Following the collapse of Ukraine’s “spring offensive,” which has made no significant advances despite the deaths of tens of thousands of troops, the United States is expanding its direct involvement in the war. Later this week, Zelensky will visit the White House and Pentagon for crisis talks following the firing of leading members of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. Biden is seeking to ensure the passage of another $21 billion in funding for the Ukraine war, in addition to the over $150 billion that has already been allocated.
At his address to the United Nations, Biden declared, “The United States, together with our allies and partners around the world, will continue to stand with the brave people of Ukraine as they defend their sovereignty and territorial integrity and their freedom.” The war against Russia, he said, is an investment in “the future of every country that seeks a world governed by basic rules that apply equally to all nations and uphold the rights of every nation, no matter how big or how small: sovereignty, territorial integrity.”
Biden asserted that “Russia alone bears responsibility for this war. Russia alone has the power to end this war immediately. And it is Russia alone that stands in the way of peace, because the — Russia’s price for peace is Ukraine’s capitulation, Ukraine’s territory, and Ukraine’s children.”
As usual, Biden ignored the fact that the United States has bombed, invaded, or destabilized dozens of countries since World War II, in violation of this supposedly inviolate principle of “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity.” He ignored the systematic rampage of war crimes committed by the United States, from the systematic massacre of civilians during the Vietnam War, to the US’s open embrace of torture and kidnapping in the name of the “war on terror.” Biden’s declaration that “Russia alone” is responsible for the war ignores the US’s role in massively arming Ukraine in the years before 2022 and the NATO provocations in the immediate lead-up to the war.
Biden was followed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who delivered an ethnically-charged rant against Russia and condemned the United Nations for refusing to openly participate in past wars.
Zelensky referred to Russia and Russians as “evil,” and as “terrorists,” and accused them of carrying out a “genocide” against Ukraine.
Notably, Biden spoke just one day after the New York Times reported that a missile strike on a Ukrainian market that killed 15 people earlier this month, which led Zelensky to condemn Russia as “terrorists,” was in fact fired by Ukraine.
Zelensky began his speech declaring, “This hall saw many wars but not as an active defender against the aggressions.”
He condemned the United Nations for being overly afraid of nuclear war, saying, “In many cases, the fear of war, the final war, was the loudest here—the war after which no one would gather in the General Assembly Hall again.”
He continued, “The Third World War was seen as a nuclear war. A conflict between states on the highway to nukes. Other wars seemed less scary compared to the threat of the so-called ‘great powers’ firing their nuclear stockpiles.
“The effort to promote complete nuclear disarmament,” he said, “should not be the only strategy to protect the world from this final war.”
He concluded, “For the first time in modern history, we have a real chance to end the aggression on the terms of the nation which was attacked.”
As Biden and Zelensky were making these blood-curdling statements, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin were speaking in Ramstein, Germany to make it clear the United States would continue to escalate the war.
“There’s no intention whatsoever by the Ukrainians to stop fighting during the winter,” Milley said.
Milley pointed to the expansion of the deployment of US military hardware to Ukraine, declaring, “And we’re putting this long-term commitment into action today. American M1 tanks will be arriving in Ukraine soon, and that will add another formidable armored capability to join the Leopards that are already on the battlefield. And meanwhile, we are beginning our collective training on Ukraine’s future F-16 pilots.”
He continued, “Our long-term support for Ukraine will continue to evolve through dedicated capability coalitions, like the ones that we started for armor and F-16 training and information technology. And these important coalitions will help Ukraine continue to build up a combat-credible force for the future.”
“Our commitment remains unwavering,” Milley said.
Asked whether Ukraine’s backers have the industrial capacity to support the war much longer, Milley replied, “The United States and its allied countries are rich, powerful, with significant resources, military resources that are capable of sustaining this fight, in President Biden’s words, as long as it takes.”
He continued, “and that’s exactly what we, the military, will do. We’ll do what we’re directed to do, and we’re going to do it as long as it takes.”
Milley concluded, “Wars are an interaction between two competing political wills to assert their will on the other by the use of organized violence. I mean, that’s what the essence of war is all about.”
The collective remarks by Biden, Zelensky, and Milley point to a significant escalation of the war by the United States. From Milley’s praise of war as “organized violence” by the “rich” and “powerful” countries, to Zelensky’s assertion that the United Nations should not be deterred by the threat of nuclear war, the United States and its allies are using the most reckless and provocative possible language with the aim to further inflame and expand a war that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Photo: President Joe Biden walks off after addressing the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023 © AP Photo / Susan Walsh.
Source: World Socialist Web Site.
