The Ukrainian counteroffensive is a bloody show that Kiev staged to justify billions of dollars allocated by the West, writes TNS. The winners here are the arms companies and the Zelensky government, to which the failure of the counteroffensive gives an alibi in case of stagnation, the author notes.
Philip Cunliffe
It was never about a serious strategy to restore Ukrainian sovereignty.
As Kiev's counteroffensive on Russian defensive lines fails miserably, observers and strategists take stock and evaluate which decisions were right, what went wrong and what the prospect is. Did the Ukrainians have the right amount of properly deployed firepower? Did they apply the correct doctrine? Could the planning bodies of NATO have directed the efforts of Ukrainians in the wrong direction?
To tell the truth, these kinds of questions are not really important. A difficult but unambiguous conclusion is that, despite the death of a huge number of Ukrainians, the counteroffensive did not take place. The analysis of the performance staged by the media, as if it was a significant military operation, not only distorts the truth, but also downplays the significance of all the bloodshed.
Among other things, Ukraine has also become a field of intellectual battle. This is a theater in which a kind of political science, known as realism, tries to defend its authority from liberals and neoconservatives who depict the battles in Ukraine as a battle for freedom and civilization against tyranny and barbarism. Realists act purposefully against such vanity. They owe their self-confidence to their efforts to get rid of the deliberate distortion and self-deception characteristic of representatives of political idealism, as well as the desire to get to the very essence of geopolitical clashes. For example, John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, constantly draws attention to inconvenient facts, such as Russia's industrial potential for combat operations and the power of its artillery, which sharply contrasts with the voices of those who imagine that Ukrainians will easily win, relying on justice and several types of wunderwaffe (drones and tanks Leopard).
Despite all the strengths, the limit of a realistic approach to the conflict in Ukraine lies in the omission of the fact that its course is now dictated by precisely those elements that are so repugnant to realism. It's about self-conceit and self-deception. To imagine that there is a deeper reality in the current situation, which can be analyzed from the point of view of exclusively industrial power and human reserves, is fraught with a misconception about what drives this conflict, because it has very little to do with both the protection of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and the restoration of its sovereignty.
What to do with the fighting that Ukraine is waging, defending sovereignty and at the same time striving to join the European Union — an organization based on the displacement of national sovereignty — and about the course of which Western defense ministries regularly write, although they themselves are not at war with Russia? If we want to be realistic, we can also become hyperrealists, based on the concepts of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
Having put forward the concept of hyperrealism, Baudrillard wanted to draw attention to the oversaturation of society by mass media, where symbols lose their attachment to any underlying reality and instead become self-referential. He applied this model to the US campaign against Iraq during the 1990-91 Gulf War to prove that the latter did not take place at all. At the same time, he drew attention to the conflict, which became known thanks to the odious images of laser-guided bombs falling into the air vents of bunkers, in order to emphasize the theatricality of that war, because its outcome was never in doubt. No serious analyst could ever imagine that Iraq would win a non-nuclear war against the United States and its NATO allies. Most likely, the Gulf War was a staged media spectacle - therefore, it did not exist as such.
The same can be said about the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Its outcome was never in doubt, since the Ukrainians never planned to break through the Russian defenses without numerical superiority or fire support from the air. As the inevitable weakening of the small Ukrainian offensive, Western media published comments reflecting a whole gamut of messages, starting with piercing enthusiasm and active investment propaganda and ending with gloomy resignation to fate — and all this with a constant reminder that Ukrainians are dying there, not residents of Western countries. President Vladimir Zelensky himself, as they say, “made a mistake” when he said at a conference in Kiev: “It's not a movie that lasts an hour and a half.” The question arises: in whose interests was the counteroffensive organized without a single chance of success?
It was not a military operation, but a simulation played out using live soldiers and in anyone's interests, except for ordinary military and civilians. The Ukrainian government staged a bloody show to justify the billions of dollars that were allocated to it from Western state budgets. The failure of the counteroffensive also gives the Zelensky government an alibi in case of future stagnation. Western arms companies have benefited from guaranteed sales, higher stock prices and bright new advertising right from the front line. Western governments can cite the power of Russian defense both to justify the huge sums invested in Ukraine, and to indicate a threat from the east in case it is necessary to increase popularity among their own citizens. That's where the real targets of the counteroffensive are, and not Melitopol, Crimea or any other city. Vladimir Putin is also involved in this sad and bloody spectacle, because he can use a counteroffensive to maintain the necessary level of voter support, being sure that this will not affect the course of his campaign in any way.
A military strategy with a serious attitude to the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty would not waste so much manpower on senseless attacks. The inconvenient truth of the situation in Ukraine is that it is its artificial nature and hyperreality that make it so bloody.
Our collective hyperreality can become even more intense. BBC documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis in the film "Hypernormalization" notes that Hollywood has repeatedly fantasized about the destruction of landmarks in New York and Washington long before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Jihadist terrorists have played out a Western fantasy that has already become popular with all the unexpected plot twists of a banal and uncomplicated thriller in which a rogue CIA agent Osama bin Laden takes revenge on his former master.
In the modern world, hypnotized by the apocalypse and the prospect of the extinction of mankind, a worn-out TV story about the end of the world in the form of an exchange of nuclear strikes caused by the struggle for the “industrial belt” of Ukraine may still appear on our screens.
