By VERONIKA MELKOZEROVA, Politico, 1/11/24

KYIV — Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday withdrew a mobilization bill that would supply more troops to the front, but which has come under ferocious attack for flaws in how it was drafted.

“Nothing will happen under the law on mobilization. Neither today nor tomorrow. Nor in the near future,” Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak of the pro-European opposition Voice party said on Telegram.

Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said the bill will be revamped and submitted for government approval in the near future.

“This law is necessary for the defense of our state and every soldier who is currently at the front. It needs to be approved as soon as possible,” he said in a Facebook post.

The bill — presented to parliament over Christmas — generated enormous controversy with its aims of cutting the draft age from 27 to 25, of limiting deferrals for men with slight disabilities, and of increasing penalties for draft-dodgers. But some parliamentarians claimed it wasn’t clearly formulated and included human rights violations.

The purpose of the bill is to send more soldiers to battle; the military has said it needs an additional half-million men this year. The extra troops would allow exhausted frontline soldiers who have been fighting for almost two years to rotate home, while also holding the line against the 617,000 Russians fighting in Ukraine. The latter figure was given by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is increasing the ranks of the Russian military by nearly 170,000 to a whopping 1.3 million.

Ukraine’s army now has some 850,000 troops, according to the country’s State Military Media Center and the Global Firepower Index.

The mobilization plan, however, is politically toxic.

In the early weeks of the war in February 2022, Ukrainians lined up at draft centers to join the army, while across Europe Ukrainian truck drivers, builders and waiters left their jobs to return home and fight.

But after months of bloody stalemate that continued to cost thousands of lives, that early enthusiasm has evaporated. Meanwhile, military corruption scandals and a sense of exhaustion both at home and among Ukraine’s allies have made joining up far less appealing.

The mobilization bill has been sent back to be reworked, with Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets saying some provisions could violate the constitution, and Anastasia Radina, head of the parliamentary anti-corruption committee, predicting it could increase the risk of corruption.

“We can already say that there will be changes to the bill. There will be no mobilization of disabled people, no possibility for local authorities’ discretion on mobilization issues, and also no significant limitations of human rights,” Fedir Venislavsky, an MP and member of the parliament’s defense committee, told POLITICO.

Balancing act

The enormous strain the war has placed on Ukraine has been reflected in the conflict over the mobilization bill.

Over a fifth of Ukraine’s GDP — or about $46 billion out of an economy of $214 billion — is going toward the war effort, with about half used to pay troops and a quarter feeding the military industrial complex. Simply put, Ukraine’s entire government budget is being spent on the war, with billions in aid from the EU and the U.S. helping fund the rest of the economy.

But that aid is increasingly in question — stuck in Washington thanks to resistance from the Republican Party, and blocked in Brussels by Hungary. That has forced Kyiv to balance between finding enough new soldiers to continue to prosecute the war while also ensuring enough taxpayers and workers remain to keep the economy and war industries afloat.

“The mobilization of an additional 450,000 to 500,000 people will cost Ukraine 500 billion hryvnia (€12 billion) and I would like to know where the money will come from,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in December. “Considering that it takes six Ukrainian working civilians paying taxes to pay the salary of one soldier, I would need to get 3 million more working people somewhere to be able to pay for the additional troops.”

Speaking in Estonia on Thursday, Zelenskyy said: “If you are in Ukraine and you are not at the front, but you work and pay taxes, you also defend the state. And this is very necessary.” He added that Ukrainians who have fled the country and are neither fighting nor paying taxes face an ethical dilemma.

“If we want to save Ukraine, if we want to save Europe, then all of us must understand: Either we help Ukraine or we don’t. Either we are citizens who are at the front, or we are citizens who work and pay taxes,” he said.

Pavlo Kazarin, a Ukrainian journalist and soldier, broke the calculation down in a Facebook post.

“In order to wage war, a country needs money — it is what keeps the economy afloat. It needs weapons — without weapons it is impossible to talk about resistance. Also, we need soldiers. And if the first two resources can be provided to us by our allies, people capable of defending the country live in Ukraine,” he said.

Political danger

Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said the mobilization bill is very unpopular, so politicians are afraid to take ownership; even Zelenskyy prefers the legislation be proposed by the government rather than championing it himself. At the same time, it is broadly recognized that the mobilization process must improve and that the military’s needs must be met.

“The draft law on mobilization needs significant refinement and the search for an optimal balance of interests between the provision of military needs and the financial and economic capabilities and needs of the state; between the front and the rear; between the needs of the military and public sentiment,” Fesenko posted on Facebook.

A key concern is that pulling men from offices and factories and putting them in uniform will tank the economy, but that may be overblown, said Kazarin, the Ukrainian soldier.

“They forget only that in case of successful mobilization, all those hands that have been holding weapons for the past few years will be released from duty in a year,” he said. “Many of those who serve in the army today were quite successful businessmen, specialists, and IT professionals before the war. They held the front for two years, leaving the rear to you. And now it’s your turn.”

***

Russia Matters

January 11, 2024

Population Numbers Allow Ukrainian Military to Call Up 500,000, But Can It Afford to Keep Them?

By Simon Saradzhyan

https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/population-numbers-allow-ukrainian-military-call-500000-can-it-afford-keep-them

Since December, my colleagues at Russia Matters and I have been monitoring1 how Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and its commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi have sparred over who should assume prime responsibility for the plan to conscript up to 500,000 Ukrainians. As we watched the two employ what Sun Tzu would have described as “indirect methods” to avoid becoming the person publicly associated with the unpopular plan, we could not help wondering whether the Ukrainian authorities actually have the capacity to add (and keep) half a million to the fighting force, if the government and parliament eventually agree on a bill that would authorize such an addition.2 Here’s what I have found out in my effort to answer that question.

Ukraine’s Conscription Pool Is Deep Enough, but Russia’s Pool Is Deeper

Ukraine’s demographic resources do allow for recruiting 500,000 males3 to the fighting units of its armed forces. Ukraine had 9,307,315 men aged 25-59 in 2022, according to the World Bank’s latest data.4 However, Russia had 34,619,913 men aged 25-59 that year, according to one of the bank’s databases. Thus, if one doesn’t account for factors such as the number of Ukrainians and Russians who (a) were already serving in their countries’ armed forces; (b) had been killed or seriously injured in fighting since WB’s estimate; (c) were dodging the draft and/or had fled their countries;5 and (d) were unfit for service or eligible for other exemptions, then Russia in theory had 3.7 times more males in the 25-59 age cohort that it could draft than Ukraine could (so more than the 3:1 ratio generally required for offensives, ceteres parabuis). If one narrows the age range to 25-49, then one finds that Russia had 26,366,551 such males in 2022, while Ukraine had 6,846,754. (So, again, Russia had more than the 3:1 ratio generally required for offensives.)

If Ukraine Can Afford Maintaining the Additional Troops in Its Fighting Force Is an Open Question

Mobilized conscripts in Ukraine are to be paid 6,000 hryvnia ($157) per month in 2024. If they are deployed in the combat zone, but are not engaged in actual fighting, then they are to be paid 30,000 hryvnia ($784) a month. If they are involved in combat on the actual frontline, then they are to be paid 100,000 hryvnia ($2,616) a month, according to Ukrainian media. Thus, if all 500,000 additional conscripts are actually sent to fight, then Ukraine will have to spend $15.7 billion on salaries alone every year (unless casualties are not replaced). One also needs to keep in mind that Ukraine will also have to spend sizeable sums to train, equip and feed each of the conscripts once they have reported for duty, as well as provide treatment to those injured and compensation to families of those that are killed. Thus, Zelenskyy’s recent estimate that a mobilization of 500,000 could cost $13 billion is not unreasonable.6 In my view, a country counting on the West to plug this year’s projected budget deficit of $43 billion and which has a defense budget of $46 billion can hardly afford such a sum, unless its foreign donors decide to re-boost aid to Kyiv, perhaps, beyond 2023 levels, which is doubtful.7

Quality of Fighters Matters More Than Quantity

Obviously, a sheer correlation of personnel strengths of each side’s forces cannot serve as a reliable sole predictor of whether either side might prevail, whether they have been reinforced through additional mobilization or not. How well the newly conscripted soldiers are trained, armed and commanded matters as much, if not more. Their motivation matters a great deal as well, of course (although, past predictions that the Russian campaign in Ukraine will crumble due to the low morale of its fighting forces have not materialized, even if claims of demoralization in the Russian armed forces persist).8 The would-be Ukrainian recruits should be, at least in theory, more motivated than their Russian counterparts, given that the former defend their homeland, while the latter know they are fighting for the territory of another state, even if the Kremlin tells them this territory is all historic Russian land.

Associated Press, 1/27/24

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Officials in Ukraine said Russia has provided no credible evidence to back its claims that Ukrainian forces shot down a military transport plane that Moscow says was carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war who were to be swapped for Russian POWs.

The Ukrainian agency that deals with prisoner exchanges said late Friday that Russian officials had “with great delay” provided it with a list of the 65 Ukrainians who Moscow said had died in the plane crash in Russia’s Belgorod region on Wednesday.

Ukraine’s Coordination Staff for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said relatives of the named POWs were unable to identify their loved ones in crash site photos provided by Russian authorities. The agency’s update cited Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Lt. Col. Kyrylo Budanov, as saying that Kyiv had no verifiable information about who was on the plane.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday that missiles fired from across the border brought down the transport plane that it said was taking the POWs back to Ukraine. Local authorities in Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, said the crash killed all 74 people onboard, including six crew members and three Russian servicemen.

“We currently don’t have evidence that there could have been that many people onboard the aircraft. Russian propaganda’s claim that the IL-76 aircraft was transporting 65 Ukrainian POWs (heading) for a prisoner swap continues to raise a lot of questions,” Budanov said.

Social media users in the Belgorod region posted a video Wednesday that showed a plane falling from the sky in a snowy, rural area, and a huge ball of fire erupting where it apparently hit the ground.

Kyiv has neither confirmed nor denied that its forces downed a Russian military transport plane that day, and Russia’s claim that the crash killed Ukrainian POWs couldn’t be independently verified. Earlier Friday, Mykola Oleshchuk, Ukraine’s air force commander, described Moscow’s assertion as “rampant Russian propaganda.”

Ukrainian officials earlier this week confirmed that a prisoner swap was due to happen Wednesday, but said it was called off. They said Moscow didn’t ask for any specific stretch of airspace to be kept safe for a certain length of time, as it has for past prisoner exchanges.

An International Committee of the Red Cross spokesperson in Ukraine urged Russia on Friday night to return the bodies of any POWs who might have died in the plane crash.

In a live interview with the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Red Cross Media Relations Officer Oleksandr Vlasenko also remarked that “very little time” had passed between the initial reports of the crash and Moscow declaring it was ready to return the bodies of the Ukrainian POWs.

While Ukraine and Russia regularly exchange the bodies of dead soldiers, each trade has required considerable preparation, Vlasenko said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for an international investigation into the crash. Russia has sole access to the crash site.

Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged Friday to make the findings of Moscow’s crash investigation public. In his first public remarks about the crash, Putin repeated previous comments by Russian officials that “everything was planned” for a prisoner exchange that day when the aircraft went down.

“Knowing (the POWs were aboard), they attacked this plane. I don’t know whether they did it on purpose or by mistake, through thoughtlessness,” Putin said of Ukraine at a meeting with students in St. Petersburg.

He offered no details to support the allegation that Kyiv was to blame, but said the plane’s flight recorders had been found.

“There are black boxes, everything will now be collected and shown,” Putin said…

Read full article here.

***

Kiev knew Ukrainian POWs were on plane it downed – Putin

RT, 1/26/24

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the GUR, knew there were prisoners of war aboard a Russian military transport plane shot down by Kiev’s forces, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. The full story of the shootdown will “become clear in a couple of days,” he added.

The IL-76 military transport plane was shot down over Russia’s Belgorod Region on Wednesday morning. Everyone on board – 65 prisoners, six crew members, and three Russian soldiers – died. The Russian Defense Ministry claims that the plane was brought down by Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles while en route to a prisoner exchange in the city of Belgorod, located near the Russia-Ukraine border.

The GUR was aware that Ukrainian prisoners were traveling on the plane, Putin said on Friday, according to RIA Novosti.

“The entire current Kiev regime is based on crimes committed daily, including against its own citizens,” Putin said. “The [GUR] knew that we were transporting 65 military personnel there … and knowing this, they struck the plane.”

In a statement issued on Wednesday night, the GUR did not deny that the jet was taken out by Ukrainian forces. Instead, the agency said that it was unsure whether the prisoners would be taken to the exchange point by air or other means, and that it “was not informed about the need to ensure the safety of the airspace” over the border region.

Putin said that material seized from the crash site suggests that an American or French air-defense missile was used to bring down the plane, and that exactly how the aircraft was shot down “will become clear in a couple of days.”

“The results of the investigation into the IL-76 case will be published so that the Ukrainian people know” what happened to their soldiers, he stated.

Russian State Duma Defense Committee chief Andrey Kartapolov has also alleged that Western weapons were used to target the flight, claiming that American Patriot or German Iris-T missiles were fired at the jet. A French military source told Radio France on Wednesday that a Patriot missile had struck the fatal blow.

“All currently available data points to a deliberate, premeditated crime,” Russia’s deputy representative to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, told a meeting of the UN Security Council on Thursday. “The Ukrainian leadership was well aware about the route and means by which [the Ukrainian] soldiers would have been transported to the agreed exchange point,” he claimed, alleging that “the regime in Kiev had decided this time to sabotage [the swap] in the most barbaric way.”

By Tony Kevin, Pearls & Irritations, 1/12/24

Tony Kevin is a former Australian ambassador to Poland and Cambodia, and a member of the Emeritus Faculty at Australian National University. The author of Return to Moscow (2017), he has independently visited Russia six times since 2016.

It is possible now that peace could come to Ukraine rather faster than most Western analysts are predicting, but this will only be only on terms acceptable to Russia.

Last month in Pearls and Irritations, I reviewed the stage reached in the Ukraine military conflict. I suggested that the conflict would continue until Russia was ready to end it on negotiated terms that will protect Russian national security in years ahead. I predicted that:

“Russia in my view has no alternative but to continue to fight this war using its present prudent reactive tactics all along the front, in the hope of Kiev coming to its senses; to go on mobilizing and improving its weapons advantages at home; and to continue to try to minimise civilian casualties and infrastructure losses on both sides. Russia has effectively won this tragic war. It must not let itself be fooled by a political change in Kiev manipulated by Washington and London, trying desperately to snatch some sort of diplomatic victory out of their military defeat in Ukraine. Russia has learned not to trust American false peace overtures.”

Developments over the past month are consistent with these predictions. In what is now a complex picture of Western truth, lies, and cynical shape-shifting, the US/NATO disinformation narrative slowly and reluctantly crawls towards reality. Within Ukraine itself, the political mood is shifting significantly. We are at a moment when basic questions are quietly being asked in Kiev and Washington about Ukraine’s future.

‘And what rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards Jerusalem to be born?’

That rough beast is looking more and more like the blunt and popular Ukrainian Army Commander in Chief, General Valeriy Zaluzhny.

President Zelensky is becoming more dispirited and irrelevant: he knows that the Washington imperium sees him as a spent figure and is losing interest in him. The charisma is gone, only the sulky resentment is left.

The Washington imperial elite is now urgently focussed on Middle East dangers and opportunities. The powerful Zionist lobby in the US appears bent on helping Netanyahu find ways to widen to war to Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and is trying to wrongfoot Iran into looking like the aggressor. Washington is sick of the Ukraine war, knows it can go nowhere good for US now, and wants to wrap it up in a way that the US does not lose face.

Up to a point, Russia is prepared to ease Washington’s diplomatic path to peace.

The Economist – always a good reflection of US-UK strategic thinking for public consumption – tells us that both Ukraine and Russia are war-weary, having taken massive casualties of their best fighters, and both running out of essential munitions. The mood in both countries, says The Economist, is for defensive, life-preserving war. True in the case of Ukraine, but utterly false in the case of Russia where public morale is good, mobilisation and training is well ahead of what is currently militarily necessary, and the military production lines are humming along nicely.

Along the front, Ukraine is no longer mounting suicidal media-driven offensives. Zaluzhny has scaled back a militarily pointless lodgement at Krynki, on the Dnieper east bank near Kherson. Zaluzhny is clearly trying to husband the lives of fit Ukrainian fighting men who are increasingly scarce. He is retrenching towards defensive positions along the long front. Russia is advancing where it is economical of life (on both sides) and Russian weapons to do so. The front remains essentially stable and there are no signs that Russia is preparing for major costly offensives. This is being masked by a steady diet of announcements of small territorial gains, and of Ukrainian desertions, defeatist talk, etc.

In recent days Russia mounted a major air missile attack on key military and infrastructure targets in Kiev and other large Ukrainian cities. Casualties were low. It has led to midwinter power cuts and blackouts. It was a reminder of what Russia can do to Ukraine.

The Ukrainian war party in Kiev – intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov would be a key figure still – continues with Western agency help to mount audacious attacks using missiles, drones and saboteurs on civilian targets deep inside Russia (as far as Chelyabinsk in Siberia). Severe loss of civilian life was caused in Donetsk and in Belgorod. The Economist politely commends this as ‘guerilla warfare’. Moscow condemns it as terrorism.

I surmise that peace precursor discussions through mediators in neutral sites e.g Turkey are already informally underway. Russia’s red lines are being tested and reaffirmed; no rump Ukraine NATO membership or protective affiliation under any circumstances, political neutrality for rump Ukraine (but EU membership would be acceptable to Russia), language rights for Russians in Ukraine, denazification of the worst Banderist elements in Ukrainian politics, restored good-neighbourly relations with Russia and Belarus, final abandonment of Ukrainian claims to Crimea and the four annexed provinces. Russia can expect tacit Hungarian, Polish, Romanian and Slovakian acceptance of such an outcome.

Russia will be negotiating from strength. But it will still be a complex and challenging diplomatic negotiation both at the Moscow-Washington and Moscow-Kiev levels.

Russia wants the US and its NATO satraps finally to butt out of Ukraine but is prepared to ease their path diplomatically. On this basis I suggest Moscow will be prepared to help Kiev to negotiate a post-1945 Finlandisation model of sovereign neutrality and retention of a citizen army, but with acceptance of substantial loss of former territory (as Finland then lost in Karelia).

There will be an obvious tradeoff between how cooperative Ukraine will be in such peace negotiations, and how much territory Ukraine will be forced permanently to sacrifice. Will the final Russia-Ukraine border remain on the present frontline, or will it extend to the province capital cities of Zaporizhie and Kherson, now still part of Ukraine? Will it even extend to the provinces of Odessa and Kharkov? Nobody yet knows.

My sense is that Russia would settle for the four prewar provinces in full, as long as the postwar relationship of the two countries is set fair for stability. Russia wants a friendly postwar Ukraine more than it wants to acquire Odessa and Kharkov, however tempting those territories might be. To the extent that Russia continues to face an unfriendly postwar Ukrainian rump state, annexation of Odessa and Kharkov will be more strategically attractive and may be deemed essential to future Russian security.

Everything now depends on what happens in Kiev in coming weeks, and on how helpful or unhelpful a role Washington and its key NATO /EU lieutenants (especially Stoltenberg, Von der Leyen, and Borrell) choose to play in helping, hindering or simply standing aside from any political transition in Kiev.

There are realist politicians in Kiev who could provide core elements of a new more pragmatic regime: I would include as examples Zaluzhny himself – still a popular and trusted figure despite Ukraine’s military reverses, Arestovich, and the Klitschko brothers. Some form of transfer of power away from Zelensky and diehard Russophobe fanatics like Oleksiy Danilov and Kyrylo Budanov would be necessary. The transfer could be bloody or bloodless. Much depends on Washington.

The mood in realist political circles in Ukraine now is fatalistic and despondent. Anti-Russian fanatics are falling silent. There is no enthusiasm left for prosecuting this suicidal war against Russia. Realistic Ukrainians know in their hearts that their war on behalf of the US has been lost, and they now want simply to save what they can of the national patrimony. They are coming to despise how their present political leaders let their countrymen be used as cannon fodder by the US. The Middle East strategic flashpoint around Gaza that is preoccupying Washington is their opportunity.

Peace, when it comes, may come quickly. Meanwhile, expect both sides to continue to talk big publicly of their being ready for a long war. In Russia’s case, it is true.

By MK Bhadrakumar, Consortium News, 1/26/24

An epochal anniversary from the annals of modern history on Saturday remains a living memory for the Russian people. The Siege of Leningrad, arguably the most gruesome episode of the Second World War, which lasted for 900 days, was finally broken by the Soviet Red Army on Jan. 27, 1944, 80 years ago. 

The siege endured by more than 3 million people, of whom nearly one half died, most of them in the first six months when the temperature fell to 30° below zero. 

It was an apocalyptic event. Civilians died from starvation, disease and cold. Yet it was a heroic victory. Leningraders never tried to surrender even though food rations were reduced to a few slices of bread mixed with sawdust, and the inhabitants ate glue, rats — and even each other — while the city went without water, electricity, fuel or transportation and was being shelled daily. 

It was on June 22, 1941, that the German armies crossed the Russian frontiers. Within six weeks, the Army Group North of the Wehrmacht, armed forces of the Third Reich, was within 50 kilometers of Leningrad in a fantastic blitzkrieg and had advanced  650 kms deep into Soviet territory.

A month later, the Germans had all but completed the city’s encirclement, only a perilous route across Lake Ladoga to the east connected Leningrad with the rest of Russia. But the Germans got no farther. And 900 days later their retreat began. 

The epic siege of Leningrad was the longest endured by any city since Biblical times, and, equally, citizens became heroes — artists, musicians, writers, soldiers and sailors who stubbornly resisted the iron from entering their souls.

The siege of Leningrad, 1942. (Av Boris Kudojarov/RIA Novosti arkiv.
Lisens: CC BY SA 3.0)

Petrified by the prospect of surrender to the Soviet Union, the Nazis preferred to lay down arms before the western allied forces, but Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, ordered that the honour of victory should go to the Red Army. 

Herein lies one of the greatest paradoxes of war and peace in modern times. Today, the anniversary of the siege of Leningrad has become,  most certainly, an occasion that the U.S. and many of its European allies would rather not remember. Yet, its contemporary relevance is not to be glossed over.

Death by Starvation

The Nazi leadership aimed to exterminate Leningrad’s entire population by enforced starvation. Death by starvation was a deliberate act on the part of the German Reich.

In the words of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler “intended to have cities like Moscow and St Petersburg wiped out.” This was “necessary,” he wrote in July 1941, “because if we want to divide Russia into its individual parts,” it should “no longer have a spiritual, political or economic centre.” 

Hitler himself declared in September 1941, “We have no interest in maintaining even a part of the metropolitan population in this existential war.” Any talk of the city surrendering had to be “rejected, as the problem of keeping and feeding the population cannot be solved by us.”

Hitler with Finland’s Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim and President Risto Ryti in Imatra, near the border with Russia, in 1942. (Kalle Sjöblom, digitized by Finnish Heritage Agency, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Simply put, the population of Leningrad was left to starve to death — much like the millions of Soviet prisoners of war held by the Wehrmacht. The historian Jörg Ganzenmüller later wrote that this form of mass murder was cost-effective for Berlin, for, it was “genocide by simply doing nothing.” 

“Genocide by doing nothing.” Those chilling words are as well applicable today to the West’s “sanctions from hell” with an ulterior agenda to “erase” Russia and carve out five new states from its vast landmass with fabulous resources that can be subjugated by the industrial world. 

The mother of all ironies is that Germany is even today at the forefront of the “genocide by doing nothing” strategy to weaken and bring down the Russian Federation to its knees.

The Biden administration depended on a troika of three German politicians to do the heavy lifting in that failed effort to erase Russia — the E.U,’s top bureaucrat in Brussels Ursula von der Layen, German Chancellor Olaf Schulz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. 

George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is how the far-right thrives.

Israeli General Staff meeting on Oct. 8, 2023. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In Germany and elsewhere, younger generations are becoming indifferent to the history of fascism. The idea of a Fourth Reich has entered an unprecedented heyday and is currently experiencing a new phase of normalisation in Europe. The tumultuous political upheaval throughout the Western world provides the backdrop today.

The author of  The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, historian and professor of history and Judaic studies Gavriel Rosenfeld has written that “The only way to mute the siren call of the Fourth Reich is to know its full history. Although it is increasingly difficult in our present-day world of fake ‘facts’ and deliberate disinformation to forge a consensus about historical truth, we have no alternative but to pursue it.” 

The justification of political violence is classically fascist. Last week, we saw a breathtaking spectacle at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague reminding us that we are now in fascism’s legal phase. 

If the Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy, Israel is doing the same thing by raising the bogeyman of Hamas. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. 

Meanwhile, what gets forgotten is that there has been a growing fascist social and political movement in Israel for decades. Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but this movement now has a classically authoritarian leader in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has shaped and exacerbated it, and is determined that in his time in politics it will be normalised. 

The probability is high that in a matter of a few days, the ICJ will give some sort of interim order/injunction to Israel to end the violence against the hapless Palestinians in Gaza. But the fascist movement Netanyahu now leads preceded him, and will outlive him.

These are forces that feed off ideologies with deep roots in Jewish history. They may be defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, but it would be a grave error to think they cannot ultimately win.

The Russians are learning this home truth the hard way in Ukraine where “denazification” is turning out to be the weakest link in their special military operation, given its geopolitical moorings traceable to Germany’s dalliance with the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi groups in Kiev in the run-up to the 2014 coup, which the U.S. inherited gleefully and wouldn’t let go. 

M.K. Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat. He was India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey. Views are personal.

This article originally appeared on Indian Punchline.

By George Beebe & Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft, 1/11/24

Russian progress in the Ukraine war is pushing the United States toward a painful choice.

If we want a prosperous Ukraine with a viable path toward liberal governance and European Union membership, we will have to concede that it cannot be a NATO or U.S. ally, and that this neutral Ukraine must have verifiable limits on the types and quantities of weapons it may hold. If we refuse to agree to those terms, Russia will quite probably turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional wreck incapable of rebuilding itself, allying with the West, or constituting a military threat to Russia.

Russian progress is not yet evident on the map, where the battle lines have not moved appreciably over the past year. Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed to break through Russian defenses, and Russia has not pushed Ukrainian forces significantly westward. An observer comparing territorial holdings in January 2023 with January 2024 might reasonably conclude that the war has become a stalemate.

But this picture is misleading. The Kremlin is almost certainly not seeking such a breakthrough, at least not yet. Rather, it is methodically grinding down Ukraine’s capacity not only to wage war, but also to reconstitute a post-war military, by killing and wounding enormous numbers of Ukrainian soldiers and exhausting Ukrainian and Western arsenals of arms and ammunition. Ukraine is running short of artillery shells, and the U.S. and Europe cannot manufacture new ones quickly enough to meet Ukraine’s needs. Russian barrages of long-range air and missile strikes are increasingly overwhelming the capacity of Ukrainian air defenses, and the West simply lacks the ability to continue providing Patriot missiles or other advanced air defense systems.

It is quite true, as the Biden administration has warned, that ending U.S. aid to Kyiv would quickly result in Ukraine’s collapse. Sufficient aid to help Ukraine to stand successfully on the defensive should therefore continue. But what U.S. policymakers need to understand and honestly acknowledge is that absent a compromise peace settlement, massive levels of aid will have to continue not just for the coming year, but indefinitely. There is very little realistic chance of the West being able to outlast Russia and force it to accept peace on Ukrainian terms. The controversies in Congress over aid to Ukraine reflect these realities and are unlikely to diminish.

Under such circumstances, for the Biden administration to pledge American support to Ukraine for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia is unwise, and even dishonest. It is widely believed in Washington that the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive means that the West has no choice but to back Ukraine’s fight against Russia for many years to come. Seeking compromise with Moscow is regarded as not only undesirable but also futile. Lacking alternatives, we must stay the present course, hoping that time will improve Ukraine’s position.

But time is not on Ukraine’s side, either militarily or economically, and so Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations may well be very much worse than at present. Russia’s population is at least four times that of Ukraine and its GDP 14 times. The Russian army is far better led and more tactically adept than it was at the start of the war, and Western sanctions show no signs of being able to cripple the Russian economy, which is more and more geared for war.

And whatever Brussels may say, as long as the war continues it is exceptionally unlikely that Ukraine will be able to develop economically and begin the extremely difficult process of joining the European Union.

Most importantly, the United States has not tested the assumption that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no interest in talking. It is indeed very likely that Putin believes Russia now has the upper hand in the war and can afford to wait. Nonetheless, Putin has repeatedly insisted that Russia is ready to talk, and also that Washington – not Kyiv – makes the key decisions in the war and therefore it is for Washington to engage in talks.

This may be posturing; but it is also possible that Putin recognizes that absent a settlement, Russia is headed toward the dangers of a permanently volatile confrontation with the West, an economy distorted by the demands of military production, and a constricting degree of dependence on China. Russians’ concerns about these problems are likely to grow as their fears they may lose the war in Ukraine diminish.

It is further alleged that Putin believes that a future Donald Trump presidency would be the Kremlin’s best hope for a settlement on Russian terms. However, Trump’s first term produced some friendly rhetoric but much hostile action toward Moscow, including withdrawal from nuclear arms agreements and increased flows of U.S. weapons and training for the Ukrainian army.

Moreover, given the animosity toward Trump evident in Congress and the U.S. foreign and security policy establishment, Putin has little reason for confidence that Trump could actually deliver any deal. By 2020, Russians were thoroughly disillusioned with Trump. As the leading Russian foreign policy thinker Fyodor Lukyanov told Radio Liberty about the 2020 elections, “Why should Russians care? I don’t believe anyone here expects any change regardless of who will win.”

Given that Russia now has the advantage on the battlefield and senses that time is on its side, to get Putin to end the war and end his ambition to subjugate Ukraine or seize more territory, Washington will have to offer some serious incentives. These will need to include showing that the U.S. is prepared to meet Russian concerns about the U.S. and NATO security threat to Russia (concerns that are genuinely held throughout the Russian establishment).

This will mean agreement to a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality, with security guarantees for Ukraine, that will allow that country to follow neutral Finland and Austria during the Cold War and develop as a free market democracy. Western sanctions against Russia would need at least to be eased if not suspended, but with a binding commitment that they would automatically resume if Russia launched new aggression.

On the issue of the territories presently occupied by Russia, the only possible way forward is to defer this question for future talks under United Nations auspices, while putting the maximum possible security measures in place to prevent a resumption of war.

An agreement along these lines would be extremely painful for both Ukraine and the Biden administration. However, we should see preserving the independence of 80 percent of Ukraine as a real victory, even if not a complete one. It is certainly far better than what appears to be the alternative: a war of attrition with dreadful losses for Ukraine, leading sooner or later to a far greater Ukrainian defeat.

Sophia Ampgkarian contributed to the research for this article.