Ukraine war spirals out of control after US announces major arms shipment
Andre Damon, WSWS, Apr 15 2022
The Moskva in the port of Sevastopol, Sep 11 2008 (Photo: AP)
The day after the Biden administration announced a massive expansion of US arms shipments to Ukraine, including hundreds of drones, armored vehicles and helicopters, the war took a dangerous new turn, threatening a direct military clash between NATO and Russia. The Russian warship Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, sank. Ukraine claims that it struck the Mosvka with anti-ship missiles. The Kremlin denies these claims. The Russian defense ministry said the ship’s crew of approximately 500 sailors was rescued, but Konstantin Zatulin, a senior Russian lawmaker, claimed that Russian sailors died in the attack. Boasting about the sinking of the ship, Ukrainian presidential adviser Alexei Arestovych said:
It’s a hugely important military event and the biggest defeat of the Russian Navy since WW2.
The sinking of the Moskva would be the largest warship sunk by tonnage since 1945. Earlier, the US had announced both new military weapons deployments to Ukraine and a massive expansion of “intelligence sharing,” with the WSJ writing on Tuesday:
The moves will enable Ukraine to target Moscow’s forces in Donbas and Crimea.
It is unclear the extent to which this “intelligence sharing” may have played a role in the sinking of the Moskva. Following the sinking of the warship, Russia claimed that Ukrainian helicopters caried out strikes on its territory on Thursday, attacking the border village Klimovo in the Bryansk Region and leaving seven people injured. Also on Thursday, European Union officials declared that an embargo of Russian oil imports by EU countries was in the works and would likely be adopted within a matter of weeks. The ban comes after a previously announced plan to halt the import of Russian coal. Reports suggest that, following these developments, Russia has significantly escalated direct attacks on Kiev, with explosions and power outages reported across the city. Izvestia wrote:
On the night of Friday Apr 15, powerful explosions were heard in different parts of Kyiv. Electricity went out in a significant part of the Ukrainian capital.
Further ratcheting up tensions, the Pentagon announced on Thursday According to the Pentagon:
The US will provide Ukraine with “300 Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems, 500 Javelin missiles and thousands of other anti-armor systems, 200 M113 APCs, 100 Humvees, 11 Mi-17 helicopters and a quantity of land mines. The US has now committed more than $3.2b in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden Administration, including approximately $2.6b since the beginning of Russia’s unprovoked invasion on Feb 24.
The announcement of a renewed expansion of arms shipments comes just after the prime minister of Finland declared that the country would seek to join NATO within a matter of weeks. In response, Russian officials have threatened a major nuclear buildup. Dimitri Medvedev, deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, said:
If Sweden and Finland join NATO, the length of the alliance’s land borders with Russia will more than double. Naturally, these borders will have to be strengthened.
Medvedev warned that Russia could deploy “Iskanders, hypersonics and ships with nuclear weapons” on its borders with NATO member states. Iskander missiles are capable of deploying nuclear weapons. NATO, for its part, is already massively expanding its nuclear arsenal along its borders with Russia. Jessica Cox, director of the NATO nuclear policy directorate in Brussels, told Defense News that US NATO allies would undertake to use the “nuclear sharing mechanics” of the F-35 fighter, implying the widespread deployment of tactical nuclear weapons along NATO’s borders. The escalation of the war follows last month’s NATO summit, in which Biden stated that Putin “cannot remain in power.” Following the summit, Biden declared:
We must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul. We must remain unified today and tomorrow and the day after and for the years and decades to come.
This week, Biden escalated this rhetoric against Russia yet again, declaring that the country was committing a “genocide” in Ukraine. Amid spiraling inflation, and a raging pandemic, the Biden administration is using the war in Ukraine in a desperate effort to divert social tensions outwards and manufacture national unity on the basis of war. The Biden administration is also seeking to use the war to impose a decisive military defeat on Russia, aiming to initiate regime change in the country in order to seize control of its vital natural resources, which the US sees as critical for its domination of the global economy and preparations for military conflict with China. The conflict, however, is rapidly spiraling out of control, raising the prospect of a direct clash between NATO and Russia and the first use of nuclear weapons since WW2, with consequences that are almost unfathomable.
Genocide and war propaganda
Joseph Scalice, WSWS, Apr 15 2022
Demolished vehicles line Highway 80. Operation Desert Storm, Apr 8 1991
On Tuesday, Biden declared that Russia was engaged in genocide in Ukraine. The allegation tossed off by Biden is a lie, but it is more than this. It is a political provocation consciously aimed at whipping up a public hysteria to legitimize a massive escalation of the war, including the full-scale, open participation by the US. Genocide is a word stamped with profound historical content. There is no graver charge that can be leveled. In 1948, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the UN codified an international legal definition of genocide as specific crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Genocide was the premeditated and systematic extermination of a population because of its race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.
The monstrous crimes of imperialism and war were weighed in popular consciousness by this measure, and those that began to approximate its barbarisms were deemed genocidal. History was reexamined in this light, and revealed the crimes of empire. The westward expansion of American capitalism was fueled by railroad coal and genocidal acts. The indigenous populations of America were impediments to this progress, and cavalry and settlers systematically exterminated them. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek Massacre, the forcible removal of children, the Sioux and Cheyenne, Comanche and Yuki were slaughtered. This is how “the West was won.” The emergence of American imperialism with the conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century, seizing a formal colony in Asia, was conducted on a scale and with a rapacity that was genocidal. Over 200k Filipinos were killed. They were tortured, their villages incinerated, and populations were forced into concentration camps. General Jacob Smith embodied the brutality of the conquest when he told his soldiers:
I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me.
Mass murder was a means to colonial conquest. Each of the major colonial powers held grip on their possessions by genocidal force when they deemed it necessary. The Belgians secured rubber from the Congo with forced labor, mutilations, torture and mass murder. The British retained India by dint of repeated massacres. The French subdued Algeria with genocidal violence. The dropping of atomic bombs by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocidal acts. The bombings killed nearly a quarter million people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. It is undeniable that race was a critical factor. American citizens of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned in internment camps in the United States. The “Japs” were different, it was frequently argued, and they would not surrender unless you killed every last one of them. Hundreds of thousands—doctors, high school students, grandmothers—were incinerated in the nuclear blasts; tens of thousands more died agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning.
The American ruling class sustained its Cold War hegemony by aiding and overseeing bloodshed around the world, often of genocidal dimensions. The Indonesian dictator Suharto rose to power in 1965 through the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of members of the Indonesian Communist Party. The US coordinated this mass murder, keeping track of its progress and providing radio communication to the military and paramilitary units carrying it out. Communists and alleged communists were hacked to death with machetes and their mutilated corpses clogged the rivers of Sumatra, Java and Bali. When the UN Convention on Genocide was completed in 1948, the US would not sign and did not do so for another forty years. There was a nervous awareness that charges might be raised against the US for its wars in Korea and Vietnam, for the carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and the use of Agent Orange and napalm. In 1988, when Washington finally signed the convention against genocide, it was with the stipulation that the US was granted immunity from prosecution for genocide unless the US national government authorized it.
The last thirty years have witnessed the uninterrupted crimes of US empire in the Middle East and Central Asia. Hospitals and villages were deliberately bombed. Cities were reduced to rubble. Economic sanctions starved hundreds of thousands of children to death, and drone strikes killed them at play. Once proud civilizations are haunted ruins, picked bare by the dogs of war. The only plausible defense that Bush, Obama and Trump could mount if they were charged with genocide, is that while they did launch and conduct wars of aggression that killed over a million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Afghans, they saw the deaths of men, women and children as a useful means to an end, and not as the end in itself. Their actions are undeniably genocidal. Biden stands at the head of this blood-soaked power and accuses Russia of genocide. The charges deliberately mangle and distort both the contemporary facts and the historically established legal definition.
Biden points to specific events, corpses in the streets of Mariupol, the bombing of a train station, which may be war crimes, but which require investigation. Neither the precise details nor the perpetrator have yet been established. No evidence whatsoever has been presented that Putin is intent upon eradicating the Ukrainian people. Nothing that has happened in Ukraine can be measured on the genocidal scale established by the Nazis and the US and other imperialist powers. Biden’s accusation trivializes the Holocaust and does violence to history. Biden’s accusations of genocide are not the rhetorical overreach of moral indignation. They are the deliberate and reckless escalation of conflict in service to the interests of US imperialism and they target Washington’s enemies. Washington cries genocide when Russia bombs Kiev, but not when Saudi Arabia drops US weapons on Yemen, killing more than 377k people. Biden accuses China of genocide for the treatment of the Uyghurs, but he says not a word about Israel’s systematic devastation of the Palestinians.
The atrocity stories told by Washington and the repeated, baseless accusations of genocide tell us far less of the events themselves and far more of the war fever that is convulsing the imperialist powers. Once genocide is invoked, there is no possible further rhetorical escalation. The US is preparing for direct military conflict with Russia. Biden speaks of genocide—blurring painfully acquired legal, historical, and moral distinctions, for the purposes of war propaganda. Russians, who bear no responsibility for the actions of their government—are now stigmatized, barred from international competitions, threatened and hounded internationally. In an unmistakable sense, Biden is cultivating a genocidal frame of mind, marked by irrational scapegoating and hatred on the basis of nationality. Biden’s false use of this term is setting into motion a global war which could prove to be genocidal, one in which the subject of the genocide is the human race itself.
Niqnaq 