Russia at War

Matthew Stevenson

Image

The River Volga passing through what was once Stalingrad, now Volgograd. Photo: Matthew Stevenson.

“How many divisions does the Pope have?”

—Joseph Stalin

Despite the impressive TikTok feeds showing the Russian phalanx heading in formations across the Ukrainian frontier and the missile extravaganza across the country, the success of the Russian army as an instrument of foreign policy is little better than average (perhaps not unlike the American army, which itself hasn’t won a war in seventy-seven years).

For all that the Russian President Vladimir Putin is staking his faith (if not his political survival) on the efficacy of his military’s combined arms to carry out his Soviet risorgimento, a recounting of Russia’s battles and wars in the last two hundred years would suggest that many of its campaigns have ended in ways not projected when earlier tsars and commissars unleashed the dogs of war.

The 1904 Russo-Japanese War

Take, for example, the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War that was intended to establish Russia as a Far Eastern power—with its Trans-Siberian railway reaching its terminus in the warm waters of Port Arthur on the far end of the Liaotung Peninsula.

That imperial foray, launched by Tsar Nicholas II, ended with the Japanese in Port Arthur, the Russian fleet at the bottom of the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan, and Russian revolutionaries surrounding the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg—not exactly what the war gamers had mapped out.

My point isn’t that all Russian military interventions end in disaster. For every defeat on 203 Metre Hill (outside Port Arthur) there have been inspiring victories, such as those at Shipka Pass (in Bulgaria in 1877) or Stalingrad (1942-43).

But there have been enough Russian military blunders in the last 200 years that Putin might consider hedging his cruise-missile bets with a few economic stimulus packages or some rewired Sputnik satellites beaming out 5G internet connections as a way to win hearts and minds in occupied lands.

The Dark Knight

Part of the problem with the Russian army is that very often—as in Ukraine—it is sent into harm’s way as a representative of the forces of reaction.

In recent times, especially with all the talk of domino theories in Southeast Asia and the long reach of the Comintern (the Communist International), you might have the impression that Russia remains a Marxist revolutionary force, the heir of Lenin’s operatives, on the march to sweep capitalism into the dustbin of history.

Those revolutionary passions existed, however, a brief moment in time, and didn’t last long after Joseph Stalin paid his final respects to Lenin’s deathbed (with or without a few vials of poison).

Making the World Safe for Autocracy

For the most part, before and after the 1917 revolution, Russia has gone abroad —especially in Europe—to make the world safe for autocracy.

During the revolution of 1848, for example, Tsar Nicholas I did the bidding of the young Emperor Franz-Joseph in crushing the Hungarian revolt against Hapsburg rule.

The same impulses of reaction guided Tsar Alexander I in 1814, when he followed up Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign and occupied Paris with Russian lancers so that Europe’s ruling families could return to their dance floors in Vienna and Berlin.

In many ways these European interventions were the templates for 1956 and 1968, when Russia (by the instrument of the Warsaw Pact) crushed the hopes of young Hungarians and Czechs then rallying in the streets. Putin’s attack on Kiev can thus be understood as the last great jamboree of the Warsaw Pact.

Remember Stalingrad

Geopolitically, the reason that Putin has invaded Donbas isn’t so much to rescue oppressed Russians living under a Ukrainian yoke but to enlarge what in the 19th century would have been called its cordon sanitaire (a buffer zone) between eastern Ukraine (and possibly NATO one day) and the Volga River—although that doesn’t explain the invasions from Belarus or the amphibious assaults along the Black Sea.

The river—of Mississippi proportions—connects the region north of Moscow to the Caspian Sea and is Russia’s lifeline where in 1942 it made its heroic stand at Stalingrad (Volgograd today), is only 200 miles to the east of the current border with Ukraine.

A succession of American presidents have failed to look at a map of Russia and see that NATO forces (however noble their charter or snappy their uniforms) in Donetsk or Luhansk would represent an existential threat to Russia, which if it were to lose control of the Volga could well splinter into the warlord duchies that Genghis Khan took such delight in overrunning during the 12th and 13th centuries.

Then there is this passage in Konstantine Simonov’s 1945 Stalingrad novel, Days and Nights, which reads:

The eternal bad luck…was that all the western banks of Russian rivers were steep, all the eastern banks sloping, and all the Russian cities stood without exception on the western banks: Kiev, Smolensk, Dnepropetrovsk, Moghilev, Rostov…. All of them were hard to defend because they were close to the rivers; and all of them would be hard to take back, because they would lie beyond their rivers.

What saved Stalingrad were its warehouses, which became fortifications; and Kiev itself has many similar warehouses.

Russia’s Open Western Borders

Ironically, for all that Russia drones on about threats to its nation, throughout history Russian leaders have been notoriously lax about defending its borders—or even defining them.

I own a collection of historical atlases, and some evenings in front of the fireplace I flip through them to make sense of where Russia’s true western border might lie.

On some atlas pages Russia’s western border is hard against Prussia and Austro-Hungary, with Poland wiped from the map. In other eras, Russia’s western border wanders from Riga down to Odessa, making detours around the Pripet Marshes and blurring the lines as they approach Crimea (which historically was more Tatar, aka Ottoman; only later did it become Russian).

Not only has Russia’s western border usually floated on air, but any number of tsars and commissars (Putin is just the latest of these autocrats) have failed to define who belongs to what in these borderlands—and then they to go to war when they feel cheated.

Wars of the Ottoman Succession

In the 19th century most Russian wars (leaving aside those that pushed the country east into Central Asia and Siberia) were fought with the Ottoman Empire for control of the Black Sea and access to the Straits.

Russia’s threats to Turkey in 1854 and 1877 led first to the Crimean War (although for that I would blame the Allies) and then to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 (to crush the Ottoman Empire), both of which ended with a coalition of western European nations lined up against Russia (much like today).

In 1877 Russia won the war against Turkey but lost the peace, as the 1878 Treaty of Berlin stripped Macedonia from Bulgaria (Russia’s proxy) and denied Constantinople to the tsar.

At the outbreak of World War I, Russia invaded Prussia and Galicia, just as in 1939 Stalin made a deal with Hitler to partition Poland and push his Soviet borders far to the west.

In this sense Putin—like Stalin before him—wants it both ways in Ukraine: he wants to project the image of Russia as vulnerable to western encroachment, while at the same time he’s not above the tsarist strategy of fabricating a crisis to occupy Bessarabia, Bukovina, eastern Poland, or the Baltic States.

“The blunders are all there on the board, waiting to be made.”

Although Russia is a chess culture (in Ukraine, Putin is portrayed as thinking brilliantly several moves ahead of the plodding, checker-playing Joe Biden), very often through its modern history Russia’s leaders have failed to understand the players opposite them on the board.

At Tilsit in 1807 (well, on a raft positioned in the middle of the River Niemen, which was on the frontier between central Europe and Russia), the Russian Tsar Alexander I thought he could appease Napoleon I by letting him have his way with Prussia and Austria. He could not, and less than five years later Napoleon was on the march to Borodino and Moscow, where he won the battles and lost the war.

In the run-up to the Crimean War (1853-56), Russia had ambitions to protect Christian communities in the Levant, take Constantinople, and liquidate the Ottoman Empire, but all it got was siege warfare and defeat in the Crimean hills between Balaklava and Sevastopol.

In the years before 1914, Russia failed to think through the consequences of its Balkan policies that hoped to secure a foothold in Macedonia between the receding empires of Austria and the Ottomans.

When to its surprise the Austrians invaded Serbia in August 1914, Russia launched its armies into Masuria, a marshy district in northeast Poland, where they were wiped out at the 1914 battle of Tannenberg (certainly a defeat that never needed to happen).

Stalin’s Miscalculations

Likewise, at the start of World War II, Joseph Stalin badly miscalculated Hitler’s intentions when the two of them agreed in August 1939 to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, pledging peace between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union so that both powers could carve up Poland and parts of what are now Ukraine.

Less than two years later, Hitler turned his armies against Stalin, who had used the interval to liquidate much of his senior officer corps and that of the captured Polish army.

In Ukraine today, keep in mind that the coterie of war planners around Putin are his KGB henchmen, and they will see the Russian army as a bunch of plodders, incapable of lightning black ops to solve a thorny political problem.

Note that Putin has tasked the FSB (the Federal Security Service and successor to the KGB) to liberate Kiev—an organizational rebuke to the Russian army.

You can be sure that Putin’s real enemy isn’t Ukraine’s President Zelensky but his Moscow army chiefs of staff, who will not want to fall on their embroidered swords to exonerate the planning errors of V.V. Putin. whom they will view as a political commissar attached to one of their rearguard units.

Leon Trotsky’s Excellent Adventure at Brest-Litovsk

Despite its pool-table geography of broad plains and an open steppe, Ukraine is a better place to lose a war than to win one.

In the 19th century, what we now call Ukraine was divided between Russia and Austria, although the novelist Joseph Conrad, who was born in Berdichev (two hours outside Kiev) considered himself Polish.

Ukraine in the 19th century was the location of Russia’s Pale of Settlement, which is where the Jews of the empire were consigned to live, mostly in ghettos.

At the start of World War I, as Russia attacked Germany and was defeated, Austria attacked Russia in eastern Galicia (in what is now western Ukraine) but got nowhere, at the cost more than a million casualties. Germany reinforced the wobbly Austrian army, and in 1917 Russia (under Lenin’s Bolshevik government) sued for peace.

In the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (Leon Trotsky was the chief Russian negotiator, and to drag out the settlement he turned the peace negotiations into a months-long debating society on such questions as the rights of man), Ukraine was given to the Germans, who held it for six months until the Western Front collapsed and the Russians moved in.

In 1918, briefly, the city that is now Lviv became the capital of the Western Ukraine’s People’s Republic. Before the war, Lviv was the Austrian city of Lemberg, and after that, depending on the invading army at the time, it was Polish, German, Soviet, and Ukrainian—and may now become Russian.

That quintessential Brooklynite, Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman), probably had some East European roots. No wonder he said, as if with Ukraine in mind: “I still feel—kind of temporary about myself.”

Winning Hearts and Minds with the Great Hunger

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921 retook western Ukraine and gave it to Poland. I recently bought a political map of Europe in 1930 (to understand the times in which I am living), and it shows the western border of Russia (there is no Ukraine), running down from Leningrad to the Romanian border (I am sure Putin has the same map).

In the early 1920s Lenin decided on a union of soviet socialists republics for his federal structure, in large part because he realized that Ukraine, with its distinct language, religions and ethnicities, would not merge harmoniously into Russia.

Unable to pacify Ukraine in the 1930s, Stalin delivered first the Great Hunger and then the Great Terror to its rural population, which explains why some Ukrainians celebrated the German invasion in June 1941. (Putin still nurses this grudge.)

Those welcome cheers were short-lived, as Hitler’s conquering legions rounded up Jews for extermination and other Ukrainians for work camps.

It took months for combined German and Romanian armies to capture Crimea, which they held, brutally, until 1944, when Ukraine’s territory was liberated.

Here’s an irony of history: at the 1945 Yalta Conference (in Crimea, of all places) Russia argued that Ukraine was an independent country and worthy of its own vote at the United Nations, while the United States and Britain argued that it was a region within Russia. I guess history isn’t what it used it be.

Ukraine Since 1991

With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic voted for its independence, something Russia guaranteed in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear weapons on its territory.

In 1992, in part to threaten both independent Moldova and Ukraine, Russia took possession of Transnistria (officially, it’s the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic and nothing more than a spur of land along the Dniester River—but still a wedge in the side of Ukraine), which along with the breakaway republics of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Artsakh (aka Nagorno-Karabakh) will be among the first, I am sure, to recognize the sovereignty of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, if not a puppet regime in Kiev.

In 2014 Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed the predominantly ethnically Russian territory, and I am sure Putin’s great regret is that at the same time he didn’t make a play for all of Ukraine, which would have been his for the asking.

Now Ukraine has had eight years to build up its military assets, leaving aside those that the Kremlin agitation propagandist (‘This is genius…’) Donald Trump refused to ship to President Zelensky until the Ukrainian head of state delivered some dirt on Hunter and/or Joe Biden. (Is it any wonder Putin came to the conclusion that the United States has a dysfunctional relationship with Ukraine?)

What Putin may be missing in his military assessments (slid under the door to his head-of-state bubble?) is that Ukraine is not your grandfather’s socialist republic but an evolving nation with its own (non-Russian) identity—despite all the inefficiencies and corruption that linger from the 1990s.

Online War Games

Much of the current conflict over Ukraine can be seen as an online war game, with Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden seated in front of their big screens, furiously deploying their formations.

Putin moves around his cruise missiles and armored brigades, while Biden positions his economic sanctions, as if they were knights moving in on oligarchic kings.

Eventually one side will concede the match, and the other side will move into Kiev (if Russia wins) or Kyiv (if Biden prevails). Then in six months Ukraina 6.0 will be released, and everyone can play again.

War Isn’t What It Used To Be

Starting wars, in Ukraine and elsewhere, has always been easy, much as they were in Iraq (remember the Bush sound-and-light shows over Baghdad?) and Vietnam (where the Marines landing at Red Beach in Danang were serenaded with garlands).

Getting what the invader set out to achieve is a harder proposition. For example, how did Pearl Harbor work out for the Japanese? What war in the last hundred years has gone according to plan?

In Ukraine, Russia would prefer to decapitate the Kyiv government and manage the country as a wholly-owned subsidiary with its own board of directors and security personnel to meet the incentive and sales goals. But as the Americans discovered in Afghanistan, an invasion force of 180,000, even with cruise missiles and cyber warriors, can take a capital but not hold it.

For the moment, the Pentagon’s great white hope is that the Ukrainians will fight a guerrilla war against the Russian invaders (here the template would be Chechnya), which explains why much of the military aid sent to Ukraine of late has been rifles, not Patriot missiles.

The United States invested some twenty years in the pacification of Iraq and in the end has nothing to show for it. The same is true in Afghanistan where, before the United States had its rendezvous with destiny, the Soviet Union had a go against the likes of the Taliban and came up empty. You would think that by now someone would have learned something about the invasion business.

Johnson government announces “ferocious” UK sanctions against Russia, steps up war preparations

Robert Stevens

Britain’s Conservative government and opposition parties were unanimous in their bloodthirsty response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday chaired an early morning meeting of the government’s emergency COBRA committee to “coordinate the UK response”, including agreeing a “significant package of sanctions to be introduced immediately”.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the current situation on the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 10 Downing Street. 24/02/2022. (Picture by Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr)

In a televised address that morning Johnson said he had spoken to Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy “to offer the continued support of the UK.” He pledged “a massive package of economic sanctions designed in time to hobble the Russian economy… Our mission is clear; diplomatically politically, economically, and eventually, military, this hideous and barbaric venture of Vladimir Putin must end in failure.”

Ahead of Johnson’s speech in parliament, 10 Downing Street and all Whitehall departments flew the Ukrainian flag and were lit up in its yellow and blue.

In his 5pm speech, Johnson described Putin in terms used for those leaders killed in previous imperialist interventions: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Putin was a “bloodstained aggressor who believes in imperial conquest”, who was “always determined to attack his neighbour, no matter what we did.”

The prime minister announced a 10-point sanctions package, saying, “All major Russian banks will be excluded from the UK financial system and a full asset freeze is being imposed on VBT, Russia’s second-largest bank.”

Legislation will be passed next Tuesday prohibiting all Russian companies from raising finance on UK markets and the Russian state raising sovereign debt. New sanctions were levelled against more than 100 Russian individuals, entities and their subsidiaries, including Rostech, Russia’s largest defence company. Limits will be placed on the amount Russians can hold in British bank accounts, with asset freezes extended to around 100 more people. The Russian airline Aeroflot was banned with immediate effect from flying into the UK. The sanctions include the “Intention to shut off Russia’s access to the SWIFT [global financial transactions] payment system”.

Nothing is off the table in the UK’s militarist agenda. Earlier Thursday, Tory backbencher and former party leadership candidate David Davis tweeted, “It is far too late to get boots on the ground but it is not too late to provide air support to the Ukrainian army which may neutralise Putin’s overwhelming armoured superiority.”

In Parliament two sets of MPs, Conservative and Labour, occupied either side of the chamber but stood as one party of war committed to militarism and imperialist conquest.

Throughout the Ukraine crisis, Labour has declared itself the “party of Nato” and the most fervent opponent of Moscow. In January, the Labourlist blog published a joint article, “International unity against Russian aggression is crucial and must continue”, by Blairites David Lammy and John Healey, following their visit to Ukraine earlier that month.

On Tuesday, party leader Sir Keir Starmer insisted that Johnson, who had already shipped 2,000 anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian government, send more weaponry. Yesterday he doubled down, saying the UK needed a “clean break” to the “failed approach” to handling Putin. “That means doing all we can to help Ukraine defend herself by providing weapons, equipment and financial assistance as well as humanitarian support for Ukrainian people.”

Johnson—whose government has been staggered for months by the “partygate” crisis, with his own premiership threatened—jumped to his feet in praise of Starmer declaring, “I want to say how grateful I am to the right honourable gentleman for the terms in which he has just spoken and the robust support he is offering to the government and to the western alliance at a very difficult time.”

In his televised address, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said that the UK population will suffer "economic pain" as a result of confrontation with Russia (source: screenshot-KeirStarmer/Twitter)

Earlier Starmer gave a televised national address, flanked by two Union Jack flags as he insisted that the working class will be forced to pay the price for confronting Russia economically and militarily. “We must prepare ourselves for difficulties here—we will see economic pain as we free Europe from dependence on Russian gas and clean our institutions from money stolen from the Russian people. But the British public have always been willing to make sacrifice to defend democracy on our continent and we will again.”

Labour MP Chris Bryant, a longstanding anti-Russian warmonger, tweeted that people with dual Russian and British nationality should be forced to choose one. In parliament, another Blairite, Liam Byrne demanded that “every visa issued to a Russian dual national is now reviewed and where proximity to President Putin is proven that citizenship should be stripped away.” Even the arch reactionary Johnson, after declaring “we are doing that”, had to state, “not every Russian is a bad person”.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who identifies as a Labour “left”, said, “I do hope that we will be offering all the support that we can to those people who are likely to be shunned by the fascist imperialist Putin regime.”

No opposition to war will be tolerated. Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, asked Johnson to “look here, close to home at those who enable, who propagate the propaganda that is being used by Putin to undermine his own people and free people everywhere, and to update the Treason Act so that we can identify them and call them what they are: traitors.”

Labour is equally fervent in cracking down on opposition, no matter how timid. Yesterday it demanded that 11 of its MPs, members of the rump Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), immediately withdraw their names from a statement published February 16 by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC). The 11 committed the sin of backing the statement’s tame call that “Britain should be advancing diplomatic proposals to defuse tension and seek a solution to the crisis over Ukraine rather than ratcheting it up.”

Less than an hour after their support for the STWC statement was criticised, all 11 caved in. These included John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor of party leader and fellow SCG member Jeremy Corbyn, his former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, and the SCG’s chair Richard Burgon. The only MPs now listed on the STWC statement are two who sit as Independents—Corbyn, who was booted out of the Parliamentary Labour Party over a year ago by Starmer, and Claudia Webbe, another former Labour MP.

Clive Lewis, one of the majority of SCG members who refused to sign the STWC statement, declared in parliament his support for Johnson’s anti-Russian measures, including “providing more defensive capabilities” to Ukraine. Lewis, a Royal Military Academy Sandhurst trained soldier who served in Afghanistan, politely asked of Johnson, “if you agree that we must have an end to this by a negotiated settlement and not by military means.”

Johnson dismissed Lewis, replying, “that opportunity has now gone. I’m afraid he’s [Putin] missed it. He’s chosen the path of overwhelming violence and destruction and I’m afraid that puts us on a very, very different course and we have to accept that reality.”

The reality means an even more rapid escalation of militarism and imperialist violence. Even before Johnson appeared in parliament, Downing Street announced that the UK is stepping up its “air policing contribution to Nato from RAF Akrotiri [on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus] and the UK”. A government spokesman said, “Two typhoons and a voyager for refueling from the UK will support continuous Nato air policing over Poland’s border with Ukraine ... two typhoons and a voyager for refueling from Akrotiri [will] also support continuous Nato air policing over Romania's border with Ukraine.”

COVID pandemic continues mass killing, notably focused on US and Russia

Benjamin Mateus 

While temporarily overshadowed by the crisis in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to take a deadly toll in country after country, with the two nuclear-armed countries on the brink of war, the United States and Russia, placing first and third in daily coronavirus deaths.

Registered nurse Morgan Flynn prepares to enter a patient’s room in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in Lebanon, N.H., Monday, Jan. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Like a century ago, when World War I and the influenza pandemic overlapped, working people around the world are once again facing the intersection of war and pandemic.

World War I was the impetus for the emergence of the 1918 influenza virus that killed an estimated 50 million people and infected around 500 million or one-third of the population of the world at that time. By comparison, the war led to the loss of 20 million lives, military and civilian, less than half the death toll of the pandemic.

A hundred years later, all the social and political contradictions that ignited that colossal war remain unresolved. In that regard, the COVID pandemic, which has infected 430 million people and killed 20 million in the last two years, has served as a trigger event for the chain reaction of events now focused on Ukraine.

Even as that conflict escalates, the pandemic continues to infect and kill despite all efforts by major capitalist countries to dispense with tracking the figures, or even feigning concern.

The current tally places the number of people with COVID-19 worldwide at more than 431 million and the number of reported COVID deaths at 5.94 million. The week beginning February 14, 2022, despite the decline in new cases, another 12.8 million infections were added to the list, and another 66,571 people needlessly died.

The 7-day average of 1.7 million new COVID cases globally remains at pandemic highs, with the rate of decline already demonstrating a slowing. The 7-day average of daily deaths is just below 10,000 per day. Yesterday, 10,731 people died worldwide, led by the US with 2,440, then Brazil with 956 deaths, followed by Russia with 785. Notably, both the US and Russia hold the dubious distinction of having more than 1 million excess deaths during the pandemic.

In Asia, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia are facing the peak of the current surge of infections. South Korea, in particular, which had kept the virus in check for two years, is now facing a massive wave of infections, with a record 171,452 new COVID cases on Tuesday. Around mid-January, cases were only at 3,000 per day. More than 1,500 people have died during the present wave, and approximately 5,400 of the 7,689 total deaths occurred in the last six months.

In Japan, the epidemiologic curve of new cases has finally turned downwards. Recent COVID cases remain, on average, high at around 80,000 a day. The 7-day average in deaths continues to climb, surpassing 200 per day, doubling the highs set in February and June 2021. However, like his counterparts in the west, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said yesterday that the government is considering “easing border restrictions as the country prepares to exit the sixth wave” of the pandemic.

Iceland, an island nation with 366,425 people, which had until recently demonstrated exemplary control over COVID infections, will be lifting all COVID restrictions today. The decision was confirmed through a statement published by Iceland’s Minister of Health, Willum Þór Þórsson. It reads, “Thereby, all rules regarding limitations on social gatherings and school operations as well as the quarantine requirements for those infected by COVID-19 are removed. Additionally, no disease prevention measures will be in place at the border, regardless of whether individuals are vaccinated or unvaccinated.”

As a caveat, he wrote, “We can truly rejoice at this turning-point, but nonetheless, I encourage people to be careful, practice personal infection prevention measures, and not interact with others if they notice symptoms.”

Since Christmas Eve of 2021, COVID cases jumped from under 23,000 to 115,000. The 7-day average in cases is at 2,600 per day, or approximately 0.7 percent of the population, per day. At the present rate, the entire population of Iceland will be infected in three months. Though the cumulative death toll is only 61, 24 people died during the current surge. The Ministry of Health’s proclamation only puts into words what has been in effect for the last two months.

This only underscores the critical fact that governments worldwide are rapidly changing their approach to the virus, considering it more like an endemic disease whatever the consequences. From the perspective of public health, it raises an important point: without a coordinated international strategy based on science, all future pandemic preparedness faces a similar calamity—the diktats of the markets will decide each time.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization convened this week to negotiate new rules for dealing with pandemics, “with a target date of May 2024 for a treaty to be adopted by the UN health agency’s 194 member countries,” according to Reuters. At the center of these developments are efforts on Washington’s part to financialize the health agency by setting up a global pandemic prevention fund that the World Bank would host.

With all eyes on the dangers posed by the evolving war front, cases of new COVID infections caused by the BA.2 sub-variant continue to climb slowly across the world. In the US, such cases are doubling each week, which are now above 4 percent. Globally, one in five cases is from BA.2. In 10 countries, the sub-variant is dominant, and more than 74 countries have reported its presence within their borders.

Given the sub-variant’s higher infectivity, possibly higher virulence, and disparate genetic characteristics, there have been calls to give it a new Greek letter name to distinguish it from Omicron. However, the WHO technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution, which concurs that it is a variant of concern, recommends it remain classified as Omicron and “be monitored as a distinct sub-lineage of Omicron by public health authorities.”

Despite the Japanese trial that showed BA.2 more virulent, recent small clinical studies from South Africa and Denmark suggest that the two sub-variants are equivalent to their virulence. Hospitalization numbers appear to be similar, and reinfections with BA.2 after Omicron infection have been confirmed, though uncommon.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told CNN, “The situation that we’re seeing on the ground, and I get this from talking to a number of my colleagues who actually do the genomic surveillance, is BA.2 is kind of creeping up in terms of numbers, but it’s not the meteoric rise that we saw with BA.1.”

She further explained, “It’s so soon after the initial BA.1 peak that you have a lot of people who were either vaccinated or boosted … [or] got Omicron, and so right now all of those people will have relatively high titers of antibodies, neutralizing antibodies that will protect against infection.”

Despite the plateaued case rates in South Africa, the current average COVID death rate there is over 200 per day and continues to climb. In Denmark, cases have finally turned, but the death rate continues to rise 10-fold from mid-November when Omicron debuted. In the US, on average, more than 2,000 daily COVID deaths were reported from January 12, 2022, to February 20, 2022. Only during last winter’s peak did the US see more days with such high death tolls.

New Zealand government aligns with US against Russia

John Braddock

New Zealand’s Labour-Party led government has aligned itself with the United States and NATO, as they move relentlessly closer to a devastating war with Russia.

Yesterday, Russian forces carried out a military intervention into Ukraine, including missile strikes and attacks on the country’s air force. Dozens of military and civilian deaths have been reported. The incursion was launched after President Vladimir Putin declared two breakaway Ukrainian states, Donetsk and Luhansk, independent and ordered troops to cross into the territories.

For months, the US and its allies relentlessly sought to escalate tensions and provoke a Russian attack. Since the US-backed coup in 2014, which toppled a Russia-aligned government in Ukraine, the western imperialist powers have provided billions of dollars in weapons and training to Ukraine’s military and fascist paramilitary forces. The US has deployed thousands of troops into Eastern Europe, and President Biden has just announced that 7,000 reinforcements are being sent to Germany.

New Zealand foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta (Screenshot: Youtube, NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade)

Jacinda Ardern’s government in New Zealand is supporting the US build-up. On Tuesday, New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta, currently visiting Europe, denounced the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as a violation of international law designed to “create a pretext for invasion.” On Wednesday, she said the Russian ambassador in Wellington was “called in” to hear New Zealand’s “strong opposition to the actions taken by Russia in recent days, and condemn what looks to be the beginning of a Russian invasion into Ukraine territory.”

Last night, Ardern and Mahuta released a statement denouncing what they called an “unprovoked and unnecessary attack by Russia.” They announced a travel ban on Russian government officials and the prohibition of exports to Russia’s military and security forces. Bilateral foreign ministry engagement has also been suspended.

This morning, acting Foreign Minister David Parker told Radio NZ that these measures would have a “limited” impact on Russia. New Zealand exports $293 million worth of goods to Russia, mostly dairy products.

By law, New Zealand cannot impose economic sanctions outside the United Nations. The main opposition National Party’s foreign affairs spokesman Gerry Brownlee said travel bans were “nonsense” and the law had to change so that NZ could take more “aggressive action.”

Before her departure, Mahuta had already indicated that “Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine,” would be the subject of her discussions in Europe. Her 11-day trip is primarily focused on a European Union ministerial forum dealing with “co-operation” in the Indo-Pacific. This is code for the escalating US-led confrontation in the Indo-Pacific with China, which has been joined by NATO powers including the UK, France and Germany.

Mahuta will travel to London to meet UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who has spearheaded the Tory government’s warmongering against Moscow. Mahuta’s final stop will be Geneva where she will give a speech to the UN Human Rights Council, the first from a New Zealand foreign minister since the council was established in 2006.

As the WSWS explained, the US-led war preparations against Russia have been long in the making. The aim of Washington and its imperialist allies is to dismember Russia, as a necessary step in preparation for war against China, and to establish neo-colonial control over the entire Eurasian landmass.

The entire ruling elite in New Zealand supports the Labour Party-Greens coalition government’s alignment with the intensifying war drive. At a parliamentary select committee hearing last week, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) secretary Chris Seed told MPs that Russia posed “one of the most significant security challenges and risks to international peace and security, since the end of the Cold War.” He added that war in Europe would be of “no benefit to New Zealand.”

In fact, as a minor imperialist power, New Zealand has participated in wars for over a century, attaching itself to Britain and the US, in return for their support for NZ’s colonial dominance over parts of the South Pacific.

A Defence Ministry strategic assessment released in December demanded a more aggressive military stance against China and Russia, which it accused of “undermining the international rules-based system”—i.e. the post-World War II rules established by Washington to enforce its global hegemony. It asserted New Zealand’s “freedom to act” anywhere in the Pacific where Chinese influence could be deemed a threat to its interests.

New Zealand’s ambassador to Warsaw visited Ukraine on January 24 and met with Ukrainian officials, and last week Mahuta spoke with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. According to MFAT, Mahuta acknowledged the “warm relationship” between the two countries, “underpinned by our shared values, including our commitment to multilateralism, human rights, and the rules-based international order.” In fact, the government in Kiev stems from a US-engineered coup in 2014, and is infested with fascists.

Ukraine’s Ambassador to New Zealand, Kateryna Zelenko, told Stuff that New Zealand’s condemnation of “Russia’s aggression” was “useful” in showing that Ukraine had support in every corner of the world.

Mahuta also received a telephone call from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his recent trip to Fiji. According to the US State Department, the pair discussed both the “collective challenges of the Indo-Pacific” and “their shared commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

A view is emerging in New Zealand’s foreign policy establishment that the country faces a diplomatic and military escalation on “two fronts”—in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Commenting on Blinken’s Pacific trip, Geoffrey Miller from Victoria University of Wellington wrote that “from the US perspective, Ukraine, Russia and China are increasingly being interpreted as part of the same geopolitical jigsaw puzzle.” While Miller claimed that the “two-front” theory “oversimplifies matters,” he conceded that it points to “a potential World War Three.”

The Paris meeting of the Ministerial Forum for Co-operation in the Indo-Pacific, which Mahuta is attending, is being co-hosted by the European Union and France. Nina Obermaier, the EU’s ambassador to New Zealand, told Newsroom the forum will deepen the EU’s relationship with “like-minded” countries in the Indo-Pacific.

The EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy, released last September, sets out plans for increased European positioning on the opposite side of the globe. The document notes the significant military build-up, “including by China,” with the region’s share of global military spending increasing from 20 percent in 2009 to 28 percent in 2019.

Amid deepening tensions, UK and EU navies, including from France and Germany, have repeatedly conducted provocative military exercises in the South China Sea and near Taiwan. Last October, the New Zealand naval frigate Te Kaha and an Air Force Orion joined the Bersama Gold 21 war games, alongside the UK Carrier Strike Group and allied forces in the South China Sea.

A sustained barrage is underway from the New Zealand government, media and academics against both China and Russia, while the population is kept in the dark about the devastating consequences of war. Not one critical question has been asked by the corporate media about the facts and historical background surrounding the sharpening geo-political crisis.

War crisis triggers market swings

Nick Beams

Commodity and stock markets have been hit by wild movements in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with further major turbulence to follow in the coming days as the Western powers consider further sanctions, including the removal of Russia from the Swift system of international payments.

In this Oct. 14, 2020 file photo, pedestrians pass the New York Stock Exchange in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, File)

The immediate impact of the invasion has been to deliver what has been characterised as a “stagflationary” shock to the world economy, starting in Europe, as rising prices for oil, natural gas and other commodities push inflation higher while hitting economic growth.

European gas prices rose by almost 70 percent at one point yesterday, reaching as high as €142 per megawatt hour, compared to €16 a year ago, before falling back to a 40 percent rise. The price of Brent crude rose by 9 percent to more than $105 per barrel, before dropping to just below $100.

Oil and natural gas are not the only commodities affected. Russian and Ukraine together produce about 14 percent of the world’s wheat and account for about 30 percent of wheat exports.

Wheat future prices in Chicago rose 6 percent on the news of the Russian invasion to reach their highest level in a decade. Supplies could be cut as a result of moves by Russia to block the Azov Sea, connected to the Black Sea.

Commodity trading specialist Dave Whitcomb at Peak Trading Research told the Financial Times (FT) the situation was “really serious” for agricultural markets. “There are fundamental concerns around whether grains will flow out of the Black Sea states, and both the wheat and corn markets are just on fire.”

Russia is also the source of key metals used in manufacturing, including nickel, titanium, palladium and aluminium.

Dominic Kane, an analyst at JPMorgan, said: “Russia is a significant producer of commodities so overnight developments in eastern Europe could have material implications for global supply chains.”

Others are drawing the same conclusions. Michael Every, a global strategist at Rabobank, said prolonged conflict and sanctions could result in “the same kind of shock as we had during COVID, when we rapidly found out that this elegant, concentrated just-in-time structure we had built up is flawed.”

Additional sanctions have been imposed on Russia by the major imperialist powers but there are divisions between them on whether to exclude it from the Belgium-based Swift international payments system which connects 11,000 banks and financial institutions world-wide, handling 42 million financial messages a day and facilitating trillions of dollars of transactions.

According to a report in the FT, citing officials, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pushed “very hard” to remove Russia but told MPs that was “vital that we have unity” on the issue.

The report said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had reservations on the move and so did the European Union. Asked to comment on the issue, a German official declined, saying only that “all options are still on the table.”

Johnson’s move to have Russia excluded from Swift came after earlier British sanctions were denounced as “peashooter” measures. His push for what has sometimes been described as the “nuclear option” came at a meeting of G7 leaders yesterday where Canada was also reported to be in favour.

Asked why the US had stopped short of excluding Russia from Swift, US President Joe Biden said: “It is always an option, but right now that’s not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take.”

The European hesitancy is based on the fear that exclusion of Russia, which would make it much more difficult to finance trade, could have “spillover” effects on the European financial system. And there is also the fear of what such a move would bring in terms of retaliation, particularly regarding energy supplies, with Europe dependent on Russia for 40 percent of its gas requirements.

The announcement of the Russian invasion produced violent swings on global stock markets. European markets fell by more than 3 percent and the rapid fall continued in the US when trading began. At one stage the Dow dropped by more than 850 points before ending the day a nearly 100 points higher—a movement of almost 1000 points in a day.

The S&P 500 index closed 1.5 percent higher, after falling by as much as 2.6 percent during the day.

The largest gyration was in the tech-heavy NASDAQ index. It lost 3.4 percent before closing up by 3.3 percent. This was its biggest intraday movement since the March 2020 financial crisis at the start of the pandemic.

There appear to be several factors at work in the Wall Street swing. One is likely to be the assessment that the economic impact of the war crisis will be less in the US than in Europe and so money is moving across the Atlantic to what are regarded as safer shores.

Another factor is the assessment that the prospect of a 0.5 percentage point increase in the Fed’s base interest rate when it meets in the middle of next month is now off the table and the initial rise will be 0.25 percent, which has been priced into market calculations. Shares in tech-based firms, which make up a large portion of the NASDAQ index, are regarded as more sensitive than the broader market to possible interest rate movements.

But even if the Fed decides on more gradual interest rate hikes than some of the members of its governing body have been pushing for, it faces a series of problems in determining its monetary policy.

In previous times, the Fed could have been expected to inject more money into the financial system to try to mitigate the effects of the outbreak of war. But that option is now largely closed off because of the rise in inflation, which has gone from well below its target rate of 2 percent and is now racing ahead at 7.5 percent, with further increases to come.

The pressure on the Fed and other central banks is not to cut rates but to increase them, possibly quite sharply, because of the fear that inflation, expected to accelerate even further, will become “embedded” and lead to growing struggles by the working class in the US and elsewhere for significant wage rises to compensate for the loss of real income.

“A big inflation impact in the US and Europe means central banks could raise interest rates further than anticipated, which brings the risk of economic stagflation,” Trevor Greetham of Royal Asset Management told the FT.

In other words, the war crisis in Europe may well lead to a significant recession—triggered by a combination of inflation, the hit to growth and a tightening of monetary policy.

EU imposes sanctions on Russia as NATO escalates troop deployments

Alex Lantier & Johannes Stern

Yesterday, as Russian forces bombed targets in Ukraine and attacked Ukrainian troops and far-right militias in the east of the country, the European Union (EU) agreed to impose “very massive, very strong” sanctions on Russia, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian reported last night. This came as Washington deployed 7,000 more US troops to Germany, and the NATO alliance built up its forces all along the western borders of Russia and Ukraine.

European Union leaders gather during a round table meeting at an extraordinary EU summit on Ukraine at the European Council building in Brussels, Thursday, Feb 24, 2022. (Olivier Hoslet, Pool Photo via AP)

The NATO imperialist powers are clearly responding to the Russian attacks in Ukraine not by seeking to avert a broader war but to intensify economic and military pressure on Russia, risking escalation to a global war directly between the major nuclear powers.

EU sanctions will target Russian energy and transport firms, financial firms, and trade in so-called “dual use” goods, that is, civilian goods that have direct military applications. The EU is also ending the granting of visas to Russian citizens and preparing new sanctions targeting the financial assets of Russian firms and individuals. Russian assets and property in the EU are to be seized, and the access of Russian banks and the Russian state to financing in Europe suspended.

Several EU countries, including Germany, Italy and Cyprus, opposed calls to suspend Russian access to the SWIFT inter-bank payment system, which would end Russia’s ability to make payments in US dollars, freezing it out of most international financial markets. Asked about this threat, however, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made clear it was still an option, declaring: “We need to keep sanctions ready for later times.”

Suspending Russian access to SWIFT, described in the financial press as the “nuclear option,” threatens an all-out EU energy and trade blockade of Russia, which provides the EU with 36 percent of its natural gas. This would be a devastating blow to the world economy, triggering an explosive rise in energy prices in Europe and beyond. It would, moreover, vastly intensify price inflation that is already devastating workers’ living standards and threaten a collapse of world trade.

This underscores that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not simply the product, as broad layers of European media present it, of the scheming of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is the bankrupt and reactionary nationalist response of the Kremlin to an intractable political and economic crisis of the entire world capitalist system. It is, however, the NATO imperialist powers that hold the militarily and financially stronger position on a world scale and that play the most aggressive role.

The NATO alliance is activating unspecified emergency plans to accelerate the deployment of tens of thousands of troops to the borders of Ukraine and Russia. Yesterday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said: “Today, the North Atlantic Council decided to activate our defense plans at the request of our top military commander, General Tod Wolters. … [This] will enable us to deploy capabilities and forces, including the NATO Response Force, to where they are needed.”

The NATO Response Force is a 40,000-strong rapid response force made up of troops from several NATO countries, deployed as part of the alliance’s Crisis Reaction Measures plan. A 5,000-strong Franco-German brigade that is part of this force is already on high alert. Yesterday, Washington also announced the deployment of 7,000 more US troops to Germany in a state of high alert, 300 soldiers to Latvia and F-35 fighter jets to Estonia and Lithuania.

It is apparent, moreover, that a far-reaching militarization of the NATO countries themselves is underway, as NATO asks European governments to take unspecified emergency measures.

Yesterday, the German Defense Ministry said: “Due to current events, NATO has called on its member states to take further Crisis Response Measures, a catalog of measures to be taken in event of crisis. … Based on NATO triggering rapid response measures, the [German] Federal Ministry of Defense has now triggered so-called national alert measures.” It added that the “population may notice more military movements in public areas over the next few days. There may also be transport restrictions, as land, sea and air transport must be kept available for military purposes.”

Emergency measures are indubitably being taken by Polish, Slovak, Hungarian and Romanian authorities in order to deploy troops to greet thousands of desperate Ukrainian refugees, who are fleeing the Russian invasion into EU countries on Ukraine’s western border.

It is also apparent, however, that the major NATO powers are preparing a military escalation targeting Russia that threatens an outbreak of global nuclear conflict, as well as an escalation of emergency measures at home. Already, it has deployed so-called “battlegroups” in Poland and the Baltic states, which are now also to deploy to Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary. Le Drian himself baldly warned Russia yesterday: “NATO is also a nuclear alliance.”

In this conflict, the NATO imperialist powers are indubitably the main aggressor. They have worked systematically to encircle Russia since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union 30 years ago. After Moscow emerged as an obstacle to NATO proxy wars in Syria and the Middle East, Washington and Berlin organized a coup in Kiev, led by fascist forces such as the Svoboda Party and the Right Sector, to install an anti-Russian regime in Kiev. Since then, NATO has tightened the noose around Russia.

The World Socialist Web Site rejects and opposes the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which will not stop the NATO offensive against Russia but rather intensify the danger of a Third World War. Its opposition to the reactionary Russian nationalism of the Putin regime does not, however, entail any lessening of its irreconcilable opposition to the lies and hypocrisy the imperialist powers use to justify their campaign against Russia.

The European powers are rushing to put their long cherished rearmament plans into action, while moving to eliminate all public health measures against the COVID-19 pandemic, which still claims over 20,000 lives across Europe every week. Above all, the German ruling class, which waged a barbaric war of extermination against the Soviet Union in World War II, is going on the offensive even as over 200,000 people fall ill with COVID-19 every day in Germany.

In an extraordinary statement Thursday, the German Army’s highest ranking officer, Lieutenant General Alfons Mais, called for massively rearming against Russia. “I would not have believed in my 41st year of service in peace that I would have to experience another war. And the Bundeswehr, the army I have the privilege of leading, is more or less bare,” the general wrote on the LinkedIn network. “The options we can offer the politicians to support the alliance are extremely limited.”

“This does not feel good! I’m pissed off!” Mais fumed, adding that “now is the time” to “structurally and materially … reorganize” the army.

The media is in propaganda mode, insisting that a new era of war calls for the embrace of force. “The European order, which gave the continent three decades of relative security and stability after the end of the Cold War, is breaking up. A new, dangerous era is beginning,” Der Spiegel writes, asserting that in such times, one must “say goodbye to some cherished life lies.” This includes “the assumption that all conflicts can be solved through persuasion.”

That is unmistakable: Don’t talk, but fight! Der Spiegel continues by demanding, “Europeans have to come to terms with the idea that the military is also a factor in 21st century politics. Many thought the fate of nations was determined solely by economic data, technology, artificial intelligence.” Briefly seeming to applaud the Russian invasion, it enthuses that Putin is showing “that politics can also be made with much more archaic means: tanks, fighter jets, artillery.”