The second phase of confrontation begins between Russia and the West
Two months have passed since Russia launched its special military operation on the territory of Ukraine. The second phase of the operation has begun, the theatre of operations and the operational situation have undergone serious changes. However, the collective West is also changing its approach to the military confrontation in Ukraine, increasingly realising that it is a question of changing the world order.
It is very difficult for us in Russia to understand what kind of fetish Ukraine has become for the collective West. Western propaganda plays up for the layman the banal story that a large and authoritarian Russia has attacked a small and democratic Ukraine, which, of course, needs to be helped in every possible way.
This single propaganda chorus of Western media has few precedents, and any alternative point of view is immediately marginalised or blocked. Now YouTube is removing videos that challenge the pro-Ukrainian version of the Bucha murders. The average European citizen has no direct sources of information that would show what is happening in Ukraine from the other side.
The European Community has become more united on the Ukrainian issue than ever before. Even Finland sends Ukraine anti-tank and small arms. Therefore, the Ukrainian issue has become a good reason for political PR among European leaders, who have recently been visiting Ukraine one after another.
"We are going to do everything in our power to ensure peace in Ukraine as soon as possible. In the meantime, logically, we are going to deploy all humanitarian aid and all military aid," Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said during a visit to Kiev.
For the sake of pre-election PR, French President Emmanuel Macron did a photo shoot in his office, being unshaven, dressed in hoodies and jeans, all in order to look more like Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, whom Western media constantly show in a "paramilitary environment". On April 22, Macron said that France will supply Ukraine with 155-mm CAESAR self-propelled guns.
EU leader Germany stands apart on the issue of supplying heavy weapons to Ukraine. An important role was played by a slap in the face on the part of the Ukrainian leadership when it refused to host German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, which caused a serious political resonance within Germany. At the same time, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has to justify the lack of supplies of heavy weapons to Ukraine by exhausting the arsenals of the Bundeswehr.
Also in an interview with the Spiegel magazine, he explained that when making a decision on arms supplies to Ukraine, "it's not about fear, but about political responsibility”, NATO should not become a party to the conflict. "I said earlier that we must do everything possible to avoid a direct military confrontation between NATO and such a heavily armed superpower as Russia, a nuclear power. I am doing everything I can to avoid an escalation leading to World War III. We must not allow an atomic war," Scholz explained.
It should be noted that the question of the legal status of Germany in the conflict in Ukraine really concerns the German leadership. "We support those partners who can promptly supply Soviet-made weapons. In this case, we guarantee replacement (of the weapons transferred to Ukraine), so that these deliveries can be carried out quickly by these countries. At the same time, I want to state clearly that we in the government are united in the fact that we will not become a party to the conflict by supplying weapons,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Burbok said.
In total, Germany has allocated €2 billion to Ukraine, some of which will be used for this "replacement". However, the CDU/CSU opposition parties plan to submit a resolution to the Bundestag on providing Ukraine with heavy weapons, if the Chancellor does not make such a decision. There are also quite a large number of supporters of this initiative within the ruling coalition, so the German media started talking about the possible resignation of Scholz if this resolution is adopted.
However, the essence of what is happening is not at all in the figures of German politics. Anton Hofreiter, a member of the Green Party and head of the EU affairs Committee, says that a third world war is de facto underway, of course, and the stakes are appropriate. The American political publication The Hill frankly writes that "the Ukraine war is a world-historical event altering the global order, already wreaking havoc on the world economy. How it ends will shape the world next."
On April 21, the New York Times published an article stating that the leadership in the administration of US President Joe Biden believes that the next four weeks will determine the final outcome of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with long-term consequences that will affect the map of Europe for decades to come. In this regard, the United States is in a hurry to supply heavy weapons to Ukraine in the form of artillery systems and even multiple launch rocket systems.
The New York Times writes that the list of telephone conversations between the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, included countries that could potentially provide heavy artillery to Ukraine: Australia, Great Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Turkey.
An anonymous Pentagon official told the publication that with the right weapons and high motivation, Ukrainian forces can not only stop the Russian military, but also push them back. Here it is necessary to explain that after the withdrawal of the Russian armed forces from Kiev, on American television, "military experts" began to declare that Ukraine can defeat Russia.
Also speaking to the BBC, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Ukraine “absolutely can defeat Russia”. Hence the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell’s statement that "this war must be won on the battlefield”.
After a visit to Kiev on April 24, Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin, commenting on the situation in Ukraine, even made a Freudian reservation: "We believe that they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support and we will do everything possible... We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can't do the things it did before it invaded Ukraine."
At the same time, the American magazine Politico writes that the current assistance to Ukraine from the West is not great enough, or it is already too late, since Russia has begun encircling the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Donbass. At the moment, the United States, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Estonia promise to provide Ukraine with heavy weapons and artillery. If Ukraine can immediately put Soviet-style equipment into operation, then it will take time for training to work with NATO equipment.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the British and Polish military are already training Ukrainian servicemen to work with armoured personnel carriers and anti-aircraft systems of the United Kingdom. The Americans have begun training Ukrainian soldiers with Pentagon-supplied howitzers, and the German military will also train Ukrainians to work with the PzH 2000 self-propelled guns, which the Netherlands will deliver.
In addition, it is worth noting that the Czech Defence Ministry confirmed that Czech companies will repair damaged Ukrainian military equipment, and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that Poland is ready to accept 10,000 wounded Ukrainian servicemen for treatment. Previously, Germany has already treated Ukrainian soldiers wounded in Donbass.
On April 21, it became known that the US presidential administration hired retired Lieutenant General Terry Wolff to coordinate military assistance to Ukraine and he will carry out his activities within the framework of the US National Security Council. While in the military, Wolff coordinated the supply of military equipment to the coalition of Western countries that fought ISIS.
You can be as ironic as you like about the effectiveness of this coalition's fight against ISIS, but the fact remains that the West is now creating a fully-fledged infrastructure for military support of Ukraine, which will be under the "umbrella" of NATO.
Here it’s possible to add information that Ukraine and Poland have signed a memorandum on strengthening cooperation in the railway sector, according to which they will create a joint logistics enterprise of the two countries. It has long been no secret that Poland has become the main hub that receives weapons from Western countries and from there they already spread across the territory of Ukraine.
Russia has already warned the West about arms supplies to Ukraine. On April 21, Deputy Director of the North America Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Sergey Koshelev, said: "We are directly telling the US representatives that the US-NATO weapons transports traveling through Ukrainian territory can be considered by the Russian armed forces as legitimate military targets."
On April 18, the Russian Aerospace Forces near the city of Lvov destroyed a hidden logistics centre and large shipments of foreign weapons that arrived in Ukraine from the United States and European countries, Major General Igor Konashenkov, an official representative of the Defence Ministry, said.
Naturally, the supply of heavy weapons will be easier to calculate and destroy, but some of them will still reach the UAF. It remains to be hoped that the bulk of Western heavy weapons and ammunition for them will not have time to enter the UAF units before the main major battles in Donbass.
In previous materials, it was pointed out that the Ukrainian side itself is not ready for a protracted conflict with Russia, since the Ukrainian economy is almost destroyed. They are interested in negotiations and peace agreements on acceptable terms. In a recent interview, adviser to the Ukrainian president Aleksey Arestovich said that the active phase of the conflict will end within two to three weeks.
Summing up the above, we can say that the collective West really expects to break Russia, fighting it to the last Ukrainian, although they are not ready for this. In addition, it deliberately exaggerates Ukraine's ability to defeat Russia in a military conflict in order to implement the next stage of demonising Russia - the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict.
CIA Director William Burns, speaking at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said: “Given the potential desperation of President Putin <...> none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.” This narrative of "Putin's nuclear blackmail" is now being very seriously dispersed in the Western media.
In this regard, the statements of Igor Kirillov, the head of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defence troops of the Russian Armed Forces, that the United States is preparing provocations to accuse the Russian side of using chemical, biological or tactical nuclear weapons, probably have sufficient grounds. Considering that in the current conflict we are talking about a change in the world order, with the development of Russia's success on the special military operation fronts, it is quite worth expecting an increase in the stakes from the West.