countries are nearing agreement that Turkey (and perhaps Russia) needs to leave Syria to the Syrians (abandoning the Jihadis of Erbil). This is a measure on which it will be more difficult to get agreement from the US-Kurdish alliance. Yet, that, precisely, it the goal of SCO’s Astana communique. .
NATO
For the many reasons amply discussed in my posts for the past two to three years, NATO has demonstrated itself as an odious combination of feigned superiority, aggression and incompetence and which, once its original Cold War mission was accomplished, has sought to survive and expand as a global menace. Throughout this time the countries of the USA, Germany, France and the UK bear a particularly heavy burden of culpability for a pace of escalation that for many months now has brought the globe to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, Johannes Sterns (Sterns) today details the latest war preparations in Germany whose government is systematically planning massive rearmament. The Parliamentary Budget Committee has approved armaments projects worth billions. 42 so-called €25 million legislative bills totalling €27 billion have been approved by parliament in the last six months alone. This includes a recent plan to procure 105 Leopard 2A8 battle tanks worth almost €3 billion, to be delivered to the army by 2030 at the latest. 35 of these will reinforce the planned German combat brigade in Lithuania by 2028. The Bundeswehr currently has just over 300 Leopard main battle tanks. The new procurement would increase the fleet by more than a third. Germany’s defense budget is already €90 billion for 2024. which is in addition to the Bundeswehr’s €100 billion “special fund” which has already been exhausted.
Such moves are being celebrated with reference to the Nazi build-up of tanks in preparation for the (flawed, murderous and disastrous) invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The new expenditures will directly benefit the German armaments industry and there is direct reference to the sending of some of these new munitions to Ukraine. Among other things, 20 more Eurofighters will soon be ordered in addition to 38 aircraft currently in the pipeline at a total cost of €7.5 billion. The Bundeswehr is also considering purchase of eight more F35 fighter jets at a cost of $1 billion; this would be in addition to €10 billion committed in 2022 for 35 US F-35 Lightning II stealth bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The first are to be delivered from 2026.
There are also plans to procure four more Patriot air defence systems for a total of €1.35 billion, to replace missile batteries that the Bundeswehr has handed over to Kiev and increase the air force’s current inventory of nine Patriot systems.
None of these measures remotely suggests a European capability of matching the weapons manufacturing prowess of Russia and the rate of its increase in manufacturing capability. All they promise is continuing conflict, massive loss of life to no good purpose, greater social and economic inequality.
NATO Hanging
Yet as Germany makes moves towards a new world war capability (a game I believe it is playing for electoral purposes; the current chancellorship of Scholz and political leadership of the Green party’s war machine regime is doomed in the face of the collapse of German manufacturing and energy crisis) there are major moves afoot which, like the SCO meeting referenced above, augur momentous changes just around the corner.
Following Hungary’s Viktor Orban’s visit to Putin in Moscow over the past day or so, in which Orban, who this year chairs the European Union, asserted that peace over Ukraine was now necessary. Putin has said many important things. First of all (1) that Russia, as Putin consistently says, is open to negotiate. But, (2) it cannot negotiate with an illegitimate President whose regime, including the RADA, is also an unsuitable interlocutor for negotiations. Putin also appears to be saying, however, (3) that Zelenskiy has the means to put this right through the mechanism of a Constitutional Court judgment which might endorse the continuation both of Zelenskiy’s imposed martial law and of the Zelenskiy presidency. Soon or later, however, the period of martial law must end, and Zelenskiy will be obliged to call elections which he will almost certainly lose. The logic of this I think, is that an initiation of negotiations would be accompanied by the end of martial law in Ukraine. Indeed Putin says that there must be elections - I presume as a precondition for negotiations. Putin says that as a minimum condition (4) for the initiation of negotiations, Russia would require complete withdrawl of Ukrainian troops from the Donbass and from Novorussiya which I believe is tantamount at the very least to the four oblasts that Russia has already integrated into the Russian Federation along with Crimea.
One source commenting on a speech given by Putin in 2014 claims that Putin’s ‘rediscovery’ of Novorossiya “appears to include the following provinces in addition to Crimea: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Mikolaiv and Odessa,” and that Moscow would then “dominate the entire northern littoral of the Black Sea and control a wide band of contiguous territory stretching all the way from Russia’s current western boundaries to the borders of Romania and Moldova (conveniently including the latter’s already self-declared breakaway province of Transdnistria)” (Fisher).
Yet for the moment, Zelenskiy is demanding that at the NATO summit in a few days’ time, much stronger commitments be made for eventual Ukrainian membership of NATO, stronger than those Ukraine was given at last year’s summit. And of course he wants more weapons (quelle surprise!), in what could be interpreted as a form of blackmail - give us membership and weapons or we will sign with the Russians. Stoltenberg, on his way out the door, has been saying that Ukraine could achieve full membership by 2034. The EU has already been sending very encouraging signals to Ukraine that membership of the EU can be hastened for both Ukraine and Moldova.
What all these promises fail to acknowledge is that the unity of both NATO and the EU is fragile, particularly in view of the current changes of leadership that are taking place in Britain, in France, and very likely in the USA and Germany. In France, Marie Le Pen has stated that if she becomes Prime Minister there will be no sending of French troops to Ukraine and that no French weapons will be used on targets in mainland Russia and that on these issues the Prime Minister’s authority trumps that of Macron, should he still remain French President. There is an expectation, however, that Le Pen’s party will fail to win an outright majority, an outcome that may intensify instability in France.
In the USA, of course, the potential new presidency of Donald Trump has also been accompanied by distinctly anti-war noises - nso much as these merit any trust at all. In the UK, the Labor Party “landslide” is barely more of a proportion of the vote than was achieved five years ago when Corbyn led the party to defeat. The sudden appearance of an entirely new party, Farage’s Reform Party, with the achievement of 13 seats (out of 650 in total, of which Labor has 412, the Conservatives 131 and the Liberalm Democrats 60) is indicative in the context of the lowest turnout in twenty years, of growing public unrest with policies of a failed Brexit, economic stagnation, widening inequality, poorer social services, corruption and war.
The Battlefields
There has been considerable recent controversy in the US concerning US legitimation and increasingly overt support (long semi-secret or covert) for the neo-nazi Azov 12th Special Purpose Brigade which appears to enjoy considerable autonomy from the regular military. Dima of the Military Summary Channel predicts today that the Azov brigade will very soon initiate a major development, probably in the Kharkiv area, and speculates that the Azov Brigade may have a future role to play in getting rid of Zelenskiy and perhaps seizing power in Ukraine.
For the regular Ukrainian military, things appear to be becoming increasingly dire with many reports of troop complaints, troop protests, troop abandonment of positions to oncoming Russian forces. Some of these are coming from the area west of Avdiivka and west of Ocheretyne, where, in Zhelanne, for example, Russian forces are seizing many Western-produced heavy armored vehicles while Ukrainians flee westwards. In the Toretsk area, Russian troops are penetrating the town of Toretsk and have taken control of Niu-York where the Ukrainian 206 Battallion appears to have collapsed with the loss of 300 or so men. Other brigades that have been gravely weakened in recent days include the 14th, 19th, and 92nd. In Chasiv Yar, Russia is subjecting the settlement to heavy bombing in the center and in the west, and it is likely to launch its ground operation not from the north, as many have expected, but from the area east of the aquaduct. In Kharkiv, Rusian forces are expanding on the territory that they have taken around the border town of Prylipka, and have demolished Ukraine’s 92nd brigade near Hlyboke during the process of Russian repelling of Ukrainian counterattacks here and in Lyptsi which Russia continues to devastate with FAB bombs.