Afrasianet - The catastrophic losses in Ukraine serve as a warning to EU countries, because they too will suffer horrific losses if they launch a war of aggression against Russia.
Alex Lanter, writing for WSWS, writes an article about the European summit in Paris, which discussed the future of the war in Ukraine and the possibility of sending NATO troops to fight Russia.
The following is the text of the article copied into Arabic:
European Union heads of state this week held a summit meeting in Paris to discuss the future of NATO's war against Russia to counter the imminent collapse of Ukrainian forces, the alliance's proxy, after suffering heavy losses after two years of fighting.
The summit was called to draw up plans for the engagement of NATO and EU forces directly against Russia in Ukraine. Before the EU, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fiko warned against sending "NATO and European countries military forces to Ukraine on a bilateral basis." "I can't say for what purpose they will go there."
French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed Fico's warnings and said, "Everything is possible to prevent a Russian victory," and it is possible for European countries to send military forces to Ukraine individually. Macron pledged to support Ukraine with "medium- and long-range missiles and bombs". In other words, Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other senior EU officials agreed on a framework for a large-scale EU-NATO war against Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his speech to the conferences in Paris via video technology, summed up the official lie aimed at concealing the catastrophic effects on his country of being embroiled in a war against Russia on behalf of the West. Zelensky claimed that "31,000 Ukrainian soldiers died in this war, not 300,000 or 150,000, or what Russia says."
Zelensky's speech reveals his contempt for the Ukrainian people, who know he is lying. If NATO powers are now calling for sending their troops to the battlefield, it is because of the deaths of many Ukrainian soldiers, the Ukrainian army's manpower has atrophied considerably.
In 2022, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, said 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded, although the New York Times wrote at the time that "officials privately said the numbers were closer to 120,000." In August, the Times quoted U.S. officials as saying Ukraine had lost about 70,000 dead and 120,000 wounded.
U.S. officials who are critical of Ukraine's war and have access to classified intelligence reports said the 2023 figures minimized Ukrainian casualties to reduce opposition to the war. US Colonel Douglas McGregor said, "I think the Ukrainians have so far lost 400,000 men killed on the battlefield." "We were talking about 300,000 to 350,000 a few months ago until the number went up after the Ukrainian offensive that failed to sweep the battlefield," he said.
Ukrainian losses today are much higher than last year. Ukraine's "counteroffensive" was cancelled, which included landing troops behind "enemy" lines with the support of all sectors of heavy weapons, but well-prepared Russian fortifications backed by mines, heavy artillery and drones repelled and shattered the Ukrainian offensive. Since then, Ukrainian forces have suffered catastrophic defeats along the front line, most recently the abandonment of Avdevka amid reports of 1,500 soldiers killed daily.
A recent Washington Post report on the Ukrainian front found that many infantry battalions had only 40 of the 200 men left. One commander of Ukrainian battalions warned that "the front will collapse at some point."
The catastrophic losses in Ukraine are a warning to EU countries, because they, too, will suffer horrific losses if they launch a war of aggression against Russia. A 2023 study in the Journal of the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, which called on the United States to re-enlist, to be able to absorb the losses it would incur in any future war with Russia, predicting that the U.S. military would suffer 3,600 casualties a day, or 1.3 million a year.
Moreover, deaths and injuries will not be limited to the battlefield, it is certain that the direct involvement of NATO forces in the war against Russia will inevitably develop into a nuclear conflict, with the death toll reaching tens and hundreds of millions.
If Zelensky is brazenly lying about the war death toll, what is he lying to his NATO allies?
The entire narrative fabricated by the powers of the Western system about the Ukraine war, to justify the military escalation plans that were drawn up behind the backs of their citizens, is a tapestry of lies that must be rejected, and instead, the people must take the initiative and political protest to stop the war.
The ruling powers in the United States and Europe lie relentlessly about the causes of the war in Ukraine, claiming that it was an unprovoked Russian aggression. But over the weekend, the New York Times published its call for a vote in Congress to pass a $60 billion military aid package to fund the war, with an article detailing how Ukraine is a valuable asset for the CIA's espionage and assassination programs against Russia. "The details of this intelligence partnership, revealed by the newspaper For the first time", it was a heavily guarded secret a decade ago.
The "heavily guarded secret" of complicit U.S. and European media is that NATO raised the causes of Russia's special operation in Ukraine in 2022. Since the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 that installed the current regime in Ukraine, NATO powers have spent tens and hundreds of billions of dollars to turn Ukraine into a Western military base. This amounts to an invasion and onslaught of the capitalist system on the post-Soviet Russian Federation.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO powers have waged wars throughout the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa, killing millions of innocent people. This bloody savagery has allowed NATO powers to plunder the world's wealth and support authoritarian police regimes that act as proxy for Western colonial powers to act against their citizens and supreme national interests at home.
The disintegration of the Ukrainian front comes at a time when the lies used to justify these wars have severely discredited. The Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" invoked by Washington as a pretext for the invasion of oil-rich Iraq in 2003 were nothing but a resounding lie. NATO's wars in Libya and Syria in 2011 ended in tragedies for millions in both countries. Western powers are once again supporting Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Amid growing social anger, strikes against inflation and austerity, and widespread pro-Palestine mass protests around the world, the dominant European elites are turning to the far right, fearing that the defeat of Ukraine will blow up the edifice of lies used to justify their imperialist wars abroad and class wars at home, which will have paved the way for World War III to explode across Europe and the world.