Why nobody wants peace in Ukraine
by Guy Mettan,* freelance journalist, Geneva
(9 May 2022) [2 May 2022] We guessed it since the beginning of the conflict but it is now proven, peace will not take place in Ukraine before long.
In the aftermath of their classified trip to Kiev on April 24, U.S. Secretary of Defense [Lloyd J. Austin] and Secretary of State [Antony Blinken] announced their intention upon their return to Poland: they want “to see Russia weakened so much that it can no longer do such things as an invasion of Ukraine.” A spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council added: we want to turn “this invasion into a strategic failure for Russia” and a “victory for Ukraine.” 1
Unprecedented surge in US military investment
Putting their money where their mouth is, they immediately announced an additional $700 million in arms deliveries to Ukraine, bringing the U.S. war effort to $3.7 billion since February 24, to which must be added the $4.6 billion in 2021 and the billions of euros in arms delivered or promised by the Europeans.2 Four days later, Joe Biden triggered an unprecedented escalation in the history of US military investments by requesting Congress to provide $33 billion in aid to Ukraine, including $20 billion for offensive weapons, while Nancy Pelosi secretly went to Kiev on Sunday to declare her love for President Zelensky. The warlike madness that Vladimir Putin was accused of in February now seems to have taken hold of the West, making any prospect of peace, or even a simple ceasefire, highly unlikely, and making this conflict by far the most dangerous since 1945. The West and NATO seem determined to fight to the last Ukrainian, and if possible, to the last Russian.
Both sides are now walled up in their certainties: by drawing first, Russia has indirectly justified the United States’ denunciation of Putin’s warmongering. But by transforming what was a neighborhood conflict and a regional security problem into a global war to annihilate the Russian foe, the United States is in the process of proving Putin right, seeing in the hostile attitude of NATO and the United States since the 2000s a deadly threat to his country’s existence.
From this point on, it is difficult to see how peace, even if precarious, could be achieved.
From this perspective, the case of the alleged war crimes in Butcha will have been a decisive turning point, making any conciliation between Ukraine and Russia impossible and negotiations between the two parties futile. It is therefore no coincidence that, for the past month, on the military level, the nature of the operations has changed, turning into a war of attrition and territorial nibbling, and no longer a war of movement, to use the language of 1914–18, with Russia now claiming the “liberation” of eastern and southern Ukraine.
An unprecedented military confrontation
But let us first examine the characteristics of this unprecedented military confrontation between the two great nuclear superpowers. By the end of February, it was clear that military operations went far beyond Ukraine, and that NATO was massively mobilized in terms of weapons supplies and training, as well as troop command, intelligence, radar and satellite surveillance, cyberwarfare, propaganda and information, and economic sanctions. As Radio Canada revealed, Canadian instructors have been present in Ukraine for years, even training extremists of the Azov battalions despite domestic legislation prohibiting them from doing so.3 See also the testimony of French reporter Régis Le Sommier, who found himself handled by a U.S. officer while accompanying volunteers to the front.4
As a matter of fact, many NATO countries are actively engaged against Russia in all aspects. We can therefore well talk about a “total war” (see the Swiss Radio Libre podcast dubbed “Anti-thèse” on April 14 with Gabriel Galice5) or better, of an endless war. By proclaiming it is now a matter of “beating Russia”, the United States has raised the tension to a new level.
It is unlimited in time – it is made to last as long as possible and with the highest possible intensity, the only limit being the nuclear threshold. It therefore differs from the wars in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Syria between 2015 and 2018 by a higher degree of aggressiveness, while not being total, since the nuclear level is not (yet) initiated.
It is also unlimited spatially insofar as the conflict goes beyond the sole territorial limits of Ukraine and seeks to destabilize Russia and its close neighborhood, from Finland to Central Asia, while isolating it from the rest of the world through continuous trains of economic sanctions and enormous pressure against those states who refuse to join this blood bath. It doesn’t merely seek to destabilize Russia but to dismantle it and to overthrow its government.
Finally, this war is unlimited in its spectrum of activities since it is deployed in all fields of human activity, military, cognitive, cultural, economic, political, informational, spatial, scientific, etc.
Two worlds at odds with each other
It is therefore about two worlds clashing in a merciless struggle: one that claims to fight to preserve its “democratic, liberal and progressive values”, and the other that fights to preserve its right to exist in a different way and for whom these values are only a cloak of hypocrisy intended to conceal an irrepressible ambition for world hegemony.
The clash pits, roughly speaking, the 37 countries that make up the West against the 150 countries that doubt, hesitate or oppose it, and that have expressed this by refusing to take economic sanctions against Russia.
In addition to these geopolitical and civilizational hurdles, there is a circumstantial factor preventing peace: the mid-term elections to be held this fall in the United States. There is very little talk of this in Europe. And wrongly so, for it carries a great deal of weight.
With a not particularly popular President Biden, perceived as senile, the Democrats are counting on an escalation of the conflict to mobilize their troops and, above all, counter their Republican opponents. This is all the easier since the United States can fight the war by proxy, spare the lives of its soldiers, have economic sanctions only affecting its European allies, and let the Democrats’ hatred of Russia since Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 election just flow out.
Despite the negative outcome of the investigations carried out by the two special prosecutors appointed to investigate Russiagate, they persist in claiming that Russia truncated the 2016 election.6 In Washington, peace is anything but desired, at least until the end of November.
Looking back at the Butcha case
The third obstacle to peace is even more decisive, while remaining taboo in Europe: it is the consequences of the Boutcha incident. For the West, it is a massacre, a war crime, a crime against humanity, even a genocide, committed by Russian soldiers.
But the course of events raises a number of unanswered questions: why didn’t the mayor of the city mention these killings during his first speech on March 30? Why was it necessary to wait for three days, two of which were used by the Azov and Safari militias to “cleanse the city of saboteurs and Russian accomplices”, to see the first photos of the slaughter appear? Why did the satellite images of this massacre originate exclusively from an American company working for the Pentagon? How is it that all civilian victims of Boutcha have been attributed to Russian “assaults” whereas the city when occupied by the Russians was subject to very intense shelling by the Ukrainian army for four weeks? One may ask many questions and only time will tell what really happened.7
What cannot be disputed, however, is the media display of the dead bodies, whose pictures flooded the Western media for days and prompted macabre pilgrimages by every Western politician and journalist. These hordes of journalists carefully screened, framed and bussed to the “crime scene” to film it do not inspire anything good. They smell like a staged performance. People have seen them too often, and for my part experienced them in Sarajevo or elsewhere, to believe in their innocent spontaneity.
In the same way, testimonies collected on microphones should be taken with a grain of salt, knowing that the inhabitants live in terror of the Azov battalions and various Ukrainian death squads that have recently liquidated mayors and negotiators judged to be too conciliatory with the Russians, machine-gunned Russian soldiers who were taken prisoner, decapitated a Russian soldier with a sickle, etc. All these images can be found on social networks but have seen little coverage in our newspapers.8
In any case, the Boutcha impact has been devastating for peace. People forget that the media coverage of the killings took place after the negotiations in Turkey had advanced, after the Russians had announced the withdrawal of their troops from northern Ukraine. As a result, the Russians lost all confidence in the Ukrainian side and in the negotiation process.
They know now, like the Ukrainians in the East, that if they give up an inch of conquered territory, the same media outpouring will take place and all the victims will be considered as heinous “war crimes”. As for the Ukrainians in the East and South, they have also learned their lesson: they will be mercilessly massacred by the Azov troops, kidnapped or tortured by the SBU if the Russians abandon them, like the American-Chilean blogger Gonzalo Lira in Kharkov.9
Similarly, the continuous broadcasting of these images has caused hatred of Russia to boil over and exacerbated Russophobia among Ukrainians in the West as well as in Western public opinion. From now on, on the whole European continent west of the Dnieper, we are witnessing a political and media overkill to request more weapons, more sanctions, more money for Ukraine and oppose any serious attempt to dialogue with Russia, while supporters of peace are described as traitors or friends of the “criminal” Putin.
Climate in Ukraine
Even for Zelensky, negotiating has become impossible, because he would immediately be accused by hardline nationalists on his side of siding with the “butcher of the Kremlin”. His political and even physical survival would be at stake.
It is also striking to observe the extent to which the Ukrainian regime has become more radical in recent weeks with the surveillance and deportation of non-compliant journalists, but above all the dissolution and banning of opposition parties (left-wing bloc parties and those deemed to be pro-Russian), of which the leader of the main one, Viktor Medvedchuk, was abducted, held incommunicado and offered to be released in exchange for Russian prisoners.10 It should be remembered that television channels and media considered “hostile” had already been shut down. This drift towards authoritarianism is therefore also affecting Ukraine.
Climate in Russia
On the Russian side, the atmosphere is no better. The attacks on Russian culture, the cancellation of theatrical performances, university courses and classical music concerts were considered as acts of barbarism unworthy of the West. The removal of statues and monuments to Russian and Soviet heroes who fell to liberate Europe from Nazism at the cost of 26 million deaths was also resented.
The massive deliveries of weapons, the continuous trains of sanctions, the accusations without proof of war crimes, the exactions committed by Ukrainian nationalists against Russian soldiers and civilians in the Donbass, the banning of the Russian media, the closure and withdrawal of Western companies from Russia, the boycott of Aeroflot and the freezing of 300 billion in Russian assets have completed the process of turning public opinion against the West.
As a result, Putin’s approval rating has never been so high, with 83% in favor. So, the Russians will not overthrow their president overnight, as the Europeans would like, and put an end to the “liberation” of Ukraine, which they increasingly believe to be justified.
Not to mention that a significant part of the Russian population does not mind seeing the freezing of the oligarchs’ assets and their compulsory stay at home: this is all the more money that will stay at home as well ...
Others have also hailed Western sanctions as a welcome gift because it will force the country to reindustrialize and invest in its own production rather than importing everything.
Climate in the West
It is therefore hard to see how peace could be restored in such a climate of hysteria. One even wonders if the West, which seems to speak only the language of arms, is not struck by a kind of suicidal madness. In these conditions, we can at best hope for a cease-fire and a more or less frozen conflict with a Ukraine cut in two. But even that is a long way off!
In the weeks and months to come, with arms deliveries underway, hopes of victory proclaimed by the Western coalition, the resilience of a Russian economy far from collapsing, and the confirmed support of China and India, we should rather expect an escalation of the fighting and of international tensions ... and the propaganda that goes along with it!
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
| * Guy Mettan is a political scientist and journalist. He started his journalistic career with Tribune de Genève in 1980 and was its director and editor-inchief in 1992–1998. From 1997 to 2020, he was director of “Club Suisse de la Presse” in Geneva. Nowadays he is a freelance journalist and author. |
1 Cf. CNN https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/04/25/politics/blinken-austin-kyiv-ukraine-zelensky-meeting/index.html
2 Cf. the US Department of Defense website https://www.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-withukraine/#:~:text=Since%202014%2C%20the%20United%20States,and%20improve%20interoperability%20with%20NATO
3 Cf. Radio Canada https://ici.radio-canada.ca/amp/1873461/canada-regiment-ukrainien-lie-extreme-droite-azov
4 Cf. C News https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8a23ub
5 Cf. https://radiolibre.ch/podcast/ukraine-une-guerre-totale-gabriel-galice-par-anti-these/
6 Cf. Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/trump-russia-danchenko-steele-dossier-fbi-durham-11636152567
7 Cf. Consortium News https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/04/questions-abound-about-bucha-massacre/
8 Cf. Consortium News https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/20/zelenskys-hardline-internal-purge/
10 Cf. Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/zelenskyy-offers-russia-trade-captured-putin-ally-medvedchuk-ukraine-prisoners-2022-4?amp