On 10 February, two weeks before the Russian invasion, President Joe Biden told Americans in Ukraine to get out within 48 hours. Since then, the US has returned to this country, albeit in different ways. Without risking a single soldier’s life, they are using the succession of disasters caused by Vladimir Putin to achieve strategic gains: a Russia weakened for the long term; a China discomfited by its neighbour’s setbacks; a NATO strengthened by Sweden and Finland’s fast-track accession; a raft of contracts for American exporters of grain, arms and gas; and a Western media that reliably spouts Pentagon propaganda. Why would US strategists want such a fortuitous war to end?
The answer is, they don’t. For weeks, it’s seemed as if the only conclusion to the conflict which the US would truly welcome would be a victory parade of Western armies through the streets of Moscow, with Biden on the podium and Putin in an iron cage. When it comes to achieving its now express objective of ‘weakening Russia’ — in fact bleeding it — the US is not skimping. It’s delivering more offensive, more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine and (probably) helping it locate and take out Russian generals and even sink the flagship of Russia’s fleet. Not to mention that for the past three months the US Congress has already approved $54bn of assistance for Ukraine equivalent to more than 80% of Russia’s military budget.
Biden initially feared that helping Ukraine too directly would trigger ‘a third world war’. He seems to have concluded that Moscow’s nuclear threat was a bluff and that Russia, whose military might he had overestimated, can safely be backed into a corner. He is thus at one with the neocon Republicans for whom any concession to Putin’s expansionism ‘would be like paying the cannibal to eat us last’ (1). American overreach has gone so far that Biden, speaking to Lockheed Martin workers in Alabama who make the Javelin antitank missiles whose formidable effectiveness many Russian tank crews know first-hand, expressed delight at Ukrainian parents ‘naming their newborn child Javelin or Javelina’.
On 21 May, Volodymyr Zelensky restated that the war could only end at the negotiating table. But, with diplomacy in the doldrums, the Russian army is keeping up its destructive conquest of cities in the Donbass and US political leaders are benefiting from the expansion of the conflict. Europe, meanwhile, looks passive, torn between a rather isolated French president Macron, who rightly observed that ‘peace cannot be built by humiliating Russia’, and Estonia’s prime minister Kaja Kallas, who retorted, ‘We should not offer Vladimir Putin a way out ... The solution can only be military. Ukraine must win this war’ (2). For the moment, it’s Washington’s puppeteers who are pulling the strings in Europe.
Serge Halimi
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