EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR FRIDAY JUNE 23, 2023
The ‘Counteroffensive’ Is Dead: Time ‘To See Oursels As Ithers See Us!’
June 22, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—The harsh reality of thousands of Ukrainian youth dying in “killing fields” in the last 2-3 weeks of the vaunted “counteroffensive” is beginning to haunt the Western alliance. Instead of the beginning of conquering of the Donbass, of Zaporozhye, of the drive into Crimea, etc., an estimated 13,000-plus Ukrainian soldiers are casualties (wounded or killed) in 2.5 weeks of senseless battle. Not getting past even the first line of multi-layered defensive lines erected by Russia, lines built up with trenches, fortifications, minefields, questions must be asked.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies of CODEPINK relate that “on the advice of British military advisers in Kyiv,” Ukrainian troops were sent forward “without air support or demining operations. The results have been predictably disastrous.” They cite a “senior European military officer in Kyiv” who said: “We tried to tell them to stop these piecemeal tactics, define a main thrust with infantry support and do what they can.... [But] they were trained by the British and they’re playing Light Brigade,” referring to the infamous 1854 battle in which Britain’s Light Cavalry Brigade made a suicidal charge into massive Russian cannon and were wiped out during the Crimean War. Such a violation of “the basic rules of military tactics” comprises a “suicide mission.”
What sort of reckless disregard is it that can’t take into account what Russia had done in the construction of the defenses the last many months? Or perhaps it was known, but, as Benjamin and Davies argue, Kyiv and the Western allies, without a chance of succeeding, deliberately sacrificed “the flower of Ukraine’s youth in a proxy war they will not send their own children or grandchildren to fight”—and that “reflects the moral bankruptcy of U.S. and NATO political leaders.”
At Russia’s Security Council meeting today, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reported to President Putin that the estimate of 13,000 Ukrainian casualties was based upon intercepted communications of Ukrainian military commanders. The mass slaughter has halted, at least temporarily, the counteroffensive. Meanwhile, Russian recruitment and production of weapons continues to expand, with 114,000 additional troops through regular channels, plus 52,000 “highly motivated” volunteers being kept in reserve.
Who is more to blame—the gang in London and Washington that play so cavalierly with Ukrainian lives in their continued drive Eastward? Or the gang in Kyiv that has been so cavalier with their own population, willing to fight the proxy war, all the while trying to manufacture a bloody enough shirt to get the West into a direct confrontation with Russia? There’s not much honor amongst thieves, or amongst such gangs, and that injects no little instability in this world.
Hussein Askary of the Belt and Road Initiative in Sweden (BRIX) and Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche participated yesterday in a webinar, joined by officials from Pakistan and Afghanistan, entitled “International Forum on Xinjiang Modernization Drive from a Global Perspective.” There, the positive model of China’s development of its Xinjiang Province, investing in education and industry to outflank poverty, backwardness, and recruitment into violence and terrorism was posed as the solution for Afghanistan and any underdeveloped area. Yes, that Xinjiang!
The self-indulgent fantasies promulgated in the West against China about abuse and genocide in Xinjiang are no less perverse than the inability to see the defenses that the Russians have constructed, or the 800,000,000 Chinese peasants brought out of deep poverty over the last three decades.
Perhaps it is time to take a page from that republican poet Robert Burns, in his poem “To a Louse”: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!” Humans have that power, as surely as we have a sense of humor, and a passion for the sublime
