Ukraine Battlefields
In Ukraine, Russian forces are clearly winning on the battlefield. The fall of Vuhledar (confirmed today by the Russian Ministry of Defense), and what seem to me to be the plausibly approaching falls over the coming weeks and months of Pokrovsk, Chasiv Yar, Siversk, Toretsk, Kupyansk - following, as they do, successful Russian victories in such places as Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Marinka, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk and Mariupol - even as Russia moves its forces more deeply into Zapporizhzhia, suggest that it is inevitable that Russia will eventually secure all of the Donbass, most if not all of Zapporizhzhia, maybe eventually all of Kherson. We simply dont know, yet, the bare minimum of the conditions that would have to be met were Russia to be enticed into negotiation assuming, that is, that Russia will not simply continue until Kiev’s capitulation.
Today we hear that Russian forces are on their way to taking Boholiavlenka to the north of Vuhledar and Novoukrainka to the west, and that beyond Boboliavlenka Russians are already bombing and shelling Katerynivka and Yelyzavelivka in the direction of Veselyi Hai. Further north, Russians are encroaching close to Karakhove and the Karakhove resevoir both from the east (Hostre to Ostrivksa) and from the north (Novoselivka and Tsukuryne), forming a cauldron which encompasses some 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The only exit route for fleeing Ukrainian soldiers is the Illinka to Hirynyt road which is already being bombed and shelled by Russia. Further north towards Pokrovsk, Russian forces continue to surround Selydove from both the south (Ukrainsk area), south west (Vyshneve area), and north (Novohrodivka area outtowards Lysivka, where Russia has cut the important M30 highway. The Russian Ministry of Defense has confirmed or is about to confirm Russian control of Leonidivka in the Toretsk area, and Verkhnokamianske in the Siversk area, just north of which lies Bilohorivka and the “Whte Hill” fortress which, once succumbed to Russian forces will precipitate major Russian advances westwards. Russia continues to extend its territory around Makiivka in the Kupyansk area.
The Russian invasion of Kharkiv never advanced much further south of Vovchansk and may now be being beaten back by Ukraine. Russia appears to have contained and in some places to be reversing the Ukrainian invasion of the Russian oblast of Kursk. Ukrainian forces in the eastern part of the salient that they established a few weeks ago now have nowhere to flee. Although, to be sure, one must never underestimate the suffering of the peoples of Kursk and Belgorod and how this must play into the politics of pressure in Moscow.
NATO Support
Zelenskiy’s legitimacy as president is sustained by the Western pretense that he is a legitimate leader. The US has cooled on Zelenskiy, depriving him, at least for the moment, of encouragement to think that Ukraine can be doubly fast-tracked into NATO membership, or that he can expect permission to use Western cruise missiles on Russian targets in Russia (another way of saying permission for NATO to itself to fire its own missiles onto Russian targets from its proxy, Ukraine).
However the new NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, who has in the past favored use of Western missiles on Russian targets is currently in Kiev, and says that a decision on cruise missiles will wait until the next NATO meeting at Rammstein. In the meantime there is no further move towards Western agreement on NATO shooting down of Russian projectiles flying over Ukraine.
The $8 billion that is allegedly the size of the latest tranche of US support for Ukraine is barely enough to meet the expenses of the Ukrainian administration for two months and not all of it will be made available to Ukraine in the immediate future.
The Biden administration is maintaining the appearance of supporting Ukraine while trying to avoid doing anything that might risk an embarrassing defeat of the US and NATO in advance of the November US presidential election, especially given the growing likelihood of a hot war in the Middle East which will serve as a further drain on US stocks of weapons (notably cruise missiles, 155mm ammunition and air defense systems).
Europe continues to be somewhat more belligerant in its anti-Russian rhetoric, and is still trying to come up with some scheme involving the use of stolen Russian assets seized by European banks in order to fund Ukraine. But the amounts of money that European economies can afford to give Ukraine is otherwise falling, while these economies fall further into stagnation and recession (and de-industrialization, as in Germany) but European governmental policies on Ukraine are increasingly open to challenge from so-called right wing and some left-wing parties in France, Germany, Austria and Italy.
November Nerves
If Kamala Harris wins the election, then we can expect more of the same: a war of attrition against the Global South, encompassing US favorite enemies: Russia over proxy Ukraine, Iran over proxy Israel, and China over proxy Taiwan. This is a war that the US and its allies will ultimately lose as the overall GDP strength of its Global South opponents begins to dwarf that of the GDP, but which will keep the thumb of the incubus of the US National Security Monopoly Capitalist Collosus firmly on the throats of the American people and of the citizens of Washington’s toadying allies for quite some time to come.
If Trump wins the election we should expect that US aid to Ukraine will dry up while a Trump administration makes good on the National Security State’s commitment to preparing for war with China by 2027 (so helpful of the US to let China know this well in advance!). See the US Navy’s Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy announced two weeks ago. It is not that a Harris administration would not commit equally to a war with China but that it would hope to finish Russia first. That this is not going to happen is of course guaranteed by Russia’s lowering of the nuclear threshold so that it can now strike a non-nuclear power that is being supported by a nuclear power.
The outcome of the upcoming election is looking very close. We have yet to see what will happen if the results are contested by one side (Trump) and whether that contestation will be stronger than the one he mounted in 2020 (actually discussed in the recent debate between the vice-presidential candidates where Trump’s January 6 threat to democracy was traded against the Biden-Harris era of State Censorship wherein a great deal of opinion with which Biden-Harris - inheritors of the Russiagate Hoax shenanigans of Hilary Clinton’s crew - disagree is terroristic disinformation, deserving ofcriminal penalty. See Assange)
The Middle East
Is the US making any more or less headway in the Middle East than in Ukraine?
This depends on how one interprets US goals. If it is a US objective (and the Bush doctrine of 2002 would suggest that it is) to prevent the emergence of any power that is competitive with that of the US (or its proxies, including Israel) in the Middle East, then yes, the US does want to diminish and is close to diminishing Iran and those countries that it says are Iranian allies in the region (all of them also regarded as in the pro-Russian camp) such as Lebanon (including Hezbollah which is the dominant political and military power in southern Lebanon), Syria (still under the control of Assad despite every best effort by the US, with the aid of the Caesar Act, to cripple its economy, steal its oil and injure its friends which include Iran and Russia and, increasingly, Iraq) and Houthi Yemen.
Practically all the weapons that are being utilized to suppress, undermine, and destroy these countries and their peoples, as in the case also of Gaza and the West Bank, are American weapons, implicating the US as the foremost responsible party, just as it has been the foremost responsible for the previous destructions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
There is an argument as to whether the US is the tail or the dog when its comes to Israel. What the US needs in the Middle East is any mechanism that enables it to control the world’s single most important source of fossil fuel, with a view by this means to control China and other countries which depend heavily (in a way in which the US itself does not) on fossil fuel.
Since the 1953 US and UK overthrow of the Mossadegh government of Iran in what was a carefully staged and executive and of course illegal coup d’etat, Israel has positioned itself - by all manner of means including bribery and lobbying - as the US tool of control in the region.
We can certainly debate whether the US made the wisest choise of tool, since not only have Israeli machinations now deeply corrupted and to an extent taken over US foreign policy but there is little that Israel actually does that demonstrably works to the advantage of the American people.
To the advantage of the armaments industries of the National Security Collusus, then yes, one begins to see how all this works. Those who steer US foreign policy in the Middle East have themselves become tools of a corrupt, illegal, apartheid, genocidal, Zionist and economically and militarily dysfunctional regime that must inevitably fall. So the tail and dog binary doesn’t really work. Both parties are tails and dogs at the same time.
The fog of war with respect to the latest developments following Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon and Iran’s missile attack on Israel earlier this week is still foggy. Western mainstream media deference to Israel’s prohibition on any reports concerning damage inflicted by Iran’s attack certainly do not help, and Iran is understandably inclined in its public statements to maximize the damage it claims to have inflicted.
I am now inclined to believe that the 200-400 projectiles launched were indeed cruise missiles (not drones as I had originally suspected), and some of these may well have been hypersonic, probably of Russian origin. I think it is indisputable that a number of these landed and that almost certainly a number of those that landed hit military targets (with almost no civilian casualties whatsoever - in sharp contrast to the maniacal murderousness of Israel both in Gaza and in Lebanon).
The indications coming out of Tehran suggest to me that Tehran would prefer not to have to fire any more missiles, while threatening Israel that if Israel retaliates than Iran also will escalate. In its favor, it could turn out that Israel has fewer options than at first it might seem. Destroying Iranian nuclear energy facilities, which are very dispersed, will by no means make it impossible for Iran to rebuild them. Besides the destruction of any nuclear facility could be a counterproductive move in this region. Destruction of Iranian ports and other measures that push up prices for oil will impact Iran directly and greatly assist Iran’s ally, Russia (whose defense agreement with Iran is expected to be signed by both parties in two weeks time during the BRICS summit in Kazan). They could also prompt Iran to close the straits of Hormuz and inflict heavy damage on both the Western and the global economy. And they might even prompt Turkey, finally, to shut down its supply to Israel of oil from Azerbaijan.
I argued yesterday and I am still of the same mind today that this apparently civilized, diplomatic game of calibrated escalation beloved of the pro-Western scions of Iranian elites is not the kind of game to be playing with a maniac. If Iran has the capability to cripple Israel existentially, including Israel’s own nuclear armory, then it must do so right away; if it doesn’t act now, with maximum force, then it is displaying a weakness that Israel can and will exploit.
In the meantime global perceptions of Israel have sunk to a million fathoms below the sea, while Washington in regarded more and more not as a paper tiger but as a very sick joke.