The Ukrainian people are resolutely defending their county’s sovereignty as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion entered its fifth year Feb. 24. Moscow’s airstrikes on the power grid, which controls heat, light and water in the harsh winter, are only stiffening the resolve of Ukrainian working people to resist. Thousands of people worldwide rallied in solidarity with them to mark the anniversary.
“The Russians left millions of Ukrainians without heating and electricity, but it’s still not enough,” Taras Ratushnyi, 52, an artillery captain who lost his two soldier sons in the war, told the Feb. 24 New York Post. “Did they get our missile or drone factories? No. We are still a force to be reckoned with.”
Putin declared Dec. 17 that “Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means” unless Kyiv and its Western allies bow down and accept the Kremlin’s demands to surrender the entire Donbas, including many areas still in the hands of Ukrainian forces. In fact, Great Russian chauvinist that Putin is, he believes Russia should control all of Ukraine.
For the first time the Kremlin’s huge battlefield losses now outstrip the pace of new recruitment, challenging Putin’s bloody gamble that Russia’s much larger population will keep supplying enough cannon fodder for him to win, no matter how long it takes. The Kremlin keeps tightening its repression in Russia as sentiment against the war bubbles among both the troops and working people at home.
This conflict, the biggest between two states in Europe in eight decades, is driving rival powers worldwide to expand their militaries and armaments in preparation for wider wars to come. Washington is leading the charge, seeking to prop up its weakening world dominance.
Moscow’s invasion bogged down
The Kremlin’s brutal war has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s defensive battle against German imperialism’s invasion in World War II. “In the Great Patriotic War, we knew what we were fighting for,” Irina, a ticket collector at the Yelets bus station 200 miles south of Moscow, told the BBC Feb. 23. “I’m not sure what we’re fighting for now.”
“Lots of people have been killed,” she added, listing relatives and friends who perished at the front.
Ukrainian defenders have held off Moscow’s numerically larger army along an 800-mile fortified front for three years. As Ukrainian drones increasingly demolished any frontal tank assaults, the Kremlin’s high command shifted to “meat grinder” infantry waves. Despite now losing over 1,000 troops a day, far higher than the defenders’ losses, Moscow has only gained an extra 1.5% of Ukrainian territory in the past two years.
Russian troops have suffered up to half a million killed since their invasion, over 20 times the number of Soviet fatalities in the invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s. And that was a war waged by a much larger population.
The Russian army refuses to issue statistics on how many soldiers have been killed. But Moscow now pays more rubles in survivor benefits to relatives of hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers than it pays on salaries of living troops or to recruit replacements.
Thousands of family members desperately appeal online for news about the large number of husbands, sons or brothers the brass has claimed were “missing in action.”
At the same time, there is mounting resistance to front-line deployment and deepening demoralization among Russian troops. Some 18,000 Russian workers in uniform are estimated to have deserted since the war began.
Among Russian units on the southern Kherson front, desertions are increasing. Commanding officers are confiscating soldiers’ bank cards to try to prevent them escaping. ATESH, the partisan movement in occupied Ukraine, reported late last year that 36 soldiers from Russia’s 217th Parachute Brigade alone abandoned their positions and took off.
Four Russian soldiers, now in exile, told the BBC Feb. 24 they witnessed fellow troops being executed on the spot by their commanders for refusing orders to join suicide attacks. One saw 20 bodies of soldiers in a pit after being “zeroed” by officers, Russian military slang for executing your own.
Ilya, the sole survivor from his squad of 79 troops, says he loves his country, “but not what Putin has done to it.” Dima, a former medic, says, “In the Russian army there are too many guys who don’t need this war, who hate commanders, who hate Putin, who hate our system, and they need to break us.”
This is why Russian workers, in and out of uniform, are the best potential allies of Ukrainian working people.