The provision of weapons to Ukraine has been a failure

Never before has the war been proven to be a failure for both parties as it is now, after the useless massacre in Bakhmut.

On YouTube, debates and in-depth analysis among military experts are taking place. There are ways to gather information from a plurality of sources, breaking through the wall of propaganda from unified networks. Everything can be found on the Internet, with daily updates. Digital maps of Ukraine, geolocated maps of Donbass, and detailed reconstructions of combat using satellites can be accessed. There are also eyewitness testimonies collected by freelance journalists and investigative reports from the international press. After months of careful research, observation, and verification, I have learned to distinguish the most reliable sources from the unreliable ones

The number of casualties is top secret

Numerous elements allow us to understand what is happening on the battlefield. We can know with extraordinary precision the movements of troops day by day. However, we do not know the number of casualties. It is a military secret. Western governments do not request this information either. Parliamentarians, who vote to send weapons as a pure act of faith, do not know these figures either. They have no way of knowing if these weapons have actually saved the lives of those under attack and kept the aggressors at bay. Without data on war casualties, no verification is possible regarding the effectiveness of sending weapons. Neither can we verify the consistency of the effects of sending weapons with the originally desired objectives. Like it or not, war also has its statistical science, and sophisticated calculations can be made using extensive databases of the victims suffered and those inflicted.

The true purpose of sending weapons

The fact that casualty figures are not communicated to us says a lot about the true goals of war and the sending of weapons. These are no longer those of a romantic defense of the population. The actual fight is to defeat Russia, to obtain its surrender, just as happened in World War I when the powerful Germany collapsed in 1918, exhausted, along with Austria, whose empire was dismantled. If this is the real purpose of the war in Ukraine, it is obvious that endless casualties are taken into account, not counted so as not to depress the morale of the Ukrainian population, who will have to sacrifice themselves for a strategic victory of the West. This is all in blatant contradiction to what our European leaders say they want to achieve by sending weapons.

What emerges is dramatically evident in the absurdity of what happened in Bakhmut. The weapons sent by the West have been used to send an impressive and imprecise number of young and often inexperienced people to their deaths

The dismay of military experts

Military experts have never been as embarrassed as they are now, faced with the senseless series of choices made in this long battle conducted for mere image reasons, with no military relevance. With even counterproductive effects compared to the declared and pursued objectives week after week. Experts and even the highly skilled military personnel participating in these webinars are astonished and disheartened by the senseless sequence of choices made with enormous human sacrifices. Choices made at times by crossing the fragile boundary that divides military reasoning from idiocy. We pacifists see this slaughter from the perspective of "cruelty." They, the war experts, see it from the perspective of inefficiency for practical military success. Because this war is a pile-up of frustrations on both sides, with expected results that do not materialize in the face of enormous human and material losses. On both sides, offensives and counter-offensives are announced, which translate into advances of a few hundred meters per week and military upheavals of modest relevance that nullify them. And in the meantime, double and triple lines of trenches are dug. The specter that looms is that of an endless war. Instead of defending the civilian population, they will scrape the bottom by recruiting old bearded men and young inexperienced ones to throw them into the meat grinder.

War: from bitter medicine to poison

What is happening is the revelation of absurdity. War, proposed as bitter but necessary medicine, is proving to be poison. After swallowing it, it kills the patient instead of healing him. There is food for thought for democratic interventionists who, after more than a century since the end of the First World War, today follow the same mistakes as a hundred years ago. Democratic interventionism, which split the front of European pacifist socialism, is now rising again to commit the same mistakes, as if history had never been studied.

Elly Schlein and the Washington Post

Contrary to what some had hoped, the new secretary of the Democratic Party (the center-left Italian party) continues to support the reasons for sending weapons. The purpose is apparently simple and does not seem to cause any wrinkles: to stop the aggressor and protect the attacked. In the open letter to Elly Schlein, however, I tried to provide some food for thought: https://www.peacelink.it/editoriale/a/49398.html

I wrote to her (without receiving a response to date), highlighting that the weapons sent, in the long run, did not stop the massacre but rather misled Zelensky into thinking he had won. And from this illusion, the monstrous situation described by the Washington Post arises. Battalions of 500 men, with 100 dead and 400 wounded, replaced by conscripted boys who, when they can, run away. All things that need to be answered because if the goal of sending weapons is to defend the people in Ukraine, then there is only one way to verify it: count the victims. But the victims of war are covered by state secrecy in Ukraine. Because if there were a transparent and objective verification, it would be seen that as the delivery of weapons increased, there was not a decrease in deaths, but an impressive increase. Are we protecting the attacked or sending them to their doom?

The dramatic data of the Kyiv Independent

The sending of weapons was supposed to defend civilians, but it has become the reason for new forced enlistments, which are carried out by rounding up young people in Kiev and other cities in Ukraine. There are so many young people fleeing conscription and becoming deserters. It is talked about little, but the problem is there, and it is vast

Someone will say that these young people are needed to defend other helpless civilians. The truth is different. They are employed in suicide missions similar to those ordered by General Cadorna during World War I. Here are some glimpses of this lucid madness. "The battalion arrived in mid-December... among all the platoons, we were 500," says Borys, a military doctor from the Odessa region fighting around Bajmut. "A month ago we were literally 150," he confesses to The Kyiv Independent. "When you go into position, there is not even a 50% chance of coming out alive," says another soldier. It's more like 30/70."

Reversing the narrative

The more research is done, the more it is discovered that the narrative of war deviates from the reality of war. And it contradicts it.

It is therefore time to proudly claim our choice as pacifists. We need to reverse the narrative of war as a painful but necessary choice, because that narrative no longer stands up to the harsh contradictions of evidence. We are in the midst of a "battle of narrative," and NATO pays close attention to the storytelling of war.

The right "war of defense," the rhetoric of the aggressor and the aggressed, everything is falling apart because the war is becoming prolonged, it risks becoming like World War I. We are facing the logic of feud, not the war of defense, and it is unfortunate to see intelligent people, who have written books, losing their way, thinking they are showing the way to others.

Even Luttwak is disheartened by the military stalemate and has spoken of referendums in war zones to get out of the quagmire. We were fooled into thinking that a few weeks of sanctions were enough to economically collapse Russia and that sending weapons was meant to serve as a waiting period for the effects of the sanctions to take hold. It didn't happen.

The military holding of Russia

Russia - just study, research, and delve into the data - has weapons, men, consensus, and economic resources to continue for a long time. It has demonstrated remarkable resilience. The rest is propaganda to convince us that Putin can be ousted and that another shipment of weapons or more sanctions can make a difference. The only difference is whether the F-16s or long-range missiles are deployed to strike Crimea or bases on Russian territory. But in this case, we are heading straight for nuclear confrontation. Therefore, the war against Russia cannot be won. And it must be ended as soon as possible because it makes no sense to send other soldiers to the slaughter without achieving any results, many costs for zero benefits. The military say it, General Milley, head of the Pentagon, says it.

Interventionist Anarchists

Finally, a note on those who - faced with the Russian aggression towards Ukraine - have sincerely found the situation intolerable to the point of renouncing their pacifist principles to save those under attack.

During World War I, in addition to the end of the socialist international, another internal crisis occurred within a group that traditionally opposed armies: the anarchists. Germany invaded neutral Belgium and brutally devastated it. It was called "the rape of Belgium." This shook those who believed in neutrality. This was how Pëtr Kropotkin and 15 other anarchist intellectuals expressed themselves in favor of the war against Germany, arguing that Germany represented a threat to freedom and democracy, and that Allied intervention would be justified to defend Europe from German militarism. This was criticized by the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta.

See https://www.peacelink.it/storia/a/49366.html

How many similarities!

Kropotkin later regretted his position. But it was too late.

Alessandro Marescotti

President of PeaceLink