Current Affairs

What to make of Biden’s trip to Kiev and Putin’s speech, are just distractions from what Ukraine needs. The question has to be can Ukraine win with current losses, 100,000 either dead or injured. Russia itself is haemorrhaging manpower, 200,000 dead or wounded, a statistic of 2:1 in favour of the Ukrainians. But the argument is that Russia can continually dip into its vast trove of manpower, which the Ukrainians can’t.

The concept that this is a battle of attrition, where the country that has the most manpower will win, leads to the question of whether the Ukrainians need a better outcome when it comes to kill rates. In Rhodesia, the kill rate was 10:1, this to large for the government to take and peace talks ended the war, though the government dominated the kill rate. But the question itself is distant from the reality that is going on, people in Ukraine are going through their daily lives, spending time with their families and only stopping for funerals and kneeling to the brave who have fallen. In Russia, the dead are hidden, the statistics don’t exist and those that are remembered are soon forgotten.

Russia has thrown everything it can to make the Ukrainians uncomfortable, rockets that hit housing estates, drones that splutter to a halt in mid air and crash into electricity sub stations and above all artillery that smashes into homes that once held families. Each a crime against humanity, but the uncomfortable truth is that this was nothing compared to the executions, rapes, movement of children from their home towns into exile in Russia, where they are re-educated with the books that do not mention their identity, or the teachers who do not identify with anything that their Ukrainian parents would have wanted, or identified with.

The books stored outside the Mariupol University was just the catalyst of a state that cannot accept that there are other voices or that anybody would identify with Ukrainian, culture, literature, language or art. Lives that have been lost, are being swept under banners proclaiming the greatness of the Russian state. Those lost in the rubble of the theatre or library in Mariupol are being forgotten, as the ethnic make-up of the city is being sidelined by a culture that does not recognise those who live their lives in a desperate huddle of queues that have to find a way to live.

So is Joe Biden, willing to give the Ukrainians what they need to bring the kill rate up, or like everybody else is still sitting on the fence and arguing that 2:1 is a good number. That is the question that must be dominating the thoughts of those who have to sit in a trench, be bombed by artillery and stand tall when suicidal Russian soldiers run into the gunfire that slaughters them.

In an interview with the Economist last year, President Zelinsky was asked whether this would be a long war or short war. After thinking for a couple of seconds he managed to question whether the West wanted a long or short war. There are countries he argued that wanted to see the Russian military weakened, they don’t want an outright victory just the depletion of the Russian military, whatever the cost to Ukraine. “We can win this war” he claimed, “but whether we win in the short term is dependent on the type of weapons that we have.”

President Joe Biden, yesterday promised that longer range missiles were on their way, but fighter jets themselves were still under consideration. Analysts were left with the question of whether the tanks promised from the West would be protected by the current weapons systems that were in Ukraine. The consideration of a shorter war is dependent on the Ukrainians securing the necessary equipment to secure the skies not only over the cities of Ukraine but also over the battlefields. The question has to be why these weapons are not coming into the hands of the Ukrainians.

According to the Telegraph newspaper, President Putin wanted to launch his new multi head missile on Kiev during Biden’s visit to Ukraine. Whether this is just not true or whether Putin really did, should have focussed the mind of Biden. But the problem is that it takes an action to create a response by the West and those responses are very much taken in Ukraine. But it is the type of war that is being fought that differentiates the West from Russia, it has become a question of incrementally increasing the weapons that the Ukrainians can use, before Putin threatens something else.

Putin in his state speech declared that Russia was leaving the strategic arms agreement, but the question is why. The answer is quite simple, he realises that Russia cannot fight a war with NATO and win. The dominant argument that Russia is a Super Power is now determined by nuclear weapons. The reality is that the Russian army is not the force that he thought or was led to believe, and that Russia itself is not a super power.

The reality is that Putin lost the war when he invaded Ukraine, the arguments about Ukrainian identity were lost when the Russian’s moved into Ukraine in an act of force that was not only suicidal but also determined by vague ideas that Ukraine would buckle to the will of Russian force. Ukrainian identity has been cemented within Europe, they no longer question their own ethnic make up, but celebrate the fact that they are European, sooner, rather than later.

But the geopolitical argument itself has moved Russia to new markets, strangely moving Russia into the hands of countries that are either cash poor or a dominant power. China and India have taken positions that have refused to vote against Russian aggression in Ukraine in the United Nations, and have brought Russian oil, but this itself does not tell the whole story. Putin in his speech detailed that the poor would get 18 percent help from the state. This means that Russia is expecting inflation to reach this mark, which tells you something about the situation and the balance of payments. So are China, India etc, buying oil at a hugely discounted cost. This is one of the geopolitical questions that may be significant, especially as the West has put a $60 per barrel price cap on Russian exports of oil. So is the price cap significant, that is a question that cannot be answered, but the 18 percent uplift certainly determines that Russia is in some sort of inflationary spiral that will challenge the Russian state in the year to come.

Ultimately, it is a war that will end, how it ends is entirely in the hands of the Russian state, but the argument that Ukraine is a satellite state to Russia, no longer holds true. If Russia is sensible it will open doors to negotiate, but the red lines determined by Ukraine have now been set. There is no argument other than the security of Ukraine, but that itself is dependent on Ukraine winning this war and liberating the whole of the east and once again being a country with roots out to the world along its shore, which was agreed in 1990. The story has not ended, but Putin seems to know that the game is up and though he is shoring up his popularity within controlled outlets, such as the stadium rally, the reality is that Russia needs to think again and realise that they are no longer the super power that they once thought they were.