On 14 September Prime Minister Keir Starmer travelled to Washington for foreign policy talks with US President Biden. NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine was central to the discussions; Starmer’s purpose was to lobby the US on Ukraine’s possible use of NATO-supplied long range missiles against Russian territory. Such an escalation risks the proxy war moving towards a direct confrontation between nuclear-armed imperialist powers. George O’Connell reports.
The bilateral talks followed a joint visit to Ukraine by Foreign Secretary David Lammy and his US counterpart Antony Blinken. There they heard Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pleas for the removal of existing restrictions on the use of US ATACM and British Storm Shadow missiles. At present they can only be fired on targets within Ukrainian territory; Zelensky wants permission to fire them into Russia itself, currently a ‘red line’ imposed by the US, NATO’s de-facto leader, as well as by key European imperialist power Germany. Russian President Putin has pointed out that their deployment requires trained NATO operators and that the missiles would depend on targeting information from NATO satellites. Their use would thereby constitute direct NATO aggression and would entitle Russia to respond in kind and possibly use nuclear weapons.
On 20 September Zelensky addressed the UN general assembly pleading for support from the ‘global south’ before visiting Washington to deliver a ‘plan for victory’ centring on the relaxation of the missile restrictions. However, the military significance of lifting the restrictions will not be a game-changer for Ukrainian military prospects: supplies are limited by dwindling NATO stockpiles and production lead times, and they will not compensate for Ukraine’s gaping shortages in manpower and artillery shells.
British imperialism: provocateur-in-chief
Former Foreign Secretary David Cameron raised the possibility of granting Ukraine permission to launch Storm Shadows into Russia in May 2024 but when Keir Starmer followed suit after his July general election victory, the Ministry of Defence had to row back for the moment. Throughout the conflict, British imperialism has been the provocateur-in-chief among Ukraine’s imperialist backers. It was the first NATO member to provide Ukraine with battle tanks and the first to provide long/medium-range strike missiles. Then in March 2024 leaked correspondence between high-ranking German military officials revealed British soldiers were ‘on the ground’ in Ukraine. Whilst the value of British military aid to Ukraine is a fifth of that from the US, Britain has focused on political stunts to force escalation of the conflict with the enthusiastic support of the media.
Hence the sensationalist rhetoric: ‘What are Storm Shadow missiles and why are they crucial for Ukraine?’ – BBC News, 12 September. The supposedly liberal Guardian, unable to contain its excitement, published a map on 13 September of prospective targets in Russia for British missiles. The next day it ran a political cartoon depicting a Swastika-adorned Putin protesting: ‘it’s an outrage, we’re the only ones allowed to use long-range missiles!’, flanked by a Russian bear saying: ‘keep bluffing till Trump gets back in’.
Kursk incursion
On 6 August Ukraine’s army launched a surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk Oblast region, marking the first instance where the front line has moved into Russian territory since the start of the war in February 2022. Whilst it holds some military significance, its political implications are much greater.
Throughout August, Ukraine took some 1,300 sq km of Russian territory in the region. By comparison, Russia controls more than 100,000 sq km of Ukrainian territory. The incursion is far from a turning point for the war: it has scarcely halted Russia’s advance into Eastern Ukraine. Thus on 9 September Ukraine announced Russian forces are 7km from Pokrovsk, a town in the Donbas, and an important logistics and railway hub, and threaten Chasiv Yar, another strategically important town.
The Kursk incursion was only possible due to the enormous concentration of NATO arms in Ukrainian hands. Whilst the official narrative is that Ukraine went ahead with the Kursk offensive without the knowledge of its imperialist backers, a claim that Zelensky repeatedly echoed, it was not an independent development but the outcome of active NATO arming and training of Ukrainian forces and the provision of military intelligence.
The use of NATO tanks in Russian territory was confirmed by Sky News on 15 August, specifically the British Challenger 2 and German Leopards. Central to the offensive has been US-provided HIMARS rocket artillery. On 18 August, The Times gloated:
‘Unseen by the world, British equipment, including drones, have played a central role in Ukraine’s new offensive and British personnel have been closely advising the Ukrainian military for two years, on a scale matched by no other country.’
Zelensky made clear the Ukrainian ruling class’s perspective on the need for the costly operation on 19 August:
‘The naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled apart…If our partners lifted current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we wouldn’t need to physically enter the Kursk region.’
The obvious limitations of the operation did not dampen a frenzy of excitement in the British corporate media. On 8 August, the Financial Times editorial board called it an ‘audacious counter-incursion’. In a 15 August article entitled ‘Ukraine has called Putin’s nuclear bluff’, The Telegraph celebrated the escalation as a ‘bold masterstroke’. The Guardian ran articles on 13 August gloating over ‘Russia’s embarrassing failure in Kursk’. Such rhetoric is meant to bolster support for arming Ukraine to the teeth.
Labour movement: cheerleaders for British imperialism
The fact that British politicians and media can express such open chauvinism in their anti-Russian rhetoric and actions highlights the lack of domestic opposition. The Labour left includes some of the biggest cheerleaders for this aggression. Thus on 26 June, a handful of Labour left MPs signed a pre-election appeal as ‘representatives of the Labour and Trade Union Movement’ urging the new government to grant Ukraine ‘all weapons needed’ to continue ‘resisting Russian imperialism’. Signatories included Labour MPs Clive Lewis, Nadia Whittome, Rachel Maskell, Kim Johnson, John McDonnell, and Ian Lavery.
Despite his temporary suspension from Labour for voting against the two-child benefit cap, McDonnell’s support for arming Ukraine remains unwavering. He chaired the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign AGM on 11 September which also called for British imperialism to accelerate its arming of Ukraine and ramp up sanctions on Russia. The trade unions are no different: at his speech to the 2024 Trade Unions Council (TUC) congress on 9 September, TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak condemned ‘Russia’s illegal and indefensible invasion of Ukraine’ several times, but could only mention Palestine in the context of a call for ‘a safe and secure Israel’.
Deepening inter-imperialist rivalry
The NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine remains the most obvious expression of growing inter-imperialist rivalry. This extends beyond Russia, and includes other states seen as hostile to Western imperialism. On 10 September US Secretary of State Blinken announced that Iran was transferring long-range ballistic missiles to Russia, described by Lammy as a ‘significant and dangerous escalation’. According to British media, Starmer and Biden discussed concerns that Russia is granting Iran nuclear secrets in exchange for the ballistic missiles. This is the significance behind NATO’s attempts to contain Russian imperialism economically and militarily: Russia is part of a wider bloc of states threatening the hegemony of US imperialism, centred on China and including Iran. There is, however, the growing recognition that the longer the proxy war in Ukraine goes on, the closer the political, economic, and military ties between these countries become.
Outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg aired these concerns in a 17 September interview with The Times, which summarised: ‘President Putin is unifying an authoritarian power axis of China, Iran and North Korea around his war in Ukraine, leaving Moscow increasingly beholden to Beijing’. He said: ‘China is a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine. China is upholding Russia’s war economy’, citing trade in civilian components with ‘dual use’ military applications between Russia and China.
This has prompted a string of high profile Western military officials to raise the possibility of future war with such countries. On 23 July, newly-appointed Head of the British Army General Sir Roly Walker publicly warned that British imperialism has three years to prepare for war with an ‘axis of upheaval’: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Beyond this the opportunity would be lost as these rapidly arming states would become too powerful. This date, 2027, was tipped by US Admiral John Aquilino, head of Indo-Pacific Command, in March 2024 when he predicted that China would ‘invade’ Taiwan, and that US imperialism would have to go to war with China in response. The concern is that the attempts to contain these rivals so far through protectionist measures, sanctions and proxy wars are failing to halt US imperialism’s relative decline. All that is left is direct confrontation.
The constant refrain in the Western imperialist media is that any talk of nuclear confrontation is hot air, and therefore NATO is free to continue stripping back each ‘red line’ set by Russia on western support for Ukraine. They claim that President Putin’s 13 September statement that allowing Ukraine to use NATO missiles against targets within Russia ‘will mean that NATO countries, the USA and European states, are fighting with Russia’ is just empty rhetoric: ‘Russia has drawn red lines before. And seen them crossed before.’ (BBC News, 13 September). On 15 September British Foreign Secretary David Lammy remarked: ‘Putin said “don’t send tanks”. We sent them. Putin said “don’t send any missiles”. We sent them. Putin threatens every few months to use nuclear weapons’. This is almost verbatim a repetition of what Cameron had said when he visited Ukraine in May 2024.
The NATO imperialists have made clear they have no intention of directly entering the conflict, evident by their preventing of Ukraine from joining the alliance. However, such an escalation may not be the outcome of some pre-planned, strategic decision, but the consequence of a smaller, accidental event. As things stand, relentless NATO escalation in Ukraine has created a tinderbox whose ignition will mean nuclear annihilation. The role of British imperialism as NATO attack dog and provocateur-in-chief is especially dangerous and must be opposed.
No to British imperialist warmongering! No to NATO!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 302 October/November 2024
