_{Photo: Cemetery in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images}

On top of the fog of war we have the additional problem of understanding due to the fog of the media.  Again and again we have been told that the West can increase its intervention because Putin’s red lines are a bluff.

In The Irish Times, its Ukraine correspondent commented (under the headline – ‘Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian supply lines would likely expose Putin’s escalation bluff’) – that previous delivery of F16s and invasion of the Kursk area of Russia had not ‘triggered the escalation that Moscow threatens.’  The byline also states that ‘Permission from US and Britain for Kyiv to hit targets deeper inside Russia expected to spark closer Moscow link with Iran and North Korea, not conflict with Nato.’

A second IT article states that ‘The US may in the coming days grant the UK and France permission to let Kyiv use their long-range strike weapons, which rely on American navigational data, inside Russia as requested by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said people familiar with the discussions.’  In the event, we have been told that this decision has been postponed.

The British, in the shape of Starmer and Lammy have been to the forefront in pushing their use, with Lammy rejecting Putin’s threats because he was just “throwing dust up into the air” with “a lot of bluster.”  Some voices urging caution have been reported (see the second link above) but no explicit explanation why Putin’s ‘threats’ might be real.

The western media pretends to the truth and objectivity but this whole narrative is suffused with propaganda and illustrative of how an unwitting and unwilling public could be dragged into war.  The US and UK threaten to hit Russia with long-range missiles, but it is Putin who issues ‘threats’.  The potential for escalation can be ignored because previous Russian red lines have been crossed without consequence, even if many of these red lines have been the creations of the Western politicians and media itself, under the cover of general Russian disapproval and vitriol.

The West threatens these attacks while dismissing Russian ‘escalation’ as if the word escalation is a Russian one, which only its actions involve. It has also been suggested that Russia doesn’t really have any red lines, a view which ironically helped bring about the war in the first place. If there are three claims made about it, it is that Russia carried out a full-scale invasion in 2022 that was illegal and unprovoked.  However, only one of these is correct.

Without doubt the invasion was illegal but it was not full scale and was not unprovoked.  The head of the Ukrainian armed forces Syrskyi recently admitted that Russia invaded with around 100,000 troops, a force far smaller than the Ukrainian army. Hardly full scale in terms of numbers and therefore in objectives.  Russia had for decades made it clear that Ukrainian membership of NATO was unacceptable and represented a threat to its security.  The Russian invasion took place because this red line was crossed, and the threat of long range missiles against it is confirmation of why it took this view.

This does not mean that its position is therefore justified and should be supported.  The nature of the war is determined by the nature of the forces involved and socialists cannot support either Russia or Ukraine/NATO without ceasing to be socialist.  Many in the West have taken this course and in doing so crossed class lines – the red lines that socialists have – to become traitors and enemies of the working class.

Repeated escalation of Western involvement has been accompanied by the claim that previous Russian red lines have been crossed while at the same time stating that they don’t exist.  Russian warnings can thus be acknowledged and then ignored, bit by bit habituating workers in the West to further and further aggression and steps towards outright war.  This has been clear from before the Russian invasion through NATO expansion into Eastern Europe but still many leftists in the West pretend there is not an imperialist proxy war, a claim more and more impossible to square with each escalation.

Putin, who the media is ever so keen to quote, has stated that in order for long range missiles to strike Russia NATO personnel must be directly involved, on top of provision of intelligence and targeting assistance.  This is one reason given why Germany has rejected such action – because it involves NATO in direct conflict in a new way.  The risks of a significant step towards world war are obvious, made all the more unjustifiable by repeated acknowledgement by those championing their use that these missiles ‘would have only “a limited effect” on the war as a whole’ and Lammy’s admission that “No war is won with any one weapon.”

Putin has stated  that “direct participation” of NATO countries in the war in Ukraine “would substantially change the very essence, the nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the USA and European states, are fighting with Russia.”  The self-censorship of the Western media means that this statement is quoted without any attempt to acknowledge its truth or even to deny it.

There is a certain amount of irrationality in such a course and a number of ideas have been propounded about it, such as that the US and Russia will have an agreement that certain targets will be off-limits if/when these attacks are carried out. In any case, it is clear that Zelensky and the most rabid Ukrainian nationalists either cannot or will not survive politically without escalation, with their justification that it will bring the end of the war closer through Russian agreeing to negotiations already being disproved.

Ukraine is losing the war, and its only hope is increased US/NATO intervention, which it may seek to achieve through provocations against Russia producing a response that could be used as justification.  Just as Ukraine is losing, so is Russia winning, which is why so many of its purported red lines have been ignored while it has continued its objectives of degrading and neutering the Ukrainian armed forces. It has no reason to seek to go beyond its existing approach.

The goal of the US is degradation of Russia, and it has no interest in ending a war that achieves this or makes a significant contribution towards it.  At the same time, it has no interest in a war with Russia although miscalculation can play a part in creating one.  Its intervention so far has been to prolong the war through military support to Ukraine, without which it could not have continued, and scuppering the potential peace deal that was being negotiated, something given additional support by a recent interview with the US apparatchik Victoria Nuland.  If the war cannot be pursued through Ukrainian collapse the US with NATO may seek to freeze it in order to lay the ground for another one at a more propitious time, as it did with the MINSK agreements.

Whatever motives and calculations are being made by the various imperialist elites we can be sure that the fog of the media will not reveal them but provide the gloss necessary for their actions to maintain the passivity and ignorance of their populations.  The pro-war left go a step beyond this to prettify these motives, calculations and actions so that they are worse than the capitalist media. They too rely on it to ensure that the real nature of the war is covered up.

See also Sticking it to the Russians