With no mutiny in Moscow, NATO faces disaster in Ukraine
After a quickly declared "civil war" in Russia crumbles, proxy war cheerleaders continue to ignore dangerous realities in Ukraine.
When Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin launched an abrupt revolt against Russia’s military leadership, proponents of the Ukraine proxy war quickly predicted the pending implosion of their Kremlin foes. “Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war,” Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic. “There’s going to be a big fight”, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul announced, barely containing his glee at the possibility that “Russians will be killing Russians, probably in large numbers.” Yale Professor Timothy Snyder was among several proxy war cheerleaders to amplify “reports” that Vladimir Putin had already fled the Russian capital, presumably for exile.
The Western-declared “civil war” not only ended within hours of these pronouncements, but without a single shot being fired on Moscow. Prigozhin claims that he never intended to oust Putin, but to protest his forces’ looming deadline to become subsumed by the Russian military.
The rush to sign Putin’s death warrant reflects the desire for regime change in Moscow that undergirds US policy in Ukraine, as made plain when Joe Biden, in the early weeks of Russia’s invasion, declared that Putin “cannot remain in power.” More immediately, it also reflects a growing acknowledgement that Ukraine’s long-planned “counter-offensive” – a key step in the guiding US strategy to “weaken” Russia -- is failing to live up to the hype.
“Ukraine’s counteroffensive is having less success and Russian forces are showing more competence than western assessments expected,” CNN reports, citing US and NATO sources. The offensive is “not meeting expectations on any front,” one official said. Mark Milley, the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently acknowledged that Ukraine is facing a “very difficult” and “very violent fight” that “will likely take a considerable amount of time and at high cost.” “I don’t know what the government’s plans are,” one Ukrainian soldier complained to Vice News, “but it looks like extermination of its own... combat-ready and working-age population.”
The Ukrainian government has in fact signaled a potential plan for an unparallel disaster. As Western officials grudgingly acknowledged the counter-offensive’s failure to date, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of plotting to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest. Ukraine “has received information that Russia is considering the scenario of a terrorist act at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — a terrorist act with the release of radiation,” Zelensky claimed. According to Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, the purported Russian plan has been “drafted and approved,” and could “happen in a matter of minutes.”
Even if we were to entertain the possibility that Russia would be crazy enough to destroy a nuclear power plant, the allegation still defies logic. Controlling around 20% of Ukrainian territory and succeeding in repelling Ukraine’s offensive so far, Russia would have no motive to carry out such a reckless and dangerous strike. Moreover, Russia would also be destroying the very nuclear plant that its forces currently control. For months, Ukrainian forces have accused Russia of shelling the plant, an allegation dutifully parrotedby US media. The NATO propaganda wall was finally pierced in April, when the Times of London reported that, while “Kyiv has never acknowledged attacking Europe’s largest nuclear power station,” Ukrainian forces had finally “revealed... details of the highly dangerous operation to recover the site.”
At worst, the Ukrainian government’s new “warning” is an act of projection in preparation for a false flag attack. At best – and more plausibly, in my view – the Zelensky government is bluffing in an attempt to attract more military support from its NATO patrons, as well as to distract from its battlefield losses.
What is undoubtedly clear is that Zelensky’s clique, at least publicly, remains steadfast against negotiations. Zelensky's chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, recently declared that he’s “against formal diplomacy.” Instead, Yermak told the Wall Street Journal, he favors “soft power,” centered on attracting “celebrities” to Ukraine in a bid to drum up global support, “as a raft of Western stars have done since the start of the invasion last year.”
Yermak’s avowed faith in Western A-listers is a likely reflection of his boss’s star power in NATO states. But his hostility to diplomacy also reflects an entrenched dynamic in Ukraine that predates, and helps explain, Russia’s invasion. According to the Journal, “Yermak says efforts before the war to make a deal with Russia were hamstrung by a 2015 agreement, concluded under Western pressure, that handed Moscow control over parts of Ukraine.” That agreement refers to the Minsk Accords, the internationally recognized formula for ending the post-2014 Donbas war. When it comes to implementing Minsk, the decisive “Western pressure” has in fact come from a bipartisan US political establishment that bitterly opposed it, in alliance with Ukraine’s far-right.
Yermak’s view, as rendered by the Journal, newly underscores this position. In his view, efforts “to make a deal with Russia” and avoid an invasion were hamstrung by Ukraine's refusal to implement the very peace deal that Ukraine had already signed. The added explanation that Minsk would have given “Moscow control over parts of Ukraine” is transparently false: would any Ukrainian government have signed such a deal? In reality, Minsk would have effectively – though not formally -- made Ukraine neutral, in accordance with the wishes of a plurality if not the majority of Ukrainians, according to polls. It also would have recognized the rights of its ethnic Russian population – a non-starter for Ukraine’s far-right.
The squandered opportunity for diplomacy extends to after the invasion, as has been newly underscored. In a recent meeting with African leaders, Putin produced a document containing what he said was a peace deal signed by Zelensky’s government last April. The document – whose authenticity no one has denied – adds to a body of evidence, all from NATO and Ukrainian sources, that Ukraine and Russia reached a pact that could have ended the war in its early weeks, only to be sabotaged by then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with presumed US backing. Because this episode undermines the prevailing narrative that a Hitlerian Putin invaded Ukrainian to erase it from the map, the story has been duly concealed from consumers of establishment Western media.
The dangers of the prevailing rejection of diplomacy with Russia have newly escalated with Russia’s deployment of nuclear weapons in Belarus. The move, Putin announced, was intended as an act of “deterrence” to show the West that they cannot achieve their intended “strategic defeat” of Russia. It is also plausible that Russia is setting the stage for Cuban Missile Crisis-style diplomacy, wherein both the US and Russia would remove their (apocalyptic) offensive weaponry (in the US case, from its missile sites in Poland and Romania, a longstanding Russian grievance that factored heavily in Moscow’s quickly rejected and long-forgotten December 2021 draft peace treaty with the US and NATO).
Naturally, rather than attempting diplomacy, the US establishment has responded to Putin with more bellicosity. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) introduced a measure threatening Russia with “total obliteration by NATO forces if they are so reckless and irrational as to resort to tactical nuclear weapons.” The measure also vows to “destroy” Russia “if they destroy a nuclear plant in a way that threatens surrounding NATO nations,” – an apparent reference to Zelensky’s new allegations of a Russian plot against Zaporizhzhia.
Anyone expecting the Biden administration to tamp down the rhetoric and embrace negotiations will need to wait, at minimum, until after the 2024 presidential race. “As he heads into next year’s reelection campaign,” the Washington Post notes, “Biden needs a major battlefield victory to show that his unqualified support for Ukraine has burnished U.S. global leadership, reinvigorated a strong foreign policy with bipartisan support and demonstrated the prudent use of American military strength abroad.”
Note how none of this supposed “support for Ukraine” has anything to do with defending Ukraine. Instead, Biden’s Ukraine strategy is centered entirely around the higher priorities of his re-election campaign and protecting “US global leadership”/“use of American military strength abroad” – provided, of course, that the world manages to survive it.
https://mate.substack.com/p/with-no-mutiny-in-moscow-nato-faces
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