When NATO members ranging from paralyzed Germany to pro-war Canada balk at shipping tanks to Ukraine for yet another round of escalation, NATO's General Secretary says otherwise. And now Germany follows suit. Canada will be next. The dam has burst.
Does anyone still deny this is a proxy war? It boggles the mind how the stream of arms shipments into Ukraine from NATO countries can be conceived as anything else. What do people imagine a proxy war is?
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The war is confusing as hell and the propaganda and lies are voluminous, although they've started to wane. Here in the West, Russian propaganda is virtually non-existent, but one of the tricks of Western propaganda is now convincing everyone that it lurks everywhere ready to trick you into falling under Putin's magical spell. Meanwhile, Westerners are marinating in a vile jingoism concocted by the corporate media, political elites, and the military brass.
Does anyone still believe the Russians will be rolling through Kharkiv and Kyiv, let alone Lviv? Is anyone under the delusion that the Russians have air superiority or that guided missiles have changed the nature of aerial warfare? Does anyone seriously believe the pariah war criminal Putin can command a Russian military that has lost all initiative and suffered three strategic setbacks: the advances on the capital, on Kharkhiv and Kherson?
But the lies and jingoism continue with the tanks question. Can anyone proclaiming the need for tanks honestly reconcile this with the location of the frontlines? We are looking at the two breakaway republics in the east and Crimea under solid Russian control. There remains undisputed Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation - everything south of Donetsk and the Dnipro River to the Black Sea, with the city of Zaporizhzhia as the current site of the most bloody fighting. Then there is the territory north of Luhansk and west of Kharkhiv.
What is the plan with the tanks? To retake this undisputed Ukrainian territory? Or is the plan to push the Russians out of the three disputed territories as well? Here we get into some serious problems because once again the jingoism has buried the fact that Ukraine also has no credible claim on the three disputed territories.
Do we ignore the fact that Crimean independence was squashed by the Ukrainian parliament in the mid-1990s? Do we ignore the fact that one response to protests across much of southern and eastern Ukraine against the Euromaidan Revolution was for the new government to suspend Russian minority language rights in these heavily Russian-speaking territories? Or that Ukrainian government support for fascist paramilitaries was another response? Do we ignore the fact that the independence referendums in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk were no more dubious and undemocratic Euromaidan Revolution/coup?
As with Russian claims, Ukrainian claims to these regions cannot be accepted at face value. These two parties cannot reach a settlement without someone brokering it. If you're doing NATO's dirty work, you can't broker peace. And we no longer have Belarus to play that critical role. Having openly backed and financed a Maidan-style revolution/coup in Belarus against dictator Lukashenko's stolen election in 2020, the West pushed Lukashenko decisively into Putin's arms to save him - after a quarter century of Lukashenko carving out some autonomy by balancing off Russian power against Western power. Lukashenko was in fact hugely popular in Euromaidan Ukraine for brokering the Minsk Agreements and constantly rebuffing Putin's demands - but the West's notorious penchant for regime change resulted in Belarus becoming the launch pad for Putin's opportunity to capture nearby Kyiv. This important example of Western imperialist blowback is completely erased in the mainstream. Who knows about this? Nobody!
Almost a year of war and the Russian Bear has been seriously mauled. There remains relatively little undisputed Ukrainian territory to recover from Russian occupation, with Mariupol as the prize of this occupied territory. Is this what the tanks are for? A massive advance through this territory wrapped up by driving the Russians out of Mariupol? Will it stop there? Will Ukraine try and take Crimea, Luhanks and Donetsk? Will Russian respond with a new form of escalation?
And do we believe nuclear weapons are off the table? Why would we? From its outset, this war has upset widely-held beliefs. The prevailing attitude of normal, sane people that Russia wouldn't dare invade Ukraine was burst. This attitude was by no means confined by liberals, the left, ordinary people or the rich. The prevailing attitude of almost everyone, including state intelligence and military apparatuses around the world, was that Russia's mighty military machine would whip the Ukrainians. These notions were steadily burst in the first weeks of the war.
With the Russians on the backfoot and the Ukrainians now demanding the weapons to launch major offensives against hardened Russian positions, now would be the time to demand a ceasefire and negotiate a peace. There are a variety of options that could be discussed, from demilitarization, to an international aid program, internationally-supervised referendums, autonomous self-government, etc.
But after its 20-year criminal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, NATO brass says more weapons and military escalation is the answer. NATO and its pro-war members have done nothing to broker a ceasefire and begin negotiating some kind of peace. The last time such efforts were made in April 2022, it was widely reported that UK's PM Boris Johnson went to the Ukrainian delegation and had the whole discussion spiked. Do the Ukrainian nationalists in the wartime government want peace? Ask the fascist-controlled Ministry of the Interior that 'killed while arresting' one of the Ukrainian diplomats who was in the middle of talks with the Russians in early March of 2022.
The Canadian government backs NATO's proxy war and is in deep with the Ukrainian government through money, arms, intelligence, military training, and a whole lot more. There is also an underground pipeline of government-sanctioned Canadian paramilitaries in Ukraine who are fighting and dying and will bring their demented politics and trigger-fingers back to Canada.
Here in Canada, demanding the end to the Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine means demanding the Canadian government begin brokering an end to the war. This, however, would mean breaking with the priorities of NATO escalation. Russia out of Ukraine and Canada out of NATO must be two sides of the same peace demand. You can't wage imperialism abroad and have democracy at home. The war always comes home.