The Decline of the West and the Rise of a Multipolar World

David Pratt

January 2023, last updated 19/08/25

Contents

1. Conflict erupts in Ukraine
2. Soviet breakup and NATO expansion
3. US-NATO proxy war
4. Sanctions backfire
5. Genocide in Gaza
6. US hegemony versus multipolarity
7. Rise and fall of civilizations
8. Finance capitalism in crisis
9. Humans and spiritual progress

1. Conflict erupts in Ukraine

Former Ukraine.

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine. In an address to the nation, President Putin stated:

The purpose of this operation is to protect people [in the Donbass region of Ukraine] who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation. It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory. (kremlin)

The military operation marked a new phase in the civil war that broke out in Ukraine after the Western-backed coup in February 2014. That ‘colour revolution’ violently overthrew the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and replaced him with Petro Poroshenko. The Yanukovych government had sought a balance between relations with Russia and relations with Europe; it wanted Ukraine to join both the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) and the European Union. A poll in November 2013 showed that the population was split 50-50, but the EU told Ukraine that it could not be a member of both.

Signing an association agreement with the EU risked undermining Ukrainian industry, leading to takeovers by foreign businesses, so the Ukrainian government postponed the signing of the agreement in order to further study its implications and better prepare its economy (it did not enter into force until 2017). Yanukovych also broke off negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a loan, rejecting the demand to impose steep budget cuts and a 40% increase in natural-gas bills, and turned to Russia for financial assistance. This sparked mass protests. There is a lot of evidence that the snipers who fired on protestors in Kiev on 20 February 2014, killing about 50 people, were not government security forces but agents provocateurs; video footage shows snipers firing from buildings controlled by Maidan protesters (rt.com; Katchanovski). On 21 February Yanukovych agreed to form an interim government of national unity and to hold early elections, but the very next day he had to flee for his life.

(wikimedia)

The 2014 coup was spearheaded by ultranationalists from western Ukraine (Galicia), including neo-Nazi organizations such as the Azov regiment, Aidar battalion, Right Sector (Praviy Sektor), the Svoboda (freedom) party, and S14 (Ukr: C14). After the coup, members of Svoboda, which a 2012 European Parliament resolution denounced as ‘xenophobic, racist and antisemitic’, were given three ministerial posts and three posts as regional governors. One of its founders, Andriy Parubiy, became secretary of the National Security and Defence Council. According to the leader of S14, the Maidan protests would have been no more than a ‘gay parade’ if some 8% of the protestors had not been Nazis. (‘Maidan’ means ‘square’ and is a reference to Kiev’s Independence Square; the term ‘Euromaidan’ is also used.)

The Azov and Aidar units were integrated into Ukraine’s military. According to Andriy Biletsky, Azov’s founder and a member of parliament from 2014 to 2019, ‘The historic mission of our nation at this critical moment is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].’ The FBI states that Azov is associated with neo-Nazi ideology and has helped train white supremacists from the United States. An investigation by Time in 2021 showed that Azov has become an influential part of global neo-Nazism. On 15 November 2022 Italian police arrested four members of the Order of Hagal, a neo-Nazi organization with ties to the Azov movement, for planning terrorist attacks.

The Azov regiment’s original emblem (left) includes the inverted Nazi SS Wolfsangel symbol (centre) and
the Nazi black sun symbol (right) (multipolarista). The black sun was dropped from the emblem in 2015
to clean up Azov’s image. However, it still publishes a magazine called The Black Sun: see its logo below.

Around 1.5 million Jews were killed in Ukraine during its occupation by Nazi Germany. A prominent Nazi collaborator was Stepan Bandera, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, whose supporters massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians. During the Volyn massacre in 1944 about 100,000 Poles were brutally murdered in western Ukraine. Banderites burned alive men, women and children in hundreds of villages in Belarus. After the war, from 1945 to 1953, the US and UK supported Banderite, anti-communist rebels in western Ukraine, who killed about 50,000 civilians.

In 2010 President Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine, but this was annulled after Yanukovych was elected the following year. There are over 40 monuments to Bandera in Ukraine. On 1 January 2014, Bandera’s 105th birthday was celebrated by a torchlight procession of 15,000 people in the centre of Kiev. In 2018 the Ukrainian parliament decided that the 110th anniversary of Bandera’s birth would be commemorated at state level in 2019. The Western mainstream media used to expose the Nazi ideology of Azov and other Ukrainian organizations, but nowadays it tries to cover up Ukraine’s Nazi problem.

The Euromaidan regime wanted an ethnically pure Ukraine that excluded the country’s Russian-, Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking minorities. It whipped up anti-Russian chauvinism and suppressed the rights of the Russian minority, including a ban on official use of the Russian language – this would be like the Canadian government banning French in Quebec. These moves sparked massive protests in the eastern and southern parts of the country, which were violently suppressed. On 2 May 2014, pro-Maidan activists attacked and set fire to the Trade Unions Building in Odessa, resulting in the deaths of at least 48 Russian-speaking Ukrainians; some of the victims were burned alive, others were strangled, shot, or clubbed to death (lafionda.com).

Victims of the Odessa massacre. (fishki.net)

US officials handpicked key members of the new Ukrainian government, even in defiance of the Ukrainians and Europeans. This is illustrated by a leaked telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kiev. Pyatt says that the EU prefers a different candidate as prime minister, and Nuland famously replies, ‘Fuck the EU!’ According to Nuland, the United States invested over $5 billion to promote ‘democracy’ in Ukraine.

At that time, Joe Biden was Vice President in the Obama administration, and was in charge of policy on Ukraine. After the coup, a corrupt Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, started paying Biden’s prodigal son, Hunter, $50,000 a month to sit on its board – at a time when Biden was calling on Ukraine to step up its fight against corruption. When Biden became president in 2020, he appointed Nuland Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

Ukrainian 2010 presidential election results: anti-Yanukovych regions in yellow, pro-Yanukovych regions in blue.
(t.me/grigoriev_maxim)

A small majority of the Ukrainian population opposed the Euromaidan regime. The economy was hard hit by the new anti-Russia policies and about 6 million Ukrainians fled abroad in search of jobs and safety. Following the coup, corruption and repression increased, several opposition parties were banned, and Ukraine became the poorest country in Europe and the third-largest IMF debtor. In 2015 the Foundation for the Study of Democracy published two reports (here and here) documenting the torture of Donbass residents by Ukrainian armed forces and security forces. Ukraine is yet another example of how Western meddling can turn a country into a failed state.

After holding a referendum in March 2014, Crimea seceded from Ukraine and again became part of Russia, which used its troops stationed on the peninsula (under an agreement with Ukraine) to prevent a US-Ukrainian takeover of its Crimean naval base in Sevastopol. Ukraine responded by cutting off the drinking water supply to Crimea. The war against the Russian-speaking Donbass region, comprising the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts (regions), began on 6 April 2014, and the next day rebels seized the Donetsk oblast administration building and declared independence. Thousands of Russian-speaking Ukrainian servicemen defected and formed local militias, taking their weapons with them. There is no concrete evidence that regular Russian troops intervened directly in the fighting. Western allegations about a Russian invasion of the Donbass and Crimea in 2014 are a pack of lies (see Baud, 2023, ch. 2).

On 11 May 2014 referendums were held in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), and the majority voted for autonomy. Russia said it ‘respected’ the referendum results, but refused to recognize the two republics and rejected their request to join the Russian Federation. Ukraine stepped up the shelling of the two republics, stopped the payment of pensions and salaries, and imposed an economic and financial blockade. People’s republics also existed for a while in the regions of Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa. By March 2015, 2.6 million Ukrainians had migrated to Russia.

Ukrainian tank fires on the Donbass.

In September 2014 the Minsk Protocol peace agreement was signed between Russia, France, Germany, Ukraine, the leaders of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This would have allowed self-government for the Donbass region, but it was quickly violated by the army, which launched a large-scale offensive against the rebels.

When the Ukrainian army suffered a crushing defeat in Debaltsevo in February 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande persuaded President Putin to sign the Minsk II agreement the same month, which was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council. But all Ukrainian governments have refused to implement it and the West did not press them to comply. Poroshenko has admitted that the Minsk deal was merely a distraction intended to buy time for Kiev to rebuild its military, and Merkel and Hollande have said the same thing, thereby exposing the West’s duplicity and hypocrisy.

Kristina Zhuk, aged 23, and 10-month-old Kira, killed by Ukrainian army
shelling of Gorlovka (Ukr.: Horlivka), Donetsk, 27 July 2014. (lafionda.com)

From 2014 to the start of 2022, around 14,000 civilians and military personnel were killed in the fighting; 80% of the civilian casualties were ethnic Russians (Baud, 2023, 2.7.4). Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian by profession, was elected president in April 2019 after promising to implement the Minsk agreement and make peace with Russia. The head of the ultranationalist Right Sector militia then declared that Zelensky (who is Jewish) would be ‘hanged from a tree’ if he went ahead with these plans. Zelensky’s main financial backer, the Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, also funded the Azov regiment and other extremist militias. The Pandora Papers revealed that Zelensky and members of his inner circle had stashed large payments from Kolomoisky in offshore accounts.

Since 2017, representatives of Western governments and corporations have held annual conferences promoting neoliberal policies in Ukraine: market deregulation, decentralization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, weakening of labour protections, lower taxes on the rich, and Euro-Atlantic integration. A 2018 poll found that only 12.4% of the population supported privatization of state-owned enterprises, whereas 49.9% opposed it.

A moratorium on the sale of land to foreigners was imposed in 2001 but was repealed by the Zelensky government in 2020 in return for a $5 billion loan from the IMF. Between 3.4 and 6 million hectares of Ukrainian farmland are now in the hands of foreign agribusiness corporations and Ukrainian companies with foreign shareholders. However, the most fertile agricultural land is situated in the Novorossiya region – much of which became part of the Russian Federation in September 2022.

By early 2022, Zelensky’s support had fallen to 23%. As his ratings fell, there were increasing moves to ban opposition parties, prosecute political opponents and confiscate their property. The alliance between Ukrainian neoliberals and radical nationalists is based on their shared hatred of Russia.

After the Euromaidan coup, NATO began training and arming the Ukrainian armed forces and far-right paramilitaries, and thousands of kilometres of heavily fortified defences were built in the areas of the Donbass still held by the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian army became one of the largest and best-trained armies in Europe.

On 16 February 2022 there was a dramatic increase in Ukrainian shelling of the Donbass. About 150,000 Ukrainian troops were massed in the southeast, and the plan was to overrun the Donbass and then invade Crimea; Zelensky issued a decree to this effect in March 2021. On 21 February 2022 Russia finally recognized the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and signed friendship and mutual assistance treaties with them, which were ratified the next day. On 23 February the two republics asked Russia for military assistance, and it responded the next day by launching the special military operation, as permitted under article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

Jacques Baud, a former Swiss colonel and intelligence officer, states that ‘the Ukrainians were pushed to prepare an offensive in the Donbass in order to make Russia react, and thus obtain an easy defeat through devastating sanctions. This is cynical and shows how much the West – led by the Americans – has misused Ukraine for its own objectives.’

2. Soviet breakup and NATO expansion

The Ukraine (‘Ukraine’ means ‘borderland’) was part of Russia for nearly four centuries. An independent state – the Ukrainian People’s Republic – was first established in June 1917. Although it claimed a large part of modern Ukraine, it controlled only a small part of the claimed territories.

Following the Russian Revolution in November 1917 and the Bolsheviks’ victory in the subsequent civil war and their defeat of the invading foreign armies, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded in December 1922, replacing the Russian empire. The Russian and Ukrainian socialist republics were two of the 15 republics composing the USSR. The USSR was dissolved in December 1991.

The Donbass and the Black Sea region of the Ukraine were included in the Ukrainian socialist republic of the USSR, despite the high percentage of ethnic Russians living there. During and after the Second World War, Stalin added some of the territory of Poland, Romania and Hungary to the Ukraine, and Poland was given some of Germany’s territory in return. Crimea became part of the Russian empire in 1783, and in 1921 it became an autonomous republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1954 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian republic in a gesture of symbolic solidarity.

In January 1991, the people of Crimea voted in a referendum to restore Crimea’s status as an autonomous republic within the USSR. In 1992, after the USSR was dissolved, the Crimean parliament proclaimed the Republic of Crimea, and later declared its independence from Ukraine and created the office of president. In March 1995 the Kiev government sent its special forces into Crimea to annexe it and overthrow its president. Crimea then became an autonomous republic again, under Ukrainian authority. A friendship treaty was signed between Ukraine and Russia in May 1997, which laid down linguistic, religious and cultural guarantees for the Russian-speaking population. When the Maidan government installed by the 2014 coup violated these provisions, the Crimeans voted in a referendum to secede and rejoin Russia.

Territories incorporated into the Ukraine. Yellow: the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, proclaimed in February 1918 but disbanded a month later. Red: Crimea, transferred to the Ukraine in 1954. Blue: Galicia-Volhynia, seized from Poland in 1939. Green: Transcarpathia, a Hungarian-speaking region taken from Czechoslovakia in 1939 and 1944. Orange: territory taken from Romania in 1940. (t.me/grigoriev_maxim)

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist-run regimes in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s was the result of economic and political stagnation, and the rise of new, pro-capitalist leaders. It precipitated an economic and social catastrophe. Under the alcoholic, pro-Western president Boris Yeltsin, and with the assistance of Western economic advisers, Russia’s state-owned enterprises and natural resources were privatized, plundered and sold for virtually nothing to a new class of oligarchs. At the same time, mass unemployment returned, price controls were lifted, and subsidies for food, housing, education and healthcare were abolished. During Yeltsin’s rule from 1991 to 1999 (the US helped rig his reelection in 1996), Russia’s GDP fell by 40% and hyperinflation wiped out the savings of many citizens. A 2001 UNICEF study found that this harsh capitalist ‘shock therapy’ caused 3.2 million excess deaths in Russia and other ex-Soviet countries in the 1990s.

The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole surviving superpower. Since then, the US and its allies have carried out a series of military interventions aimed at remaking the world in their own image and achieving ‘full-spectrum dominance’. A major reason for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is its security concerns arising from NATO’s continued eastward expansion. In principle, every country is entitled to adopt its own security system and enter into military alliances. However, the 1999 OSCE Charter for European Security and the 2010 OSCE Astana Declaration laid down the principle of equal and indivisible security, which means that a country should not strengthen its own security at the expense of the security of other states.

NATO claims to be a purely defensive alliance that poses no threat to Russia. Calling NATO ‘defensive’ is a bit like calling the Ukrainian police state a ‘democracy’. NATO is an aggressive, expansionist force and has been accused of a long list of war crimes.

In 1990 Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was given assurances that NATO would not expand an inch eastward if the Warsaw Pact were dissolved and East and West Germany were reunified. The promises were made by President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, her successor John Major and their foreign minister Douglas Hurd, President François Mitterrand, CIA Director Robert Gates, and NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner. Gorbachev was extremely naïve to withdraw Soviet forces from Eastern Europe without demanding written guarantees that NATO would not expand eastward.

The Warsaw Pact disbanded in 1991, but instead of following suit, NATO began to absorb all of the Pact’s former signatories. There have so far been six waves of NATO expansion: Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were admitted in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; North Macedonia in 2020; and Finland and Sweden in 2023/2024. US missiles have been stationed in several of these countries, supposedly to combat the ‘Russian threat’. Ukraine became a de factor member of NATO in 1997 when a military cooperation agreement was signed and a Ukrainian military base began to be used as a headquarters for military exercises.

After being elected president in 2000, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB foreign intelligence officer, put an end to Western attempts to loot Russia of its oil, gas and mineral deposits and sought to restore its sovereignty. That’s why he is vilified and demonized by the West. He established a centralized state, strengthened the military, and renationalized several companies in strategic sectors of the economy; he made a deal that the oligarchs that they could keep their holdings if they stayed out of politics. By 2008, industrial production had returned to pre-Soviet-collapse levels. Since 2000, infant mortality in Russia has fallen from 19 per 1000 live births to 4.4, compared with 5.5 in the United States.

Putin believed that friendly relations with the West, especially Europe, were in Russia’s best economic interests. He supported the US in its ‘war on terror’ (or ‘war of terror’ as some call it) and floated the idea of Russia joining NATO. He was surprised when Western intelligence agencies supported Islamic terrorists in the Russian republic of Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s. NATO’s ‘humanitarian bombing’ of Serbia in March-June 1999, aimed at driving Serbia’s forces out of its Kosovo province, was a further wake-up call. The US also sought to destabilize ex-Soviet countries bordering Russia and turn them towards the West.

At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin challenged the concept of a unipolar world, ruled by the United States, and criticized NATO’s ongoing expansion, and immediately became a pariah in the eyes of the West. The 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest declared that Ukraine and Georgia would be allowed to join NATO. The same year, Russia proposed a European Security Treaty that would not permit any state to strengthen its security at the expense of the security of others, but this was rejected. In August 2008 Russian troops intervened in neighbouring Georgia to stop its attacks on the pro-Russian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. To the West’s dismay, Georgia’s NATO-trained and -equipped army was defeated in five days – a setback for its incorporation into NATO.

The Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014, the West’s failure to enforce compliance with the Minsk accords, and the subsequent ramping up of Russophobia further convinced the Russian leadership that the West was not a trustworthy partner. In 2015 Russia sent its troops into Syria at the request of its president, Bashir al-Assad, to assist the government’s fight against Western-backed radical Islamists (ISIS), and successfully stabilized the situation, but the US continued to occupy northeastern Syria and steal its oil and agricultural commodities. Russia also developed close ties with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Iran, and helped them survive the trade sanctions imposed by the United States.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has abandoned nearly all the arms control agreements achieved with the Soviet Union. It withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, the Treaty on Open Skies (allowing confidence-building surveillance flights) in 2018, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. President Trump justified withdrawal from the INF Treaty by claiming violations by Russia, but no proof was ever provided. As Jacques Baud explains, ‘the US was simply trying to get out of the agreement in order to install their AEGIS missile systems in Poland and Romania’; these systems can be used to launch either defensive anti-ballistic missiles or offensive nuclear missiles. Western leaders then tried to pretend that the missiles were directed against Iran, not Russia!

In December 2021, the Russian Federation submitted a draft treaty with the US on security guarantees, and a draft agreement with NATO on measures to ensure security (including no further expansion of NATO and removal of its missiles from Poland and Romania). But the US and NATO responded dismissively. As President Putin said on 21 February 2022, NATO’s military infrastructure has reached Russia’s borders, triggering a security crisis. He added that there is ‘good reason to believe that Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the subsequent deployment of NATO facilities has already been decided and is only a matter of time’.

... American strategic planning documents confirm the possibility of a so-called pre-emptive strike at enemy missile systems. ... NATO documents officially declare our country to be the main threat to Euro-Atlantic security. Ukraine will serve as an advanced bridgehead for such a strike. ...

The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkov will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes. It is like a knife to the throat. (kremlin)

The Russians have not forgotten that both Napoleon and Hitler invaded Russia through the Ukraine. Nor have they forgotten that 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in the war to defeat Nazi Germany. Today, neo-Nazi ideology is alive and well in Ukraine, where ethnic Russians have become the new Jews.

According to Zelensky, NATO’s leaders privately told him that it would not admit Ukraine, but that they were not going to state this publicly. However, Zelensky was lured into believing that it would be easier for Ukraine to enter NATO after an open conflict with Russia, as one of his advisers confirmed in 2019. On 19 February 2022 at the Munich security conference, just days before Russia launched its military operation, Zelensky indicated that Ukraine might withdraw from the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and acquire nuclear weapons.

The West’s refusal to address Russian security concerns and stop its client regime in Ukraine from persecuting and killing ethnic Russians was bound to end badly.

3. US-NATO proxy war

‘Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.’ (Sun Tzu)

Commenting on Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, Jacques Baud wrote in April 2022:

From an operational point of view, the Russian offensive was an example of its kind: in six days, the Russians seized a territory as large as the United Kingdom, with a speed of advance greater than what the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940.

The special military operation started with massive air and missile strikes on key military targets throughout Ukraine. Within days, the Russians incapacitated the Ukrainian command and control structure, and destroyed much of the Ukrainian air force. Russian ground forces advanced from the north, south and east. In the south, Kherson and other cities were rapidly occupied with virtually no opposition. In the north, around 20,000 Russian troops advanced towards the capital, Kiev (Ukr.: Kyiv), but did not launch an assault. This manoeuvre pinned down large numbers of Ukrainian troops and prevented their deployment elsewhere. As a former US Marine officer put it, ‘the Russians conducted a brief campaign of maneuver in the north in order to set the stage for a longer, and, ultimately, more important campaign of attrition in the east’.

The bulk of the Ukrainian army was stationed in the southeast of the country in preparation for an assault on the Donbass. The Allied forces – i.e. Russian troops (including Chechen units and Wagner PMC), plus the DPR and LPR militias – proceeded to partially encircle it, and then began the slow and laborious process of using their superior firepower to grind down the heavily fortified defences that the Ukrainians had built up over the previous eight years.

For the first seven months of the conflict, the Russian and DPR/LPR forces were outnumbered by between two to one and three to one. Ukraine began the conflict with about 200,000 troops, but since then there have been many mobilizations, and hundreds of thousands of men have been forcibly conscripted.

The Western media largely ignored the main battleground in the Donbass, including the important fact that most of the active fighting there was initially carried out by the DPR and LPR militias, with the Russians providing air, artillery, missile and intelligence support. The Western propaganda machine magnified any minor tactical victories by the Ukrainian forces, while painting a comic picture of incompetent, ill-equipped, demoralized ‘Russians’ who were heading for certain defeat – despite the fact that even the Ukrainians’ official map showed that the Allied forces were gradually gaining territory. While portraying Russia as weak and backward, the Western narrative also claimed that it posed a serious threat to the whole of Europe.

Western war propaganda.

At the end of May 2022, Russian troops and DPR militiamen finished capturing the heavily fortified city of Mariupol on the Azov Sea. Even with the full backing of NATO, Ukraine was unable to mount an offensive to rescue its trapped forces there. Over 4000 Azov Nazis and Ukrainian servicemen were killed, and 2500 militants who had taken refuge in the Azovstal iron and steel plant surrendered. The Western media claimed that the Azov fighters had merely ‘ceased operations’ and been ‘evacuated’ – i.e. taken to the Donetsk People’s Republic as prisoners.

If Russia’s initial aim had been to conquer the whole of Ukraine, it could have adopted the US-NATO tactic of ‘shock and awe’, and bombed the country ‘back into the stone age’ – as the US boasted of doing to Vietnam. Instead, it launched a limited military operation, with the main aim of helping to liberate those areas of Ukraine with a Russian-speaking majority and destroying the Ukrainian military. Its soft approach was intended to spare the lives of both Ukrainian civilians and Allied troops, and leave more room for a negotiated settlement.

During talks in Istanbul in March 2022, a draft peace settlement was agreed between the Zelensky government and Russia: Ukraine would be declared a neutral, nuclear-free state, all Russian troops would withdraw, and there would be further talks on the status of Crimea and the Donbass. Russia even withdrew its column of tanks from the outskirts of Kiev as a good-will gesture (which the West hailed as a great Ukrainian victory). But the agreement was torpedoed by Western leaders and NATO: on 24 March a NATO summit opposed all negotiations, and on 11 April, British prime minister Boris Johnson, with President Biden’s blessing, made an unannounced trip to Kiev and instructed Zelensky not to make any concessions (braveneweurope). Zelensky also faced opposition from the far-right elements of the Ukrainian security apparatus. The Ukrainian regime then passed a law prohibiting negotiations with Russia as long as Putin was in power.

Believing its own delusional propaganda that Russia could easily be defeated, the US/NATO began to pour tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and financial assistance into Ukraine in order to prolong the conflict and bleed Russia. By mid-November 2022, the US had allocated $91.3 billion for Ukraine – 33% more than Russia’s entire military spending for 2022. However, the advanced weaponry supplied to Ukraine is generally inferior to the Russians’ own weapons and falls far short of replacing the equipment that the Russians have already destroyed since the conflict began. Without this support, the Ukrainian armed forces would have been defeated in June 2022.

The US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Finland, Poland and Romania provided thousands of mercenaries/volunteers/contractors (wearing Ukrainian uniforms) to fight in Ukraine. Jihadists from the US-controlled region of Syria were also paid large sums of money to fight in Ukraine. In addition, NATO countries, especially the US and UK, have trained Ukrainian soldiers, provided intelligence, and helped to plan attacks. For example, British military specialists were involved in organizing a failed aerial and maritime drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol on 29 October 2022.

In August 2022, Amnesty International confirmed that the Ukrainian army was using human shields:

Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals ... Most residential areas where soldiers located themselves were kilometres away from front lines. ... In the cases it documented, Amnesty International is not aware that the Ukrainian military who located themselves in civilian structures in residential areas asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings – a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians.

While Russia sought to create humanitarian corridors to empty cities of civilians and leave only the Ukrainian militias, the militias tried to prevent civilians from fleeing, in the hope of extending their own life expectancy. As the position of the Ukrainian forces grew weaker, their shelling of civilians in regions under Russian control intensified. American HIMARS missile launchers, operated by Western personnel, have been used for this purpose, but this goes unreported by the corporate media.

Ukrainian ultranationalists run the Myrotvorets (‘Peacemaker’) website – a ‘kill list’ giving the names and addresses of about 187,000 ‘enemies of Ukraine’, including several hundred children. It was created in 2015 and is supported by the Ukrainian government and the security service (SBU). Many people on the list have been murdered, and are now marked as ‘liquidated’. They include some of Zelensky’s opponents, and also Russian journalist Darya Dugina, daughter of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin; she was killed on 21 August 2022 in a car bomb attack just outside Moscow, carried out by a female SBU agent who then fled to Estonia.

The Ukrainian war strategy is largely geared toward public relations victories. Ukrainian troops are often ordered to ‘stand and fight’ and not give up any territory, no matter how many lives this costs. As Baud says, ‘in Ukraine, operations are managed by the political leadership, while in Russia, operations are managed by the General Staff’. NATO officers provide training and advice, and ‘Ukraine’s weaknesses are therefore NATO’s weaknesses: they wage a war at tactical level, while the Russians are fighting at operational level’. This is because for over 20 years, the US armed forces and its allies have waged war against vastly inferior opponents and ‘somehow have lost the ability to fight at the strategic and operative levels’.

In June 2022 a Zelensky adviser stated that the Ukrainian armed forces were losing 100 to 200 men a day. Another adviser put the figure at 200 to 500 fatalities a day and 1000 casualties (dead, wounded, captured, deserters). The Mexican president summed up what he called NATO’s ‘immoral policy’ toward Ukraine as follows: ‘We supply the weapons, you supply the corpses!’ In November 2022 the Russian defence ministry put the kill ratio at one dead Russian soldier for every seven or eight dead Ukrainian soldiers. In mid-January 2023 US war veteran Colonel Douglas Macgregor estimated the number of Ukrainian dead at 157,000 (including 35,000 missing in action) plus around 400,000 wounded, compared with around 16,000 to 20,000 dead and 50,000 wounded on the Russian side.

Former CIA officer Larry Johnson explains:

Russia’s current military leadership is not following the tactics Soviet generals employed in WW II (i.e., mass troop assaults). Russia primarily has relied on massive artillery and rocket/missile strikes before launching a ground offensive. The Russian rate of artillery fire is unlike anything we’ve seen in history. More importantly, the accuracy of the artillery is enhanced by the use of drones and satellites to adjust fires, with updated coordinates relayed in real time to the artillery units. Another factor contributing to Ukraine’s horrendous casualties is its lack of air power and effective air defense systems to counter Russian batteries.

In April 2022 it was estimated that only 30-40% of the weapons supplied by the West were reaching the battlefield. If they do reach the frontline, there is a high risk of the Russians targeting and destroying them. The Russians are also extremely successful at shooting down missiles; Western analysts admit that Russia ‘possesses some of the most advanced air and missile defense systems in the world’. Some high-tech Western weapons have been sold to the Russians on the black market. Others have reportedly ended up in the hands of jihadists in Chad. The West will come to regret flooding Ukraine with weapons without proper monitoring.

The Western powers are in the process of actively demilitarizing themselves. The United States provided Ukraine in six months with more Javelin anti-tank weapons than it can produce in a whole year. By the end of 2022 most NATO members were running short of weaponry to give Ukraine. Much of the money earmarked for Ukraine ends up in the pockets of the mafias and oligarchs, but most of it goes to Western arms manufacturers, who are receiving contracts to replenish the West’s dwindling arms stockpiles.

In June 2022 the Royal United Services Institute, a defence think-tank, admitted: ‘Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war.’ It estimated that the number of artillery rounds fired by the Russians in two weeks was equal to the number produced by the US in an entire year, and that the number of missiles fired by the Russians in three months was four times the US annual missile production. In short: ‘The Russian onslaught consumes ammunition at rates that massively exceed US forecasts and ammunition production.’ By mid-November 2022 the United States no longer had any excess 155 mm howitzer shells to send to Ukraine and was asking South Korea to provide 100,000 artillery rounds – barely enough to last two days if the Ukrainians, like the Russians, were to fire 60,000 rounds a day.

In September 2022, with the Allied forces overextended along the 1000 km frontline, Ukrainian troops launched several counterattacks to retake territory. The first counterattack was in the Kherson region in the south. It turned into a bloodbath for the Ukrainians as they had to leave their fortified positions and cross open terrain where they were decimated by Russian artillery.

Then came a counterattack in Kharkov (Ukr.: Kharkiv) oblast. The small number of Allied forces present withdrew to more fortified positions and evacuated many civilians, allowing the Ukrainians to retake about 2% of the territory that had been under Russian control. But as Colonel Macgregor says, ‘the price for Kiev’s propaganda victory was high’: ‘an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Ukrainian troops were killed or wounded in a flat, open area that Russian artillery, rockets, and air strikes turned into a killing field.’ The Allied forces proceeded to withdraw entirely from Kharkov due to insufficient manpower. The West hailed this as a major victory for Ukraine.

Ukrainian counterattacks continued in Kherson and elsewhere for many weeks, but always with the same result: thousands of Ukrainians were killed for the sake of capturing mainly empty fields and deserted villages. In late October 2022 Macgregor wrote: ‘The series of Ukrainian counterattacks over the last 60 to 90 days have cost Ukraine tens of thousands of lives, human capital in uniform that Kiev cannot replace.’

The endlessly repeated claim that the Russians were running out of weapons, ammunition and missiles was wishful thinking. Russia had been preparing for a potential conflict since at least 2014. The West should have taken note of President Putin’s words in July 2022:

Today we hear that they [the West] want to defeat us on the battlefield, well, what can I say, let them try. We have heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian – this is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. ... But everyone should know that, by and large, we haven’t really started anything yet. (kremlin)

By mid-summer 2022 the Russian leadership had concluded that a negotiated settlement with the US/NATO was impossible, and that it needed to greatly increase the number of troops deployed and intensify its campaign in order to achieve its stated objectives: protecting Russian speakers, demilitarization and denazification. Russia announced a mobilization of 300,000 reservists in September 2022, and over 100,000 volunteers also signed up.

In September 2022, referendums were held in Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye (Ukr.: Zaporizhzhia) and Kherson on whether to join the Russian Federation. These regions cover an area of around 120,000 km², have a population of about 6 million people, and produce around 85% of Ukraine’s GDP. The West reacted with howls of outrage, because democratic votes are unacceptable if they go against Western interests. By contrast, when Kosovo – without even holding a referendum – declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008, it was recognized by many Western countries.

Russia’s military intervention can be seen as a violation of Ukraine’s national sovereignty – though it could be argued that Ukraine ceased to be a sovereign nation at the time of the US-backed Euromaidan coup in 2014, after which its resources increasingly fell into the hands of foreign multinationals. UN law speaks of the sanctity of territorial integrity, but it also speaks of the sanctity of the self-determination of peoples; there is a perennial tension between these two principles.

Although Russia’s initial objective was to defend the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass, it could not abandon people in other regions who chose the Russian side, as there was already abundant evidence that ultranationalists were murdering many people suspected of ‘collaborating’ with Russia (which includes accepting Russian food packages). The Bucha massacre (inevitably blamed on ‘the Russians’) is just one example of this (see Ukraine’s Crimes Against Humanity (2022-2023)). The treaties on the accession of the four new territories to the Russian Federation were signed on 30 September 2022, marking the start of a new phase in Russia’s military operation. The DPR and LPR militias were placed under the unified command of the Russian General Staff, enhancing their combat effectiveness.

On 8 October 2022, Ukrainian saboteurs used a truck bomb to try and destroy the Kerch bridge connecting Crimea with the Russian mainland. This attack generated widespread jubilation in the West. But the West reacted hysterically when the Russian forces started carrying out regular missile and drone strikes on critical energy infrastructure that they had previously left intact. This reduced Ukraine’s ability to move troops and weapons, degraded its air defence capability, and accelerated the exodus of Ukrainian refugees (10 million fled the country during 2022). The Western narrative is that bombing dual-purpose infrastructure is a ‘war crime’ if Russia does it, but not when the US and its allies do it (e.g. in Serbia).

On 9 November 2022 Russia announced the tactical withdrawal of its forces from Kherson city, the only city it held on the west bank of the Dnieper river, after evacuating 115,000 civilians. This was partly due to the danger of the Ukrainian/NATO forces successfully destroying the Kakhovka dam and flooding the city, and partly because it was far easier to defend positions on the east bank of the Dnieper. Having given up territory to preserve its fighting capability, Russian artillery then began pounding the Ukrainian units that moved into the city.

By December 2022, all Ukrainian counterattacks had petered out. The main battlefield was still the Donbass, where Russian forces were continuing to make incremental advances. The city of Bakhmut (known locally as Artyomovsk), a key logistics hub, turned into another slaughterhouse for the Ukrainian forces. Determined to hold on to it, the army kept pouring soldiers into the city, many of them inadequately trained, losing as many as 500 to 800 dead and wounded per day. In early April 2023, the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed there was estimated at 11,000 a month.

Even pro-Ukrainian sources admitted that units were routinely suffering casualties of 70% or more. The admission that the Ukrainian forces are outgunned by a factor of 9 to 1 confirms that they must be suffering far heavier casualties than the Russians. By this time, Ukraine was conscripting all males aged 20 to 55, regardless of family status, profession, or physical or mental health. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief felt it necessary to call for more severe punishment of Ukrainian soldiers disobeying orders or deserting.

In December 2022, after spending months in Ukraine training soldiers, former Marine Colonel Andrew Milburn of the Mozart Group mercenary firm (which later disbanded) admitted on camera that Ukraine is a ‘corrupt, fucked-up society’ run by ‘fucked-up people’, and that Ukrainian soldiers commit ‘atrocities’ and ‘kill dudes who surrendered’. He then tried to justify his support for Ukraine by claiming that ‘it’s about global norms’ (full video)!

In January 2023 American mercenary Ryan O’Leary, serving in the Bakhmut area, denounced his Ukrainian commanders for their corrupt, criminal behaviour, including selling badly needed weapons on the black market and trafficking in illegal drugs. He called his captain a ‘piece of shit’. An Australian mercenary in Bakhmut described Russian forces as sophisticated and well equipped, with outstanding Intel, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). He contradicted media lies about the Russians throwing ‘human waves’ against Ukrainian defences and admitted that the Ukrainians are simply outmatched.

In January 2023, after much arm-twisting, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz finally agreed to send 14 Leopard tanks to Ukraine, against the will of the majority of Germans. The Ukrainians had already lost over 1000 tanks and had 200-300 left, while NATO was intending to deliver a few hundred at most. The Russians had 3000-5000 active tanks. In February 2023 NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg warned that Ukraine was burning through ammunition many times faster than its allies can provide it, and that the delivery time for large-calibre ammunition had increased from 12 to 28 months.

In his address to the Russian Federal Assembly on 21 February 2023, President Putin stated that ‘the longer the range of the Western [missile] systems that will be supplied to Ukraine, the further we will have to move the threat away from our borders’. Ukraine is now receiving missiles with a range of over 300 km. This implies that, after expelling all Ukrainian troops from the four regions already annexed, Russia might seek to capture other Russian-speaking regions, such as Kharkov and perhaps Sumy in the north, and Odessa, Nicolaev (Ukr: Mykolaiv) and perhaps Dnepropetrovsk in the south. There will also need to be a demilitarized zone around any new territories taken.

By the end of 2022, Ukraine had less than 200,000 combat-trained troops left, and was desperate for NATO troops to intervene directly, while Russia had assembled over half a million combat forces in southern Ukraine, western Russia, and Belarus. The liberation of Artyomovsk/Bakhmut on 20 May 2023 was a huge blow to Ukrainian morale. According to conventional military doctrine, an army attacking an entrenched force needs to outnumber the defending soldiers by at least three to one. But with the help of massive artillery and aerial barrages by the Russian armed forces, the Wagner Group’s 50,000 fighters defeated a NATO-backed Ukrainian force of over 120,000 troops, with the Ukrainian troops suffering an estimated 50-60,000 dead, and Wagner 19,500.

In early May 2023 Russia began using its fixed-wing aircraft to carry out devastating bombing raids on Ukraine’s positions throughout the country and reduce its ability to launch a counteroffensive. Given Ukraine’s severely depleted air defence system and inability to provide adequate air and artillery support, and the inadequate training new recruits had received, the counteroffensive it finally launched on 4 June 2023 was doomed to fail. In the first three days of fighting, the Ukrainians lost 3715 troops, 52 tanks, 207 armoured fighting vehicles, 134 motor vehicles, 5 aircraft, 2 helicopters, 48 pieces of field artillery, and 53 unmanned aerial vehicles (mil.ru). The Russians lost 71 servicemen and 210 wounded. The main Ukrainian success was the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam – an act of eco-terrorism.

The Russian strike on Khmelnitsky storage facilities in May 2023 destroyed 500 million
dollars’ worth of ammunition and equipment, including depleted uranium munitions supplied
by Britain (simplicius76). The radioactive plume reached southeast England.

The West pressurized the Ukrainians to launch a counteroffensive based on its delusional expectations. By the time it began, the Russians had built three heavily fortified lines of defence, up to 120 km deep, along the line of contact, including over 3600 km of trenches and passages. The Ukrainians were expected to break through all the defences, take Melitopol, and advance into Crimea. Instead, they failed to even reach, let alone breach, the first defence line. Any Ukrainian forces advancing towards it had to cross minefields and were pulverized by superior Russian firepower. By the time the offensive fizzled out, 160,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed.

Leopard tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles destroyed during Ukraine’s amateurish counteroffensive.

In July 2023 the US began to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs, because its stocks of conventional 155 mm shells were running low. In September 2023, after much vacillation, the US decided to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles. It also decided to supply M1 Abrams tanks. In April 2024 the US ordered the Ukrainians to withdraw M1 Abrams tanks from the frontlines because too many were being destroyed. The UK had already told the Ukrainians to move UK Challenger tanks away from the frontlines for the same reason.

A few F-16 fighter jets were delivered to Ukraine in August 2024. F-16s are 50-year-old technology, and require 17 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight. One of the planes was quickly shot down, most likely accidentally by the Ukrainians themselves. All the ‘game-changing wonder weapons’ NATO has supplied, including Javelin anti-tank systems, M-177 howitzers, HIMARS rocket launchers, Patriot air defence systems, Storm Shadow missiles and ATACMS missiles, have had minimal impact, while the Russians have developed an exceptional ability to locate and rapidly destroy enemy weapon systems. Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities have also proved very effective against NATO missiles. Some Ukrainian missiles inevitably get through and hit their targets, and this is then celebrated as a major victory by the Western media. But a few pinprick successes are of no strategic significance.

The West has no clue how to extricate itself from the Ukrainian debacle without loss of face. Based on the military capabilities Russia has demonstrated in the Ukraine conflict, the US Army War College admitted in July 2023 that if the US went to war with Russia, it would suffer in a single day more casualties than it suffered in the entire 20-year Afghan war, and 50,000 casualties in just two weeks, and would not have enough manpower to sustain the conflict.

Colonel Alex Vershinin admitted in March 2024 that NATO is not prepared for a war of attrition and lacks the necessary industrial capacity. According to one estimate, Russia makes artillery shells three times faster and four times more cheaply than Ukraine’s Western backers. European officials claimed that over 1.5 million artillery shells were produced or procured in 2024, but the actual number was 400,000 to 600,000, whereas Russia produces or procures 250,000 to 350,000 per month. A July 2024 report by the Pentagon-funded RAND think-tank stated that the US military lacks ‘readiness’ for a major conflict, and the industrial base is ‘unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the United States and its allies and partners’.

Western governments were hoping to freeze the Ukraine conflict but Russia has no interest in doing so because, as the Minsk accords showed, the West would merely take the opportunity to rebuild the Ukrainian armed forces and replenish its own weapon stockpiles, in preparation for the next attack. Russian leaders have stated that either Ukraine must capitulate, or it will cease to exist as a nation. Ukraine is already economically and financially bankrupt, and it is kept afloat solely by injections of Western cash and weapons. By the start of 2024, it had received over $203 billion in foreign assistance, and had been supplied with over 1600 pieces of missile and artillery equipment, over 200 air defence systems, 5220 tanks and armoured vehicles, and more than 23,000 drones.

The anti-Russia sanctions have inflicted great harm on European economies, leading to cracks in the Western coalition. By contrast, the Russian nation is more united than it has been for decades, and half a million volunteers enlisted in its armed forces in 2023. Its manufacturing sector grew by 5% in 2023, and its leaders are prepared to continue the conflict for several years if necessary. It will never allow NATO to install offensive weapons in Ukraine, and its ultimate goal is for NATO to remove its missiles from Poland and Romania, as part of a new security architecture. In September 2024 Russia had 1.5 million active-duty troops, while the US had 1.3 million and is unable to meet its recruitment targets, except by lowering them.

In late September 2023 an elderly Ukrainian Waffen-SS volunteer, who had fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union during the Second World War, was praised as a ‘Ukrainian hero’ and given a standing ovation in the Canadian parliament during a visit by Zelensky. He was one of over 2000 Ukrainian Waffen-SS veterans admitted to Canada after the war, along with some 1000 Nazi SS veterans from Baltic states. Also admitted was one of Nazi Germany’s top Ukrainian propagandists, whose granddaughter is Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s former deputy prime minister (thegrayzone). Like many Western politicians, she and President Trudeau are happy to support Ukrainian ultranationalists and neo-Nazis if they’re persecuting or killing Russian speakers.

Headlines by journalist Colonel Richard Kemp, former British army officer.

By the end of 2023, even the mainstream media were admitting that the counteroffensive had been a disaster, and some Western voices were advising Ukraine to negotiate. The Western narrative shifted from ‘Russia is losing’ to ‘Russia is winning – and plans to invade the whole of Europe’! As President Putin remarked, ‘These are just horror stories for people in the street in order to extort additional money from US taxpayers and European taxpayers in the confrontation with Russia in the Ukrainian theatre of war.’

The former attorney-general of Ukraine admitted in January 2024 that Ukraine had lost over 500,000 soldiers, killed or seriously wounded, since February 2022. Far from the conflict having reached a stalemate, the Ukrainian army was short of trained soldiers, munitions and equipment, while the Russians had ample reserves of troops, tanks, artillery pieces, drones and ammunition. The EU had promised to deliver one million shells, but it turned out that it could only provide 300,000.

On 25 December 2023 the Russian forces captured Maryinka, and then proceeded to inflict catastrophic losses on the Ukrainian troops (including Azov units) in Avdeyevka, Ukraine’s most heavily fortified town, which came under full Russian control on 17 February 2024. The Ukrainian army had used Maryinka and Avdeyevka to shell residential areas of the nearby city of Donetsk for the past 10 years.

In February 2024, after a lot of infighting, Zelensky replaced General Zaluzhny with General Syrsky as the new commander-in-chief, but this did not stop the Ukrainian army being forced to retreat in many areas of the frontline. Syrsky presided over the Ukrainian defeats in Debaltsevo in 2015, in Soledar in 2022 and in Bakhmut/Artyomovsk in 2023, and has the reputation of being a ‘butcher’.

As the situation on the battlefield deteriorated, the Ukrainian regime stepped up attacks on soft civilian targets. The loss of Maryinka was followed by a cluster-bomb rocket attack on the Russian border city of Bolgorod, killing 24 civilians, including four children. Such attacks are carried out with Western weapons and targeting intel, and often with the direct involvement of NATO personnel. According to the EU, dropping banned cluster munitions on city centres is justified by Ukraine’s ‘right of self-defence’. On 3 February 2024 the Ukrainian army bombed a bakery in Lisichansk (Lugansk region), killing 28 people.

On 22 March 2024 four Tajik nationals carried out a terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow, killing 145 people and injuring 551. The gunmen then tried to flee to Ukraine, but were captured by Russian special forces. Western leaders immediately insisted that the attack was entirely the work of Islamic State Khorosan (ISIS-K). However, the four terrorists were found to have received money and cryptocurrency from Ukraine. The Ukrainian intelligence services (SBU and GUR) have been routinely recruiting ISIS supporters for their own purposes (strategic-culture).

Moreover, Ukrainian intelligence agencies have close ties with US and British intelligence agencies (CIA and MI6), which also have a long history of using radical Islamists to do their dirty work. The US and UK knew that a terror attack was imminent, and on 7-8 March 2024 their embassies in Moscow warned their citizens to avoid large gatherings, including concerts, for the next 48 hours. No actionable intelligence was passed on to the Russian authorities through official channels. The attackers intended to target a concert by Russian superstar Shaman on 9 March, but the massive security led them to postpone the assault. On 31 January 2024, after talks with GUR chief Budanov, Victoria Nuland, the most hawkish US backer of the Kiev regime, had promised that ‘nasty surprises’ were in store for ‘Putin’. On 5 March 2024, she resigned or was fired from her post in the Biden administration.

NATO tanks etc. have reached Moscow. (youtube)

The ongoing collapse of Ukrainian defences sent Western leaders into a panic, and several made threatening noises. In April 2024, President Macron vowed to deploy thousands of French soldiers in Ukraine, and the UK foreign minister advocated Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory with British weapons. These statements were quickly walked back after Russia said that it would respond by striking French and British targets outside Ukraine, and announced plans to hold exercises for the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

There are already several hundred French soldiers in Ukraine, and over a hundred have been killed, but the French authorities deny this, out of fear of protests. On 23 July 2024 a Russian Iskander missile struck a command headquarters in Odessa, reportedly killing 50 foreign trainers and mercenaries, including British SAS personnel and French soldiers. As usual, the Western media remained silent.

Given Kiev’s policy of constantly shelling Bolgorod and other civilian targets inside Russia, Russian forces launched an assault on Kharkov oblast in May 2024 to drive back the Ukrainians and create a buffer zone. The major fortifications that the Ukrainians had supposedly built in the area turned out to be nonexistent, due to the high level of embezzlement and corruption.

Due to Ukraine’s frontline troops being overstretched and the shortage of trained reserves, a new mobilization law took effect on 18 May 2024, and tens of thousands of men went into hiding or fled the country. The US is pressuring Ukraine to lower the official mobilization age from 25 to 18. Zelensky’s five-year presidential term ended on 20 May 2024, but he refused to step down or hold elections. Polls showed that he had less support than Budanov and Zaluzhny.

On 23 June 2024, American ATACMS missiles, equipped with cluster warheads, struck a beach in Crimea, killing four people, two of them children, and injuring 151. The flight data were provided by US personnel. On the same day, at least 10 people were killed in terrorist attacks on two Orthodox churches, a synagogue, and a traffic police post in the Russian republic of Dagestan. The aim is to provoke Russia into overreacting. But it has no need to do so, given that it is winning on the battlefield and strengthening its geopolitical alliances, while the West’s influence continues to decline. Russia said it would also considering supplying long-range missiles to the West’s opponents in various parts of the world.

The Ukrainians had promised to launch a counteroffensive in Kharkov before the NATO summit on 9-11 July 2024, but it failed to materialize. Thousands of Ukrainian troops were diverted to Kharkov from other areas of the front. Ukraine was then losing over 2000 soldiers a day on the frontlines. As of mid-September 2024 the BBC/MediaZona, based on obituaries and social media reports, put the confirmed number of Russian troops killed in Ukraine during the entire conflict at 69,000.

On 6 August 2024 around 30,000 Ukrainian troops and foreign mercenaries, with NATO assistance, launched an incursion into Russian territory near Kursk. Polish, French and Georgian mercenaries raped and murdered several hundred civilians and some of the surrendering border guards were executed, but the plan to capture the Kursk nuclear power station or divert Russian troops from other parts of the battlefield failed. Ukraine committed its best-trained reserves to the operation, and pulled thousands more troops from the frontlines in the Donbass, enabling Russian forces to accelerate their advances there.

The operation was planned mainly by British military ‘experts’, in the hope that a great Ukrainian victory would galvanize NATO support for Ukraine. But it turned into yet another catastrophic failure. By the end of April 2025 the Ukrainians had been driven out, with the loss of over 76,550 soldiers and 412 tanks. A Ukrainian commander stated that the casualty ratio there was 6:1 in Russia’s favour for manpower, and 30:1 for vehicles/armour. At North Korea’s request, its own soldiers fought alongside the Russian troops, and were described by the Ukrainians as skilled, motivated, disciplined and fearless.

An earlier British-planned disaster was the attempt to cross the Dnieper river and capture the village of Krynky in Russian-occupied Kherson. The operation by British-trained Ukrainian marines began on 30 October 2023, and was supposed to turn the tide of the war by creating a beachhead, allowing Ukrainian forces to march on Crimea (Britain’s obsession with wresting Sevastopol from Russian control dates back to the Crimean War of 1853-56). For the next nine months wave after wave of Ukrainian troops attempted to reach Krynky by boat without any air cover. Those who made it there alive were ill-equipped, and it proved virtually impossible to resupply them and evacuate the wounded. The Brits had expected the Russian forces to run away, but instead they subjected the Ukrainians to relentless fire with artillery, drones, mortars and flamethrowers (thegrayzone).

On 3 September 2024 two Iskander missiles struck a military training centre in Poltava, killing and injuring over 500 Ukrainians, along with dozens of NATO instructors from Poland, France, Germany and Sweden. The Swedes were training pilots for two Swedish-supplied AWACS aircraft for the purpose of missile strikes on Russian territory. This was not the first time Swedes have died in Poltava: in 1707 Sweden invaded Russia but suffered a crushing defeat at the battle of Poltava two years later, leading to the collapse of the Swedish empire.

The Russian army liberated 820 square kilometres of territory in August and September 2024, and 478 square kilometres in October, mostly in the Donetsk region. At the start of October it captured the strategically important fortress-town of Ugledar (Ukr.: Vuhledar), with the Ukrainian forces suffering massive losses and desertions. In October 2024 Ukrainian journalists reported that over 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had already deserted, and the number of desertions was 380 per day. Ukraine was barely hitting two-thirds of its conscription target, and there was growing pressure to mobilize 18-25-year-olds.

On 21 November 2024, in response to attacks on Russian territory with British and US ‘long-range’ missiles, which require the direct involvement of personnel from those countries, Russia struck a largely underground military-industrial facility in Dnepropetrovsk (Ukr.: Dnipro) with its new Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile system armed with hypersonic (3 km/s) warheads, which no NATO weapons can intercept.

Europe’s saviours or a bunch of clowns?

In early 2025 there was lots of fiery rhetoric by European leaders about ‘rearming’ in preparation for war with Russia, and the UK and France talked about sending troops to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire, but this was just impotent posturing. The Trump administration was still supplying weapons and intelligence to the Ukrainian armed forces, and its efforts to freeze the conflict failed. At the Istanbul 2 peace talks in mid-May 2025, the Russian negotiators said that there would be no ceasefire unless Ukraine withdrew its remaining troops from all the four oblasts that have already joined Russia, and if it refused to comply it would end up losing another four oblasts. Under the Istanbul 1 deal of March 2022, Ukraine would only have lost Crimea, but it was scuppered by the Banderite nationalists, UK and US.

The Russian forces continue to advance all along the frontline. In May 2025 Syrsky put the number of Russian troops at 640,000, compared with about 125,000 at the start of the conflict. Some Western corporate media were still pretending that the conflict was at a stalemate or even claiming that Russia is ‘starting to lose’. However, in August 2025 the UK Telegraph admitted for the first time: ‘in what may well go down in history as the West’s gravest foreign policy failing of the 21st century, Ukraine has lost the war against Russia’.

A common Western meme is that Russia is losing more troops than Ukraine. The two countries frequently exchange the bodies of dead soldiers. In the first six months of 2025 Ukraine received 10,301 corpses while Russia received 290 – a ratio of 35.5 to 1. In early August 2025 Col. Douglas MacGregor put the number of dead Ukrainian troops at 1.8 million. Russian hackers who claim to have hacked a Ukrainian General Staff database say that it puts the total number of Ukrainian soldiers killed or missing at 1,739,900: 118,500 in 2022, 405,400 in 2023, 595,000 in 2024 and 621,000 in the first seven months of 2025. Ukraine had just passed a law allowing men over 60 to join the army. Mediazona put the number of Russian troops confirmed dead at 121,507, a tenth of what the establishment media are claiming. At the start of the conflict 73% of Ukrainians believed that Ukraine should fight until victory, but by July 2025 69% favoured a quick negotiated end to the war.

In July 2025 the US announced that it would suspend deliveries of some weapons to Ukraine (including air defence systems) because its own stockpiles were running low. The Russia-US summit on 15 August 2025 underlined that there will be no ceasefire in Ukraine until a comprehensive settlement is reached that addresses the root causes of the conflict – NATO expansion and the Banderite regime that seized power in 2014. The EU and UK, and various factions in the US, will try to prolong the fighting (and the flow of money to the military-industrial complex) as long as possible.

In the meantime, the Russian armed forces will continue to demilitarize Ukraine and NATO on the battlefield. In the days preceding the summit, Russian ballistic missiles destroyed production facilities across Ukraine which, with Germany’s help, were secretly manufacturing a long-range missile system. A few days after the summit, Russia destroyed a US-owned factory in the far west of Ukraine that was making components for drones.

The US-NATO empire has grossly miscalculated over Ukraine, and has exposed once again its ignorance, incompetence, impotence, and lack of strategic planning. The Russia-NATO conflict in Ukraine is only one facet of a much broader geopolitical, military, economic, financial and cultural struggle that will reshape the world in the coming decades.

4. Sanctions backfire

‘Know your enemy and know yourself, and in one hundred battles you will never be defeated. If you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, the chances of winning and losing are about equal. If you are ignorant of both the enemy and yourself, there is danger in every conflict.’ (Sun Tzu)

Some Western leaders and officials have openly called for the overthrow or even assassination of Vladimir Putin, the destruction of the Russian economy, and the breakup or ‘decolonization’ of Russia. They were convinced that by arming Ukraine and triggering a war with Russia, they would be able to crush Russia militarily, and quickly ruin it economically by imposing thousands of sanctions. There were claims that Russia’s economy would contract by up to 25% in 2022, but the actual figure was 1.2%. The economy grew by 3.5% in 2023 and about 4% in 2024. Instead of the ruble turning to ‘rubble’, as President Biden predicted, it grew stronger.

Russia allowed itself to be provoked into the conflict because it believed that diplomacy had been exhausted and its economy was resilient enough to survive. The sanctions imposed on it after its reunion with Crimea in 2014 compelled it to become more self-sufficient (it is now a net food exporter), and develop a new generation of weapons that give it military superiority – such as its hypersonic weapons, where NATO countries lag 20 years behind. A further 19,535 sanctions have been imposed since February 2022, bringing the total to 22,230.

Countries sanctioning Russia. (castellum.ai)

The aim of sanctions is to cause so much suffering that the people rise up against their leaders. However, Putin has enjoyed 80% approval ratings in Russia since the military operation began. The Russian people have seen the footage of Ukrainian attacks on Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbass since 2014, while the West turned a blind eye and continues to do so. The West’s sanctions and hate-filled, anti-Russia rhetoric have further consolidated support for the military campaign, as have the barbaric acts of Ukrainian Nazis who have filmed themselves torturing and killing Russian POWs. In the March 2024 presidential elections Putin won 87% of the vote, with a turnout of over 77%.

Victims of Ukrainian army shelling of Lugansk, 13 August 2014. (lafionda.com)

Strictly speaking, the sanctions are illegal, because only the UN has the right to impose them. But the West does not consider itself subject to international law; for decades it has advocated the ‘rules-based international order’. These unwritten ‘rules’ have never been voted on; the West makes them up as it goes along, and other countries are expected to do what it says – or pay the price.

The collective West – the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea – often refers to itself as ‘the international community’, but it represents only 14.6% of the global population, while Russia and China together make up 20%, and the rest of the world 65.4%. The West likes to think of itself as morally superior, but many non-Western countries see it as an arrogant, hypocritical bully. Only the West is unable to recognize its own responsibility for provoking the Ukrainian conflict. By singlehandedly standing up to NATO, Russia’s prestige is on the rise in regions of the world that know from experience that Western ‘freedom and democracy’ is often a euphemism for ‘death and destruction’. As Samuel P. Huntington wrote:

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

The EU’s foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell admitted in October 2022 that Europe’s prosperity was based on cheap energy from Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union) and on access to the huge Chinese market. By imposing sanctions on Russian oil, grain, fertilizer and other products, and forcing many companies to withdraw from Russia, Europe was shooting itself in the foot. Asian countries are buying increased quantities of Russian oil and gas at discount prices and selling them to the West at a nice profit, so that the West can pretend that it is freeing itself from Russian energy. Europe now pays two to four times more for its energy. The Russian trade surplus has rocketed, while the eurozone trade balance has sunk into a severe deficit.

In 2022 many Western countries faced soaring inflation and the prospect of serious energy shortages – partly due to their own anti-Russia sanctions and partly due to their unrealistic green policies and earlier lockdown-related supply chain disruptions. Some nations are deindustrializing because many companies are being forced to close down or to relocate to countries such as the US or China where energy costs are lower. In 2022 Europe succeeded in lowering its energy consumption by 20% – mainly due to business closures and production cutbacks! The rising cost of living generated political, industrial and social unrest across Europe, and the US-European alliance began to crack.

According to UK data, 9.7 million adults and over 4 million children in the United Kingdom experienced food poverty in September 2022, meaning they could not afford three meals a day. This represents 18.4% of UK households, whereas the figure was 8.8% in January 2022. 6% of the UK population had days when they could not afford anything to eat at all.

United Kingdom – ruled by idiots.

At the start of May 2023 the Financial Times reported: ‘Households across Europe are facing a persistent pinch from one of the worst cost of living crises since the second world war, despite inflation falling almost as quickly as it rose.’ Between 2020 and 2022, real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wages in the eurozone dropped by 6.5%, and are expected to stay 6% below 2020 levels until the end of 2024.

That the West’s response has backfired so spectacularly is testimony to its leaders’ extraordinary arrogance, ignorance and incompetence. In September 2022, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, claimed that ‘Russia’s economy is now on its way to oblivion’ and ‘The Russian military is taking chips from dishwashers and refrigerators to repair their military equipment because they are running out of semiconductors’. Admittedly, she is an ignoramus who was trained as a gynaecologist. Her fairy tales generate widespread laughter inside Russia, which has no problem producing all the microchips it needs for military purposes (Martyanov, 2024).

 
Headlines in The Economist in March 2022 (left) and October 2022 (right).

The financial sanctions are also boomeranging as they are undermining trust in the dollar and euro. Western countries froze $19 billion in assets owned by private Russian individuals and about $300 billion of the Russian central bank’s foreign-exchange reserves. Despite the doubts expressed by some countries, the G7 agreed in June 2024 to seize the interest from frozen Russian assets to fund the proxy war in Ukraine. Russia is rapidly dedollarizing and switching to the yuan as its main foreign currency, and importers now have to pay for its gas and oil in rubles. Some Russian commercial banks were excluded from the SWIFT interbank messaging system, but alternative mechanisms are being created.

Other countries are also eager to reduce their dependence on the Western financial system in view of its history of lawlessness, including the confiscation in 2018 of $1.95 billion worth of gold held by Venezuela at the Bank of England, and the confiscation in 2021 of assets worth over $7 billion held by Afghanistan at the New York Federal Reserve. Other countries that have had their assets frozen by the West include the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran (multipolarista).

The US dollar has been the world’s primary reserve currency since the Second World War, accounting for around 80% of global trade, but its dominance is eroding. In 2001 around 73% of world reserves were held in USD, in 2021 55%, and in 2022 47%. Since 2015 the share of US Treasury securities held by foreign investors has fallen from around 34% to 23-24% in 2024. A major pillar of dollar hegemony is the petrodollar system, introduced in the 1970s, under which Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members sell oil only for dollars. Both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have decided to accept local currencies for oil. Dedollarization will weaken the United States’ ability to keep running huge trade and budget deficits.

(wolfstreet)

The Western narrative is that Russia is economically weak. US warmonger John McCain once called Russia ‘a gas station masquerading as a country’. In terms of nominal gross domestic product (GDP), the Russian economy is about the same size as Italy’s and half the size of Germany’s. However, economists recognize that nominal GDP needs to be adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), which means taking account of differences in price levels between countries. According to the World Bank, in terms of nominal GDP, the United States has the largest economy in the world, China the second largest, and Russia the eighth largest. However, in terms of PPP-adjusted GDP, China has the world’s largest economy, the US the second largest, India the third largest, and Russia the fourth largest, ahead of Japan and Germany. In 2024 the World Bank also upgraded Russia’s ranking to that of a high-income economy.

GDP is defined as ‘the total value of goods and services produced within a country in a year’, though it also includes the profit markup on retail goods sold in that country but produced elsewhere. It is a misleading indicator as it takes no account of the size of the parasitic service sector in relation to the far more important commodities and industrial sector.

Russia is the largest country in the world, and also the richest country in terms of natural resources. It has a robust, technologically sophisticated industrial base. It is a linchpin of the global production chain; it is the largest exporter of gas and wheat, the second-largest exporter of oil, the third-largest exporter of coal, and a major exporter of key metals (nickel, aluminium, titanium and palladium). Russia is also one of the least indebted countries in the world. In 2021, its debt was 16.99% of its GDP, compared with 68.6% for Germany, 95.35% for the UK, 128.13% for the United States, and 259.43% for Japan. Russia has twice as many science students per capita than the US, and 20% more than China. Adjusting for the overvaluation of the service sector, the Russian economy is far larger than Germany’s and represents 5 or 6% of the global economy, while the Chinese economy represents 25-30% (Bertrand).

In military-PPP terms, US military spending in 2019 was $734.3 billion, and the next three countries were: China ($390.0 billion), India ($243.3 billion) and Russia ($207.2 billion). However, spending does not correlate directly with military power and effectiveness. The US military-industrial complex (MIC) is geared to maximizing profits, not to producing the most effective and reliable equipment at the lowest possible cost. The Russian (state-owned) MIC exists to serve the Russian government, while the US government exists to serve the American MIC.

The United States, United Kingdom and EU do not always share the same interests. For example, the US has opposed the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia and Germany since the project began in 2005. It wants Europe to stop buying low-priced Russian pipeline gas and to buy its own high-priced liquified natural gas (LNG) instead. Under US pressure, Germany never turned on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was completed in 2021. Despite the sanctions, Russia continued to fulfil its contractual obligations to deliver gas via Nord Stream 1 in 2022, but supplies declined sharply after sanctions interfered with turbine repairs.

On 26 and 27 September 2022 the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were sabotaged by underwater explosions in the Baltic Sea. Many Western politicians and media outlets insisted that Russia had destroyed its own pipelines. But as the Russian foreign ministry said, ‘The incident took place in an area controlled by American intelligence.’ In February 2022, Biden promised that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the US would ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2. After the attacks, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the pipelines as ‘a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy’.

The lack of outrage from any of Europe’s leaders at this state terrorist attack on its energy infrastructure shows how cowardly and servile they are. Germany and Sweden investigated the sabotage but refused to disclose their findings, for reasons of ‘national security’. Russia was not allowed to investigate. In February 2023, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that US Navy divers planted the explosives during a NATO exercise in June 2022. The covert operation was planned by the CIA in late 2021 and early 2022 and approved by the Biden administration, and was aided by NATO member Norway. Hersh, who has exposed many US crimes over the years, obtained this information from an internal source, who called the sabotage an act of war. US intelligence responded by spreading a silly story blaming six pro-Ukrainians on a yacht that was not even big enough to carry the necessary equipment and explosives.

Poland, too, is strongly opposed to Nord Stream 2, as it would provide an alternative to supplying gas through overland pipeline networks in Poland and Ukraine, which bring in valuable transit fees. The day after the attack on the pipelines, Poland inaugurated a new pipeline for transporting gas from Norway through Denmark and the Baltic Sea. Norway is now Europe’s largest supplier of pipeline gas.

The damage to Nord Stream could be repaired. One of the Nord Stream 2 lines was undamaged, but Germany has not turned on the tap. To completely replace Russian pipeline gas, Germany would need to spend over $5 billion to build at least 11 LNG terminals – which would take five to 10 years, as well as making German industry less competitive. By the end of 2024 Germany had built four temporary (floating) LNG terminals.

In October 2022 several people were arrested after a foiled attack on the TurkStream pipeline on Russian territory. Europe is still receiving natural gas from Russia via TurkStream and one of the Ukrainian pipelines. While European imports of Russian pipeline gas declined by more than 80% during the first nine months of 2022, European imports of Russian LNG increased by 50%, even though it costs three or four times more than pipeline gas. At the start of 2023 Russian gas accounted for less than 10% of Europe’s gas supply, compared with over a third in 2021, with about half the supply being LNG. In the first half of 2024, the EU imported 7% more Russian LNG than in the same period in 2023. In the first 10 months of 2024, supplies of Russian pipeline gas to Europe increased by over 10%.

In 2021 Russia delivered 140 billion cubic metres of pipeline gas to Europe, compared with only 24 billion cubic metres in 2023. In the 20 months since February 2022, the EU spent €304 billion on gas imports, whereas it spent €292 billion for higher volumes in the nine years from 2013 to 2021. In 2023 gas prices in Europe stabilized around $500 per thousand cubic metres, significantly less than the $1000 to $2500 in 2022, but still $300 more than in 2021.

The G7 and EU have imposed a price cap on Russian oil (from 5 December 2022) and refined petroleum products (from 5 February 2023). According to one analyst, the price cap was invented by bureaucrats with no understanding of oil markets and has failed completely. During the first three months of the $60 price cap, Russia sold its crude oil for an average of $74 per barrel. Most countries have no intention of joining the sanctions regime against Russian oil, and Russia’s Asian partners are creating alternative shipping and insurance schemes. In December 2023, Russia’s monthly income from oil exports was greater than before its military operation in Ukraine began.

The sanctions imposed by Europe are far stricter than those imposed by the United States. By November 2022 European leaders were beginning to realize what should have been obvious from the start: that the US was shafting Europe. Or as Vladimir Putin put it, the EU is allowing its American ‘overlord’ to treat it like a doormat. One senior EU official stated that ‘the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons’. He warned that the price being charged for American LNG, which is nearly four times higher than in the US, together with the green subsidies and taxes announced under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which threaten to destroy European industries, risk turning public opinion against both the war effort and the transatlantic alliance. Brussels may introduce subsidies to save European industries – resulting in a transatlantic trade war.

The West’s pecking order.

In October 2022 the EU’s chief ‘diplomat’ Borrell exposed his neocolonial mentality when he declared that Europe had built a beautiful ‘garden’ of freedom and prosperity, while ‘[m]ost of the rest of the world is a jungle’. Europe, he said, must become ‘much more engaged’, otherwise ‘the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means’. As the Russian foreign ministry pointed out: ‘Europe built that “garden” through the barbaric plundering of the “jungle”.’ It will be interesting to see what remains of the European ‘garden’ once the EU’s short-sighted and counterproductive policies have taken their toll.

By December 2024, the EU had spent over $135 billion on Ukraine, including $50 billion in military assistance. It is determined to double down on failure, impose more sanctions and continue pouring money down the drain. The EU’s economy has been stagnating since it imposed its anti-Russia sanctions.

(europa.eu)

5. Genocide in Gaza

The flareup of violence in the Middle East (West Asia) in October 2023 has to be understood in the context of the ongoing decline of the US-dominated world order. Israel is the creation of Western imperial powers, is dependent on their support, and has always acted as their attack dog in the region.

(palestinecampaign)

Israel was created in 1948 after Britain ended its colonial mandate in Palestine. Neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states supported the UN partition plan. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist armed gangs massacred 15,000 Palestinians, and 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and became refugees. The Palestinians call this act of ethnic cleansing the Nakba (catastrophe). During the Six Day War in 1967 Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights, the Jordanian West Bank, and the Egyptian Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, after defeating the Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian armies in a surprise attack. 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians and 100,000 Syrians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and the Golan Heights respectively. Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1979. Today, 7 million Palestinians live under Israeli oppression in historical Palestine, stretching from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

Over the years, Israel has continued its illegal occupation and systematically expanded its illegal settlements in defiance of UN resolutions, with the aim of seizing all the land that the biblical ‘God’ supposedly promised his ‘chosen people’ and recreating ‘Greater Israel’ (Eretz Israel). Today, there are over 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the occupied territories.

Of the 15.7 million Jewish people worldwide, 6.3 million are US citizens, while 7.2 million are Israel citizens, with about 1 million of them living abroad. The corporate media like to label anyone who dares criticize Israel or Zionism an ‘antisemite’. That must mean that the countless Jews, including rabbis and Holocaust survivors, who protest against Israel’s actions and the racist ideology of Zionism are ‘antisemitic’ too. Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, for example, states that Zionism is incompatible with Judaism. Moreover, given that Arabic, like Hebrew, is a Semitic language, those condoning the persecution and killing of Palestinians or denying their right to self-determination are also ‘antisemites’. Furthermore, the alleged Semitic origin of contemporary Jews has been called into doubt.

In the 19th century, the founders of Zionism called for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Uganda, Madagascar or elsewhere in order to escape anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe. They were largely nonreligious Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe known as the Ashkenazim, who are partly descended from the Khazars, a group of Turkic clans that settled in the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Today, 70% to 80% of all Jews worldwide are Ashkenazi Jews. Genetic research shows that Palestinians (whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim) are genetically closer to the ancient Israelites/Canaanites than the Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Israel and stole the Palestinians’ land.

Today, anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, regardless of whether they are practising Jews or atheists, has the right to ‘return’ to and live in Israel – but not if they are Muslims, even though Jews and Muslims worship the same God. Israel was a close ally of the racist, apartheid regime in South Africa, and treats its 2 million Arab citizens as second-class citizens, denying them equal rights to own property or even use their own language. In short, Israel is an apartheid, expansionist, Jewish-supremacist state, suffering from delusions of ethno-religious superiority fuelled by biblical fantasies. The German Nazis regarded the Jews as subhuman, and that is how Israel’s Zionist regime views and treats Palestinians.

The peace process has been monopolized by the United States and its European allies/vassals. They pay lip service to a two-state solution, but since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, they have not even compelled Israel to stop expanding its settlements, let alone dismantle them and entirely withdraw from the occupied territories, making the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible.

The Oslo Accords led to the formation of the Palestinian Authority, run by the Fatah organization, which exercised partial control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005 with the aim of freezing the peace process and preventing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Hamas unexpectedly won the elections in Gaza the following year, and has governed it ever since, after unsuccessful efforts to form a unity government with Fatah and the subsequent outbreak of armed clashes. Since 2007 Israel has exercised strict control over Gaza’s airspace and territorial waters, and has restricted the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza. It has bombed and invaded it several times, and refers to these killing sprees as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the words of a Hebrew University professor, the impoverished enclave has become ‘the largest concentration camp ever to exist’.

On 7 October 2023, about 1200 Palestinian resistance fighters, mostly from Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades, breached the barrier between Gaza and Israel using motorized paragliders, missiles and drones, and attacked various military bases and militarized kibbutz settlements. In the fighting that ensued, around 1139 Israelis died, about a third of them being military, security and police officers.

Video footage shows some people being shot by Palestinian gunmen with rifles, but many Israelis were killed by the Israeli military itself. According to eyewitness testimony published in the Israeli media, when Israeli troops moved in to quell the assault, with tanks and Apache helicopters, they were given orders to bomb and shell homes and other buildings in which people were being held captive, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians as well as Palestinian fighters. This is a tactic that the Israelis have often used in the past, and is known as the Hannibal Directive. Videos show Apache helicopters firing on people fleeing the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im without being able to distinguish between civilians and combatants. They also fired on vehicles returning to Gaza, without knowing whether they contained hostages (haaretz; thegrayzone; electronicintifada; electronicintifada; thecradle; thecradle; mondoweiss; ajiunit).

None of the widely publicized stories about Israeli babies and other civilians being raped, beheaded or burned alive by the attackers has been substantiated. Charred bodies in destroyed buildings and cars are the result of Israeli incendiary bombs and Hellfire missiles, as the militants were not equipped with heavy weapons.

The resistance fighters took 250 hostages back to Gaza, with the aim of exchanging them for some of the 5300 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention centres, including 700 children and 1264 people being held without charge (hostages of the Israeli state). The Israeli prison system is notorious for its inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. In 2011, the Israeli government freed 1027 prisoners in exchange for a single captured soldier.

The military operation on 7 October, which took a year to plan, was code-named Al-Aqsa Flood, in reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site. This site has been repeatedly desecrated by Israeli settlers and security forces, most recently in the days before the attack on Israel began. The attack utterly humiliated the Israeli military, security and intelligence services. Senior Israeli officers had received intelligence reports that an attack was being planned, but did not take the information seriously.

The Zionist regime took revenge by indiscriminately bombing and slaughtering the civilian population of Gaza. Residential buildings, mosques, churches, hospitals, schools, universities and fleeing civilians have all been targeted, along with doctors, aid workers and journalists. By 19 August 2025, over 62,004 Palestinians had been killed, including 18,430 children, and more than 156,230 had been wounded. Over 14,220 people are missing, presumably buried under the rubble. Over 176 health workers have been killed, together with 270 journalists and media workers, more than 284 UN workers, and about half of the hostages. An article in the Lancet in June 2024 estimated that the true death toll, taking into account disease and hunger, could be over 186,000, or 7.9% of the total population of the Gaza Strip. (For comparison, from 1 January 2008 to 6 October 2023, there were 2352 Palestinian fatalities in Israel and the occupied territories, and 73 Israeli fatalities.)

1.9 million Gazans have fled their homes, and the supply of water, food, medicine, electricity and fuel has been restricted or cut off, causing a humanitarian crisis. 72% of all housing has been destroyed. Israel’s initial goal was to ethnically cleanse Gaza and force the entire population into the Egyptian Sinai. The European Union and United States tried to bribe Egypt to accept this, but it refused. So instead Israel decided to make Gaza uninhabitable and kill as many people as it can get away with. Gaza is now one of the most heavily bombed areas in history. By February 2024 hundreds of thousands of Gazans were on the brink of starvation.

Gaza City.

The collective punishment of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants (70% of them being refugees) was given unconditional backing by the US and many other Western countries – exposing once again the West’s hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. There is much talk about Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’, but under international law an occupying power has no right of self-defence. It is like saying that the Nazi aggressors who occupied France had the ‘right’ to suppress the French Resistance, or that the French colonialists had the ‘right’ to kill 1.5 million Algerians during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62).

To justify Israel’s depravity, prime minister Netanyahu invoked the biblical tale in which God orders the Jews to exterminate their enemies: ‘Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’ (1 Samuel 15:3). An Israeli minister called the military operation ‘Gaza Nakba 2023’.

According to the Israeli defence minister, there are no innocents in Gaza, only ‘human animals’. (sonar21)

(video)

(video)

Gazan sisters Hanan, 3 years old, and Misk, 18 months old, lost their mother and limbs in an Israeli air attack. Over 10,000 Gazans have lost at least one limb, including 4000 children, who often ask when their limbs will grow back. (thenationalnews)

Israel called up 220,000 reservists and said that the operation could last a year or more. Since October 2023, 370,000 Israeli settlers have left Israel, and over half a million have been internally displaced. As a result of the war, the Israeli economy is losing around $220 million per day, and its GDP contracted by 20% in the fourth quarter of 2023. Israel’s actions have brought the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia to a halt. Most Arab and Muslim states have refrained from taking concrete action, such as cutting diplomatic ties or stopping oil and gas exports. Turkey has restricted some exports to Israel but still allows oil from Azerbaijan to pass through Turkey to Israel.

Since 7 October the Israeli army has killed 905 Palestinians and injured over 7370 in the occupied West Bank. It has also arrested and imprisoned 3290 Palestinians, including children, with the connivance of the Palestinian Authority, the puppet government led by Mahmoud Abbas, which controls 39% of the West Bank (Israel controls the rest). The army has imposed curfews and raided refugee camps, while armed Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian farmers and seized their land. Six Palestinian detainees from the West Bank have died in Israeli custody since 7 October 2023.

A truce brokered by Qatar and Egypt began on 24 November 2023, during which Hamas released 80 Israeli women and children (video), along with 25 foreign hostages, and Israel released 240 Palestinian hostages, mainly women and teenagers, from its prisons, and humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza. The Israeli war cabinet had earlier declared that it would never agree to a ceasefire as that would be a victory for Hamas – an indication that the incursion into Gaza was not going according to plan. Israel resumed its carpet bombing of Gaza on 1 December 2023, with US approval and the overwhelming support of the Israeli public.

The Israeli ground troops in Gaza have met far stiffer resistance than they expected. According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 604 Israeli troops were killed in the first six months of the fighting, while Hamas estimates Israeli losses at over 1600. Israel claims to have killed around 14,000 Palestinian fighters. By July 2024 only three out of Al-Qassam’s 24 battalions had been rendered combat ineffective, and thousands of new recruits were replenishing its ranks.

The Israeli reservists are poorly trained and poorly disciplined, while the Palestinian fighters are very skilled at urban warfare, and have destroyed hundreds of Israeli tanks and other armoured vehicles. The extensive tunnel system is a vital asset in the defence of Gaza, just as it was in the liberation struggles in Korea and Vietnam. The Israeli occupation forces initially estimated that there were 500 km of tunnels, but by June 2024 they were saying 1000 km, due to the scale of resistance they are facing.

Three male Israeli captives who had escaped were shot dead by IDF soldiers, who mistook them for Palestinians. Another captive died when Israeli special forces failed to free him and then blew up the building where he was being held. Unable to defeat the armed resistance in close combat, the IDF uses the cowardly tactic of relentlessly bombarding the civilian population and infrastructure. For example, on 24 December 2023 it bombed an area of Maghazi refugee camp that it had told Palestinians to evacuate to, killing over 70 people. On 8 June 2024 the IDF, with US assistance, rescued four Israeli captives held in Nuseirat refugee camp, but in the process massacred 274 Palestinians and injured 700 more.

Oppression breeds resistance, and resistance tends to turn violent if peaceful action is repressed or achieves nothing. The legitimacy of armed resistance by oppressed peoples is recognized by UN resolution 45/130. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad now have more support than ever before. The Palestinian men willing to sacrifice their lives to fight the Israeli occupiers today are people who have lost family members in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza. Young Palestinians witnessing the horrors of Israeli state terrorism today will become the fighters of tomorrow. Throughout history, national liberation struggles have been terribly asymmetrical, because the oppressors always have military superiority – yet ultimately they lose, and justice prevails.

The Israeli regime could not survive or commit its war crimes without massive funding and weaponry from the United States and other Western nations. Biden has said several times that if Israel did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it – which is exactly how it came to exist. Israel has played a crucial role in the maintenance of US dominance in the Middle East, a region with vast oil reserves and key trade routes. Since the Second World War the United States has provided more foreign aid to Israel than to any other country. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan phoned Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and ordered him to stop the carpet bombing of West Beirut, and Begin obeyed. The current US administration could also halt the righting if it really wanted to.

The powerful pro-Zionist lobby (American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC) owns most members of the US Congress and the Senate, and conservative Christian evangelists support the reestablishment of Greater Israel because they believe it will trigger the return of Christ and the beginning of the Rapture – the end times. Since 7 October 2023, the United States has sent Israel more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment, worth over $17.9 billion, including 2000-pound (900 kg) bunker-buster bombs that can flatten an entire neighbourhood. It has also spent $4.86 billion on intensified US military operations in the region, where it now has around 43,000 military personnel.

The United States has bases in Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq. Its bases in Iraq and its illegal bases in eastern Syria are being attacked by local militias, which Israeli and US airstrikes have failed to stop. Iraq is seeking the withdrawal of all US troops from its territory.

Ansarallah (sometimes called the Houthi movement), the main organization in the government that controls most of Yemen, has launched drones and missiles at southern Israel, and on 19 November 2023 it hijacked an Israeli-owned cargo ship in the Red Sea. It has also used missiles and drones to attack Israeli-linked commercial vessels and US warships. To destroy each $2000 drone fired by the Houthi forces, the Americans have to fire a $4.3 million missile. Many major shipping companies have suspended operations through the Red Sea and Suez Canal. This is preventing ships from docking at the port of Eilat, which is now bankrupt, and is damaging the Israeli economy. Many cargo ships now have to travel around Africa, raising the costs of shipping.

In December 2023 the US and UK put together a naval taskforce in an attempt to bully the Yemenis. Other members of the motley coalition included Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, which supplied a handful of officers. Italy, Spain and France refused to participate, as did all the countries bordering the Red Sea, including Saudi Arabia, which does not want to jeopardize its truce with Yemen. (From 2015 to 2022 Ansarallah successfully resisted the US-backed, Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen, in which over 377,000 Yemenis died.)

The naval operation is codenamed Prosperity Guardian, but Genocide Guardian would be more accurate. Rather than resolving the issue by forcing Israel to stop its aggression in Gaza, the US and UK started to illegally bomb Yemen in January 2024. However, Ansarallah did not back down and began attacking British and US vessels in the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. In May 2024 it announced that it would start attacking Israel-bound ships in the Mediterranean. By October 2024, around 100 ships had been attacked in the Red Sea, and two had been sunk. Many cargo ships are still avoiding the area, and the US and UK have withdrawn some of their warships – highlighting the West’s impotence. By late April 2025 the Yemenis had shot down or captured (using electronic warfare) 22 Reaper drones (each worth $32 million) which the US uses over Yemen to gather information.

After 7 October 2023, the IDF stepped up attacks on the Lebanese Hezbollah militia (an ally of Iran) in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah responded with missile strikes on military targets in northern Israel, forcing over 60,000 Israelis to flee from the north. Israel does not have the capability to fight an all-out war with both Hezbollah and Iran, and would like to draw the US into direct military involvement. Netanyahu is desperate to keep the present conflict going because, once it ends and he leaves office, he faces possible jail time on long-standing corruption charges. He needs to retain the support of other members of the war cabinet who hold even more extremist and fascistic views, such as national security minister Ben-Gvir and finance minister Smotrich. Smotrich has said that it would be ‘justified and moral’ to cause all 2 million Gazans to starve to death.

Hezbollah has an arsenal of over 100,000 rockets and missiles, and is much stronger today than it was in 2006, when it used guerrilla tactics to defeat the IDF during the Lebanon War. Iran demonstrated its military capabilities in January 2020, when it launched a missile attack on the Ain Assad airbase in Iraq, to avenge the assassination of Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani, in a US drone strike. The missile strike was so successful that the United States chose not to retaliate. It showed that Iran has standoff weapons capable of sinking aircraft carriers and destroying all US bases within 2000 km of Iranian borders (Fadi Lama, ch. 8).

On 29 December 2023 South Africa filed a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest UN court, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and requesting emergency measures. The 84-page document describes Israel’s war crimes and human rights abuses in great detail. On 26 January 2024 the court ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide, punish those inciting genocide, and provide the necessary humanitarian assistance. The court has no authority to enforce its decision.

An article in the prominent Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 11 April 2024 made some stark admissions:

Saying What Can’t Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat
It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves. ... The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished. ... The beating we took will sting for years to come. The international ostracism won’t go away.

On 1 April 2024 Israel carried out an airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing 16 people, including military officers. This violated the 1961 Vienna Convention, but the US, UK and France prevented the UN Security Council from condemning the attack. On 14 April, under article 51 of the UN Charter, Iran retaliated by launching about 300 drones and missiles (worth about $27.4 million) at military targets in Israel. Despite Israel firing 2 to 3 billion dollars worth of interceptor missiles, and receiving assistance from the US, UK, France and Jordan, at least nine Iranian missiles got through and struck two heavily protected Israeli air bases and an intel installation in the Golan Heights. Iran’s measured response (which it announced 72 hours in advance) demonstrated its ability to breach Israel’s supposedly invincible missile defence shield, even without using its hypersonic missiles.

On 19 April 2024 Iranian air defences repelled an attack by a few quadcopter drones, launched from within Iran. In addition, one or more missiles were fired towards Iran from Iraqi airspace, but were shot down. Israel did not admit responsibility. Iran’s stance shifted the balance of power in West Asia in favour of the Axis of Resistance – an informal alliance of both Sunni and Shia Muslim groups and governments in Iran, Syria (until the fall of Assad), Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza.

Amid reports of male and female Palestinian detainees being raped and tortured by Israeli soldiers, a poll in August 2024 revealed that 47% of Israelis approved of this, 43% did not, and 10% gave no answer – showing that Israel is a very sick society. On 22 August retired Israeli general Yitzhak Brik warned that Israel ‘is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.’ The head of Israel’s internal security service (Shin Bet) has warned that Jewish terror against Palestinians in the West Bank is out of control and the government’s refusal to tackle it is endangering Israel’s existence. There are deep divisions within Israeli society, many people have left the country, and the economic situation is catastrophic.

Medical staff perform CPR on a Gazan child who was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper (theguardian).
Targeting children is standard Zionist practice (nytimes).

Many Israeli soldiers are traumatized by their actions and experiences in Gaza and some later commit suicide. Eliran Mizrahi, for example, was a father of four children, and served in Gaza, where he drove an armoured D-9 bulldozer. According to his co-driver, they were ordered to ‘run over terrorists [i.e. women and children], dead and alive, in the hundreds’ on several occasions, and had seen things that are ‘difficult to accept’. Mizrahi struggled with mental health issues after returning home, and committed suicide shortly before he was due to be redeployed.

On 30 July 2024, Israel assassinated a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut, and on 31 July it assassinated the political leader and chief negotiator of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, in the hope of sparking a wider war. In mid-September, 39 Lebanese people were killed and over 3000 were maimed and injured when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded, as a result of sabotage by the Israeli spy agency, Mossad. Over 50% of the casualties of this terror attack were Hezbollah members employed as medics and other social service workers. The cross-border fighting in the north then escalated, with Israel indiscriminately bombing the civilian population of Lebanon. On 27 September 2024 Israel dropped 85 bunker-buster bombs on a neighbourhood of Beirut, flattening many residential buildings and killing the Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah and other senior officials.

On 1 October 2024 the Israeli army launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon. However, its troops were unable to advance more than a few kilometres, and by 26 November, when a truce came into force, 130 Israeli soldiers had been killed and 1250 wounded, and 59 tanks had been destroyed. The Israeli armed forces are very good at bombing defenceless civilians, but not so good at face-to-face combat with disciplined, highly motivated fighters. Hezbollah’s missile, rocket and drone attacks forced more tens of thousands of settlers to flee northern Israel.

On 1 October 2024 Iran responded to recent assassinations by firing around 200 ballistic and hypersonic missiles at military and intelligence bases in southern and central Israel. It said that 90% of the missiles got through and over 20 F-35 fighter aircraft were hit. The attack again demonstrated Iran’s ability to penetrate Israel’s US-supplied air defence systems.

On 26 October, with US assistance, Israel launched around 100 F-35s to attack military sites in Iran. They are supposedly stealth aircraft, but while flying over Iraq they were locked onto by Iranian air defence radars, so they fired their missiles without entering Iranian airspace. Most of the missiles were intercepted or suppressed by Iran’s air defence and electronic warfare systems (partly supplied by Russia), which Israel failed to neutralize, resulting in limited damage. The attack was very feeble, but the pro-Zionist media declared it a great victory.

On 29 November 2024, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, formerly Al Qaeda/ISIS) and dozens of other Takfiri, head-chopping jihadist groups, assisted by Turkey, Qatar, the US, UK, Israel and Ukraine, launched an offensive in northern Syria that quickly led to the collapse of the Assad government, which was a key supporter of Hezbollah. Syria had been impoverished by 14 years of sanctions and American theft of its oil and grain, and large sections of its corrupt and underpaid army refused to fight. In recent years Assad had rejected offers by Russia and Iran to train its army and supply weapons, and ignored their advice to pursue national reconciliation to prevent a new armed rebellion. Instead, he sought closer ties with the Gulf monarchies and the United States.

Syria was once part of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, as was Palestine/‘Israel’, while Zionists believe that Greater Israel should include a large portion of Syria, along with parts of Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. HTS (later integrated into the Syrian Defence Ministry) consists of foreign mercenaries with no family or tribal ties to Syria. It is mainly controlled by Turkey, though Israel has also provided support to such groups. The Western media rebranded HTS as moderates, and have ignored its massacres of Alawite, Christian and Druze communities. HTS would like to turn Syria into an Islamist caliphate, but its leaders have also promised to open up the economy to predatory Western interests, and have made both pro- and anti-Israel comments.

Syria will continue to be the scene of multiple warring ethnic, tribal and religious factions. Israel has bombed Syrian military infrastructure and seized territory and resources in the west, Turkey is fighting US-backed Kurdish separatists (PKK/YPG) in the north, US troops continue to occupy the oil fields in the northeast, and remnants of the Syrian army are still ambushing HTS forces. Russia still has an airbase and naval base in Syria, but does not intend to get involved in the mess.

On 19 January 2025 a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas came into force, involving an exchange of captives (1977 Palestinian prisoners for 33 Israeli prisoners) and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. It is essentially the same deal that was on the table in May 2024: it was accepted by Hamas but consistently rejected by the Israeli government, until President-elect Donald Trump signalled that Israel would no longer be able to count on uncritical support from the US. Meanwhile, the Israeli assault on the West Bank has been intensified.

1.5 million displaced Palestinians immediately returned to northern Gasa from the south. After 15 months of bloodshed, Israel had failed to defeat the Palestinian resistance movement, despite committing unspeakable atrocities against the civilian population. Hamas is still the unchallenged ruler of Gaza (video). Israeli sources report that over 890 Israeli soldiers were killed in the past two years, 38 committed suicide, and 20,000 soldiers were wounded in Gaza alone. Palestinian resistance groups have captured many Israeli weapons and unexploded bombs.

After violating the ceasefire over 350 times and killing at least 170 people, as well as preventing food deliveries, Israel resumed its genocidal war on Gaza on 18 March 2025, killing over 404 people within a few hours. Yemen then reimposed its blockade on Israeli-linked shipping. By 19 August, the death toll had reached 10,460 people, of whom 266 had died of starvation, including 122 children. The Zionist regime is determined to either kill or expel all Palestinians in Gaza, but 75% of Hamas tunnels are still intact and its fighters have increased in number to 40,000. Israel is still receiving vital financial and military support from the Trump administration and European countries.

On 15 March 2025 the United States carried out airstrikes on civilian and military targets in Yemen, and Ansarallah responded by attacking US aircraft carriers. On 6 May 2025 the US declared ‘victory’ over Yemen, after agreeing a ceasefire under which it would stop bombing Yemen and withdraw its vessels from the Red Sea. Since March it had flown over 1000 sorties, killing hundreds of Yemeni civilians and damaging infrastructure. It had also lost seven Reaper drones and three $60 million F/A-18 Hornet aircraft, and expended around $3 billion. Yemen is seen as a hero nation by the global majority for its active solidarity with the Palestinian people and for resisting attempts by US imperialism to bomb it into submission. Ansarallah is still firing missiles at Israel and is able to penetrate its air defences.

On 13 June 2025 Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, with the support of the US, UK and other Western countries; ìt temporarily disabled Iran’s air defence system with a cyberattack, and also activated terrorist cells within Iran. The stated aim was to destroy Iran’s missile programme and prevent it developing nuclear weapons. Israel has repeatedly claimed since the early 1990s that Iran is only a few years away from producing nuclear weapons, while Iranian leaders have until now opposed this on religious grounds. The main aim, however, was to collapse the Islamic Republic and install pro-Western puppets. Iran was caught off guard as US officials had assured it that no attack would take place while the negotiations on its civilian nuclear programme were still in progress. The strikes killed several Iranian commanders and nuclear scientists, damaged nuclear and air defence facilities, and killed many civilians. However, many of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities are buried deep underground and cannot be destroyed by Israeli airpower, and regime change is now even less likely than it was before.

Iran retaliated with waves of drone and missile attacks on Israeli military and energy infrastructure, and exposed once again the ineffectiveness of Israel’s Western-supplied air defence systems (electronicintifada). The Zionists and their Western backers seriously miscalculated, and the destruction inflicted on Israel plunged the country into a state of shock. The US struck three already evacuated Iranian sites on 22 June 2025 but caused less damage than they claimed, and Iran retaliated by hitting the biggest US base in the region; in both cases advance warning was given. If Iran were to continue its war of attrition, Israel would run out of interceptor missiles. Israel therefore sought a cessation of hostilities, which took effect on 24 June.

Muslims and Jews once lived peacefully side by side in Palestine, before the foundation of the settler-colonial state of Israel.

6. US hegemony versus multipolarity

‘We lie, we cheat, and we steal.’ (Mike Pompeo, former US Secretary of State and CIA director)

The United States is the world’s leading violator of international law. Since the end of the Second World War, US-led wars, military coups and intelligence operations have led to the deaths of over 20 million people in some 40 countries across the globe (globalresearch). Many surveys have found that, worldwide, the United States is viewed as the biggest threat to world peace.

Countries bombed and/or invaded by the United States and its allies from the end of the Second
World War to 2020. None of these countries has ever attacked, invaded or occupied the US. (me.me)

In the Korean War (1950-53) the US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,000 tons of napalm, and at least 2.5 million people lost their lives. The war ended with an armistice between North Korea, backed by the USSR and China, and South Korea, backed by the US.

In the Vietnam War (1955-75), around 2 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed, along with up to 310,000 Cambodians, 62,000 Laotians, and over 58,000 US service members. The US dropped over 7 million tons of bombs on Indochina during the war, compared with the 2.1 million tons of bombs it dropped on Europe and Asia during the Second World War. The US also dropped 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of herbicides (e.g. Agent Orange) on Vietnam.

Napalm victim. (ratical.org)

Birth defects caused by Agent Orange. (vietnamnet.vn)

According to the United States’ Wolfowitz Doctrine, which was leaked in 1992, the US mission in the post-Cold War era is to destroy any potential competitor to US hegemony, especially advanced industrial nations like Germany and Japan, and to prevent ‘the emergence of a purely European security system that would undermine NATO’. Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute, also made a blunt admission: ‘Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.’ US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once asked: ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?’

As military analyst Andrei Martyanov states, ‘the US has been at war non-stop since 1990, leading to the obliteration of seven Muslim countries, and causing widespread suffering, death, destruction, and acute refugee crises – all of it on false grounds’.

From the debacle in Iraq, to the lost war in Afghanistan, to inspiring a slaughterhouse in Syria, to unleashing, with the help of its NATO Allies, a conflict in Libya, to finally fomenting a coup and a war in Ukraine – all of that is a disastrous record of geopolitical, diplomatic, military and intelligence incompetence and speaks to the failure of American political, military, intelligence and academic institutions.

The US and its NATO allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001, claiming that its Taliban government was giving refuge to Osama bin Laden, a former ally whom the US held responsible for the terror attacks in New York on 11 September 2001 (9/11). In August 2021, after 20 years of fighting, US-NATO troops were forced to flee in utter humiliation, leaving behind billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware. The Western-equipped Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers and the massive police force simply melted into thin air, lacking any real base in Afghan society. The 75,000 Taliban fighters, on the other hand, had been defending their villages, clans, society and country. The Biden administration then froze the Bank of Afghanistan’s dollar reserves, throwing the Afghan economy into crisis. The total death toll in the Afghanistan/Pakistan warzone was about 243,000 people, including over 70,000 civilians.

On 20 March 2003, 248,000 US troops, 45,000 British troops, and soldiers from around 40 other countries launched an invasion of Iraq, which led to the death of up to 1 million Iraqis. At least 4 million Iraqis were made refugees, and 5 million children were left orphaned. Saddam Hussein was at one time a US ally, but upset the Americans by seeking to sell Iraqi oil with euro-denominated contracts, thereby threating US dollar primacy. To justify the invasion, his regime was falsely accused of having weapons of mass destruction and supporting al-Qaeda. The collapse of his secular regime led to civil war between Shias and Sunnis and to a lengthy insurgency against the invading forces, most of which pulled out in 2011. The US-led massacre in the city of Fallujah in 2004 used white phosphorous and depleted uranium weaponry, leading to elevated rates of genetic mutation and cancer. In 2003 Iraq was forced to agree to keep all of its oil export earnings in US banks. The cost of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is put at $4.4 trillion.

Beginning in March 2011, the US, Britain and France spearheaded a NATO bombing campaign against Libya. The aim was to overthrow its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, who had ejected foreign military bases and was planning to create a gold-based African currency area. At least 50,000 Libyans were killed, 55% of the population fled the country, and the attack reduced what had been one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, with a developed welfare state, to a society torn by tribal conflicts in which slaves are sold at auctions.

A 2023 Brown University study estimates that the wars waged and fuelled by the US and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan following 9/11 caused 4.5 million deaths; nearly a million people died in the fighting, and the rest were indirect deaths, caused by health and economic problems. Another study found that these wars, together with US-sponsored wars in Libya and Somalia, forcibly displaced at least 38 million people, and possibly as many as 49-60 million; 26.7 million displaced persons have since returned.

The United States currently has over 173,000 troops stationed abroad, 750 military bases in 80 countries and territories across the world, and ongoing ‘counterterrorism’ operations in 85 countries. Its Guantanamo naval base in Cuba is used as a prison camp for people from predominately Muslim countries and is maintained against the will of the Cuban government. Russia has military bases in Syria and seven former Soviet republics. China has military bases in four countries.

(aljazeera)

Any country that opposes Western diktats or adopts policies disapproved of by the West risks being labelled ‘authoritarian’, an ‘autocracy’, or a ‘rogue state’. This is rather ironic given the West’s rapid descent into authoritarianism. We see an ever-expanding national security state and mass surveillance, and ongoing erosion of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Unwelcome information is labelled ‘disinformation’ and censored where possible, especially on social media. The 14-year persecution and incarceration of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was designed to deter people from exposing the West’s crimes. British freelance journalist Graham Phillips had all his assets seized because the UK government disapproves of his honest reporting from the Donbass.

Anyone who challenges the woke agenda and denies that men can become pregnant or that, in addition to males and females, there are at least 72 other genders (e.g. ‘axigender’, ‘burstgender’ and ‘fluidflux’), risks being cancelled for ‘hate speech’. American parents who express outrage at their daughters being asked to shower with males claiming to be females have been labelled ‘terrorists’. Many people have the impression that the West is in the grip of mass psychosis.

The concept of the ‘right to protect’ (R2P) is sometimes invoked to justify ‘humanitarian intervention’ in foreign countries. But while concern about human rights abuses is often cited as an excuse, the real motive tends to be economic and geopolitical interests, especially the desire to gain access to a country’s raw materials and markets. For instance, the Iraq war was about oil, and the Afghanistan war was about gas pipelines. Moreover, human rights abuses are tolerated if the country concerned is an ally. As Chris Hedges points out:

There is not a single case since 1941 when the coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, US sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars, or military interventions carried out by the United States resulted in the establishment of a democratic government.

In the 1990s the United States sought to engage with Russia and China through trade; this brought in extra profits but also contributed to these two countries’ economic expansion. As soon as they started to emerge as rival world powers, the US switched to a policy of containment. In March 2021, shortly after taking office, President Biden said: ‘The rest of the world is closing in and closing in fast. We can’t allow this to continue.’ This is the warped mentality of American exceptionalism. The US does everything in its power to destabilize, weaken or destroy governments it dislikes, including funding opposition groups and ‘non-governmental’ organizations, imposing financial and economic sanctions, sponsoring armed resistance groups, and outright invasion.

In his influential 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned: ‘Potentially, the most dangerous scenario [for the US] would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.’ He also identified Ukraine as a ‘geopolitically pivotal’ state that deserved ‘America’s strongest geopolitical support’. US sanctions and aggressive policies towards China, Russia and Iran have pushed them to unite in exactly the way Brzezinski was afraid of.

The United States’ arrogant, imperial mentality is illustrated by a study published by the RAND Corporation think-tank in 2019, entitled Overextending and Unbalancing Russia (full report), setting out ways in which the US could weaken Russia’s economy, armed forces and political standing at home and abroad, with a view to maintaining its own global supremacy. Measures include: destabilizing Russia by encouraging domestic protests (i.e. meddling in its internal affairs), imposing deeper trade and financial sanctions, providing lethal aid to Ukraine (which would ‘exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability’), reducing Europe’s gas imports from Russia, promoting regime change in Belarus (there was a failed attempt in 2021), flipping Transnistria (a Russian-speaking enclave in Moldova, bordering Ukraine) and expelling the Russian troops there, reducing Russian influence in Central Asia, increasing support to the Syrian rebels (including Islamic jihadists), and intensifying NATO’s relationship with Sweden and Finland.

By January 2023, events on the ground in Ukraine had caused RAND to change its tune. It issued a new paper entitled Avoiding a Long War, proposing ways to prevent a protracted conflict, because this would better serve US interests than ‘facilitating significantly more Ukrainian territorial control’.

China has 4.3 times more inhabitants than the United States and, in PPP terms, its economy is already 20% larger than the US economy. The trade war launched against China by the Trump and Biden administrations has failed. China’s goods trade was 11% larger than that of the US in 2018, but 35% larger in 2021. China’s exports were 53% larger than those of the US in 2018, but 92% larger in 2021. China now accounts for 35% of global gross manufacturing production – nearly three times that of the US.

The West has used Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia, and the United States in particular is using Taiwan as a battering ram against China. No country in the world, including the US, recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation. Taiwan and the Chinese mainland are one country. The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing sees itself as the ruler of the whole of China. The government of the ‘Republic of China’ (ROC), as Taiwan calls itself, in Taipei also sees itself as the ruler of the whole of China. This situation arose in 1949, at the end of the Chinese civil war, when the PRC was established and the ROC government was forced to retreat to Taiwan. The ROC’s UN seat was replaced with a seat for the PRC in 1971.

The PRC’s long-term goal is to unify Taiwan with the mainland, peacefully if possible, while allowing it to retain its own economic system – as it did with Hong Kong. This would make economic sense, given that China is Taiwan’s main trade partner. The United States, however, has different plans. Its aim, as always, is to stoke tensions and conflict in the hope of weakening China. The US maintains a military presence on Taiwan, supplies weapons, and trains Taiwanese ground troops and navy personnel. We can imagine what would happen if China were to supply weapons to Hawaii, which the US illegally annexed in the 19th century. The US is also intensifying its military activity in the South China Sea, and regularly sends US warships through the Taiwan Strait.

However, according to the Commission on the National Defense Strategy (2024), ‘unclassified public wargames suggest that, in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g., anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days. Once expended, replacing these munitions would take years.’

In February 2023 the Chinese government issued a scathing report entitled US Hegemony and Its Perils, which ‘seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples’. It advises the US to ‘let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices’. It represents a major shift in China’s diplomacy, and signals how seriously it takes the warmongering Sinophobic rhetoric of the US establishment.

At a meeting with Russian parliament leaders in July 2022, President Putin stated:

They [the collective West] should have realised that they would lose from the very beginning of our special military operation, because this operation also means the beginning of a radical breakdown of the US-style world order. This is the beginning of the transition from liberal-globalist American egocentrism to a truly multipolar world based not on self-serving rules made up by someone for their own needs, behind which there is nothing but striving for hegemony, not on hypocritical double standards, but on international law and the genuine sovereignty of nations and civilisations, on their will to live their historical destiny, with their own values and traditions, and to align cooperation on the basis of democracy, justice and equality.

He added that non-Western countries ‘want substantive, real sovereignty and are simply tired of kneeling, of humiliating themselves before those who consider themselves exceptional, and of serving their interests even to their own detriment’.

New cooperation structures are taking shape that are not dominated by Western nations. For example, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – a global infrastructure project – was launched in 2013 as the centrepiece of China’s foreign policy. Over 150 countries have so far signed up, and China is now the main provider of infrastructure in the global South.

(leidenasiacentre.nl)

Western officials often accuse China of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’. But Western governments and financial institutions are responsible for the vast majority of debt that developing countries are saddled with, and the terms of China’s trade and investment deals are much more favourable than those of the West. Sri Lanka, for example, owes 81% of its external debt to US and European financial institutions and to Japan and India, while China owns just 10% of it. But the West blamed China for the economic crisis and recent social unrest in Sri Lanka.

In August 2022 China announced that it was forgiving 23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries, after cancelling $3.4 billion of debt and restructuring $15 billion from 2000 to 2019. Chinese banks have never actually seized an asset from any country. African countries are showing less interest in collaborating with former colonial powers. For example, the Central African Republic and Mali have asked France to leave their countries and turned to Russia. In September 2023 Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger formed the Alliance of Sahel States, which, with Russian assistance, will combat Western-backed terrorists. As Jacques Baud says: ‘The West’s loss of influence stems from the fact that it continues to treat the “rest of the world” like “little children” and neglects the usefulness of good diplomacy.’

BRICS, founded in 2009/10, is the main rival of the G7. The G7 comprises the United States, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, and represents about 10% of the world’s population and 29.1% of global GDP (PPP), compared with 52% of global GDP in 1990. BRICS originally consisted of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It has since admitted another five members: Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. It also has 10 partner countries: Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. It now accounts for 55.6% of the world’s population and 43.9% of global GDP (PPP).

BRICS operates the New Development Bank, which provides loans mainly for infrastructure projects. BRICS members are seeking to increase the use of national currencies in their bilateral trade and investment, in order to bypass the US dollar. Efforts are being made to develop a cross-border payment system, and a financial messaging system that will provide an alternative to SWIFT (geopoliticaleconomy).

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a Eurasian political, economic and security organization founded in 2001. It now has nine member countries (including China, India and Russia), three observer states, and 14 dialogue partners. It is the world’s largest regional organization, covering 80% of the area of Eurasia, comprising 42% of the world population, and accounting for 32% of global GDP. Various infrastructure projects are being developed.

After the Maidan coup in Ukraine, President Putin launched the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in 2014-15. Its members are former Soviet states. It has proposed a common payment system to BRICS, including a single payment card, which will compete with Visa and Mastercard. The EAEU-BRICS union will then move towards a further geoeconomic merger with the SCO. The partnership between Russia and China is central to these efforts.

The International North-South Transport Corridor is a 7200 km network of road,
rail and ship routes aimed at boosting trade between Russia, Central Asia, Iran
and India. It bypasses Europe (and its sanctions). (nakedcapitalism)

On 10 March 2023 China made the surprise announcement that it had brokered a deal to normalize relations between archenemies Saudi Arabia and Iran. Earlier peace talks, hosted by Iraq, were sabotaged in January 2020 when President Trump ordered a drone strike to assassinate General Soleimani, a top Iranian negotiator. China’s diplomatic breakthrough promoted peace and stability in the Middle East, after decades of devastating US wars and interference. It put an end to the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, which the US saw as a way to weaken Iran. It was also a further blow to the petrodollar and will advance Asian integration (geopoliticaleconomy). In May 2023 Syria’s membership of the Arab League was restored, after years of US- and UK-led efforts to oust the Syrian government.

Economist Michael Hudson writes:

U.S. President Biden and his State Department spokesmen have explained that Ukraine is just the opening arena in a much broader dynamic that is splitting the world into two opposing sets of economic alliances. This global fracture promises to be a ten- or twenty-year struggle to determine whether the world economy will be a unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy, or a multipolar, multi-currency world centered on the Eurasian heartland with mixed public/private economies.

Hudson draws parallels between the United States’ New Cold War against Russia and China and the Great Schism of 1054, which ‘created the fateful religious dividing line that has split “the West” from the East for the past millennium’. In that year, Pope Leo IX, seated in Rome, excommunicated the Eastern Orthodox Church centred in Constantinople and its entire Christian population, because he wanted to exercise unipolar control over Christendom.

Various papal dictates were announced, aimed at cementing Rome’s power. For instance, all princes were required to ‘kiss the feet of the Pope alone’ in order to be deemed legitimate rulers, just as modern US ‘diplomacy’ sponsors ‘colour revolutions’ aimed at putting US-approved leaders in power. Regions strong enough to resist papal demands for financial tribute faced intense hostility, just like countries that resist neoliberal ideology or IMF austerity programmes today. The Crusades (1095-1291) were intended to incite Western antagonism against the Muslim East, along with Jews and European Christians who opposed Rome’s control. Similarly, today’s New Cold War crusade seeks to arouse fear and hatred of countries resisting or threatening Western dominance.

As President Putin has stated: ‘Western elites have spent centuries filling their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must realize that the vampire ball is coming to an end.’

7. Rise and fall of civilizations

Based on a study of 11 nations/empires spanning 3000 years of recorded history, from Assyria and Persia to the British empire, John Glubb (1976) observed that these empires tended to last for around 250 years, or 10 generations, and passed through the same six (partially overlapping) stages of evolution, despite the diversity of their political systems.

• The age of pioneers: An often insignificant nation suddenly bursts onto the world stage.
• The age of conquests: It undergoes rapid military expansion.
• The age of commerce: The acquisition of vast territories gives rise to commercial prosperity.
• The age of affluence: This period marks a nation’s high noon. Art, music, literature and architecture flourish. Glubb: ‘Enough of the ancient virtues of courage, energy and patriotism survive to enable the state successfully to defend its frontiers. But, beneath the surface, greed for money is gradually replacing duty and public service.’
• The age of intellect: As decline sets in, political rivalries intensify, but there is also an expansion of intellectual activity and the pursuit of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a proliferation of colleges and universities.
• The age of decadence: Decadence is the result of too long a period of wealth and power, selfishness, love of money, and the loss of a sense of duty. This period is characterized by defensiveness, pessimism, cynicism and materialism, together with an increase in frivolous and sensual pleasures. There is often a significant influx of immigrants (especially for menial or military tasks), women acquire more influence in public life, a welfare state develops, and religion weakens. Empires eventually collapse due to a variety of external causes combined with internal decay.

Glubb describes how Baghdad historians in the early 10th century viewed the decline of the Arab empire:

They deeply deplored the degeneracy of the times in which they lived, emphasising particularly the indifference to religion, the increasing materialism and the laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also the corruption of the officials of the government and the fact that politicians always seemed to amass large fortunes while they were in office. The historians commented bitterly on the extraordinary influence acquired by popular singers over young people, resulting in a decline in sexual morality.

Glubb concludes:

Religion alone can persuade men to abandon their immediate, short-term selfishness and to dedicate themselves to the common good in complete self-oblivion. By religion, I mean the conviction that this life is not the end; that there is a spiritual world which, though invisible, penetrates all creation, and which can strike a sympathetic note in every human heart.

There is a widespread perception that the United States is diminishing in power economically, financially, militarily, geopolitically, culturally, morally and spiritually. Incomes, wealth and life expectancy have stagnated for much of the population, contributing to an angry national mood and exacerbating political divisions and ethnic/racial tensions. The country is plagued by poverty, homelessness, depression, morbid obesity, gambling, alcoholism, opioid addictions, suicides, and mass shootings.

The richest 0.1% of the population own roughly the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%, nearly 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck, 600,000 people are homeless yet there are over 17 million empty homes, and 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 40 million tons of food are wasted every year (Garrido, 2023). A poll in 2021 found that 79% of respondents believe the US is ‘falling apart’.

Michael Anton remarks that the United States ‘is no longer a republic, much less a democracy, but rather a kind of hybrid corporate-administrative oligarchy’.

Cycle theory predicts that every more or less good regime – whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy – falls when it inevitably becomes overbearing and odious. Thus do monarchies degenerate into tyrannies, which are replaced by aristocracies that decay into oligarchies, which are overthrown by democracies that descend into mob-rule or even anarchy.

He also notes that around a hundred million immigrants, from many different countries, have arrived in the United States since 1965, accounting for at least two-thirds of its population growth. This is unprecedented in human history, as is the fact that these migrants ‘are exhorted to embrace their native cultures and taught that the country to which they’ve chosen to immigrate is the worst in world history’.

The most common (one may say only) way that multi-ethnic societies have been successfully governed is centrally, from the top, by some form of one-man rule, whether monarchical, Caesarist, or tyrannical. This, ultimately, is how Rome ‘solved’ the problem of admitting so many foreigners to citizenship, to say nothing of its far-flung conquest of peoples whom it never made citizens. In more recent times, one may think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Tito’s Yugoslavia.

He also observes that the ruling elites ‘seem determined to make the American population fat, weak, ugly, lethargic, drug-addled, screen-addicted, and hyper-sexualized, the men effeminate and the women masculine’. He expects the US to undergo either imminent collapse or drawn-out decline.

Chris Hedges points out that fading empires often indulge in ill-considered military adventures in a desperate attempt to recover lost power and prestige. He sees this as the reason for the United States’ decades-long military fiascos and the increase in tensions with Russia and China – and it makes little difference whether Republican imperialists or Democrat ‘liberal interventionists’ are in power. He draws parallels with the Roman empire, which created a military machine that – like the Pentagon – was a state within a state: ‘Rome’s military rulers, led by Augustus, snuffed out the remnants of Rome’s anemic democracy and ushered in a period of despotism that saw the empire disintegrate under the weight of extravagant military expenditures and corruption.’

He believes that the loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will usher in a severe economic depression and will ‘probably mark the final chapter of the American empire’. He foresees a bleak future:

The mechanisms, already in place, for total social control, militarized police, a suspension of civil liberties, wholesale government surveillance, enhanced ‘terrorism’ laws that railroad people into the world’s largest prison system and censorship overseen by the digital media monopolies will seamlessly cement into place a police state.

In a speech in October 2022, Vladimir Putin presented his view that there are at least two different Wests. One of them is ‘the West of traditional, primarily Christian values, freedom, patriotism, great culture and now Islamic values as well’ – with which Russia shares ‘common, even ancient roots’. The other West is ‘aggressive, cosmopolitan, and neocolonial’ and acts as a ‘tool of neoliberal elites’. He calls it the ‘empire of lies’. He adds that Russia will never submit to the dictates of the neocolonial West, whose period of domination in world affairs is now coming to an end, as Asia, Africa and Latin America pursue their own development.

The change of eras is a painful albeit natural and inevitable process. A future world arrangement is taking shape before our eyes. In this world arrangement, we must listen to everyone, consider every opinion, every nation, society, culture and every system of world outlooks, ideas and religious concepts, without imposing a single truth on anyone. Only on this foundation, understanding our responsibility for the destinies of nations and our planet, shall we create a symphony of human civilisation. (kremlin)

8. Finance capitalism in crisis

Since the Second World War, and particularly since the late 1970s, the economic system of the Western industrialized nations has evolved into what has been called ‘finance capitalism’ – a form of capitalism in which the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector plays a dominant role. Unlike manufacturing, mining and agriculture (the ‘real’ economy), the FIRE sector does not create new value, but vampirizes and redistributes the wealth created by the productive sector.

The rise of ‘financialization’ in the major capitalist economies has been accompanied by varying degrees of deindustrialization, as much of their manufacturing industry has moved to countries with cheaper labour where higher profits can be made. In the United States, manufacturing shrank from 40% of GDP in 1960s to under 12% in 2020. Western economies are also characterized by huge levels of debt, growing economic inequality, stagnating living standards, and rising costs of utilities, housing, education and healthcare. In the US, the national debt has soared to over $35 trillion, while total personal debt is over $25.7 trillion. Debt servicing therefore absorbs a massive share of personal income, corporate income and public revenue.

Michael Hudson stresses the historical importance of debt forgiveness in preventing wealthy families from becoming an independent financial oligarchy:

From Sumer in the 3rd millennium BC and Hammurabi’s Babylonia in the 2nd millennium BC down to the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Persian Empires in the 1st millennium BC, rulers held the support of their local populations by proclaiming Clean Slates that annulled debts, liberated bondservants and restored self-support lands to debtors who had lost them to creditors.

This policy was also adopted by Byzantine rulers of the 9th and 10th centuries. It was not however widely followed in ancient Greece and Rome, despite many popular demands for debt cancellation. Greek oligarchs denounced as ‘tyrants’ any city-state leaders who advocated cancelling debts and redistributing land. Roman creditors expropriated smallholders and created the latifundia (agricultural estates worked by slaves), which evolved into the feudal system of aristocrats and serfs in the Middle Ages.

After the junk-mortgage crash in 2008, the US Federal Reserve spent trillions of dollars bailing out the banks that had made bad loans, while millions of indebted US families were left to lose their homes. Hudson writes:

American homeowners were not permitted to have their mortgages written down to the low distress prices that banks received in foreclosure sales. This pro-bank move by the Obama Administration was highly rewarding to Obama’s Wall Street campaign contributors. Demonstrating the hypocrisy of American identity politics, it was a class war with a strong racial and ethnic bias against the black and Hispanic mortgage debtors who had been major supporters of Obama’s electoral victory.

Following the financial crash and recession in 2007-09 and the recession caused by the Covid lockdowns in 2020, the US Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank indulged in large-scale money printing – euphemistically called ‘quantitative easing’ – while lowering interest rates to near zero. This created debt-fuelled stock-market and real-estate bubbles that benefited a tiny segment of the population, while the real economy shrank. In recent years over 90% of US corporate revenue has been paid out as dividends or used for stock buybacks (i.e. to inflate share prices), rather than being reinvested in the productive economy.

Mainstream parties on both the left and right of the political spectrum have pursued neoliberal policies that have further concentrated wealth and power in the hands of the corporate, financial and security elites. Despite sharply rising productivity since 1980, US wages have flatlined and working conditions have become more severe. Hudson comments: ‘To distract attention from this deterioration in U.S. wage and workplace conditions in the face of rising FIRE-sector expenses, identity politics based on racial, ethnic, gender and religious categories has replaced the common identity of being wage earners.’

Share of national income earned by the top 10% of earners, 1980-2016. (equitablegrowth.org)

In past centuries the European colonial powers used a combination of brute force and divide-and-rule to subjugate poorer nations, plunder their resources, and enslave their populations. When, in the postwar years, colonies gained independence, often after a long and bloody struggle, less coercive, neocolonial measures were adopted to continue their exploitation, and perpetuate their underdevelopment and dependency. Through trade and investment, high-technology countries are able to capture a portion of the value produced in lower-technology countries, where productivity, wages and prices are lower.

Hickel et al. (2022) estimate that, since 1960, the ‘advanced’ (imperialist) economies have drained $152 trillion from the global South – 30 times more than the total aid it received during this period. The drain increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, when neoliberal ‘structural adjustment programmes’ were imposed across the global South. Today, the global North drains from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion per year (in Northern prices) – 15 times more money than would be required to end extreme poverty worldwide. The high levels of material consumption in the richest countries are therefore still fuelled by imperialist profiteering.

Leading industrial nations like Britain and the United States achieved dominance by adopting protectionist measures to build their economies. Western proponents of globalization, however, now say that developing countries should refrain from introducing tariffs and subsidies as this would ‘distort markets’. Instead of striving for greater self-reliance and self-sufficiency, poorer nations are advised to specialize in plantation crops, raw-materials exports and low-wage handicrafts, and to refrain from increasing productivity and living standards by subsidizing public investment and services. As Hudson says: ‘The implication is that countries can succeed in exporting more “labor-intensive” products by lowering the price of their industrial labor, winning the race to the bottom by imposing austerity – as if poverty will make them rich.’

Loans provided to developing countries by the World Bank are mainly geared to creating infrastructure linked to exports, not to promoting domestic self-sufficiency. When loans can’t be repaid, the IMF steps in and provides further loans subject to notorious ‘conditionalities’: debtor nations are required to adopt ‘free market’ deregulation, roll back labour rights, and pursue tax policies that serve the interests of foreign investors. They are also encouraged to raise money by selling off land, natural resources and public enterprises to private corporations. The cancellation of unpayable debts is essential if financial and trade dependency are to be avoided.

Since 1981, the Chinese government has lifted 853 million people out of poverty thanks to the policies adopted by the Communist Party of China. This achievement was made possible by the fact that the state controls key sectors of the economy, including the banks, and accounts for around 40% of investment. That is also why China was able to largely escape the 2008-09 recession. Instead of the state building houses for rent, however, the Chinese government opted for the ‘free market’ solution of private developers building for sale. This resulted in a huge rise in house prices in the major cities and a massive expansion of debt. The debt-fuelled property bubble has also sharply increased inequalities of income and wealth. The Chinese leadership has recently taken steps to raise living standards by cracking down on profiteering in the housing, education and healthcare sectors.

All economies are planned to some extent. ‘The key to understanding their dynamics is to ask who is doing the planning, and in whose interest,’ says Hudson. Private financial institutions in the West have no objection to being bailed out by the state. What Western rulers do not want is for other countries to socialize their financial systems, land and natural resources, and prevent public infrastructure utilities from being turned into privately-owned monopolies that siphon off economic rents. Hudson writes:

To neoliberals a ‘free market’ means letting the rentier class become the economy’s planning agency. Governments are accused of being ‘autocracies’ if they resist this takeover. ...

There are essentially two types of society: mixed economies with public checks and balances, and oligarchies that dismantle and privatize the state, taking over its monetary and credit system, the land and basic infrastructure to enrich themselves but choking the economy, not helping it grow. The lesson of history is that privatized oligarchies polarize and become failed states. Mixed economies with governments strong enough to protect their society and people from predatory rentier exploitation are successful and resilient.

Global recessions since 1870. (worldbank)

Hudson is right to highlight the issues of debt bondage and rent extraction, but economic injustices and periodic crises were as much a feature of industrial capitalism as they are of financial capitalism. Mainstream economists assume that a capitalist economy tends towards equilibrium, and they attribute crises to chance, bad policy, external shocks, or technical malfunctions. By contrast, while recognizing that any particular crisis can be triggered by a variety of factors, Karl Marx located the root cause in the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production.

According to his labour theory of value, for part of the working day productive workers produce goods with a value equal to their wages, and for the rest of the day they produce surplus value, which is realized as profit once the goods are sold. Private companies are compelled to invest in labour-saving machinery in order to undercut their competitors. Rising productivity means that each worker generates more profit, but also that the value of plant and machinery relative to workers’ wages tends to rise, and since only human labour creates new value, this results in a long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall (see Human society and economic development, section 7).

Empirical data shows that over the past 150 years there has been a secular rise in the volume of capital per person employed and an overall fall in the rate of profit, and that all major capitalist crises occurred after a fall in profitability, and eventually in the mass of profits, in the productive sectors. The tendency for profitability to decline can be counteracted through a reduction in living standards and government spending, laying off workers, imposing harsher working conditions, lowering corporate taxes, the deflation or destruction of capital (due to bankruptcies or wars), an increase in financial speculation, and trade with and investment in poorer nations (‘globalization’).

Rate of profit (%) in the G20 (= G7, Australia, EU, BRICS, Argentina, Mexico,
Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia). (Michael Roberts)

Rate of profit in the imperialist countries (G7 + Australia) and in the dominated countries (the rest of the G20). Since 1974 the rate of profit in the imperialist bloc has fallen by 20%, while the higher rate of profit in the dominated bloc has fallen by 32%. (Carchedi & Roberts, 2022, ch. 4)

The development of a welfare state in the major capitalist nations in the postwar period was made possible by the relatively high rate of profit. In the late 1960s, profitability began to fall, ushering in the era of ‘neoliberalism’. Gains made by workers through trade union struggles began to be reversed. At the same time, the role of financial capital massively increased, with an ever-expanding credit bubble and increased speculation in financial assets (‘fictitious capital’). But the 2008-09 recession cannot simply be blamed on reckless financiers and speculators; it was symptomatic of the shrinking industrial base resulting from the underlying decline in profitability in the richest nations (Roberts).

The 2008 crash was followed by a weak recovery in what has been called the Long Depression, characterized by stagnant or reduced world trade and capital flows (deglobalization) and intensified economic and geopolitical rivalries and conflicts. The Covid lockdowns in 2020 further disrupted global supply chains, and the sanctions imposed due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict have contributed to the fragmentation of global trade along geopolitical lines.

9. Humans and spiritual progress

According to German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), the ‘Absolute’ or ‘World Spirit’ evolved the universe with the instinctive aim or hope of attaining self-consciousness and self-understanding. H.P. Blavatsky points out that the ‘changeless absolute’, in the sense of infinite consciousness-substance, is not a being and can have no instincts or hopes – in contrast to the spiritual intelligences (dhyani-chohans) that constitute the universal mind in the phenomenal world (The Secret Doctrine, 1:51, 106-7, 640-1).

She quotes the following passage by Hegel:

the essence of man [is] acknowledged to be Spirit ... only by stripping himself of his finiteness and surrendering himself to pure selfconsciousness, does he attain the truth. Christ – man as man – in whom the unity of God and man has appeared, has in his death, and his history generally, himself presented the eternal history of Spirit – a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as Spirit ... (The Secret Doctrine, 1:52fn; Secret Doctrine References; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1857, p. 340)

Blavatsky interprets ‘the unity of God and man’ to mean the ‘identity of the individual with the Universal consciousness as taught by the Vedantins and some Adwaitees’. To put it another way, our evolutionary purpose is to bring to expression our higher spiritual nature – our inner Christ, Krishna or Buddha. Blavatsky expands on this idea in setting out the following theosophical teaching:

The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul, the latter being itself an aspect of the Unknown Root; and the obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul – a spark of the former – through the Cycle of Incarnation (or ‘Necessity’) in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law, during the whole term. In other words, no purely spiritual Buddhi (divine Soul) can have an independent (conscious) existence before the spark which issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth principle, – or the over-soul, – has (a) passed through every elemental form of the phenomenal world of that Manvantara [evolutionary cycle], and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas [mind], from mineral and plant, up to the holiest archangel (Dhyani-Buddha). The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations. (The Secret Doctrine, 1:17)

The panorama of evolution that Blavatsky is depicting here spans tens of billions of years. Hegel, however, also applied his ideas on a much narrower and more mundane scale, as Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin explains:

According to Hegel, history is the process of the unfolding of the Spirit, which passes through nature, the change of religions and civilizations, until it reaches its climax – the end meets the beginning, the alpha with the omega. Through many trials and dialectical twists and turns, the Spirit that drives humanity will finally incarnate in an Absolute Monarchy, in a world empire that will become the Empire of the Spirit. Its power will be given to a supreme autocrat, an enlightened monarch-philosopher. Capitalism and civil society are only a stage in the unfolding of this process, and scientific materialism will move to an angelic, purely spiritual, science. Hegel believed that this would happen in Germany. (thepostil.com)

According to philosopher Karl Popper, Hegel’s system was a thinly veiled justification for the absolute rule of Frederick William III, the King of Prussia from 1797 to 1840, and Hegel saw the ultimate goal of history as being to attain a system of governance similar to that of Prussia in the 1830s (The Open Society and its Enemies, v. 2, ch. 12). However, Hegel also called America ‘the country of the future’.

Dugin continues:

Marx, who turned Hegel’s spiritual dialectic into his historical materialism (significantly perverting the original), agreed that liberal capitalism was only an intermediate stage, but put communism and a materialist worldview in place of the Empire of the Spirit. ...

In the Cold War, the dispute over the interpretation of the end of history – whether it would be communist or capitalist – unfolded.

According to the theory of historical materialism put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the development of human society is driven mainly by the development of technology and the means of production, and – after the emergence of private property, a ruling class and its state apparatus – by the struggle between those who own the means of production (slave-owners, feudal lords, capitalists) and those who work for them (slaves, serfs, wage-earners).

Marx and Engels argued that although the profit-driven capitalist system had revolutionized the productive forces, the only way to escape repeated economic crises is to replace it with a planned, collectively-owned system of production, so that competitive, greed-fuelled societies would eventually be transformed into cooperative, classless societies in which ‘the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all’. They believed the members of the future utopian society would not worship supernatural ‘gods’, but scientific materialism – which reduces consciousness to a byproduct of physical matter in motion.

Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama was the next philosopher to prematurely declare ‘the end of history’ – which he interpreted to mean the victory of Western-style liberal democracy on a global scale, and the abolition of any ideological, geopolitical, economic and sociocultural alternatives. Dugin says that ‘The unipolar world order was based on a liberal version of Hegelian eschatology.’

Russia’s intervention in Ukraine signals the end of its efforts to integrate into the Western world system, and Dugin believes that this marks a new phase of world history, in which Russia will fulfil its ‘messianic destiny’. He even declares: ‘We are the Orthodox bearers of the Eurasian Empire of the End’, which he seems to think might last until the ‘Second Coming of Christ’. He sees things in very black-and-white terms: ‘Truth and God are on our side’ – i.e. on the side of Russian civilization and its traditional Orthodox Christian values. ‘We are fighting the absolute Evil embodied in Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism.’

Russia may well be destined to play a pivotal role in the West’s decline (and possible future renewal) and in the emergence of a multipolar world based on cooperation and peaceful coexistence, but every nation and people needs to guard against delusions of superiority and grandeur. Nations are just as complex, contradictory, flawed and wayward as the individuals that form them. And patriotism is a multifaceted emotion that can easily be manipulated for nefarious ends.

All civilizations rise and fall; none will last forever. The souls in incarnation at any given moment of history determine the nature of individual countries and the relations between them, including all their problems, conflicts, antagonisms, failures, successes and achievements. The roles that we assume in our lives provide an opportunity for us to learn and develop, by facing the consequences of our own thoughts and deeds in our present and past lives, and by acting as the agents of karma for our fellow humans. We all make and work out our karma together, as part of families, communities, nations, races and civilizations. And we are born at different stages in the life cycle of civilizations, in cultural, socioeconomic and political conditions that provide the experiences and challenges we require.

Wars between population groups and countries are an extension of the conflicts between individuals, which in turn reflect the struggles within each one of us, between our solar and lunar natures. The history of humanity is partly written with love, and partly written in blood.

War is brutal and barbaric; it involves inflicting maximum death, destruction and suffering on ‘the enemy’. War is a time of intensified tests and trials, an acceleration of our collective national and international karma, a large-scale karmic culling. It draws out many different emotions and qualities: hatred, compassion, cowardice, bravery, cruelty, self-sacrifice, honour. But as Ernest Hemingway once said: ‘Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.’ War may temporarily change things for the better, at least for the victors, but hatred and resentment can smoulder on and flare up again later, including in future lives.

Ultimately, only compassion, forgiveness, brotherhood and wisdom can dissolve tensions and divisions, bring peace and harmony, and create a true community of the spirit.

Human society and economic development

Where reincarnation and biology intersect

Life beyond death: evidence for survival

Evolution in the fourth round

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