Are they stupid?
Yes
Because it is politically impossible. Any retreat is seen as treason, and moreover they fear that any visible setback will jeopardize the continued financial and material support by the West.
Militarily it makes absolutely no sense to remain in such a disadvantageous position, it hasn’t for weeks if not several months. But this conflict is peculiar in that one side is extremely obsessed with and dependent on symbolic acts.
They claim that they stay there to delay Russia’s advance until Ukraine’s long awaited counter-offensive comes that will magically turn the tide, but meanwhile the resources that were supposed to go into that offensive are instead being used up faster than they can accumulate them just to keep feeding into this shrinking salient.
Probably because Bakhmut is of major strategic importance. If the Russians take, they’ll be able to start conducting attacks on several other locations.
Probably speaking to the choir here, but Russia has had Bakhmut for several weeks. I’m not entirely sure what NATO gains from allowing thousands of soldiers to walk into a slaughterhouse. Are they really worried about the consequences to public perception if they “admit defeat?”
Yes. Because they are 100% dependent on external material support, the way that their situation is perceived has real material consequences for Ukraine.
The thinking is that if it takes sacrificing fifty tanks to maintain the perception of successful resistance that may get them a hundred more to replace them.
So far their math seems to be wrong. It doesn’t look like they’re coming out ahead. Also the trained manpower they are losing is even harder to replace.
But the second line of thinking behind sacrificing huge amounts of manpower and materiel just to hold on to a few more square kilometers for a few more weeks or months is that they hope that eventually something will magically materialize that will turn the tide.
Either a regime change in Russia, or a direct intervention by NATO is their dream scenario. Or somehow managing to beg and grovel until they get enough stuff together that they can pull off a counter-offensive, though what they hope to achieve with it apart from maybe reviving the enthusiasm in the west by showing success and keeping the grift going for a few more months is anyone’s guess.
Because they a) can’t reverse the larger trend of slowly losing the war of attrition, and b) if they are hoping to humiliate Russia by taking some territory and thereby trigger some sort of political crisis in Moscow i think they are mistaken, in fact that would more likely cause Russia to escalate even further and take off the gloves entirely, especially if the moderates now in charge are replaced by some actual hardliners.
Ukraine seems to. They have to present some kind of perceived victory to keep the foreign military aid coming.
Why doesn’t Putin just make Russia into the USSR again? It was more successful as a state…Is he Stupid? /s
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this is the honest comment, what do we really know? workers are dying over bourgeois territorial control. does anyone here actually know someone from Donbass? like do they feel liberated yet as their homes lie in further ruins? wonder how they’ll get their lives back together after losing their economic/industrial center and their families through an entrenched DMZ border threatening nuclear standoff.
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And for what exactly? To fight the “pedophile, gay satanists” in the West? To fight “Mongolic orcs” in the East? Dogshit.
This is a reductionist framing. Communists everywhere are watching this conflict with bated breath because we want to believe the US war machine is on the outs. We want so badly to believe that the encirclement of China is a failure, that the US will not be able to continue to dominate the next century through military force nor through economic force. We interpret the conflict with much the same motivations that we interpret the dedollarization movement.
Communism is still fragile. Losing China to the West through war or through subversion would be a set back that would take decades, if not a century or more, to recover from. Emotionally, we are attached to the US losing this proxy war because of its implications for the future of global communism.
It has nothing to do with good vs evil, with dehumanization of the sides, nor with sports fanaticism. Sometimes it gets expressed in those ways, because of culture and psychology and because we’re on the socials, but these are aesthetic buffers to protect our psyches from the acknowledgement of the fear that if the US is triumphant here, then there will be darker times ahead of us and if the US fails here, and they don’t launch nukes, then there’s a chance they’re decline will be fast enough to avoid significant armed conflict with China and some of us may live to see a new stage of global human society.
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The people dying on both sides in Ukraine are our working-class brethren. And they’re not dying to fight imperialism or advance the interests of the working class - though that could be a welcome side effect of the conflict. They’re being fed into this meatgrinder to further the interests of two bourgeois sides duking it out for their own material interests.
Donbas republics have been fighting the colonization of Ukraine since 2014, so fuck outta here with that. The Russian bourgeoisie is against the war, why? Because they’ve been trying to join the Western Imperialist order for decades now. Not fighting Imperialism, what the fuck would you call what the US did to Ukraine? What they did to Libya? What they tried to do to Syria? It’s not Imperialism if the target has a bourgeoisie?
There’s zero evidence that the Russian bourgeoisie or some usurper trying to take their place has any monopoly pressures guiding it into annexing Donbas. Donbas is insignificant in food production, and Donbas industry has been a carcass since the collapse of the USSR. These people live off of pensions from dead jobs. It just doesn’t compute that this is an inter-bourgeois conflict. It does compute that this is a colonial struggle as Donbas is taking up arms against the puppet state which has been privatizing land, devaluing the currency (lowering the cost of labor, and the value of pensions), cutting health benefits, etc. And Ukraine is not just an economic colony, it is stuffed with the empire’s weapons and the remnants of the Red Army. It is an offensive bulwark aimed at Russia. It’s entirely suspicious that a supposed bourgeois conflict is benefiting one country specifically, the Imperial Hegemon, at the expense of Europe. The contradictions of this Colonization effort are allowing the rest of the world to review their relationships with the USA and China, only because Russia is defeating the Ukraine colony can these developments take place.
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The existing bourgeois state doesn’t negate the reality of a liberation struggle. Through the struggle the bourgeois state must be shed if it is not able to protect the nation. Frankly if one camp of the bourgeoisie decides to defend the nation that doesn’t mean a liberation struggle isn’t underway, it just means it has not developed to the point where the bourgeoisie should be tossed aside. Every Liberation struggle has had a split bourgeoisie.
If there was no class interest, Russia wouldn’t be doing it. Posing anything else is literally a rejection of class analysis and Marxism in general.
The bourgeois state isn’t absolute, this is something we like to forget it seems. The bourgeois state exists within a delicate balance of the state acting in class interests, and the strength of the state. This situation the Russian population is overwhelmingly supportive of the Donbas, as noted by the Communist Party, so if the state failed to defend Donbas, it would have looked too weak to defend Russia. This would have put the state itself into crisis. Does this mean a section of the bourgeoisie is fighting for its own existence, yes of course, but this doesn’t mean they haven’t been pushed into a concession by the toiling masses.
Not to mention this mischaracterizes the Donbass struggle itself severely. The Donbass Republics were literally praised by Russian nationalists for their extreme libertarian character.
Evidence? How could it possibly be more “libertarian” than Ukraine proper which cut social spending across the board and privatized land for an IMF deal. I’m sure Donbas pensioners captured the government buildings for their Libertarianism, talk about ignoring class interests.
We live in times where things can get much worse, so we fear far more than living horrors. We fear what has happened in the past and what is primed to happen again. This goes, one way or another, for communists, liberals, and fascists alike. The war must end because of the toll it is taking on the world, but it will continue because the die is cast. Even if peace talks and mediation prevails the structures that fostered this conflict will likely remain and the sentiments that the conflict has exacerbated will not relent. I’m afraid there is no rhetoric, and no disposition, that can stop things from getting worse and we don’t have the social infrastructure to try if it could. Indeed, we are no longer crossing the brook by feeling for the stones because the waters have risen much too high.
To fight the “pedophile, gay satanists” in the West?
Come on, how is it not obvious to you that the US is trying to colonize Russia? Do you know what happens if Russia loses this?
It doesn’t matter how reactionary the leadership of Russia is, Russia as a country will always be a target for Colonization by the Atlantic empires. The Russian nation’s path for survival is anti-Colonialism, therefore anti-Capitalism, therefore Socialism.
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It’s not vulgar materialism. At this stage in history Russia has no other option than alliance with the developing world, led by China. With China comes industrialization and socialization of labor which will necessarily invoke class struggle in the countries it develops with. Any nation that seeks to develop its productive forces is faced with Finance Imperialism which seeks to permanently freeze the development of all countries. Can development opposed to Finance Imperialism develop itself into monopoly Imperialism? This is what I doubt, and which obviously has not occurred yet.
The Russian bourgeoisie, the Oligarchs, are opposed to the war. The United Russia party was pushed towards intervention from the bottom up.
Further, you said you do not deny that the US is trying to colonize Russia, but then you say Russia’s actions aren’t anti-Colonial. How does this make sense? Serious question, looking at the Russian intervention in Syria, do you think that was not anti-Colonial? Do you think Syria isn’t under threat of colonization by the US? Is fighting against that attempt not anti-Colonialism?
and thank you for finally saying it. I agree this fascination is like sports. so many seem to know more about Ukraine War - SMO than their local struggles, struggles they can directly improve. imagine what we can do if we just let our brains not be occupied by things beyond our control
