M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

An epochal anniversary from the annals of modern history is coming up in another ten days that remains a living memory for the Russian people. The Siege of Leningrad, arguably the most gruesome episode of the Second World War, which lasted for 900 days, was finally broken by the Soviet Red Army on 27th January 1944, eighty years ago to be exact.

The siege endured by more than three million people, of whom nearly one half died, most of them in the first six months when the temperature fell to 30° below zero. It was an apocalyptic event. Civilians died from starvation, disease and cold. Yet it was a heroic victory. Leningraders never tried to surrender even though food rations were reduced to a few slices of bread mixed with sawdust, and the inhabitants ate glue, rats — and even each other — while the city went without water, electricity, fuel or transportation and was being shelled daily.

It was on the 22nd of June, 1941 that the German armies crossed the Russian frontiers. Within six weeks, the Army Group North of the Wehrmacht, armed forces of the Third Reich, was within fifty kms of Leningrad in a fantastic blitzkrieg and had advanced 650 kms deep into Soviet territory.

A month later, the Germans had all but completed the city’s encirclement, only a perilous route across Lake Ladoga to the east connected Leningrad with the rest of Russia. But the Germans got no further. And 900 days later their retreat began.

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

A pall of gloom descended on Europe as the long-feared uncertainty set in over the weekend as to how long would the collective West underwrite the proxy war in Ukraine. To lift their sagging spirit, some European foreign ministers impromptu took the train to Kiev to spend Monday with President Zelensky. It was an extraordinary sight of defiance of the call of destiny, as the war passed the 19-month mark.

A deal in Washington that averted government shutdown for now but cut funding for Kiev; the Polish election campaign in which the ruling Law and Justice party, until recently one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters, has toyed with various measures such as questioning more arms deliveries and blocking agri-products from its neighbour in order to court voters; and, the stunning parliamentary election results in Slovakia catapulting a pro-Russian left-wing political party to power and signalling the first true political embodiment of “Ukraine fatigue” — suddenly, the West’s mantra of being by Ukraine’s side “for as long as it takes” feels seriously open to question.

The CNN exaggerated, perhaps, while commenting that the above developments “appear to have thrown Ukraine and its war with Russia under the bus” — but only by a bit. The politics of Ukraine war has crossed an inflection point and is poised for bigger things in the critical months ahead.

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Armenia no longer disputes that Nagorno-Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan. The prospect of peaceful resolution of a regional conflict ought to be good news, but this is an incredibly complex situation with an external environment where a brutal war is raging with no end in sight, and the protagonists pursue contrarian interests.

A settlement over Nagorno-Karabakh conflict leading to peace and reconciliation might open the pathway to Armenia’s (and, Azerbaijan’s) induction into the EU and NATO in a foreseeable future. The Armenian lobbies in European capitals and Washington wield much political influence. Oil-rich Azerbaijan eyes European market.

That said, Russia will resist the EU and NATO’s expansion into Transcaucasia, a highly strategic geographical region on the border of Eastern Europe and West Asia, straddling the southern Caucasus Mountains and bridges the Black Sea and the Caspian. Armenia is in a military alliance with Russia but Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has increasingly appealed to the West, including the EU.

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

The G7 Leaders’ 2700-word statement on Ukraine, issued in Hiroshima after their summit meeting glossed over the burning question today — the so-called counter-offensive against the Russian forces.

It is a deafening silence, since rumours are swirling about the disappearance of the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces. Significantly, President Vladimir Zelensky himself is making himself scarce from Kiev touring world capitals — Helsinki, Hague, Rome, Vatican, Berlin, Paris, London and Jeddah and Hiroshima. It does seem that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

As the G7 summit ended, the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on Saturday that the Russian operation to capture the strategic communication hub of Bakhmut in Donbass region of eastern Ukraine lasting 224 days, has been brought to a successful completion, overcoming the resistance by more than 80,000 Ukrainian troops.

It is a painful moment for Zelensky, who had boasted before US lawmakers in Capitol Hill last December that “just like the Battle of Saratoga (in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War), the fight for Bakhmut will change the trajectory of our war for independence and for freedom.”

Meanwhile, to distract attention, there is talk now about a subtle shift in the US policy regarding supply of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine in an indeterminate future. In reality, though, no one can tell what the Ukrainian rump state will look like when the jets arrive. Unsurprisingly, the Biden Administration still seems to be in two minds. F-16 is a hot item for export; what happens if the Russians were to blow it out of the sky with their hi-tech weapons and rubbish its fame?

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

The old adage is that a good foreign policy is the reflection of the national policy. A perfect storm is brewing on the foreign policy front in America triggered by the OPEC decision on Thursday to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day, which will on the one hand drive up the gas price for the domestic consumer and on the other hand expose the Biden Administration’s lop-sided foreign policy priorities.

At its most obvious level, the OPEC decision confirms the belief that Washington has lost its leverage with the cartel of oil-producing countries. This is being attributed to the deterioration of the US’ relations with Saudi Arabia during the Biden presidency. But, fundamentally, a contradiction has arisen between the US interests and the interests of the oil producing countries.

Contradictions are nothing new to the geopolitics of oil. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed two major “oil crises.” One was man-made while the other was an interplay of historical forces — the Yom-Kippur War of 1973 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

In the downstream of the Yom-Kippur War, the Arab nations weaponised oil and proclaimed an oil embargo on western nations which were perceived to have supported Israel in the war. The result was that the price of oil rose nearly 300% in less than 6 months, crippling the world’s economy.

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

A recurring feature of the Cold War was that the United States almost always placed great store on the optics of a Soviet-American affair while Moscow chose to concentrate on the end result. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the best known example where the denouement was about the publicised abandonment of the planned Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba and a US public declaration and agreement not to invade Cuba again. But it later came to be known that there was also an unpublicised part, namely, the dismantling of all of the Jupiter ballistic missiles that had been deployed to Turkey.

The behavioural pattern remains the same in Ukraine. Per the western narrative, Russia is staring at the abyss of defeat amidst the “rout” in Kharkov Region. Interestingly, though, at the responsible levels in the Beltway, there is noticeable reticence about beating the drums presumably because of their awareness that the Ukrainian forces simply re-entered the Balakleysko-Izyum direction to occupy areas that Russians had planned to vacate.

Moscow is once again leaving the optics almost entirely to the American journalists while Moscow concentrates on the end result, which has had three dimensions: one, complete the ongoing evacuation from the Balakleysko-Izyum direction without loss of lives; two, exploit the Ukrainian troop movements to target the forces that came out into the open from well-fortified positions in the Kharkov Region; and, three, concentrate on the campaign in Donetsk.

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Russian FM Sergey Lavrov rounded off a tour of African states in a blaze of media publicity despite US hopes to “isolate” him.

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a press availability at the State Department on Wednesday made the dramatic announcement that he intends to speak to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov “in the coming days...for the first time since the war began” in Ukraine on February 24.

Interestingly, he gave an alibi that harks back to the Soviet era — prisoner exchange. The US is offering a swap of a Russian entrepreneur Viktor Bout, who was arrested in Thailand in 2008 on a US warrant and later convicted to 25 years in prison on charges of weapons trafficking, in exchange for Brittney Griner, a basketball star who has been detained at Moscow airport on drug charges and, importantly, Paul Whelan, an ex-US Marine, who was arrested in Russia in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison two years later on charges of espionage. Whelan surely was a prize catch for the Russians. The American ambassador in Moscow had been visiting him in prison.

Blinken also added a second topic he’d like to discuss with Lavrov —implementation of the recent “grain deal”. Washington played no role in negotiating the deal and is presumably hoping to make a lateral entry into the matrix now. Blinken claimed he is “seeing and hearing around the world a desperate need for food, a desperate need for prices to decrease. And if we can help through our direct diplomacy encourage the Russians to make good on the commitments they’ve made, that will help people around the world, and I’m determined to do it.”

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

France's President Emmanuel Macron, U.S. President Joe
Biden, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Euro-
pean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen walk
along the boardwalk during the G7 summit in Carbis Bay,
Cornwall, south-west England on June 11, 2021.

Henry Kissinger predicted some three weeks ago that the Ukraine war was dangerously close to becoming a war against Russia. That was a prescient remark. The NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in a weekend interview told Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper that in the alliance’s estimation, the Ukraine war could wage for years.

“We must prepare for the fact that it could take years. We must not let up in supporting Ukraine. Even if the costs are high, not only for military support, also because of rising energy and food prices,” Stoltenberg said. He added that the supply of state-of-the-art weaponry to Ukrainian troops would increase the chance of liberating the Donbass region from Russian control.

The remark signifies a deeper NATO involvement in the war based on the belief not only that Russia can be defeated in Ukraine (“erase Russia”) but the cost shouldn’t matter. The NATO chiefs traditionally take the cue from Washington, and Stoltenberg was speaking just a fortnight before the alliance’s Madrid summit.

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Amidst intense fighting under way, Russian forces entered Severo-
donetsk city in Luhansk, Donbass region, May 24, 2022.

The Western narrative that Russia is facing defeat at the hands of the Ukrainian military is falling apart. The contrived narrative that Ukraine was “winning” made Kiev delusional which in turn created conditions for Washington and London to extend the war and incrementally enter into it laterally and turn it into a war of attrition against Russia.

But the compelling reality is that the Russian forces are steadily seizing the upper hand in the Battle for Donbass. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday that “the most active phase” of the Russian special operation has begun in Donbass. In military terms, Russian forces face the daunting task of taking over the best-fortified areas of Ukraine, which have been carefully preparing for this battle for seven years. But on the other hand, after their triumphant victory in Mariupol, Russian forces have the wind on their sail.

Looking back through the past 3-month period, Russia’s topmost priority has been to establish a land corridor to Crimea and put in place the economic underpinnings for the region’s development. That objective stands fulfilled. It is from such a viewpoint that the current operation in Donbass needs to be understood. Ukraine and its Western allies are pinning hopes that the sanctions will eventually exhaust Russia’s military and economic potential.

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M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Fall is imminent of Azovstal iron and steel works, Mariupol, where
thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and NATO officers are trapped.

In his first extended remarks in nearly a month about the conflict in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that peace talks had reached a “dead end” and pledged that Russia’s “military operation will continue until its full completion.”

Putin defined a more limited aim for the war, focusing on control of the Donbass — and not all of Ukraine. [He] reiterated that Russia’s actions so far in several regions of Ukraine were intended only to tie down enemy forces and carry out missile strikes with the purpose of destroying the Ukrainian military’s infrastructure, so as to “create conditions for more active operations on the territory of Donbass.” In his words,

💬 “Our goal is to provide aid to the people of Donbass, who feel an unbreakable bond with Russia and have been the subjects of genocide for eight years.”

Asked why the operation cannot be speeded up, Putin told reporters:

💬 “I often get these questions, ‘can’t we hurry it up?’ We can. But it depends on the intensity of hostilities and, any way you put it, the intensity of hostilities is directly related to casualties.”

He made it clear that...

💬...“our task is to achieve the set goals while minimising these losses. We will act rhythmically, calmly, and according to the plan that was initially proposed by the General Staff.” He added, “The operation is going according to plan.”

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