Tanks used by the Ukrainian military, destroyed in the counter-offensive. Photo: Voltaire Network.
By Thierry Meyssan – Jun 13, 2023
In six days, from June 4 to 10, 2023, the Ukrainian army launched its counter-offensive and suffered a terrible defeat.
During the summer, Russian forces built two defense lines in the part of Novorossia they liberated and in the Donbass. They prevent the passage of all armored vehicles.
Ukrainian forces have chosen a dozen points of attack to retake “enemy-occupied” territory. Their armored vehicles were unable to get through the first line of Russian defenses and piled up in front of it, where they were destroyed one by one by Russian artillery and suicide drones.
At the same time, the Russian army targeted missiles at command centers and arsenals inside Ukrainian territory and destroyed them.
The Ukrainian air defense system was destroyed by hypersonic missiles as soon as it was installed. In its absence, the Ukrainians were unable to carry out the maneuvers planned by Nato.
Russia did not use any of its new weapons, apart from its NATO weapons jamming system and some of its hypersonic missiles.
The border is now a long graveyard of tanks and men. Airports are full of smoking Mig-29 and F-16 wrecks.
The staffs of the United States, the Atlantic Alliance and Ukraine are passing the buck for this historic disaster. Hundreds of thousands of human lives and 500 billion dollars have been wasted for nothing. Western weapons, which shook the world in the 90s, are now worthless compared to the Russian arsenal of today. Strength has changed sides.
Two conclusions can already be drawn:
Do not confuse the Ukrainian army with the “integral nationalists”
While there is no longer a Ukrainian army capable of high-intensity warfare, there are still the forces of the “integral nationalists” (sometimes called “Banderists” or “Ukrainian-Nazis”). But they are only trained for low-intensity warfare. Its leaders went to fight in Chechnya in the late 90s on behalf of the CIA and NATO secret services, and sometimes in Syria in the 2020s. They are trained in targeted assassinations, sabotage and civilian massacres. Nothing more.
They succeeded
- In sabotaging the Russian-German-French-Dutch Nord Stream gas pipeline, plunging Germany and then the European Union into recession on September 26, 2022.
- In sabotaging the Kerch Strait bridge (known as the “Crimean Bridge”), on October 8, 2022.
- In attacking the Kremlin with drones, May 3, 2023
- In using drones to attack the Ivan Kurs, the intelligence vessel defending the Turkish Stream gas pipeline in the Black Sea, on May 26, 2023.
- In sabotaging the Kakhovka dam to split Novorossia in two, on June 6, 2023.
- In sabotaging the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline to destroy the Russian mineral fertilizer industry, on June 7, 2023.
Just as in the two World Wars and the Cold War, they proved their terrorist capabilities, but played no decisive role on the battlefield.
Now more than ever, we need to distinguish between Ukrainians who thought they were defending their people, and the “integral nationalists” [1], who don’t care about their compatriots and have been trying for a century to eradicate Russians and their culture.
The Ukraine we knew is dead
Until now, Ukraine has been above all a power of communication. Kiev succeeded in making people believe that the 2014 coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected president in favor of integral nationalists was a revolution. Likewise, it has managed to make people forget the way it crushed its citizens in the Donbass, refusing to give them access to public services, to pay civil servants’ salaries and pensions to the elderly and, ultimately, bombing its cities. Finally, it succeeded in convincing Westerners that Ukraine was a homogenous country with a single population living a common history.
As in most wars, there is also a “civil war” aspect [2]. Today, everyone can see that, contrary to what was claimed, Vladimir Putin’s analysis was not a reconstruction of history, but a factual truth. The people of Donbass are profoundly Russian. The people of Novorossia (including Crimea) are of Russian culture, albeit with a different history (they have never known serfdom). Ukraine has never existed as an independent state in history, apart from one decade, during the periods 1917-22 and 1941-45, and three other decades, since 1991.
During these three experiences, Kiev never stopped purging its people and massacring its citizens when the full nationalists were in power (1917-22 with Simon Petliura, 1941-45 with Stepan Bandera, and 2014-22 with Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky). In total, over the course of a century, the “integral nationalists” – as they call themselves – have murdered more than 3 million of their compatriots.
During the First World War, the people of Novorossia had already risen up around the anarchist Nestor Makhno; during the Second World War, the people of Donbass and Novorossia rose up as Soviets; while this time, they are fighting against the “integral nationalists” in Kiev with Russian forces.
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The only way to stop these massacres is to separate the “integral nationalists” from the population of Russian culture they want to kill [3]. Since Nato staged a coup in 2014 and put them in power, there’s no other way but to note the country’s current division and leave them in power in Kiev. It is the Ukrainians, and they alone, who will have to overthrow them.
Current military operations have already done so. The part of the country liberated by the Russians voted in a referendum to join the Federation. However, last year’s Russian advance was halted by President Vladimir Putin as part of negotiations with Ukraine, conducted first in Belarus, then in Turkey. Odessa is still Ukrainian in law, even though it is culturally Russian. Transnistria is still Moldavian, even though it is culturally Russian.
The war is technically over. No offensive can alter the current borders. Admittedly, the fighting may drag on and a peace treaty is a long way off, but the die is cast. There is still a problem in Ukraine and Moldavia: Odessa and Transnistria are still not Russian. Above all, there remains a fundamental problem: in violation of their oral and written commitments, the members of the Atlantic Alliance have stockpiled US weapons on Russia’s borders, jeopardizing its security.
