Four and a half years since its invasion began, Moscow’s stalled ground war and murderous bombardment of Ukrainian cities continue daily, but are failing to break the resistance of the Ukrainian people.
Its escalating campaign targets civilian populations in residential areas, schools and hospitals while Ukraine has dwindling supplies of defense weapons. Conversely, Ukrainian forces don’t target civilians but are trying to cripple military sites and industries that underpin Moscow’s war economy. The regime of Vladimir Putin still hopes to wear down Ukraine using Russia’s larger population and vastly greater resources. Moscow’s airstrikes have killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in recent months. A jet-powered drone struck an ammunition depot that shouldn’t have been in a Kyiv suburb Aug. 28, killing 38 people.
Moscow has also targeted printing presses and publishing houses across Ukraine, destroying 12 million books and damaging the record of Ukrainian history and culture. A million textbooks were demolished just before the Sept. 1 start of the school year. Over the past two months, one-third of all the books printed in Ukraine this year have been lost to airstrikes.
“I believe it is deliberate on the part of the Russian Federation,” Viktoria Haidai, commercial director of Konvi publishers, one of the firms hit, told the BBC Aug. 31. Its forces are “destroying printing houses in an attempt to erase Ukraine as a nation,” she said. “But frankly they will not succeed.”
Moscow is adding Chinese-made turbojet engines to its Iranian-model drones, making them faster and more lethal. During four days at the end of August, 1,500 long-range drones were launched against Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine is moving to develop its own more advanced interceptor drones to try to shield its cities. Now its front line is protected by swarms of drones causing heavy casualties among the invading forces. Moscow is now losing 6,000 more troops a month than it can replace through recruitment. Yet the Russian army has only made tiny advances in the eastern Donbas region this year, while losing ground to Ukrainian counterattacks in the country’s south.
Ukraine is rapidly improving the range, speed and lethality of its long-distance drones, bringing more of Russia’s vast territory within reach. A Ukrainian drone strike Aug. 26 caused a massive fire at one of Russia’s largest oil refineries 280 miles east of Moscow. Recent widespread strikes on Russia’s refineries have caused a significant fuel crisis.
Russian miners strike over wages
The capitalist rulers in Russia face an economic contraction and sullen resistance by working people.
More than 1,700 miners at the Severny Kuzbass company went on strike to demand nearly a year of unpaid wages. “We are not asking for charity; we are demanding what we earned through hard mining labor,” striking coal miners in the Kemerovo region of Siberia said in a video appeal to the Russian State Duma.
The mining industry across the region, which produces about half of the country’s coal, is in crisis. Four-fifths of the enterprises are operating at a loss and 18 have already closed. Coal production has fallen to 2011 levels. Instead of paying the miners, Severny Kuzbass used the wages fund to pay off debts and issue bonuses to its bosses.
Andrei Klepach, chief economist at the Russian state-owned development bank VEB, was dismissed Aug. 16 for criticizing the way the continuing war in Ukraine is weakening Russia’s capitalist economy.
“We are losing the global race, both technologically and economically,” he said, referring to intensifying rivalry among capitalist powers. “We aren’t just losing to China and the U.S.” but could also lose “the competitive race in this war of attrition” with Ukraine.
“A social crisis could erupt at a time when no one is really expecting it,” Klepach warned, noting that in 1917 “no one expected the February Revolution either.”
Some among Russia’s capitalist rulers backed Klepach’s views. “We constantly hear talk about the need to mobilize the entire economy … toward the war effort,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. “But if there is no civilian economy … then we won’t achieve success in the war either.”
Russia’s Supreme Court Aug. 17 approved the disqualification of the liberal bourgeois opposition party Yabloko from September’s parliamentary elections. The Kremlin doesn’t want there to be any way for working people to register their opposition to the war at the ballot box.
The same day, a Russian court sentenced Yabloko deputy leader Lev Shlosberg to 11 years and one month in prison after he was convicted on the frame-up charge of “discrediting the use of the armed forces.”
Shlosberg used his closing statement at the trial to call for an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine and to condemn the Putin regime’s assaults on free speech and targeting of political opponents.