WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY RUSSIA UKRAINE News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #173: Reflections on the war in Ukraine (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The events in Russia and the events of Prigozhin have unleashed the foreign policy experts and even more the warmongering pennies such as Paolo Mieli who believed they could exploit the Russian mercenary for pro-Ukraine propaganda and for fueling the conflict, betraying their task for correct information. 

---- It is not just a violation of professional ethics, but bad faith, ignorance, short-sightedness and

guilty complicity, aimed at hiding the root causes of the war in
Ukraine, avoiding a more in-depth reflection on the role of the
different political systems in the management of power.
Therefore, he takes the opportunity to repeat the usual clichés about
the merits of Western democratic systems and the virtues of
"democracies" that would oppose autocracies and dictatorships, with the
result of not allowing us to grasp the crisis of all political systems,
plastically represented by attempts to coups d'état, such as the assault
on Capitol Hill or the Brazilian Parliament, on closer inspection
differing only in forms and methods from the action put in place by the
Russian mercenary. This is because it would be embarrassing to have to
admit the legitimacy crisis of governments and institutions in Western
democracies, which occurs in the substantial estrangement and
disinterest of the peoples.

It is therefore worth intervening on the facts to clarify and offer
material for reflection to all and all those who resent being taken for
a ride on political events, power strategies, intertwining interests
that upset their lives, and lastly on the reasons for the supply of
armaments and the co-belligerency of NATO States to the Ukrainian
conflict which needs, so that its causes and possible effects can be
examined, to be placed in the context of a geo-strategic vision of
relations between States, regardless from the proposed reading scheme.
All this bearing in mind that Russia's military intervention in Ukraine
has causes prior to the entry of troops into the
country in 2022, starting from the actual start of the narration of the
facts. This is why to proceed with the analysis it is worth doing it by
points, also in order to avoid omissions as much as possible with
respect to a complex issue.

Peoples, armies and war

A priority reflection is required: that on war and the composition of
armies today. The world is far from at peace, proof that there are
currently about forty wars on the planet, including those between states
and civil wars, often fueled by the interests of other states or
economic powers, for the purpose of prey on
resources of very poor states, but rich in mineral and/or oil resources.
To fight these wars, governments cannot rely on traditional national
armies, but often resort to private militias which in the West take the
name of contractors, managed by agencies that place themselves at the
disposal of clients to carry out the tasks entrusted to them (for
example the civil war that for years has torn Sierra Leone apart for
control of its diamond production); these armed organizations in Eastern
Europe are called companies.
The reason for resorting to private armies arises from the fact that in
modern societies citizens are unwilling to "immolate themselves for
their country" and take the field to fight wars in which they are
personally uninterested, but which instead greatly concern the strategic
economic interests of governments and individuals and which respond to
the interests of economic and power groups operating on the market, in
order to grab the management and exploitation of resources, especially
in those countries which do not have such political and economic
stability as to self-manage and which
therefore they are at the mercy of the most enterprising "investors" who
try to prey on their resources in every possible way. This is the case
in many African countries, in Latin America, in the Far East and, why
not, also in the Arab-Islamic world.
The unpopularity of the war, especially after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, has stimulated the West to resort to contractors massively, proof
of which is whether to fight the war in Iraq or manage the occupation of
Afghanistan, after the first phase of the he invasion through the
regular army, or should we say, the regular armies, has been replaced by
private militias in increasing numbers. It was necessary to manage the
war, which had become unpopular and too costly because, carried out in
the spotlight of the news, it produced a continuous return of bodies of
soldiers who had documented deaths on the field which alarmed public
opinion.
homeland. In this situation, it was better and more convenient to resort
to war through private militias, appropriately financed by those
economic groups which directly profited from the war and which were
therefore interested in provoking and conducting it, such as, for
example, war industry companies, interested in renewing arsenals and
producing ever more effective weapons, or the mining and oil companies.
Conversely, this phenomenon was also developing in Russia, which had
inherited the legacy of the defeated Soviet Union and was experiencing a
situation of total collapse of the military apparatus, upset by the
changed political balance in the countries of the former Warsaw pact and
from the dissolution of the Soviet state estate. The oligarchs
successively in power, after having bought the remains of the State at
bargain prices, they dedicated themselves to rebuilding new balances of
interest between groups and conglomerates of companies and, acting on a
market without rules, they fought wildly for its control; to support
their strength in the context of a damaged state structure, they
equipped themselves with support militias. This is the origin of the
companies, such as Wagner (but there are about fifty of them in Russia),
which offered their services to generous clients with increasing
effectiveness. The State took advantage of this market offer which,
lacking an efficient military apparatus and also trained by the many
dead in the Afghan war, reserved the residues of its organized resources
of men to manage the atomic arsenal, through a restricted
but he did not have the strength and resources sufficient to recreate an
efficient and capable land army, whose presence was not recommended even
to prevent it from offering itself to the politician of the moment to
aim for control of the state.
The intelligence cadres were an exception in this scheme, and it is no
coincidence that Putin comes precisely from that world of ex-Soviet
secret services which, once demobilized after the defeat in the war
against the United States, tacitly fought and lost, sought a new
position in business and politics, to recycle the acquaintances,
friendships, supports, the potential for political blackmail accumulated
with respect to a recent and even remote past, to make their way and
establish themselves in the new balance of power.
In this way we reach the 2000s with the situation deteriorating and
becoming more and more complicated due to the growing ambitions of the
Russian government to rebuild imperial Russia on a new basis, with the
support of the Russian Orthodox Church and its Patriarchate at its
centre, which provides a revised and updated version of the all-Russian
ideology that nurtures Russia's imperial dream. This creates the
conditions for the proliferation of private companies and armies in
Russia and multiplies their use on all fronts of the world stage.
Thus, especially with the Syrian war, the use of companies grows, with
the State as client: their presence multiplies in various African
countries, such as Libya, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and
Mali, where the mercenaries go to replace the Foreign Legion and French
colonialism in retreat.
Sub-powers operate alongside the two main players, which are now the
memory of past glories, the legacy of former empires, such as the French
and British, which now act through a differentiated strategy. France
does not disdain to operate through what remains of its Foreign Legion,
but it also resorts to regular army bodies which it sends whenever it
can to the French-speaking countries of Africa to watch over French
interests, it must be said with little success. Great Britain does the
same, resorting instead to the use of militias to its professional army,
after having abandoned for geopolitical reasons and the independence of
the national states - where the recruitment took place - the special
corps such as those of the Gurkhas, which had characterized his colonial
adventures. It is in this context that the overall reflection on the
role of military companies such as Wagner, and of agencies, should be
inserted since the phenomenon of private armies is of a general nature.
A parallel reflection should also be developed on the role played by the
many less well-known contractor companies, but equally present on the
proxy war market.

The war in Ukraine and the changes in the war market

Since its inception, the Ukrainian war was born with particular
characteristics and is characterized under the name of "special
operation". It is no coincidence that it begins with a long column of
tanks heading towards Kiev, with the aim of soliciting a popular
uprising deemed possible, the birth of a puppet government in the
capital through which to regain political control of the country
. As is well known, the operation does not take place under Russian
flags, but assuming a Z as a symbol, drawn on the military vehicles that
make up the invasion corps, as if to distance itself and distinguish it
from a state operation. (in the vague memory of the interventions of the
Warsaw Pact - now dissolved - in Hungary and Czechoslovakia).
The events are known. The column, incredibly deployed on a road which
allows it to advance on condition of creating a reciprocal obstacle
between the vehicles and difficulty in maneuvering the vehicles
employed, with the loss of all mobility, and can be partially destroyed
by an effective work of contrast through the drones that represent the
new weapon of this war. On closer inspection it could only be so because
the operations were conducted by a parade, operetta army, accustomed to
the ritual parades in Red Square, but completely devoid of the capacity
for military intervention. In this disastrous situation from a military
point of view, it was necessary to resort to the militias and employ
both Wagner and Kadýrov's private army and move the combat front to the
East, i.e. to the oblasts where it had already been
war going on. The army did not disappear from the front, but was used in
marginal situations and yet with a growing role in the fighting.
In this use of militia the Ukrainians were no less, proof of this is
that they relied on special corps such as the Azov battalion, but there
were other paramilitary and "volunteer" corps, made up on an ideological
basis by Ukrainian Nazis (who have rooted presence in the country) who
had been preparing for some time to adopt a policy of aggression towards
the Russian component of the country, the armed wing of political
parties operating in Ukraine, until then largely a minority. The
resistance of the political power to the invasion and Zelensky's failure
to escape soon launched into the first place
plan the role of the regular army and brought out the underground work
carried out since 2014 by the British and other private special bodies,
operating in the country under NATO in the training of Ukrainian
fighters and with the task of providing for the re-establishment of the
army Ukrainian.
The work was carried out with undoubted effectiveness, to the point
that, after a few months from the beginning of hostilities and to an
ever increasing extent, in parallel with the supply of weapons, a
Ukrainian army was deployed on the battlefield capable of leading to war
and absorb and incorporate the private militias which initially
conducted the hostilities. On the one hand, the call to arms and the
compulsory conscription of the Ukrainians followed, with the ban on
leaving the country for men aged to carry out military service, and on
the other, Russia realized that it could not lead the war, by now
full-blown and started towards a long-term commitment on the front,
through private militias and therefore proceeded in turn to compulsory
coercion, through gradual and prudent mobilization.
This leap in the quality of the conflict produced an emigration from the
country of many young people opposed to the war and unwilling to lose
their lives to satisfy Putin's imperial dreams, deaf to the appeals of
the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church who called to fight to oppose moral
degradation of the West in the name of Holy Russia and immediately
increased the need to resort to companies, which received a free hand in
recruiting militiamen inside prisons and among the poorest classes of
the population.
The growth of the strength of the Ukrainian army in the field, supported
and reinforced by Western weapons and by the presence of volunteer corps
of suspicious origin and composition, the gradual and constant growth of
the professionalism of soldiers trained by NATO personnel, accentuated
the growth and prevalence of the role of regular armies. The process
proceeded more rapidly on the Ukrainian front, while on the Russian
front the militias lined up mainly waiting to train the recruits in the
meantime to take them to the front. A division of roles was implemented:
the regular army, in addition to training, would build defensive lines
and fortifications, while the militias would hold the front and attack.
In the run-up to the much-announced Ukrainian counter-offensive, the
general staff of the Russian army decided that the conditions had been
created for taking full control of the front and conducting military
operations, also in the belief that the enemy was taking advantage of
the fragmentation of the Russian command: the decree was therefore
promulgated which from 1 July 2023 integrated the militias into the
army, eliminating the operational autonomy of the companies and this
caused the uprising of Wagner which undertook the well-known march on
Moscow to negotiate its status.
The strategy of the Russian army can be explained by the belief that the
nature of war has changed and that the survival of the country is at
stake, before that of its political and power system. The Russian
General Staff is aware. of the extent of the clash and therefore starts
from this elementary observation: in the face of a Ukrainian population
reduced to less than 25 million present within the country and a ratio
between men and women estimated at one to 5, Russia can have a
population of 144 million in which to recruit the military forces to be
used in the conflict that has changed its nature to the point that both
contenders see their existence at stake. Therefore the war can only end
with the victory of one or the other, unless there is a massive
diplomatic intervention by the international community, with the United
States and China in first place, which appears unrealistic at the
moment. So we have to fight
up to the end and regardless of Putin: war has become a national issue.

History according to Putin

Observers report that at the basis of Putin's work there is nostalgia
for the tsarist empire, his aversion to Wladimir Lenin, seen as the
traitor of Russia who prepared its dissolution, asking for the right of
secession to be included in the Constitution of the Republics belonging
to the Federation that had requested it and expressed their intention.
Putin also attributes to Lenin the role of traitor to the Russian
imperial dream and sees him as the architect of the request for the
peace of Brest-Litovsk, stipulated between Bolshevik Russia and the
Central Powers on March 3, 1918, in today's Belarus, which end of
Russian intervention in World War I.
For Putin it was a decision taken in compliance with the agreement
reached with the German general staff from which Lenin obtained the
availability of a railway carriage that would take him, together with a
small circle of revolutionaries from Switzerland, where he was in exile,
through Germany up to Helsinki, from where he returned to Russia, which
in the meantime had arisen.
Given that Lenin's relations with the German general staff are
historically proven and that the commitment to accept a separate peace
was effectively taken, it must be said that this choice, if on the one
hand closed the international contradiction constituted by the crisis
opened by the war intervention of the various States in the imperialist
war and restricted the revolutionary capabilities in the rest of Europe,
was important to save Russia and allow the Leninist vanguard to prevail,
offering the people the much desired and requested peace and was at the
same time the occasion to theorize and build
the premises to give life to the realization of socialism and then of
communism in a single country.
Lenin was well aware of the counter-revolutionary attempts of the white
generals, financed by England, who from the south, starting right from
the Ukraine, intended to go up Russia to defeat the revolution; he
feared them and let them be stopped in the area by the resistance of the
Makhnovists who fought and defeated these generals, allied with the Red
Army, but he intended, by withdrawing from the conflict, to weaken their
work, and contenting himself with dissuading Western governments from
intervening in support of the Tsar. In other words, the controversial
revolutionary role of Lenin certainly cannot be dismissed by the
pro-tsarist and nostalgic positions of the neo-tsar Putin, nor by those
of the equally reactionary Patriarch of Moscow, author and creator of
the pan-Russian ideology which presides over the action of the despot of
the Kremlin,
of Soviet ideology and the great power policy of the Russian Communist
Party which made Russia an empire and a protagonist in world politics.
It is also certainly true that, for instrumental reasons, Putin becomes
the spokesperson for the Russian imperial dream, however disguised on an
ideological level, because in reality he pursues the country's imperial
dream and this to the complete detriment of the Russian people and their
position within equal and collaborative relationships with other countries.
based on respect for international law, brotherhood and peace among peoples.

The underlying reasons for the conflict

If, leaving aside any ideological consideration, we start from the
reconstruction of events to understand when it happened, there is no
doubt that Russia is the invading country and there are no doubts about
how the war started or at least how it started if we assume the
beginning of the phase starting from the entry of Russian troops into
Ukraine.
There is no doubt, and it can be seen by everyone, except Paolo Mieli,
that the war began well before, i.e. in 2014, when, parallel to the
recovery of Crimea by the Russians, the revolt began in the oblasts of
Donbas, hit by the economic and social crisis due to the progressive
deterioration of the Ukrainian economic situation.
It is no coincidence that we have spoken of the recovery of Crimea by
Russia because only since 1954, and for 38 years, this territory has
been part of the Ukrainian state, given that only in 1954 was it
transferred to the administration of Ukraine within the USSR for reasons
of greater administrative practicability for the management of the
territory. This means that there are well-founded reasons for believing,
on the Russian side, that it is historically Russian territory. Not so
do the Ukrainians for whom the administrative borders existing at the
fall of the USSR were assumed as the "historical" ones. Consequently,
the right of secession by the individual republics applies to them,
established in the Constitution of the USSR and exercised with the
reconquest of independence in 1991.
Russia to Ukraine as a result of World War II. This same way of
reasoning cannot instead be applied for the Ukrainians to the
inhabitants of the territories of the oblast who had risen up against
the Ukrainian government, claimed the same right of secession,
historically envisaged for the territories that had requested it,
rediscovering the
their economic, social and historical ties with Russia!
The world powers that participated in the meetings in Minsk were well
aware of this and had taken charge of exercising the right of secession.
so much so that in two phases they had hypothesized a solution to the
problem through the granting of a large autonomy, which had never
happened on the part of Kiev and through the holding of referendums
under the control of international bodies. These facts, denied by
Prigozhin, in order to support the deliberate aggression, criticize the
army and Putin, were artfully believed to be true by Mieli, a historian,
but in the best case scenario, ignorant, and dialectically used in bad
faith with the primary objective of branding the pacifists like Putin,
to support the shipment of arms as a priority and discredit negotiation
as the only possible solution to war,

A war against Europe

Honest journalists such as Bernardo Valli recall that well before the
war groups of international lobbyists belonging to arms manufacturers
met to support the policy of a significant part of US congressmen,
collecting resources for this purpose for 50 million dollars in support
of the operation and it is known that an equally powerful lobby,
officially constituted within the United States Congress, supported the
need to prevent the construction of Nord stream two at all costs.
Il Sole 24 Ore reported on the maneuvers implemented in the Washington
Congress by this lobby in the two-day issue preceding the start of
operations in Ukraine.
It is also no coincidence that the situation precipitated following the
exit from the scene of Angela Merkel, who had been responsible for the
construction of the infrastructures which were supposed to allow Europe,
and above all German industry, to obtain supplies very low cost of oil
and gas. The destruction of Nord Stream Two was also one of the priority
objectives of Biden's electoral campaign, who considered this as a
priority, so much so that he sent his talked-about son to Ukraine to
conduct absolutely opaque business, such as those relating to the
testing of biological weapons and to establish relations with Ukrainian
intelligence, in concert with the British secret service.
These elements, all known, and which emerged in various opposing press
organs are now confirmed, as is the sabotage operation by "unknown"
people of this infrastructure, rendered useless in order to profoundly
and irreversibly change the lines of supply of energy to European
industry in a very delicate phase of transformation and transition from
fossil energy to renewable energy, in the face of a simultaneous
abandonment, especially in Germany, of nuclear energy.
If it is true that the United States has invested in arms for Ukraine,
to the full advantage of their war industry and it is also true that the
United States has gained a lot from the sale of oil and liquefied gas to
European industry, reversing the flow of supplies energy, creating a new
and more expensive dependency, producing an increase in the cost of
goods produced in Europe and therefore increasing the competitiveness of
those of the United States.
These are the geo-strategic reasons that preside over the Ukrainian
conflict, in addition to the one wanted and stubbornly pursued by the
NATO relaunch arms industry which (remember Macron's definition of
organization in agony) was deemed no longer necessary and under
liquidation. Today the war industry thanks
the war in Ukraine is experiencing a new golden age not only due to the
growing need for ammunition, but also due to the need to rebuild stocks
and the effects that German rearmament will have on the production of
weapons, destined to change the geo- strategies and policies of Europe.
Another country to benefit from the operation is England which
cultivates its dream of rebuilding the empire, completely unrealistic
and catastrophic from an economic point of view, as demonstrated by the
recent performance of the British economy. The British Conservatives
derive from this operation the ultimate and coveted effects of Brexit by
cultivating their other great objective which is to support their
independence in the face and only on condition of splitting the
continent, preventing its unity,

A multipolar world of plates

But if the devil makes the clocks he doesn't make the lids and the
result of this operation is not the probable destabilization of Russia,
but rather, as we will see, it has created the premises for its
restructuring in the context of a new set-up of international relations,
characterized by a world of plates, multipolar, where there are
different actors who aspire to be the center of independent autonomous
powers, thanks to access to energy, nuclear weapons as deterrence and
strong in an area of economic and geo-strategic domination destined to
change the order of the world and to put an end to the domination of the
United States in the future.
In fact, there is a strengthening of the bloc of the BRICS countries,
which not by chance are giving themselves their own bank, their own
rules for economic and commercial exchanges which exclude the dollar and
the euro and resort to the priority use of national currencies, in the
context of a reciprocal compensation mechanism under construction,
intended to
supplant the dominance of the dollar and thus to eliminate the
positional rent of the United States. At the same time, the number of
countries requesting to join in different forms, but converging on the
bloc of BRICS countries, whose role is growing, is growing, as evidenced
by their siding on the war in Ukraine within the UN assembly .

In conclusion

Remaining within the scope of this analysis and narrowing our attention
to what is happening in Russia, we note that the consequences of the
rise of the Wagner militia to power will inevitably lead the Russian
political regime to a profound restructuring, both militarily and
economically and politically. .
On the military level, the effects of the decree of 1 July which
established the passage under the control of the army in all militias
and private armies will end up by attributing to the regular army a
greater political role within the state, but also allowing it in the
field the reconstruction of the unity of command of operations or at
least the attempt of this, focusing on the possibility of general
mobilization consequent to the patriotic alarm stimulated in Russia not
by the Putin crisis, but by the danger of dissolution that the State
must face and which historically it has pushed the Russian population to
gather around the ruler of the moment, without calling him into
question, as happened in the time of Stalin, thanks to the commitment in
the Second World War and the Nazi aggression of the country.
We don't know if this attempt will be successful or what consequences it
will have on the Ukrainian war, but we are quite certain that when it is
coming it will contribute to
prolong it, to make it deeper because the very fate of Russia, of its
unity, of the army, of its generals and of the interests is played out
on its results, expressed by the economic and power group that revolves
around the arms industry and which cannot do without Russian military
might in the world. The movement of the Wagner to Belarus, even if it
will not be used on the battlefield, still represents a security problem
for the Ukrainian front and forces this country to move troops to the
Belarusian border to guarantee any surprise, thus weakening the eastern
front, while the fortifications erected by the Russian army in the
occupied territories in recent months seem to show the possibility of
containing the effects of a Ukrainian offensive while waiting for the
military mobilization to be extended to the whole country, and that the
gradual training and deployment of new troops on the field can, even if
with the sacrifice of many, many dead, overturn and determine the fate
of the conflict.
At the same time, operations through Russia-based militias will continue
on various world chessboards to ensure Russian political penetration in
different countries. Ultimately this strategy relies on the fact that
everywhere there is a need for watchdogs of the various regimes in
exchange for the exploitation of poor and weak countries, endowed with a
national bourgeoisie ready to sell itself to the highest bidder,
offering the resources of its country in exchange of power and profit.
All this tells us that a solution to the war in Ukraine is yet to come
and is receding in time, while the destruction of the Ukrainian people
grows as does the massacre of the Russian people, both prisoners of two
unscrupulous oligarchies, interested in power, cloaked in ideologies
nationalists, formally in defense of the nation, but in reality agents
of death who operate on the market, in search of better profits, without
caring about the mourning and the ruins they sow but rather who lick
their lips waiting to savor the fruits of destruction of resources, of
men and women, of infrastructures, and of everything that serves to make
life better, regardless of the destruction of the environment, of the
planet, of the loss of precious resources to feed life in a material
sense and the future possibilities of humanity.

The editorial staff

http://www.ucadi.org/2023/07/10/riflessioni-intorno-alla-guerra-in-ucraina/
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