Ukrainians are realising with horror that their Western “allies” are de-prioritising their war with Russia as the Palestine war and West Asian flare-ups keep the Western power bloc focused on sustaining tiny client Israel. The United States alone has so far provided Ukraine with military aid worth US$ 44 billion since the Russian invasion of Ukraine but that is small compared with the West’s pampering of Israel.
In recent months the Ukrainian armed forces have faced defeat after defeat in their several tactical battles with advancing Russian forces. In addition to rolling back the Ukrainian “counter offensive” launched in mid-2023, Russia has been able to push further forward since last December capturing several villages. Several small towns are also threatened after the Russians overran the city of Adviivka, a key junction.
Russia remains in firm control of nearly a fifth of Ukraine’s land area, all in the mainly Russian-populated eastern provinces of the country. Now Moscow has added hundreds of square kilometres further west, ominously, in the direction of the capital, Kyiv.
At the same time the air war is very much in Russia’s favour due to sheer numbers of drone and aircraft sorties and the direct targeting Ukraine’s energy production. No modern state can fight a war without electricity, especially a high technology conventional war. Actually, it is in the economic war that Ukraine is cornered. All its energy installations are within easy reach, not of long range bombers but, of short range drones.
Russia’s territory is so vast (it has the world’s biggest land area) that many of its vital installations are beyond the reach of aerial strikes except by long range ballistic missiles or long range bombers, neither of which Ukraine has. Russia does, and that is why NATO doesn’t even dream of using its own superpower military capacities against Russia.
Ukrainian analysts warn that further advances westward could give Moscow actual strategic gains following the many tactical battlefield successes.
Strategic gains
‘Strategic gains’ mean Moscow’s ability to pressurise Kyiv to begin think differently about its military options. At some point, the continued Russian occupation of large tracts of Ukraine will severely weaken the current Ukrainian government’s popularity.Russia can continue to stomach the current level of aerial incursions by Ukraine even as it advances on the ground. But Ukraine does not have the size and capacity to bear the current toll on life, infrastructure and economic resources.
This situation, then, has more than military effects. Economic attrition affects the whole population. Ukraine’s once-militant anti-Russian nationalism lost its flamboyance and romance (some of it mere media hype anyway) long ago. People are complaining about conscription. Gangster type military units like the rightwing neo Nazi militia are playing bigger roles, in a way not conducive to rational, socially accountable decision-making.
As Western strategists arewarning, NATO faces an uphill task of sustaining both Ukraine and Israel in direct military terms. The Ukrainian leadership, meanwhile, is realising the difference of priorities for the West.
The difference in the two war situations is stark. There is a huge difference in terms of actual military operations, battle theatre and strengths of opposing forces.
Ukraine is a major state with the largest territory in Europe other than Russia. The scale of war with Russia – still a nuclear superpower even if its economy has shrunk – is that of a totally different scale to the one-sided war being waged by tiny Israel against the Palestinians resistance and its neighbourhood militia allies.
The Ukraine war is full scale conventional war on land, air and sea. Land battles involve, on both sides, top line heavy armour (main battle tanks, other motorised units), long range artillery, missile barrages, and division or brigade level troop movements. There are constant drone and aircraft sorties, and, in the Black Sea, limited Naval actions.
While Russia may have lost up to three medium size Naval units (a damaged light cruiser, destroyer and a smaller craft), the main war is on the land.
Ukraine is fighting a war with an enemy also deploying all standard modern arms and equipment. But Russia is the far bigger military, as well as largely self-reliant in both military production as well as economic resources.
Israel, on the other hand, is tiny in terms of land area (by any standards), while its relatively large (350,000 personnel) military is not even fighting another conventional military force. But Israel’s war is as difficult to fight for different reasons.
While Russia technically overpowers Ukraine (if not for NATO aid), Israel is fighting several guerilla militia who are from the occupied population in Israel’s dominated land area. The IDF is a conventional military – one of the world’s most hi-tech – which struggles to fight an unconventional insurgency.
Illegitimacy
Most importantly, the Israeli military is somewhat hamstrung by its own illegitimacy as an ‘occupying power’ holding other people’s territories. But Ukraine is fighting a wholly legitimate war against an illegitimate foreign invader.
But, after months of war in eastern Europe and West Asia, it is becoming clear to the world that the illegitimate war being fought – and so illegally with ethnic cleansing and blockading of civilians – by Israel is the most defended politically, and supported militarily, by the West.
Ukraine’s more obviously legitimate war is hardly defended politically by the West after the initial set of economic and diplomatic sanctions (severe, no doubt). Military assistance by the West is slow, requiring political and legislative approvals, approvals that are becoming even slower across NATO governments as popular sympathy has waned.
In comparison, NATO’s lavishes aid to Israel almost on a daily basis if one counts the steady release of ammunition from US military stockpiles maintained inside Israel itself. Weekly, tens of thousands of rockets, bombs and shells are resupplied by American and European companies to the IDF.
In terms of military re-supply, the technical difference is that, for Ukraine’s conventional war, it requires millions of such ammunition (not just thousands) because the scale is far greater. Ukraine has to engage in rocket, artillery and aircraft duels over thousands of square kilometres while Israel only needs to unilaterally bomb, bombard and shoot, all in just a few hundred km².
Many analysts now believe that the West has given up on defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity, leave aside its original intention of NATO membership. Legislatures in the EU as well as in the US are now dragging their feet, even in the face of continuous Ukrainian losses.
Does not this reveal NATO’s hope that Ukrainians themselves will lean towards negotiation with Moscow? At present ‘negotiations’ is a dirty word – in public. Moscow is clearly hammering on, waiting to see for how long informal mutterings in Kyiv will translate into serious politics. Pro-Russian opposition political groups are also biding their time.
Everyone is aware that such negotiations will be slow to begin and even slower to proceed, with much posturing to save political skins.
Old fashioned
Meanwhile, the overall global geopolitical picture makes it clear that the West is learning the hard way that it has allowed old-fashioned Cold War attitudes and assumptions to inform its geopolitical strategies.
The world today is very far away from the two-sided Cold War configuration. It is also far away from what it was in the Persian Gulf invasions at the turn of the century.
The difference in the global order is military as well as, most significantly, economic. The rise of economic powers outside the old ‘East’ and ‘West’ was perhaps realised quicker by the Eastern powers (Russia and China). The West has too long been used to greater dominance and, that very dominance became such a habit that it is only now beginning to learn the degree of change in the world community.
It began to learn its lessons with its sanctions tactics against North Korea, Iran, and most recently, Russia.
Not sooner than it imperiously clamped sanctions and assumed that all would be intimidated into obeying sanction rules, than the West began to realise that the world community of states that must comply with such rules was not just a collection of impoverished nations.
Rather, we now have a multi polar world with many strong economies of the Global South presenting asymmetric dynamics rather than the simpler bilateral conflict of the East-vs-West Cold War. Even 30 years ago,the Non-Aligned Movement or other Third World states did not have the economic independence they now enjoy.
What is now the Global South, is itself a far stronger network than when it was the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War. Now we have other power blocs, especially the rapidly expanding BRICS as well as the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. At the same time, Arab and other Muslim petro-dollar wealth enables many emergent states to demonstrate their autonomy and to assert self interests, especially since increasingly educated citizenry want socio-economic stability.
Thus, the sanction regimes are being by-passed by these multi-layered economic dealings that work for the benefit of far more nations than just the originally targeted state.
And these asymmetrical networks have enabled multiple levels of politico-military confrontations and resistance. This is precisely the picture in West Asia.
The West’s (and Israel’s) old doctrine of military ‘rapid dominance’ – the ‘shock and awe’ aggression once boasted by western military commanders at the start of the Gulf War – now soundhollow. Israel’s rapid dominance failed in Lebanon and is now failing in Palestine.
The West demonstrates far greater strategic commitment to Israel than to Ukraine. This betrays the geo-strategic importance to the West of sustaining its last European colonial state, Israel, in a zone considered vital to the West’s overall dominance.
What the West still must learn is that in an increasingly multipolar world, no single bloc can behave in terms of unipolar ‘dominance’. In a genuinely civilised world community, why should there be a “No. 1”?
