Clashes erupt across France as Macron imposes pension cuts without parliamentary vote

Alex Lantier

Police descend on protesters at the Concorde square after a demonstration near the National Assembly in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

Mass protests erupted last night in cities across France, after Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne announced that her government plans to impose President Emmanuel Macron’s pension cuts without a vote in the National Assembly. Anger is mounting in the working class, which is entering into a direct confrontation with the Macron government, with revolutionary implications.

Macron’s police-state machine is trampling democracy and the will of the people underfoot. He ignored the opposition to his cuts of three-quarters of the French people, and nationwide protest strikes against the cuts by millions of workers have continued for two months now. With 60 percent of the population supporting a general strike to blockade the economy and force Macron to withdraw the cuts, strikes and protests are mounting France.

Police assaulted protests by thousands in Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rennes, Brest, Dijon, Angers and Besançon. Tens of thousands gathered at Concord Square in Paris, where police armed with tear gas, water cannon, rubber-bullet guns and assault rifles guarded strategic buildings, including the Elysée presidential palace, the National Assembly and the US embassy. Clashes broke out after police charged the protest; fires burned in streets across central Paris as protesters battled riot police. At least 120 protesters were arrested.

An objectively revolutionary situation is emerging in France and across Europe, as the class struggle erupts amid the bloody NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. Millions are striking against inflation and wage cuts in Germany and Britain, strikes are continuing in the Netherlands and Portugal, and a general strike hit Greece yesterday. Even as social anger assumes titanic dimensions across Europe, Macron has nothing to offer besides repression.

Macron told his council of ministers yesterday morning that he would activate line 3 of Article 49 of France’s constitution. The 49-3 allows the government to force the National Assembly to adopt legislation without a vote, unless the Assembly votes to bring down the government. Borne’s announcement came amid reports that Macron, whose party only has a minority in the Assembly, could not get enough votes for the pension cuts from the right-wing The Republicans (LR) party.

Macron told the council of ministers that if the pension cuts went to the Assembly and were voted down, the result—amid a mounting financial crisis, fears of failures of European banks, and growing speculation on the French national debt—would be catastrophic. It would also, clearly, cut across Macron’s attempt to fund his €413 billion military budget and his participation in the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine via pension cuts.

Macron said: “My political interest and my political will were to go to a vote (in the Assembly on the cuts). Among all of you, I am not the one who is risking his position and a parliamentary seat. But I consider that in the current situation, the financial and economic risks were too great.”

Macron dispensed with the lie that his pension cuts are dictated by the need to ensure the financial viability of the French pension system. It is truly a vast handout to the banks and the war machine.

France’s CAC-40 stock index, which had fallen heavily in early trading, surged after Borne said she would use 49-3 in the parliament. With financiers expecting further massive profits, the CAC-40 rose over 120 points to close back over 7,000.

The Macron government is pledging to ram through the cuts, no matter the cost. Borne gave a prime-time TV interview on TF1 in which she defended her record, dismissed reporters’ questions on mass popular opposition to the cuts, and pledged the cuts would go through.

The trade union alliance that has called the nationwide strike protests over the last two months, including the social-democratic French Democratic Labor Confederation (CFDT) and the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT), also held a brief press conference yesterday evening. Tbey called a further one-day strike protest on March 23.

In an atmosphere of panic across the French ruling establishment, bourgeois journalists and pseudo-left politicians are peddling the line that workers should limit themselves to begging Macron to change his mind, or begging parliamentarians to censure his government and call new elections. It is a desperate attempt to buy time, give the union bureaucracy room to get control over the situation, and prevent a revolutionary struggle against Macron.

“This the beginning of something that is skidding out of control. … Representative democracy no longer allows for the expression of the voice of the people,” commented Marianne editor Natacha Polony on BFM-TV, whose editorialist Bernard Duhamel desperately asked: “The risk is that the trade union will not hold. Will the union leaderships be able to hold?”

Members of 2022 presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Union coalition peddled illusions that Macron and the ruling elite would suddenly abandon the cuts. “We are in a major political crisis,” said Green politician Sandrine Rousseau, asking the right-wing LR party to provide the decisive votes for the motion of censure and force new elections. She added: “Things must be calmed down, the government has a responsibility to calm things down.”

“Social harmony must be re-established. Mr Macron must return to reason,” declared François Ruffin of Mélenchon’s own Unsubmissive France (LFI) party. Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) leader Fabien Roussel pledged to organize a petition campaign to gather four million signatures to ask Macron to reconsider. “What president of the Republic would act with contempt towards such a petition?”, Roussel cynically asked.

This is a fraud. If Macron is willing to trample underfoot the opposition of 50 million people in France and 3 million strikers, he can easily dismiss a petition with 4 million signatures.

The union bureaucracy is also strenuously signaling, in its behind-the-scenes talks with employers but also now in the media, that it will do everything it can to crush the workers. Jean-Christophe Deprat, the Workers Force (FO) union bureaucrat in charge of Paris mass transit, complained of the “risks of things getting out of control. It risks turning into a big mess where everyone does whatever they want.”

“A certain insurrection is possible,” warned CGT-Energy bureaucrat Frédéric Ben. “We fight against the radicalization of movements … but on a strike picket, there are not only CGT members. Workers, they do what they want.”

These statements amount to a pledge not to mobilize opposition to Macron’s coming crackdowns. Already yesterday, riot police broke up pickets by striking garbage collectors in Paris and arrested several striking CGT energy workers for distributing free energy to workers’ homes.

The Grammys, the Super Bowl and the crisis in popular music

Erik Schreiber

Popular music in the US in particular has degenerated to a remarkable extent, and its decline has serious implications for the overall cultural level and health of society.

Although their artistic quality has always been variable, popular songs once reflected daily life, gave expression to widely felt anger and protest and even addressed broader issues—all of this, of course, within the limitations imposed by the commercial, for-profit music industry.

One could find inspiration and creativity in hit songs and relate to the observations and hopes that their lyrics expressed, in various genres, such as soul, rhythm and blues, folk, country and rock and roll. There were more or less “universal” musical figures genuinely admired and even beloved, if sometimes excessively or misguidedly, by great numbers of people. There are virtually no such personalities at present. The list of the most popular musical artists in 2022 includes undoubtedly gifted individuals, but it is difficult to conceive of any of them seriously enduring or mattering deeply to a vast audience.

2023 Grammy Awards poster

Much of the music that the major corporations release and the media promote bears the unmistakable stamp of the production line. It is cold and uninspired. Worse, boorishness and retrogression have flooded the airwaves and streaming services. The lyrics to many popular songs are at an abysmally low intellectual and moral level. Bombast, posturing, vulgarity and pandering confront us from seemingly all sides, with a relative handful of individuals and firms making vast profits out of it all: revenues for the global music business rose for the seventh straight year in 2021 to $26 billion.

As we noted in a comment on Beyoncé’s Renaissance, the appearance of an album by that singer “is not primarily a musical or artistic development,” it is an economic and political one. On the one hand, a portion of the recording and entertainment industry depends on such “blockbusters.” On the other, the identity politics “industry” ties its racialist and nationalist program in part to the singer’s success.

The state of mainstream popular music inevitably reflects the state of society. American capitalism is in a condition of profound decay and degeneration. Fantastic wealth has been generated through parasitic speculation, producing obscene levels of inequality. For decades, the US government and military have waged bloody, neo-colonial wars based on lies or no explanations whatsoever. Now, the ruling elite seems intent on provoking catastrophic wars with both Russia and China.

The working population has been made to pay for this rapacity through deepening attacks on its jobs and living standards. The trade unions have become ever more open agents of the corporations and the state. Former liberals and radicals have enriched themselves and shifted sharply to the right, promoting irrationality and obsession with race and gender as “progressive” perspectives. 

Bad Bunny 2019 [Photo by Glenn Francis / CC BY 2.0]

These profoundly unhealthy and regressive developments have affected social consciousness and created an inhospitable environment for artists. Instead of facing reality and speaking honestly, many artists have successfully been encouraged to celebrate money, egotism and backwardness. Some do so consciously, having hitched their wagons to the entertainment industry and the opportunities for vanity merchandising that it creates. As we have commented, “the lumpen quasi-pornography that dominates so much of the music and entertainment world functions to pollute the atmosphere, drowning or blotting out social criticism and encouraging the worst, basest instincts.”

The emergence of rapper Kanye West as an open anti-Semite and Hitler admirer does not come out of the blue. No one should imagine that he is alone in his foul views. West has merely raised to the next level the ignorance, selfishness and anti-democratic tendencies that have been brewing for years, cultivated or accommodated to by the music corporations, the media and the so-called left.

None of this means that the spark of musical genius has gone out or even that there is not immense technical and verbal skill already present in what is currently being produced. Moreover, the new media open up previously unimaginable possibilities. A great deal of trivia or worse rises to the top at the moment, but it is not at all difficult to imagine a song that speaks directly to the seething discontent of vast layers of the world’s population attracting almost at once an audience of billions. All the more reason, from the point of view of the powers that be, to nurture the most anti-social, mercenary, individualistic and callous attitudes.

Some of the current problems were on display at the February 5 Grammy awards and the Super Bowl halftime show one week later. These spectacles provided snapshots of the current state of popular music, or a well-promoted portion of it. Many artists thump their chests or offer violence and titillation. Others say as little as possible.

Harry Styles, 2022 [Photo by Lily Rodman / CC BY 2.0]

Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper and singer (and the year’s most-streamed artist in the world on Spotify), opened the Grammys by performing his song “El Apagón,” which means “The Blackout.” Bondholders and banks have plundered Puerto Rico for years, causing a scandalous deterioration in the island’s infrastructure. Despite its title, however, the song barely acknowledges this social crime, let alone the culprits. Bad Bunny makes a fleeting reference to the holes in the highways and briefly badmouths Governor Pedro Pierluisi. But the rest of the song is given over to crude Puerto Rican nationalism and machismo.

The expletive-flecked declaration that Puerto Rico is great is repeated endlessly, as is a vulgar line that praises a part of Puerto Rican women’s bodies. The lyrics are thoroughly puerile and stupid. This intellectual poverty is matched by musical poverty. The first half of the song consists only of a tom pattern and Bad Bunny’s slurred, quasi-drunken rapping. The second part is a two-note synth pattern with electro drums. Rather than protesting Puerto Rico’s misery and neglect, Bad Bunny turns it into a point of pride. Nothing progressive can come from this outlook. 

Harry’s House, by English singer Harry Styles, won the title of Album of the Year. Styles got his start in the boy band One Direction, which was manufactured by the entertainment industry like New Kids on the Block and the Monkees once were. After the band’s de facto breakup in 2016, Styles pursued a solo career, gaining notice for his gender-bending fashion sense and his upbeat, playful persona.

Styles performs an updated “blue-eyed soul” that’s light on “soul”: a pleasant amalgam of disco and ’80s synth pop suitable for piping into a hotel lobby. The album conveys little sense of musicians interacting with each other; it is a professional product, polished to a sheen.

Lizzo at the 2020 Grammys (Photo credit Cosmopolitan UK)

Styles sticks to harmless love songs and displays a modicum of cleverness, but not depth. His gentle warble is as unthreatening as can be. His demonstrations of sensitivity and words of reassurance to his romantic partners are gentlemanly and might well be sincere. But if the album is as introspective as Styles claims it is, then he spends little time thinking about anything of substance. His only comment about the outside world is that listening to the news is unpleasant. He’d rather focus on sushi restaurants, red wine and romance.

Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” won Record of the Year. The upbeat song evokes disco artists such as Chic and Donna Summer. Lizzo says that she wrote the song to “celebrate our survival and celebrate how far we’ve come” from the “major traumas and hard experiences” of the past few years. But the singer fails to name any of these “hard experiences” (such as the pandemic, police killings, inflation and the attempted fascist coup), which are by no means behind us. Instead, she celebrates alcohol and luxury goods, throwing in a few gratuitous profanities along the way. “It’s bad bitch o’clock, yeah, it’s thick-thirty. / I’ve been through a lot, but I’m still flirty,” she sings. The implicit (and false) return to normalcy has Lizzo “feelin’ fussy, walkin’ in my Balenci-ussies,” and she needs “two shots in my cup.” Lizzo is not an especially good singer, and the escapism and lack of serious commentary in this supposedly topical song are conspicuous. 

The song “Unholy” by Sam Smith and Kim Petras won the award for Best Pop Duo or Group Performance. It combines electronic instruments, mechanical rhythms, an ersatz church choir and minor chords to little purpose. Smith sings about a married man who visits a mistress or prostitute to do something “unholy” (a word that is frankly silly in this context). Petras, in her turn, demands accessories from Prada, Miu Miu et cetera before touting her discretion and continual availability for sex. This is a joyless celebration of libido and materialism; it elevates sensation over substance. The duo’s much-noted nonbinary, transgender status does not make the song any more meaningful. 

To close the Grammys, DJ Khaled performed his song “God Did” alongside rappers Rick Ross, Li’l Wayne and Jay-Z. This opus grinds on for more than eight minutes without any musical development. In an apparent attempt to create an atmosphere of reverence, the song begins with a clumsy, autotuned, unintentional insult to gospel singing. Rick Ross and Li’l Wayne indulge in braggadocio but connect it, however tenuously, with the religious theme of the song.

Rihanna, 2018 (Photo credit Fenty Beauty)

Not so Jay-Z, who makes the song all about himself. He changes the refrain “God did” into “Hov did,” Hov being his nickname (short for the modest “Jay-Hova”). Our hero sucks up all the oxygen and turns the song into a tedious paean to his wealth and power. He brags about his personal brands of marijuana and champagne, his collaboration with Rihanna on lines of makeup and lingerie, and his tax shelter in the Bahamas. Every line is about how he made a million dollars on some venture or other, yet he has the audacity to claim that his goal is to make “real” people “feel seen.” Do the real workers who toil to produce his luxury goods feel seen? Jay-Z is a foghorn of megalomania. The song is truly insufferable. 

During her Super Bowl performance February 12, Rihanna proved to be little better than her business partner Jay-Z. She sang a career-spanning medley of hits such as “Bitch Better Have My Money,” “S&M” and “Rude Boy.” The cultural and moral void of her music was embodied in lyrics such as “You wanna see me naked,” “Strippers and dollar bills,” and “Money makes the world go round.” Rihanna grimaced, grabbed herself strategically and wagged her rear end in a remarkably perfunctory performance. The robotic moves of her horde of white-clad dancers matched her robotic music. Rihanna herself showed little energy or stage presence.

The most revealing, and obviously planned moment came when she paused to apply some of her vanity brand setting and blotting powder. This was likely the first time that a Super Bowl performer has interrupted her show to advertise her own wares. Rihanna previously had refused to perform at the Super Bowl in solidarity with former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was blacklisted by the National Football League for protesting police brutality. But perhaps her true principles are summarized in her lyric “All I see is dollar signs.” 

Today’s popular musicians are by no means responsible for the far-advanced economic, social and cultural breakdown. But how can anything remotely progressive come from artists who have embraced capitalism with both arms? This embrace commits them to a rejection of social responsibility and a refusal to address the conditions in which masses of people live. In other words, it commits them to a rejection of art’s capacity to illuminate and inspire.

US maternal mortality rate soars: An example of capitalist barbarism

Patrick Martin

US maternal deaths rose by 40 percent in 2021, the latest year for which statistics are now available, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The number of maternal deaths rose from 754 in 2019 to 861 in 2020 and 1,205 in 2021. The maternal mortality rate, at nearly 32 per 100,000 births, is back to where it was in 1965, a staggering regression of more than half a century.

Women who give birth today in the United States are nearly four times more likely to die than their own mothers were when they gave birth. The US maternal death rate hit its all-time low of 6.6 per 100,000 births in 1987. It was in single digits from 1978 to 2002, then rose steadily, doubling by 2017, then skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly doubling again.

These figures, stemming from a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics, a unit of the CDC, are an indictment of American capitalism and the profit-based health care system, which denies adequate prenatal and postpartum medical treatment for millions of women, simply because they are poor or uninsured.

The United States is not only the worst-performing among the industrialized nations, in terms of maternal mortality, the difference is not even close. Women giving birth in the US are four times more likely to die than in Germany, France or Britain, and 10 times more likely to die than in the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries. They are twice as likely to die as in China. According to the World Health Organization, these disparities predate the COVID pandemic: Maternal-mortality rates in the US rose 78 percent between 2000 and 2020, while dropping in most other countries.

The particular causes of death are varied, according to the CDC, although a majority are cardiovascular in origins, including cardiomyopathy (disease of the heart muscle), 11 percent; blood clots, 9 percent; high blood pressure, 8 percent; stroke, 7 percent; and other cardiac conditions, 15 percent. Infection and postpartum bleeding account for another 24 percent, while mental health issues, including drug overdoses and postpartum depression leading to suicide, are also a factor.

But it is the social causes of death that are the main issue. According to estimates by the CDC and other health authorities, 80 percent of maternal deaths are preventable with proper treatment. Many pregnant women, however, and even more so many women during the weeks and months after birth, do not receive proper treatment.

This lack of care has two basic causes. Women in rural areas are frequently living in what have been termed “obstetric deserts,” more than 25 miles away from a labor and delivery unit. According to the CDC, some 2 million women of childbearing age live in such conditions. This has been greatly exacerbated by the evisceration of rural health care in recent decades, with hundreds of rural hospitals and medical centers, generally smaller and poorly financed, being forced to close their doors.

Far more significant is the overall growth of poverty and the consequent social isolation throughout the whole of American society, to the point that urban and suburban women, living only a few miles and even a few blocks from a well-appointed hospital or a skilled provider, are unable to access the care they need because they lack health insurance and cannot afford the expense.

Both factors contribute to the much worse than average statistics in Southern states with impoverished rural populations, like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas. It is clearly poverty and inequality which are the overriding factors in a heavily urban state like New Jersey, with one of the highest per capita incomes but the fourth-worst maternal mortality rate among the 50 states.

The CDC and other agencies have laid stress on the racial disparities in maternal mortality, and these are quite significant. Black women had a maternal death rate of 69.9 per 100,000 births, compared to 26.6 for white women and 28 for Hispanic women. Native American and Alaska Native women had a mortality rate over 50, and 90 percent of their deaths were considered preventable.

A pregnant woman waits in line for groceries with hundreds during a food pantry, sponsored by Healthy Waltham for those in need due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak, at St. Mary's Church in Waltham, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

However, claims of “systemic racism” fail to explain why, if only white women were considered, the United States would still be the worst among the industrialized countries, and three times worse than any Western European country in terms of maternal mortality. The rate for white women in the United States is equivalent to the rate for Chinese women, who live in a country still mired in mass poverty, particularly for hundreds of millions in rural areas.

It is also the case that during the COVID pandemic, maternal mortality has risen more rapidly for white and Hispanic women than for black women, who were already at an abysmal level in terms of deaths during pregnancy, childbirth, or in the year afterward.

As with so many social indices in the United States, the breakdown along class lines is simply not reported. But there is little doubt that there is a direct correlation between income and maternal mortality. The mothers in the ruling elite only die in childbirth in the rarest of circumstances, when there are health care complications of an extreme or novel character that even the best medical care money can buy cannot resolve.

The effect of the income divide is exacerbated by the reactionary social policies of state and federal governments. Medicaid, the joint federal-state program providing health insurance for low-income families, drops expanded coverage for pregnant women 60 days after they give birth, although doctors advocate a much longer period of additional care and monitoring.

The “let it rip” COVID policy of the Trump and Biden administrations has worsened the crisis. Pregnant women, particularly if they are not vaccinated, are at a much higher risk of severe illness if they contract coronavirus. Moreover, the persistence of the pandemic, thanks to the rejection of any serious effort to suppress it, means that health care facilities have been overwhelmed with people sick with COVID, leaving fewer resources available for non-emergency treatment such as care for pregnant or postpartum women.

The systemic neglect of poor and working class women stands to be greatly exacerbated by the barbarous consequences of the fascistic campaign being waged against abortion rights. Under conditions where pregnancy is becoming more life-threatening, the ultra-right is seeking new laws and procedures to impose forced pregnancy, even for women who face significant dangers to their own health.

In the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped women of the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, dozens of states have enacted laws banning or restricting abortions, or making them more difficult to obtain.

The latest legal salvo is an effort to impose a nationwide ban on the sale of the medication mifepristone, a key component in the two-pill regimen that accounts for half of all abortions in the US.

Here the barbaric consequences of for-profit medicine intersect with the deliberate barbarism of a social outlook that harks back to the days when women were to be kept “barefoot and pregnant.”

Police assault protests across France against anti-democratic attack on pensions

Samuel Tissot

After the French government announced that it would force through the widely opposed pension reform using Article 49.3 of the Constitution without a vote of deputies in the National Assembly, a wave of spontaneous protests broke out across France’s major cities. Seventy percent of the population oppose the reform, and around 60 percent support blocking the economy until the government withdraws it.

Pallets burn as protesters demonstrate at Concorde square near the National Assembly in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023 [AP Photo/Thomas Padilla]

On Thursday afternoon, French President Emmanuel Macron told his cabinet before the announcement of the government’s decision to pursue Article 49.3 to pass the reform bill that he could not allow a vote on the law because “the financial and economic risks are too great.”

Thursday’s protests took place amidst a wave of strikes throughout France’s critical sectors which began last week after a series of one-day mobilizations against the reform which have been ongoing since January. Thousands took to the streets in cities across France to express their opposition to Macron’s pension cuts.

Macron intends to rely on the violent state security forces to push through his reform, and Thursday’s protests were met with police repression in almost every major French city. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has augmented personal security for deputies in the National Assembly in the coming days.

In Paris, a protest of tens of thousands occupied the Place de la Concorde on Thursday afternoon. As police began to clear the square, makeshift barricades were temporarily erected by protesters. The square was only cleared by multiple violent charges and the use of tear gas by heavily armed riot police. Water cannon was also used against protesters. According to the police on Thursday night, 73 people were arrested at Concorde alone.

After clearing the square, police assault units and gendarmes chased protesters through the center of Paris, assaulting them with gas grenades and batons.

Clashes continued throughout the night in Paris, and multiple fires were lit. Barricades were put in place by protesters along Rue Saint Honoré as protesters marched toward the Élysée Palace, the official residence of the French president. As of midnight, the police announced they had made 217 arrests in Paris.

Scenes of spontaneous protest and police repression were repeated across France’s major cities on Thursday evening, although arrest figures outside of Paris were not published as of this writing.

In Toulouse, the Capitole saw a huge protest, which was also dispersed by riot police using tear gas late on Thursday evening. Thousands also protested in Bordeaux.

In Nantes, police also used tear gas to disperse 3,000 protesters, which led to a similar series of makeshift barricades and fires. On Wednesday, Nantes had also been the scene of major clashes between police and protesters which saw 34 arrests. Elsewhere in Brittany, thousands also gathered in Brest and Rennes and were dispersed with tear gas.

In Lille, spontaneous protests in the Wazemmes district were also tear-gassed by the police. There was also a gathering of thousands at the Place de la République. Thousands gathered in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Le Havre, in Normandy. In Amiens, 1,500 protesters were also dispersed with tear gas.

In the East, there were major protests in Strasbourg, Mullhouse, Dijon and Saint-Étienne. In Lyon, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the city center before being dispersed with tear gas, amid violent clashes with police.

In the South of France there were major protests in Montpellier and thousands gathered in central Marseille. Police assaulted both protests with volleys of tear gas. The alleged looting of boutique stores in Marseille has already being seized upon by the bourgeois press to claim that the protests do not reflect popular revulsion toward the reform and the Macron government.

100,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in war with Russia

Andre Damon

More than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in the war with Russia Politico reported Wednesday, according to statements by US officials.

Based on the precedent of other 21st-century wars, this would mean that total Ukrainian causalities (killed and injured) since the start of the war last year is half a million or more.

This figure is four times greater than earlier statements, such as the declaration in November by US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, that over 100,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed or injured.

A Ukrainian serviceman sits on a boat during an evacuation of injured soldiers participating in the counteroffensive, in a region near the retaken village of Shchurove, Ukraine, Sunday, Sept. 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

The latest figures would mean that Ukrainian soldiers are being killed at a rate comparable with World War I, during which 450,000 Ukrainian soldiers died over the course of four years.

Describing the bloody battle of Bakhmut, Politico wrote: “Moscow and Kyiv are continuing to throw bodies into the fight for a southeastern city the US does not consider strategically important.”

Despite the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers that died in Bakhmut, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters that the city is “more of a symbolic value than it is strategic and operational value.”

In reality, the public cannot know the actual number of dead, because both the Ukrainian and Russian governments are keeping the true number of casualties hidden from their populations.

Regardless of the death toll and a significant deterioration on the ground, the United States is determined to force half-trained Ukrainian conscripts to once more go on the offensive against entrenched Russian lines.

Politico reports that:

U.S. officials are more focused on getting Ukraine ready for a major spring offensive to retake territory, which they expect to begin by May. Hundreds of Western tanks and armored vehicles, including for the first time eight armored vehicles that can launch bridges and allow troops to cross rivers, are en route to Ukraine for the offensive…

U.S. aid packages “going back four or five months have been geared toward what Ukraine needs for this counteroffensive,” said one U.S. official.

While funding, arming and directing Ukrainian forces, Politico writes that “U.S. officials are careful not to appear to tell Kyiv how to fight the war.”

If they are keen “not to appear” to be directing the bloodletting, it is because they are. While repeatedly asserting that the goals and outcome of the war are to be determined by “the Ukrainians,” the United States has completely taken over the country’s political structures, which have banned all anti-war parties.

Despite the massive amounts of weaponry the US and NATO are surging into the country, Ukrainian forces continue to lose ground. The Ukrainian military is throwing vast numbers of raw recruits into battle in Bakhmut, where media reports have said the average lifespan on the front is as short as four hours.

On Monday, the Washington Post published an interview with a Ukrainian commander who described how his entire command of 500 men had been wiped out, and that he was the only one left.

He said that even if the coming offensive turns into “a massacre and corpses ... there will be a counteroffensive either way.

“There are only a few soldiers with combat experience,” the commander told the Post. “Unfortunately, they are all already dead or wounded.”

The commander, in the words of the Post, “described going to battle with newly drafted soldiers who had never thrown a grenade, who readily abandoned their positions under fire and who lacked confidence in handling firearms.”

Predictably, the commander, who goes by the callsign Kupol, was relieved of command, for “disseminating inaccurate information.”

A spokesperson for the Ukrainian defense ministry declared, “100% of the servicemen of the airborne assault troops, called up for mobilization, underwent basic and professional training before being appointed to positions in military units.”

He continued, “Proper training of Ukrainian paratroopers and their motivation were repeatedly noted by foreign instructors”—presumably from the United States.

But even as the extent of the bloodbath is becoming clear, the US and NATO are escalating their preparations for ever more direct involvement.

On Thursday, Polish President Andrzej Duda announced that the country would be sending Mig fighter jets to Ukraine “literally in the next few days.”

The Migs, which are reported to be upgraded to use NATO-standard weaponry, are a critical stepping-stone to a looming decision by the United States to send modern NATO-standard fighter jets such as the F-16.

The announcement by Poland crosses yet another threshold of what the United States and its allies pledged they would not do in Ukraine.

In March 2022, the Pentagon declared that “we assess the transfer of the MIG-29s to Ukraine to be high risk” and could “increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO.”

The announcement follows the publication of a letter Tuesday by a group of senators calling for sending F-16 fighters to Ukraine. Declaring that “we are now at a critical juncture in the conflict,” the senators called on the Pentagon to “take a hard look at providing F-16 aircraft to Ukraine.”

Ultimately, the achievement of the United States’ sweeping war aims will not be possible without the deployment of NATO ground troops directly into the conflict.

The downing of a US reaper drone by a Russian fighter aircraft earlier this week is a testament to the extent to which, amid horrifying casualties on both sides, the conflict is emerging ever more openly into a direct clash between NATO and Russia.

Zelensky government steps up persecution of Russian-affiliated Orthodox Church amid mounting military losses

Jason Melanovski

Amidst a deepening military and political crisis in the country, the right-wing government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky moved last week to oust Orthodox monks attached to the Russian-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) from their base at the 980-year-old Pechersk Lavra monastery complex in Kiev.

The UOC has had a long-standing affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church but declared its independence from Moscow in May 2022, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church still includes UOC-affiliated clergy in its work, however.

Regarding the escalating prosecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Zelensky appealed to both Ukrainian nationalism and religious separatism in justifying the move, claiming that “One more step towards strengthening our spiritual independence was taken this week.”

The move is a clear signal to ramp up religious and ethnic conflicts in the war-torn country. In an indication that this is just the beginning of a broader campaign, Zelensky stated, “We will continue this movement. We will not allow the terrorist state any opportunity to manipulate the spiritual life of our people, to destroy Ukrainian shrines—our Lavras—or to steal any valuables from them.”

In 1991, only 39 percent of Ukrainians identified as Orthodox Christian. In the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and amid the widespread deindustrialization and poverty that followed, religious sentiments and obscurantism grew as did various rival sects of the Orthodox Church—all with their own separate geopolitical orientations. By 2015, a Pew Research Center study found that approximately 78 percent of Ukraine’s adult population identified as Orthodox Christian.

Following the 2014 Western-backed coup of elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the right-wing nationalist government of Petro Poroshenko intervened strongly in the creation and promotion of a single Kiev-aligned Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in opposition to the Moscow-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Both antecedent separate Orthodox churches of the OCU had supported the 2014 Maidan coup and would become a central part of the NATO-aligned Poroshenko  government’s push to promote nationalism, militarism and anti-Russian sentiments.

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine was formed in 2018, out of the two smaller rival but pro-Maidan Orthodox churches, both lay claim to representing all of Ukraine. In 2019, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was granted independence or “autocephaly” from the Moscow-based Patriarch. The move by the Patriarch of Constantinople to formalize a split with the Russian church to which it had been tied since 1686 was strongly opposed by the Moscow Patriarchate led by Putin-ally Patriarch Kirill, who broke off relations with Constantinople in response.

Since the 2019 split from Moscow, the rivalry between the two separate churches over property, parishioners and religious sites continued. In this conflict, the Kiev-aligned OCU was granted the full backing of the right-wing Ukrainian government, of which it has become an integral part.

The February 2022 invasion of Russia marked a new stage in the religious war between the two churches with Kiev moving quickly to denounce the UOC as “collaborators”.

Later in October of last year, the Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), which maintains close ties to the Ukrainian far-right, began to regularly carry out raids in search of “anti-Ukrainian” materials at UOC churches, impose sanctions on its bishops and supporters, and open criminal cases against dozens of its clergymen.

The Pechersk Lavra monastery located in Kiev is viewed as one of the most important historical and religious sites within Ukraine and all of Eastern Europe. Until recently, the site was administered jointly by the National Kyiv-Pechersk Historic-Cultural Preserve and the Moscow-aligned UOC.

In January of this year, the Ukrainian government terminated the UOC’s lease of the site and intervened to allow the government-backed OCU to celebrate a Christmas service at the site’s Dormition Cathedral.

The announcement Friday gave the remaining UOC monks until March 29 to fully vacate the premises. Initial media reports following the eviction notice suggest that the UOC monks are refusing to leave and will likely be forcibly removed and arrested by the SBU after the deadline passes.

The Orthodox Church in both Russia and Ukraine has for centuries promoted obscurantism, nationalism and anti-Semitism with its own clergy members guilty of participating in some of the worst pogroms of the previous centuries.

However, there is clearly nothing progressive in Zelensky’s crackdown on one religious organization while supporting its equally backward rival. It speaks to the reactionary character of the Zelensky regime that it has embraced Ukraine’s “spiritual independence” in order to promote Ukrainian nationalism, anti-Russian chauvinism and ethnic conflict.

It is no accident that the Ukrainian government announced the eviction just as it made public plans to continue pouring troops into the “meat grinder” of Bakhmut, where Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died in the thousands and Ukraine appears to be losing.

On Tuesday, in his evening video address, Zelensky said that Ukraine's top military command unanimously favors defending the sector of eastern Ukraine including Bakhmut to “destroy the occupiers to the maximum.”

In a further indication of an intense political and military crisis, on the same day, Zelensky removed the governors of Luhansk, Odesa, and Khmelnytskyi provinces with no reason given for their sudden dismissals.

Regarding the ongoing mass death at Bakhmut, a Ukrainian soldier recently stated plainly to the Kyiv Independent that, “When they drive us to Bakhmut, I already know I'm being sent to death.”

Welsh Government Wales & Africa Grant Scheme 2023

Application Deadline: 24th March 2023

Eligibility: Grant aims for the immediate covid-19 response round of the Wales Africa grant scheme:

• Assist African partners in combatting the immediate effects of covid-19
• Encourage stringent health & safety practices
• Make contributions to the following themes of the Wales Africa grants scheme:

• Health
• Sustainable livelihoods
• Lifelong learning
• Climate Change

It must be emphasised that this is a grant funding round in response to a global crisis, requests for funding will need to strongly demonstrate the impact they will make for their African Partner in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For further information about grant aims, eligibility, and timeframes please read the full guidance document.

Type: Grants

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Grant are available from £3,000 up to £15,000. If you have a request which falls outside of this grant range, please speak to a team member before completing your request for funding. You can contact WCVA at walesafricagrants@wcva.cymru.

How to Apply: The process for funding requests is live on the WCVA website. All requests to be made on the downloadable application form and returned to walesafricagrants@wcva.cymru

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details