Markus Lehner, Neue Internationale 280, February 2024
The dying continues on the battlefields of Ukraine. In the almost 2 years since the Russian attack, about half a million soldiers are said to have fallen victim to this war, about 150,000 of them dead. It is difficult to verify the information provided by the various sides and international intelligence agencies on the military casualties – but these are the most realistic estimates from various sources. According to the UN High Commissioner for Civilian Casualties, just over 10,000 civilians have been victims of military strikes so far – remarkably, about half of those reported by the same agency for 2 months of war in Gaza. A clear sign that this war is being waged primarily in a conventional military way, i.e. by massacring soldiers.
Lack of turnaround
The turnaround expected by many in the West as a result of the Ukrainian “summer offensive” clearly did not occur. The war is currently developing more and more into trench warfare, similar to the First World War. In a remarkable interview in The Economist (11/4/2023), the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valery Zaluzhnyi, remarked: “Similar to the First World War, we have reached a situation of war technology that forces us to engage in trench warfare.” According to the textbooks of NATO warfare, Ukrainian offensive forces should have reached Crimea within 4 months. In fact, Zaluzhnyi explains in the interview, after a short time he had to recognise a standstill or only very slow action on all fronts, which he initially attributed to poor command leadership or insufficiently trained units. But, when personnel changes and troop regroupings did not change anything, he looked up old manuals from Soviet times and found that the descriptions of the offensive forces getting stuck in the First World War corresponded exactly to the situation on the frontline today.
Analysis of waves of attacks by both the Russian and Ukrainian sides, shows that the defending side has an enormous technological advantage. Both sides can observe the massing of tanks or troops with their electronic means and, through the use of drones or artillery, halt any advance with large losses of troops and materiel. Therefore, the expansion of defensive positions on both sides remains the preferred goal. In the meantime, the Ukrainian leadership has also moved away from its widely propagated offensive strategy and declares its current general line as “strategic defence”. According to Zaluzhnyi, only a special leap in war technology could lead out of this balance of terror. But military historical experience, such as the use of tanks at the end of the First World War, shows that successful integration of really new technologies takes a long time, usually becoming decisive only in the next war.
War of attrition
Now that it is obviously a war of attrition, the question of the war economy and the quantitative supply of military material to the troops is becoming more and more crucial. The war is thus increasingly decided by economics, as it was in the First World War. And this is where Russia is gaining more and more ground. As one U.S. banker recently noted, forecasts that the Russian economy would collapse in a matter of months due to Western sanctions and pressures from the war economy have turned out to be “triumphally wrong”. Contrary to the analysis of many on the left, the Russian economy has clearly shown itself to be that of an imperialist power. Not only have the shortfalls in capital and goods imports been absorbed with only slight slumps, but Russian arms production has now increased by 68% and reached a share of 6.5% of GDP. After a recession in 2022, the Russian economy grew by 2.8% in 2023. Of course, both rising import prices and the war economy have led to rising inflation of around 7%. As with military casualties, the victims are above all the workers, who are struggling with an ever-increasing cost of living with more limited supply. Nevertheless, a change of power is hardly to be expected in the presidential elections in March and, after that, the decisive supply for the troops will probably flow again on a larger scale: more soldiers through further mobilisations!
The fact that Ukraine has major problems with the war of attrition has become increasingly clear in recent months. At the height of the summer offensive, Ukrainian artillery fired about 7,000 shells a day – significantly more than Russian artillery. But currently, due to shortages, it has to limit itself to 2,000 per day, while Russian artillery fires 5 times as much. The reason for this is not only faltering aid from the West (e.g. the military aid withheld by the US Congress), but much more fundamental problems of the Western arms industry. In recent decades, this has focused on high-tech and specialised weapons, while conventional war of attrition is primarily based on mass and traditional “hardware”. In the past, supplies came mainly from the stocks of the Western armies, but now it is more and more important to actually produce new products. Ukraine itself can hardly produce the necessary quantity because of the infrastructure problems caused by the war (e.g. failure of more than half of the electricity supply).
Limits of Western Imperialism
Even Western imperialism is not as overpowering as it is portrayed by many. Ammunition production requires vast quantities of steel. If you look at the 15 largest steel companies in the world, there is not a single US company left, but there are 9 in China. The U.S. has gone from being one of the world’s most important steel producers to one of the largest importers today. They and Western Europe now have to increase their ammunition production many times over, at high cost of supplies, in order to keep up with Russia and China. In particular, they want to increase their annual production of 155mm bullets to 1.2 million by 2025, six times as much as in 2023. This will perhaps catch up with Russian production, which has already doubled since the beginning of the war (not counting the massive additional purchase of such ammunition from North Korea).
However, many such promises can hardly be implemented in the short time due to supply bottlenecks and technical conversion problems. For example, in March 2023, the EDA (the EU’s “defence agency”) pledged Ukraine 1 million rounds of such ammunition for the rest of the year, but in fact was only able to procure 480,000. While U.S. munitions production, which is under state control, can be ramped up on the basis of political decisions, the European arms companies (especially the German Rheinmetall, the British BAE Systems, the French Nexter S.A., the Norwegian-Finnish Nammo AS) as private companies are only willing to expand their production through concrete financial commitments. Their order books are now three times as full as they were before the war. Rheinmetall is currently covering the continent with new production facilities. Nevertheless, this production will lag behind the Russian one in terms of quantity at least until the beginning of 2026.
In a war of attrition, which is mainly characterised by defensive positions and artillery, such factors can be decisive. As the First World War showed, a lack of ammunition and concentrated artillery superiority can lead to individual breakthroughs again and again – and ultimately force one side to surrender. However, the warring parties are obviously still far from such a point. So, not only will billions more be poured into the arms industries, but above all thousands of soldiers will be sent to the resulting hell of war. In recent months, there have been growing recruitment problems, especially in Ukraine. Even if the motivation of the Ukrainian defenders is many times higher, many soldiers are simply burnt out after months of fighting and many dead comrades. This is reflected in the growing movement of relatives who are fighting for their husbands or sons to finally be replaced. New recruits are becoming fewer and fewer and, above all, less militarily suitable. Therefore, the recruitment efforts of the Ukrainian military are also becoming more brutal and less “voluntary”.
Inner contradictions
After all, more and more obvious contradictions are becoming visible in the leadership of Ukraine. The aforementioned interview with Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhnyi led to an angry response from President Zelensky, who saw it as a challenge to his optimistic portrayal of the course of the battle for Western donors. On the other hand, it became clear that the political guidelines had led to a costly defence of Bakhmut as well as the already failed offensive – and that the military leadership practically had to force Zelensky to turn to a defence strategy. Zaluzhny has long since overtaken the former in popularity, especially among soldiers. The mayor of Kiev, Klitschko, is also behind him, so that a real political countervailing power is beginning to emerge here. It cannot be ruled out that Zelensky is more likely to fall than Putin, especially if the West is striving for a face-saving end to hostilities without achieving Ukraine’s war goals.
On the left, the Ukraine war is often reduced to a proxy war between the imperialist powers USA/EU and Russia. Even if this is a defining moment of the entire war, which is inextricably linked to the new Cold War and the struggle for the redivision of the world, on the part of Ukraine it is also a national defensive war against the centuries-old oppression of imperial Russia. In any case, this explains the massive support of the poorer population in Ukraine for the fight against the Russian invaders.
At the same time, Western support is not absolute and unconditional – despite all the warm words that “our freedom” is being defended here. On the one hand, Ukraine’s economy is already being heavily distributed among Western agencies (see the IMF programs for Ukraine and their impact on Ukrainian workers and peasants). On the other hand, Biden & Co. made it clear from the outset that they would only provide as much military aid as was necessary for defence, and did not want to deliver anything that would make them directly participants in a war – or even bring them directly into military confrontation with Russia. This also clearly distinguishes Ukraine in 2022 from Serbia in 1914. These limits of support for them by the US and the EU also make it clear that the current shortages in military supplies may mark the beginning of a (conscious or unconscious) exit strategy. In other words, in the hope that the war of attrition will weaken both Ukraine and Russia militarily to such an extent that both are more and more willing to “compromise”. Such a “Minsk 3” (certainly not under this name, but with similar consequences) would cost Ukraine significant territories, and in turn would bring Russia the final loss of most of Ukraine from its sphere of influence. This will hardly be possible with the current leadership of Ukraine – but alternatives are already available.
Millions of Ukrainian workers and peasants who have gone to fight for their country’s independence and democratic self-determination will see this as an enormous betrayal. But a deadlocked, prolonged war of position will also fuel resentment over the war policy of the capitalist regime in Kiev, indeed over the meaningfulness of the war itself and its leadership, especially since it advanced the exploitation of wage earners during the war and massively restricted the trade union and political rights of the working class. The internal contradictions in Ukraine are further fuelled by the fact that the regime stands for unbridled conditions of exploitation and the sell-off of agricultural wealth to “Western investors”. We therefore warn against any trust in any of these alleged leaders of national defence. Rather, it is necessary to fight for the working class to withdraw all political support from the various nationalist leadership groups and to organise against the sell-out of Ukraine in every possible way, in order to prepare and embark on the struggle for an independent socialist Ukraine.
Prospects
In this country, we have to fight against rearmament and the billions for the arms companies. Under the pretext of defending Ukraine, rearmament is being pursued in the interests of its own aggressive imperialist goals and the capacity of the arms industry is being expanded accordingly. While we recognise Ukraine’s right to self-defence and to obtain the means to do so, revolutionaries in Ukraine and the West must warn against the illusions that the current military support of NATO countries is truly for independence. Rather, these deliveries are linked to the condition of securing their own sphere of influence and exploitation and are ultimately not aimed at real self-determination for the whole of Ukraine, but are intended to bring booty to the West. Whether this calculation works out, or the Ukrainian masses thwart it, ultimately depends on whether the working class succeeds in building its own revolutionary party that combines the struggle against the Russian occupation with that for a socialist Ukraine.
In Russia, the conditions for opposition to the war have not become easier since its inception. Russian imperialism was able to stabilise itself after the first, certainly unexpected, serious setbacks. Both economically and politically, the regime has the situation largely under control. The pseudo-opposition of Wagner’s leaders has served its purpose of channelling protest against “those at the top” and could be brought down in the person of Prigozhin. However, price increases, shortages of certain goods and a massive wave of emigration, especially of well-educated people, will lead to new shocks in the long term. Hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded for small territorial gains in Ukraine raise questions for the leadership. The recent massive protests in the republic of Bashkortostan on the Volga show that the calm in the vast empire is only apparent. The courageous stance of environmental activist Fayil Alsynov against the war in Ukraine and the excessive state repression have been enough to throw a hitherto passive province into turmoil. The longer and bloodier the current war of attrition in Ukraine continues, the more the call for “bread and peace” will once again shake the Russian regime. It is important for Russian socialists to prepare this moment for a new Russian October!
Revolutionary Marxists should advocate ending the Ukraine war on a just and democratic basis: Russia out of Ukraine, no to the inter-imperialist Cold War, and self-determination for Crimea and the Donbass republics. This must be linked to the longer-term perspective of an independent socialist Ukraine, because nothing else would bring a just and lasting peace.