Ukraine: Losing the War on NATO’s Behalf

Image: Richard Medhurst speaking for No2Nato in London, August 6 2023. This article by No2Nato has been reproduced as a print-at-home leaflet for No2Nato supporters.

by James Tweedie

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly claimed that he is all that stands between the horde of Asiatic Russian ‘orcs’ and ‘Western civilisation’.

He insists we must give him whatever he demands — artillery, tanks, jet fighters, warships, maybe even nuclear weapons — so he can fight the evil Russkies on our behalf.

The problem is that, even after the NATO countries have disarmed themselves to arm Kiev’s motley crew of Nazi militia and half-witted war-tourists, the Ukraine is losing.

Whatever the politicians, retired generals and spies tell the eagerly credulous mainstream media, Kiev is a world away from achieving any of the victory conditions it has defined for itself.

Dying for ‘Democracy’

The long-anticipated and overhyped offensive, finally launched in early June, quickly faltered and has failed to even reach the main Russian defensive lines.

The aim of recapturing the Kherson and Zaporozye regions on the black sea coast, the Crimean peninsula and the Donbass republics is now just a fantasy. In fact the Russian army has already begun retaking some the territory east of Kharkov that the Ukraine won back last autumn.

A lesser goal of breaking through in the south and cutting the land supply route to the Crimea, thereby diverting Russian reserves and causing a crisis of confidence in Moscow, also looks totally way out of reach.

Even US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin’s admitted war-aim of ‘weakening’ Moscow militarily has fallen flat. The Russian armed forces are now bigger, better-equipped and better-trained than they were at the beginning of 2022.

Western sanctions have backfired, causing economic chaos in Europe and North America but not in Russia. Public support for President Vladimir Putin and his handling of the conflict has increased even beyond his pre-war approval levels — the kind Western leaders can only dream of.

The ‘NATO-standard training’ given to Ukrainian troops has proven substandard. The ‘indestructible’ Leopard 2 tanks have been destroyed by the dozen. The Patriot missile defence system was knocked out by a missile.

Even US President Joe Biden, who arguably has a personal family interest in propping up the Kiev regime he helped found in the 2014 Euromaidan coup d’etat, has now admitted that the Pentagon is running so low on standard high-explosive artillery shells to send to Ukraine that it is now digging out cluster munitions which will need years of de-mining work to clear up.

Peace or Armageddon?

The wisest path the West could take is not picking a fight with Russia at all, even if it was, like a school bully, pushing the littler boy from the Ukraine into punching-distance.

It was always going to be like a boxing mismatch between a featherweight and a heavyweight. Encouraging Ukraine to sacrifice tens of thousands of its young men, for a dubious foreign policy goal, with unrealistic promises was a grossly callous act by NATO. The first and greatest war-crime is to choose war over peace, and our leaders are guilty of it.

We now know that the peace deal, negotiated in Turkey in March 2022 but scuppered by Boris Johnson after Zelensky had signed it, would have seen Russian and Donbass troops return to their February 24 positions in return for Ukraine renouncing its intention to join NATO. But Biden, Johnson and the rest only wanted war.

Since then the West has crossed every red line it drew for itself in arming Kiev: long-range rocket artillery, cruise missiles, tanks, combat helicopters, fighter and ground attack aircraft. Where will it end?

All this raises the question of what good NATO is and what we are still doing in it more than 30 years after the Cold War was supposed to have ended. The alliance is not defensive: it seeks new nuclear-armed enemies for itself even on the other side of the world in the Pacific.

The conflict in the Ukraine has brought us closer than ever to a war between nuclear powers, the one thing our political and military leaders must avoid at all costs. Rather than protecting its member states, NATO needs to be disbanded for their safety. Anyway, the non-nuclear nations of Europe were only ever included as a way of extending the post-war military occupations by the US, UK and France.

NATO has proved itself a paper tiger, whose only card left to play is nuclear Armageddon.