[D66] Fwd: Paris war summit prepares for direct deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine

[René Oudeweg]

wsws.org
Paris war summit prepares for direct deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine
7–9 minutes


European Union (EU) heads of state gathered in Paris Monday for a summit 
on the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine. Facing the imminent collapse of 
NATO’s Ukrainian proxy forces amid massive losses, the summit was called 
to lay the groundwork for the introduction of troops from NATO and EU 
member countries to fight Russia in Ukraine.

Before the summit, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico warned, “NATO and 
EU member states are considering that they will send their troops to 
Ukraine on a bilateral basis.” He added, “I cannot say for what purpose.”

These warnings were confirmed by French President Emmanuel Macron, who 
declared that the deployment of troops from NATO members was “not excluded.”

Last night Macron said that “everything is possible” to prevent Russian 
victory in Ukraine, and that individual European countries sending 
troops to Ukraine is “not excluded.”

He pledged to give Ukraine “medium- and long-range missiles and bombs” 
for use against Russia. That is, Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz 
and other top EU officials agreed to the framework for a full-scale 
EU-NATO war against Russia.

The statements of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who spoke to 
the Paris conference via video link, epitomize the official lying aiming 
to obscure the catastrophic implications of this EU-NATO escalation. 
“31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in this war,” Zelensky claimed. 
“Not 300,000 or 150,000, or whatever Putin and his lying circle are 
saying. But each of these losses is a great loss for us.”

Zelensky’s statement exposes his contempt for the Ukrainian people, who 
know he is lying. If the NATO powers are now advocating sending their 
own troops to the battlefield, it is because so many Ukrainian soldiers 
have been killed that the Ukrainian army has run out of manpower.

In November 2022, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark 
Milley said 100,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed or wounded, though 
the New York Times wrote that “officials said privately the numbers were 
closer to 120,000.” Last August, the Times cited US officials claiming 
Ukraine had lost 70,000 killed and 120,000 wounded.

US officials critical of the Ukraine war and with access to classified 
intelligence reports said these August 2023 figures in fact understated 
Ukrainian losses, so as to limit opposition to the war.

US Colonel Douglas Macgregor said, “The Ukrainians now we think have 
lost 400,000 men killed in battle. We were talking about 300,000-350,000 
a few months ago. Within the last month of this supposed 
counteroffensive which was to sweep the battlefield, they lost at least 
40,000 killed.”

Ukrainian casualties today are far higher than they were last August. 
Indeed, Ukraine’s failed “counteroffensive”—which involved throwing 
troops against well-prepared Russian fortifications backed by mines, 
heavy artillery and drones—was not called off until November. Ukrainian 
forces have since suffered catastrophic defeats all along the front 
line, most recently abandoning Avdeevka amid reports they were suffering 
1,500 casualties per day.

A recent Washington Post report on the Ukrainian front found several 
infantry battalions with only 40 of 200 men left. One battalion 
commander warned the Post, “the front will collapse somewhere.”

Ukraine’s catastrophic casualties are a warning: Other European 
countries will also take horrific losses if they wage war on Russia. It 
is worth recalling the September 2023 study in the US Army War College 
Quarterly, which called on the United States to reinstate the draft, to 
be able to absorb the losses it would suffer in a coming war with 
Russia. It projected that the US Army would take 3,600 casualties per 
day, or 1.3 million per year, in a war with Russia.

Moreover, the deaths and casualties will not be confined to the 
battlefield. The direct introduction of NATO forces into the war against 
Russia would almost certainly escalate into a nuclear conflict, with 
deaths and casualties running into the tens and hundreds of millions.

If Zelensky lies so brazenly about the number of war dead, what else are 
he and his NATO allies lying about? The answer is: everything.

The entire narrative the NATO powers have concocted around the Ukraine 
war, to justify plans for military escalation worked out behind the 
backs of the population, is a tissue of lies that must be rejected. 
Workers and youth must instead be politically mobilized to stop the war.

US and European ruling circles lie relentlessly about the origin of the 
Ukraine war, claiming it was unprovoked Russian aggression. But this 
weekend, the New York Times, to justify its call to vote for a $60 
billion military aid package to Ukraine in the US Congress, published an 
article detailing how Ukraine is a valuable asset for CIA spying and 
assassination programs against Russia. “The details of this intelligence 
partnership, many of which are being disclosed by the New York Times for 
the first time, have been a closely guarded secret for a decade,” it wrote.

That is, the “closely guarded secret” of complicit US and European media 
is that NATO provoked the 2022 Russian invasion. Since the 2014 
US-backed coup in Kiev that installed Ukraine’s current regime, NATO 
powers spent tens and hundreds of billions of dollars to build up 
Ukraine as a military base. The bankrupt post-Soviet capitalist regime 
in Russia invaded Ukraine as an essentially defensive maneuver, trying 
to pressure what it calls its “Western partners,” that is, the NATO 
imperialist powers, to drop their most aggressive policies against Russia.

Since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991, the 
NATO powers have waged wars across the Middle East, Eastern Europe and 
Africa, killing millions. This bloody rampage let the NATO powers 
plunder the world, while imposing social austerity and strengthening the 
military-police state against the workers at home.

The disintegration of the Ukrainian front comes as the lies used to 
justify these wars are now deeply discredited. The Iraqi “weapons of 
mass destruction” Washington invoked as a pretext to invade oil-rich 
Iraq in 2003 did not exist. The NATO wars launched in Libya and Syria in 
2011, supposedly to defend democracy against authoritarian regimes tied 
to Russia, ended with the NATO powers backing Israel’s genocide against 
Gaza. Amid growing social anger and strikes against inflation and 
austerity, mass protests against the Gaza genocide are unfolding in 
America, Europe and internationally.

The European ruling class is reacting to this crisis by shifting far to 
the right. Fearing that a Ukrainian defeat would blow apart the entire 
edifice of lies used to justify their imperialist wars abroad and class 
war at home, it has opened a path for World War III to explode across 
Europe and the world.

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