The Russian army, or rather the associated Wagner group, has ended the conquest of Bakhmut this week. Until 2016, this city of Donbass, now converted into waste, was called Artiomovsk, in honor of the Bolshevik leader Fiodor Sergeyev, whose name of war was Artiom. Sergeyev was the inspiration of the Republic of Donetsk during the Russian civil war and in 1918 he fought against foreign interventionists, white Russians and Ukrainian nationalists. In reaction to the change of regime protected by the US and the European Union in the heat of the popular uprising in Kiev, the inhabitants of Donbass proclaimed in 2014 the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the new republic was declared the heir to the first republic of 1918. Thus, in 2016, the Ukrainian president of Petro Poroxen changed the name of the city as part of the campaign to destroy Soviet names, monuments and symbols, replacing it with a nationalist narrative of the new regime.

In the current war, the city was declared “irreducible fortress” by the government of Kiev, where it built one of its three fortified defensive lines. The Western and Ukrainian press praised the “strategic importance” of Bakhmut/Artiomovsk a few months ago. In February began the military pulse of conquest of the city, which has been adopted by the Russians, the same means and people say that the city is strategically irrelevant. So did Bakhmut with journalist Seymour Hersh: The “Pulitzer Prize” was an “excellent journalist” until, on behalf of the president of Bide, EE.UU. explained in detail how the NordStream pipelines operated. At that time, Hersh became a “controversial journalist.” Now the Russian conquest of Bakhmut has hardly been news here.

The fall of the city indicates that Russia is winning the war. According to the most reliable analyses, Ukraine is suffering more injuries and deaths than Russia in this war.

Russian analysts take Ukraine’s announced, or already launched, counter-attack very seriously. You know the situation may get worse, but the numbers don't match what you see. Unlike last year, Russia now has a leadership in soldiers and artillery, and the latter is decisive in a war that looks more like the First than the Second World War, if not because Moscow is operating on its lines a clear economy of human lives. This is clearly not what explains the war propaganda of the West and its media network, which shows us the war as if it were a Russian meat grinder. But let us not deceive ourselves, let us celebrate less: the Ukrainians are the ones who are putting the most deaths into this dramatic massacre. And the possibility of having more soldiers is much lower than the Russians.
Eight million Ukrainian citizens have gone abroad and more than three of them have gone to Russia, another illustrative fact that has been concealed, so today the country must have between 25 and 30 million inhabitants compared to 145 million in Russia. Ukraine is desperately gathering people on the streets without wanting to go ahead. The military men of Kharkov's age fear that a raid would send to the front in 48 hours when the alarm sounded in search of last year's protection of the metro. For the same reason many do not leave the house. Hundreds of thousands of young people have left the Russian country to prevent war from being called, and the same is true of Ukraine, where in December the border service reported 12,000 detainees trying to cross the Romanian border illegally. According to reports from German anti-militarist organizations, there are over 175,000 deserters and objectors in Ukraine. And that's what happens in a country where you buy the right person by donating thousands of dollars.

This is a fairly widespread view, both in Russia and in the West – widespread, but almost non-widespread – that tanks and aircraft supplied by NATO or pending supply are going to undermine this correlation of forces. We are facing an erosion war and Russia, despite the obvious disproportion of forces towards NATO, seems well equipped from an industrial point of view. It has a good air attack defence system and a good missile system. It seems that Patriot has already removed some expensive American battery. This is suggested, beyond the relevant propaganda, by the fall in the stock market price of the company producing these weapons this month as a reaction to the news about their ineffectiveness, which will have dramatic consequences on the sale and export of those sold as empty weapons.

This does not mean that things are going well for Russia. New Western weapons, British missiles, German tanks and slightly further away American aircraft are fuelling the boom of war, and all of them will probably make possible more concentrated attacks on crime. For their part, the continuing accusations by the leader of the Wagner group, Evgeni Katozhin, against the Russian army, insulting its generals and the defence minister himself and reproaching that they had not given him ammunition, show very well the internal avatars among the Russians.

Beyond the military sphere, Russia has lost most of the Russian capital in Ukraine before the invasion. Ukrainian ethnic nationalism, which once dominated only in Galicia and in the western regions of the country, has advanced many positions throughout the territory. Outside Crime and Donbass, the resentment towards Russia of Ukrainians speaking Russian has been on the rise, with no turning back. That is the only victory of Ukrainian nationalism in this war and the Russians have served it at their fingertips.

The political and media pressure from the West is very dangerous, because they are protecting the most delirious sectors of Ukraine who dream of “absolute victory”, who want to regain all that the Russians have annexed, including Crime. This reconquest does not yet seem possible without the direct military intervention of NATO soldiers, and in this case the Russian nuclear hypothesis would have great potential.

As for Russian society, it is not yet at war. The conflict is not apparent in Moscow and St. Petersburg, although repression of the marginal opposition is very harsh. In this context, the greater military involvement of the West and the Ukrainian actions and attacks on Russian territory, such as the military raison d ' êzia carried out by far-right Russian volunteers in the Belgorod region on the border with Russia, will only encourage the support of a war-prone society.

The authors clearly acknowledge the Ukrainian attacks on civilians defending the war in Russia. “What they call terrorism, we call it liberation,” said Kiril Budanov, a young general responsible for these attacks by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. “This didn’t start because I went crazy and started killing people in Moscow, but because they invaded our country since 2014. I’m not going to expand on this, but we will kill the Russians and continue to kill the Russians anywhere in the world until Ukraine achieves total victory.” Dozens of “collaborators” have died in attacks in Russian-occupied regions: Writer Zajar Prilepin, who survived a bomb attack in his car on 6 May in Nizhni Novgorod, died there the bodyguard and the driver; the blog ultra Vladlen Tatarski, on 2 April, died in a cafe in St. Petersburg with a bomb talk, and the daughter of a dozen of a mortal past. “These cases have happened and are going to be more, those people are going to receive a deserved penalty that I will do,” proclaimed Budanov, Russian from Odessa, 37 years old.

Last year, the American position was to convince the Ukrainians not to commit attacks on Russia, while the Ukrainians did not accept the authorship of their actions. This year things have changed, Budanov clearly says, and the German Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, also considers Ukraine’s operations in Russia to be absolutely normal. “We know that decisions on these terrorist attacks are not taken in Kiev, but in Washington,” says Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.

These events, as well as the sabotage of the railways and other actions carried out in Russia, will return to Ukraine and the West, because the Russian internal social consensus will be narrowing, towards a war that still does not attract much enthusiasm, and perhaps towards a total, more reciprocal mobilization, if NATO intervenes directly. At the same time, these attacks predict what will happen in the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia, in the event of confrontation and military “victory”.

At the international level, the latest G7 summit in Hiroshima has underlined the escalation: capitulation and unconditional, and total military withdrawal from Russia, “greater assistance to Ukraine for the time needed to reach just peace” and the green light for the delivery of modern warplanes, while the tension against China is tightened. The answer has been greater industrial and military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing in Beijing, with the visit of Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishutin, accompanied by a third of his cabinet ministers, and the visit of the Chinese party security officer Chen Wenqing, the first security chief who is much more than a minister to Moscow.

The Chinese are well aware that Washington wants to “repeat the Ukraine crisis in Asia Pacific,” says the Chinese newspaper Global Times. It says that the aim is to provoke a war of procurement against China and to create an Asian NATO. The Chinese are clearly preparing against the spread of war promoted by the United States and are asking the Russians to transfer the most modern air defence systems, including the new and improved S-400 and S-500 models. Russia will, of course, receive China’s industrial/military support in return; the more it engages militarily against the two NATO, the greater the aid.

This article was collected from the publication Ctxt, where it was published with this title: Gerraren ikastaroa