Starmer’s regime, and now Burnham’s, has carried on and intensified the actions of the previous Sunak/Truss/ Johnson regime in sending Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine, for the Zelensky-Nazi regime to fire into Russia with obvious British technical and intelligence data to guide them. This could not be done without the active involvement of British military personnel, as the Russian government was always well aware. Far from being the military adventurist that Western imperialist propaganda claims, Putin has been extremely cautious and restrained in confronting this kind of provocative activity. By sticking rigidly to the strict territorial objectives of the campaign of attrition Russia has waged against the occupation of Donbass territory, Russia is on the brink of victory. The Maidan regime staggers on the brink of collapse, having coerced millions of its own citizens into unwillingly marching into a meat grinder, which may have killed millions of such forced conscripts in a dirty war to hang onto territory whose population does not want to be ruled by Kiev.
The standard tactic of the Ukrainian Nazi regime when being forced to surrender a town or village is to demand that the population leave with them, or be murdered. Many have in fact been murdered trying to hide in basements from the killer battalions, with the Russian army often making grisly discoveries when they take control. This is how the Russophone Ukrainian population of East Ukraine is treated by the Nazi regime, for whom speaking Russian is a crime worthy of death. It’s also why the mere liberation of the four provinces currently being fought over is not going to be sufficient to end the war. A realistic objective is the liberation of more than a third of present-day Ukraine, roughly on a diagonal line between just to the West of Odessa, linking up with Transnistria, the Russian-speaking rebel enclave of Moldova that is close to Odessa, skirting Kyiv and extending to the Kharkov oblast. This partition is the logic of the abolition of constitutional language equality by the Kyiv regime after Maidan in 2024.
As Russia has got closer and closer to outright victory in the Donbass , the level of hysterical Russophobia from the British bourgeoisie, as well as the other main West European imperialists, France and Germany, and the weak, vassal ruling classes in several of the weak bourgeois states in East Europe that have been absorbed into the European Union and become vassals of the main EU states, has risen to a crescendo of hatred and warmongering frenzy. The West-European bourgeoisies are actively seeking ways to wage war against Russia. They continually claim that they expect Russia to attack Western Europe by around 2030 or 2035, depending on which war narrative you read, and demand draconian cuts in social spending throughout Europe to pay for rearmament to confront and fight a war with Russia. The demand is for arms spending to rapidly rise to at least 5% of GBP over the next several years, but at the same time some of their most virulent elements keep raising demands for action now, for greater use of Western weapons and more drone terrorism by Ukraine against Russian civilians in towns and cities, or attacks on strategic economic or military assets, to provoke Russia into an armed response. This has a crazed aspect, that is causing alarm across the continent, and is provoking political dissent from some on both the left and the right.
The West European bourgeoisies are hysterical about Russia under Putin having refused to simply knuckle under to the Western diktat to privatise and subordinate its economy to the neoliberal ethos, which was proceeding apace under Yeltsin in the 1990s, an epoch which impoverished the Russian population and reduced Russia to 14th economic ranking in terms of GPD PPP. Today in the same terms, Russia’s economy is ranked 4th, and it has achieved this by not being an appendage of the West, but by de-facto, an evolving alliance with the giant deformed workers state of China, as well as Iran, in BRICS. Iran being the central nation involved in resisting the Greater Israel project in West Asia – Israel being a key, discrete imperialist power within the Western alliance of imperialist states with its own interests, which uses its independent ‘lobbying’ power among the bourgeoisies of the West to push hard for those interests within those imperialist alliances. Under Biden and Obama’s presidencies, a very similar strategy was pursed by the United States – the Maidan coup was pushed through in Ukraine by the Obama administration, and Biden as President was as provocatively anti-Russian as any of the Europeans, provoking the Special Military Operation in 2022 by pushing the Maidan regime into a major attack on the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as the current Donetsk and Lugansk provinces of the Russian Federation were then called after rebelling against the Western sponsored Nazi-Maidan coup in 2014. This was extensively reported on at the time by the courageous Swiss former OSCE Official Jacques Baud, who is now being ‘sanctioned’ by the Western powers for his dissent in a similar manner to the equally courageous and outspoken opponent of Israel’s genocide and UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese. Biden initiated the supply of US ATACMS missiles to Ukraine for firing into Russia itself, which, like Storm Shadow, needed US personnel to target and operate them, which the Russians were and are fully aware of.
The main reason why the Trump administration has demurred from this approach somewhat, both in his first (2017 to 2021) term and this one from 2025 onwards, has been because of Trump being qualitatively more subservient to Israel than previous presidents. For him, full commitment to the proxy war in Ukraine was counterposed to his project of deepening US collaboration with Israel in order to attack Iran, which no previous US President was prepared to go through with, and it was clear that the US in decline was no longer able to supply two such major wars at the same time. Now that the attack on Iran has come unstuck, and the US has suffered a major, strategic defeat in West Asia over this attack, there has been something of a swing back to at least a posture by the Trump administration of more aggression against Russia, more in tune with the Europeans. But it is somewhat hollow, as the depletion of US stocks of important missiles and other munitions, and its more general failures, have also affected its ability to be effective in the Ukraine proxy war as this failure has done elsewhere. Like the US taking THAAD missile defence systems from South Korea, where they were aimed at China and North Korea, and sending them to West Asia where a number of such facilities have been destroyed by Iran, has adversely affected the US’s ability to confront China. Which in a way is all to the good, but it does underline the contradictions of Washington’s aggression on behalf of Israel, and how it has accelerated the US decline.
