I support Putin’s Operation Z on principle, because it counters Nazism and U.S. hegemony. But it’s at risk of falling short, and of leaving Ukraine’s existence as a fascist state intact. Which would not only allow for an intensification of the human rights abuses overseen by Zelensky’s regime, but lead to a repeat of the cycle of conflict that NATO has engineered within Ukraine.
Even if Ukraine loses the war, and the fascists in Kiev lose control over a wide range of eastern territory, Kiev will be able to tighten its grip on the land it still has. This is what Zelensky plans to do when the facade of Ukraine’s upper hand in the conflict falls apart; he’s said that in the coming years, Ukraine will become a “big Israel,” where the National Guard and other policing forces get a vastly expanded presence in daily life. This will without a doubt lead to more human rights abuses—we must never forget the atrocities that Ukraine’s National Guard committed in the chaotic early months after the 2014 U.S.-orchestrated coup. Their repression of the population will be helped by the neo-Nazi paramilitaries, which are intent on continuing the persecution of the Jews, Romas, and ethnic Russians who exist in large numbers throughout Ukraine’s western nationalist stronghold areas.
With this acceleration of Ukraine’s post-2014 genocide will come an effort by the regime and its NATO puppeteers to rearm Ukraine. After Operation Z is over, the country will effectively lack a military, and its armed Nazis will be virtually wiped out. But the CIA will do all it can to stoke a new upsurge of ultra-nationalism. It’s already doing so by pinning atrocities on Russia without evidence, the objective of this being to stoke the locals into violent hatred for years or decades to come. And NATO has laid the foundations for this violence by shipping vast amounts of weapons into Ukraine.
In this project’s propaganda department, the imperialists hope to create a new version of the Holodomor, the false atrocity story about Stalin having starved Ukraine. Best case scenario for the U.S. empire, the Kiev regime will harness this confused anti-Russian sentiment to successfully create a new army, built both through conscription and through social engineering; if the CIA can exploit the situation to cultivate a rise in ethnic nationalism, it will be able to put all of Ukraine’s new weapons to use.
With a new generation of armed forces, Kiev will get weapons into the hands of radicalized, angry men who resent the dire situation they’ve been placed in. Then the regime will wage a new war, both against the disfavored ethnic groups and against the independent territories. No doubt this effort to retake the Donbass—the eastern area which has won its independence from fascist Ukraine—will be aided by the entirety of NATO. Including Germany, which has been rearming in response to the Ukraine crisis. If the fascists lose this war, they’ll try to stage a repeat of Hitler’s maneuvers against Russia, complete with a German route stretching through Ukraine. And like was the case during World War II, Ukraine will have Nazi collaborators who are willing to facilitate the atrocities within the anti-Russian siege.
If we see such a development five or ten years from now, where a humiliated fascist Ukraine tries to take revenge, it will fulfill the dream of the U.S. military-industrial complex: an unbreakable cycle of war in Ukraine. The Washington defense contractors are trying to drag on this conflict as long as possible, getting NATO and the Kiev regime to refuse to surrender no matter how much progress Russia makes. What would be best for the weapons industry’s profits is a repeat of the present events several years from now.
Or at least this is how things will play out if Operation Z doesn’t succeed in effectively neutralizing Ukraine. To do this, Russia will need to avoid the trap Washington is attempting to set for it. This trap is designed to lure Putin into a quagmire resembling the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan, which helped weaken the USSR and ultimately destroy the Soviet bloc. The flaw in the U.S. empire’s plan is that today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union of the 1970s. The Russian Federation is on the rise as a global power, even as the U.S. does everything possible to crush it. Washington’s goal in provoking the Ukraine conflict was to weaken Russia, yet the ruble has recovered as the West has suffered comparatively worse consequences from the sanctions. And as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Russia Dayan Jayatilleka has assessed, Putin can avoid the strategic military dilemma that Washington seeks to create for him:
While no one is privy to the thinking of the Russian General Staff, logic indicates that the Western trap of turning Ukraine into a quagmire for Russia could perhaps be avoided by evading the focus on seizing territory and cities, and privileging the doctrine of the greatest military mind of the post-WWII era, Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap who urged a counterforce strategy, or in his words, “the annihilation of the living forces of the enemy,” that is, the liquidation of the adversary as a fighting force….
The biggest error that the Russian state could make is to think that the situation of conflict and blockade could be faced without a united front with the Russian Communists. No tendency or tradition in Russia has the doctrine and experience of facing and waging a political-military-ideological war on a world scale against Western imperialism than Russian Communism has. When the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost its way, it was the Russian Communists who broke away, reconstructed the party, and fought ideologically against the appeasement of NATO and the neoliberal economic reforms that were aimed at liquidating the state. No other political force has greater experience in fighting ideological war internationally. The incorporation of the Russian Communists in the ruling bloc would also cement ties with the Communist parties of China, Vietnam, and Cuba—most crucially, of China.
Vindicating Jayatilleka’s optimism about the strategic smarts of Russia’s communists, this week Russian Communist Party official Roman Kononenko said the following to interviewer Fergie Chambers…
RK: I think in the current stage of the conflict, only complete military defeat of Ukraine can be a resolution of this conflict, because even if they sign any kind of truce or peaceful agreement, nothing would end. Looks [like] we have an entire Russian border with an anti-Russian population. I think even if we would sign a peaceful agreement, and leave everything as it is, nothing would end. The shelling of Russian territories would be continued as they happened for years already, and yeah, yesterday they attacked the Belgorod region, the Kursk region and the Bryansk region. We need to put an end to this. Unfortunately, at this current stage, this is the only solution.
FC: When you say complete military defeat, does that imply, a partition of Donbass, as well? And does it also imply the end of Euromaidan [right-wing protest movement]? Does it imply a change of the Kiev government entirely?
RK: Complete capitulation of the Kiev government, and a new government should come. I think there must be some provisional government. Of course, the new government should be democratically elected, but under new conditions, not under control of fascist forces.
If these three criteria aren’t met—the total military defeat of Ukraine, the solidification of a united front between Putin’s camp and the communists, and Zelensky being replaced by a leader through truly democratic elections—Washington will get what it wants. What it wants is to keep Russia in a cycle of war that won’t end until the country is thoroughly destabilized, and the imperialists can swoop in to install a new U.S. puppet regime. Such a scenario won’t materialize as long as Putin’s opportunistic personal motives don’t define the actions Russia takes, and the communists are who drive the denazification effort forward.
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