WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI FA #180 - THE COLLAPSE OF THE HOME FRONT IN UKRAINE (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

While General Winter freezes the front and forces the soldiers to take
refuge in the trenches and bunkers that dot the battle lines, the
Ukrainian internal front enters into crisis, under the weight of yet
another call to arms and mobilization, to which a ever smaller number of
men and women. According to what the New York Times wrote on August 18,
the total number of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers killed or wounded
since the start of the war is close to 500,000. Russian losses would be
close to 300,000 (we are talking about casualties, people injured or
killed ed.) and the number would include 120,000 dead and
170,000/180,000 wounded. On the Ukrainian front, military losses would
instead approach 190,000 (of which 70,000 dead and 100,000/120,000
wounded). Even taking the US newspaper's data as factual, the pool from
which the two sides can draw to recruit troops is immeasurably unequal
and it is therefore not far-fetched to say that Ukraine is scraping the
barrel: it is not enough to continuously ask for ever more sophisticated
weapons to make up for the shortage of troops, especially since learning
to use them does not end with knowing how to use the available
projectiles - which are in short supply - but it is necessary to know
how to make a coordinated use of the different armaments available. Once
the F 16s enter the field and the air battle takes place, what weapon
will be used to face the Russian war machine which continues to pour men
and women onto the front and which has a military-industrial apparatus
that has now reached full capacity, under the pressure of the war effort
and continually churning out increasingly sophisticated armaments.
The low number of recruits has many causes: the 8 million Ukrainians who
have fled abroad have deprived the country of a significant part of the
young population, so much so that it seems that as many as 80 thousand
are those that the Ukrainian state is asking Poland to repatriate,
considering them draft dodgers. Nor is recruitment going better among
the population remaining in the country, given that attempts to evade
the call to arms are multiplying: everyone knows that 2 to 4 thousand
dollars are needed to be reformed, now that, to broaden the pool of
mobilizable , HIV-positive people, people suffering from tuberculosis,
hepatitis, other chronic diseases and even those who suffer from some
types of mental or neurological disorders are considered as such. After
22 months of war - even if neither side declares what the number of dead
and wounded is - this is very high. Not only that, but those who return
wounded from the front find little assistance, meager pensions and an
increasingly weak morale around them, due not only to the incessant
bombings, but to the social situation of the country.
There are many people who became rich during the war, speculating on the
sale of foodstuffs abroad under favorable conditions, taking advantage
of the impoverishment of many families to acquire ownership, to trade in
goods and services which had become scarce due to the war. , taking
advantage of the rampant corruption to accumulate assets and appropriate
land and real estate, profiting from military supplies, appropriating
part of the financial and food aid coming from abroad to fuel the black
market, in many cases selling the weapons received on the clandestine
market .
On a more general level it should now be clear to everyone that the
sanctions have not brought Russia to its knees nor brought down its
economy; and this while the creaks on the Western front are multiplying,
giving rise to fears of the loss of financial and military support for a
now failed state. The time has therefore come
ask yourself how much the reasons still exist for an unconditional
commitment in support of Ukraine for Western countries in which there is
a growing hostility to the war, well hidden by politicians and the
press, increasingly subservient to anti-Russian propaganda.

The crisis of the principals

While it is certainly true that the war in Ukraine was triggered by the
Russian invasion. we must have the honesty to recognize that it was
tenaciously desired and pursued by both Great Britain and the United
States, which, for different but converging reasons, supported the
decision of the forces within Ukraine, an expression of chauvinistic
nationalism and of the Ukrainian oligarchs linked to agriculture, who
enriched themselves by sharing the spoils of the Ukrainian socialist
state, to prepare the country's detachment from the Russian sphere of
influence, managing the privatization of its assets.
Starting from 2014, they have worked to promote the sale of Ukrainian
land properties, opening up to investments by multinationals, in order
to find the capital necessary for a profound transformation of Ukrainian
agriculture, identifying as an objective for its economic outlets and
commercial, the country's entry into the European Union. This aspiration
of the Ukrainian kulaks found some convergence with Great Britain's
strategic geopolitical project of undermining the process of enlargement
of the European Union, inflating it with the rapid entry of other
non-homogeneous countries into the Union and at the same time making it
possible to break the strategic economic axis that linked the European
Union to Russia, from which the continent's economy received the energy
necessary to fuel its agricultural and industrial production at low costs.
This project was shared by the United States, for strategic reasons
linked to the enlargement of NATO and is fueled by economic and
commercial relations resulting from the interest of many Western food
multinationals for the purchase of land, put up for sale by the
Ukrainian government, thanks to the reform agriculture of 2019.
Faced with this project, the Russian oligarchs, whose interests are well
represented by the Kremlin, reacted by asking to participate in the sale
of Ukrainian territories, but they were excluded. They therefore decided
to fuel separatism in Donbass, an industrial region in which a large
part of Ukrainian production was concentrated
metalworking and above all steel production, put into crisis by the
competition from Western production, to which the country was opening
up. In other words, the production activities of this area still found a
place on the Russian market,
while they were out of the market in the West from a technological and
production cost point of view, one time they had to procure raw
materials on the Western market instead of receiving them at a
"political price" from Russia: this explains the request for secession
and accession to Russia or at least the request for the creation of a
special economic area through the institutional transformation of the
country towards a federal structure. The failure of the plan was pursued
with determination by the Kiev government, ensuring that the Minsk
agreements, which had as their core the granting of autonomy to those
territories, failed.
Relying on incorrect intelligence information and ignoring the war
preparation activity of the country's military apparatus, thanks to
secret agreements with Great Britain and NATO, in place since 2014,
Russia undertook the so-called "special operation" which had the aim of
staging a coup d'état. As is known, the failure of the operation and the
unexpected Ukrainian resistance demonstrate the failure of Putin's
criminal project of enfeoffing an entire country by force, justified
with the ideological cover constituted by the Russkiy mir, supported by
the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate. The intended victims of all this are
the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, pushed into a fratricidal war that is
sowing hatred, death, desperation, in the name and on behalf of
geostrategic interests and imperial aspirations foreign to the interests
of the peoples. A war that tends to become chronic and become on one
side a positional one and on the other a guerrilla war.
However, there is no doubt that some objectives of the war directors on
both sides have been achieved: the European Union is in crisis, both
economic and commercial, its energy policy has collapsed, calling into
question the green economy project: its agriculture is in crisis, due to
the feared entry into the Union
of Ukraine, to the point of producing the rebirth of agrarian parties in
various European countries; the economic effort to support Ukraine is
putting the economies of individual states and their welfare in crisis;
the growth of inflation, also due to more complex international factors,
is crushing the living standards of European Union citizens and income
gaps within the Union's population are becoming increasingly wider; in
line with what happens in the rest of the world, the number of rich
people is growing and the number of poor people is increasing.

The internal front

At this point of the situation it is inevitable to ask what convenience
there is, especially for the Ukrainian people, in continuing the war,
listening to Zelensky's constant appeals to continue the fight. The war
produced an exodus of more than 8 million inhabitants who found
hospitality in all countries of the world. Much of this emigration,
after two years, tends to become sedentary, to take root in the
territories in which it has settled, also thanks to preferential
treatment received in the name of solidarity due towards war refugees.
The more time passes, the more difficult it is for these Ukrainian
citizens to return to their homeland once the conflict is over. A
portion of them will certainly do so and, thanks to what they
accumulated in exile, while others fought and lost their lives or were
injured in body and mind, they will be able to return to the country and
purchase at a low price the destroyed goods and properties, present
everywhere, fueling social resentment towards them on the part of those
who remained in their homeland to fight or under the threat of weapons
and have lost everything, prisoners of poverty and misery. Contrary to
what warmongers and patriots believe, the peoples who emerge from wars
are no longer cohesive, united by pain and suffering, but more divided,
because they are shocked by pain and desperation, by seeing around them
and by having lived and known pain and suffering.
In a future society so divided, sick due to the war due to the thousands
of dead and disabled, what prospects are there for a life worth
reliving, offered to future Ukrainian citizens who will have to live in
a destroyed and devastated, polluted country from the use of chemical
weapons, from depleted uranium weapons, strewn with minefields,
devastated in structures and souls?
What will be the reaction of those who fought in seeing the country and
its material goods passing from the hands of those who enriched
themselves with the war, of those who arrive fresh with capital from
abroad to acquire goods and territories, to take possession of
everything that escaped the destruction of war?
But what madman can think that the pre-2014 situation can be restored in
the country; that Crimea can return to full Ukrainian jurisdiction, when
it already wasn't and in fact never has been; how can one think that the
structural economic reasons that made the populations of Donbass prefer
to look with greater interest at an economic-commercial relationship
with the Russian environment, rather than with the Western one, have
disappeared; how can one think that the introduction of the full Western
market economy in such a devastated country can produce well-being for a
population devastated by years of war, impoverished in young people and
women, deprived of a health, education, services and not understand that
war impoverishes everyone and only enriches speculators and businessmen?
The social fabric of the country is devastated, and together with the
resentment for the many deaths caused by the war, together with the pain
provoked by the memory and memory of massacres and killings, with the
profound hatred spread liberally, a short-sighted nationalism will make
the country a infected sewer, looked at with suspicion by the other
European peoples with whom the surviving Ukrainians will be called to
compete. The war also had its effects in fields in which the country
previously excelled, such as cereal production, since Ukrainian
production lost many positions on that market at an international level.
They apply to all considerations relating to wheat production, with
respect to which, it is also true that today Ukraine continues to sell
its production, halved compared to pre-war volumes, through the trade
corridor established by the European Union and that the The operation
brought Ukrainian speculators a lot of profits, a
damage to community producers, but on a global level the country has
lost its traditional markets and the reaction of community producers is
furious to the point of committing themselves to being represented at a
political level with the rebirth of agrarian parties in the West.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) - in
2023-24 Russia is expected to produce 90 million tons of wheat, the
second highest yield on record after the estimate of 92 million tons for
2022-23 and will export 50 million tons of wheat, displacing Ukraine
from many markets: this would be the highest export figure of all time
for Russia, maintaining its position as the world's leading wheat exporter.

This means, however, that the performance of Ukraine's economy is
increasingly linked to its relations with the European Community, for
which the inclusion of Ukraine in the community agricultural policy
nevertheless represents a major cause of crisis since, due to the rules
community, the country would inevitably end up absorbing most of the
compensation sources put in place by the Union to support agricultural
production. It is therefore to be believed that with the growing
awareness of these mechanisms, the political forces within the Union
that are perplexed about Ukraine's entry will only grow, thus worsening
the problems of the country and of those who politically support the
strategy of engagement with the West.
Lastly, the explosion of the Arab-Israeli conflict and what is happening
in Gaza and the West Bank have diverted the attention of public opinion
and politics from the Ukrainian conflict which today appears
increasingly marginalized and forgotten. The horrors that what is
happening in the Middle East brings with it make us forget the tragedy
of the Ukrainian war, absorbed by a society of the spectacle, the
Western one, which consumes and metabolizes everything, which feeds on
the offal that a subservient and interested press offers it to
consummate the ritual of participation of public opinion in the
tragedies of others, in reality calmly experienced and accepted,
spectacularized and only feared and suffered for the material and
economic effects they cause on a distracted and distant world. As proof
of this, it is enough to draw attention to the growing resistance of the
United States to further engage in war financing and financial support
for Ukraine which from a financial point of view is a state in economic
default.

G.L.

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/12/20/il-crollo-del-fronte-interno-in-ucraina/
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