Ever wondered what it feels like when your country is being marched off to war? Just look out the window, turn on the tv. It’s not like in the films. It creeps up piece by little piece, and at some point you look up and realise, OMG, ‘we’ are at war (who is this ‘we’ they talk about anyway?).
Britain and Europe own the Ukraine war, the Americans keep a foot in the door. Ukraine may have agency, but it depends utterly on enormous Western support: funding, arms, logistics, training and intelligence. Take them away and the whole house of cards collapses. And the West is escalating hard, with the Brits leading the charge.
Two arenas are currently of particular note: deep drone strikes into Russia and interference with Russian shipping.
Have you heard the cackling ghouls on the radio, celebrating the destruction of online retail warehouses as ‘bringing the war home to ordinary Russians’? For all the ‘Ukrainian’ labelling, it’s Nato on the inside. The Russians know that. Foreign Minister Lavrov said so.
Take the widely touted ‘Flamingo FP-5’ cruise missile, supposedly Ukrainian and painted bright pink for PR purposes. In fact this is the British-Emirati Milanion FP-5 in fancy dress. As the German Junge Welt reports, the electronics are British, the body from Germany and the fuel from Denmark.
The Dart and Hornet drones launched into Russia are American, the RZR-01 and Vector from Germany. The latest addition, the Nyan, is explicitly ‘made in England’. As retired Air Marshal Greg Bagwell told the Times, that turns British drone factories into legitimate targets. In this case, Callen-Lenz in Chilmark, near Salisbury.
Hundreds of Western drones and missiles are flung into Russia every night, most of them get shot down. Some get through, usually striking soft targets chosen for publicity value (oil tanks and retail warehouses burn so photogenically). Western intelligence guides the targeting.
The effect of all this? To harden Russian sentiment, a boost for those who want the gloves off. Vladimir Putin said on 22 August that Ukrainian strikes on Russian economic targets had opened ‘Pandora’s box’, and they would respond in kind. That is already happening. Russia has stepped up its own air war, destroying a string of arms plants and associated industries, cutting off Ukraine’s access to the sea for the first time in the war, destroying all petrol stations in key regions, and also—reciprocally—striking retail warehouses, leaving supermarket shelves empty.
In this context, with the Ukrainians out of air defence, Andy Burnham supposedly ‘handing over the plans’ for Ukraine to manufacture its own Western drones and missiles is just another piece of PR puff, hot air.
Britain waives the rules
The second arena where our unpopular overlords are asking for trouble is the tanker war. The Russian ‘shadow fleet’ is a fiction of war propaganda, and all those spectacular seizures are essentially piracy. In at least one case the UK and EU coerced Cameroon into withdrawing a ‘shadow fleet’ vessel’s registration by threatening to stop development aid, as Craig Murray shows.
Even Greenpeace wants a piece of the action, clashing with the Russian navy in the Baltic. A whole new slant on the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ schtick. And now the EU is permitting its members to flog off sequestered Russian cargoes.
The Russians say they will retaliate. When Russia fails to respond hard and immediately to provocations, our misleaders tend to portray this as weakness. What if it is actually strategic prudence?
Where is this all heading? The Telegraph gloats that the Russian navy has withdrawn from the Mediterranean, in order to concentrate on protecting merchant vessels in closer to home. Diplomat-turned-Peacemonger Ian Proud warns of the risks: ship seizures could quickly escalate into live-fire clashes.
Celebrating slaughter
It seems to me, the dogs of war are barking louder, even as their glorious victory slips away. It was one particularly sick puppy who provoked me into putting pen to paper. That’s Luke Harding, writing in the Guardian, where he celebrates the wonderful videos made by Ukrainian drone operators, who intentionally tease and torment Russian soldiers before killing them. ‘A potent propaganda weapon’ apparently. Then the video is sent to the dead soldier’s parents. And ‘we’ are the good guys? (Who is this ‘we’ anyway?)
Then there’s the BBC’s Radio 4 news, acclaiming the feat of killing Russian civilians in the distant city of Nizhnekamsk: ‘That’s pretty amazing is it not?’ Yeah, amazing innit.
Why can’t these so-called journalists tell us about the horrors of the Ukrainian press-gangs? For a glimpse, take a look at the litany of suffering catalogued by the Ukraine-linked blogger Events in Ukraine. The reports and images are stomach-churning.
Altogether there is an awful lot of spin in what we are being told. In fact, whenever the headlines are splurging some ‘Ukrainian’ feat of derring-do, there is usually a piece of bad news to cover up. While the Western news is full of things going bang in Russia, the Russian army is slowly but systematically dismantling the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk fortifications, Ukraine’s last stronghold in Donetsk.
Western talk of ‘winning’ is deluded. It can only prolong the agony. Or lead to broader war, ‘bringing it home’ to us. After the West’s repeated displays of bad faith—in Minsk, Istanbul and Anchorage—the prospects for any kind of negotiated settlement look grim indeed.
Robert Dale lives in the Berlin region, where he has been active in socialist politics since the 1980s.