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Buying time with Ukrainian blood: Burnham recommits to the slaughter

Buying time with Ukrainian blood: Burnham recommits to the slaughter

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Andy Burnham’s first foreign visit was to Ukraine, speaking of a “just and lasting peace”. But he wants no such thing. Britain and the European powers are cynically prolonging this bloodshed for their own imperialist interests, using ordinary Ukrainians as cannon fodder.

Britain’s newly unelected Prime Minister Andy Burnham spent his first foreign visit in Kiev for Ukraine’s Independence Day. During the celebrations, he thanked Zelensky, played The Smiths for the troops, and, side-by-side with the Europeans, reaffirmed that the UK is “100 percent behind” the war in Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

Also read: Ukraine: drones, delusions, and defeat.

Burnham wasn’t deterred by Russia’s threat that Britain will “pay the price” for its sponsorship of the war, nor that it would “respond in kind” to the Royal Navy’s brazen seizure of a Russian oil tanker in the English Channel. In fact, he vowed to “ratchet up” pressure against Russia.

To show he meant business, he handed Zelensky long-range missile blueprints. This is a symbolic gesture – they would take years to actually produce. It was a pledge to deepen his inherited commitment to the West’s proxy war in Ukraine, and a reckless provocation that puts disarmed, energy-dependent Britain at the forefront of ratcheting tensions with a nuclear-armed great power.

Burnham had promised in 2015 that, if he ever became prime minister, his first foreign visit would be to Israel. That would’ve caused an explosion. Political pressure has already forced him to concede that Labour “got it wrong” in its initial response to the Gaza genocide – though he hasn’t altered its current, practical support.

Nevertheless, Britain’s fresh face has cleared up any doubts as to his priorities: he defends the interests of British capitalism and imperialism, just like all his predecessors.

Buying time with Ukrainians

For all its hypocritical talk of a “just and lasting peace”, Britain wants to keep the war going, whatever the cost.

The West got into this mess with the intention of hobbling Russia, a rising imperialist rival. After four years, it is clear that has backfired. Russia is slowly grinding down the Ukrainian army, and exhausting the West’s military stocks.

The papers and politicians warn that Russia will soon go on to invade Europe. That is just a boogeyman to justify escalation and rearmament to the ones paying: the workers of Ukraine and Europe.

Really, it is their imperialist interests and prestige they are concerned about. To admit defeat, having staked so much, would be a humiliating admission that the West cannot dominate eastern Europe – and by extension the world – as it once did.

They cannot accept this. Rather than concede, they have seen no other option but to madly and repeatedly double down – just like Trump in Iran – whatever the consequences.

Their panic has only grown since Trump returned to power and began pulling America out of the war – and the continent.

The Europeans understand that losing would cement the breakup of the ‘collective West’, leaving them alone to defend what’s left of their spheres of influence against an angry Russian victor with a battle-hardened, millions-strong army.

As for Britain, it has served for decades as a bridge between American and European capitalism. If they break up, it stands to lose the most.

To stop Trump reaching a deal with Putin, the Europeans took over the cost of supporting Kiev from the Americans – dishing out huge amounts of taxpayer money, and buying up American weapons on behalf of Ukraine.

Britain has been extra zealous, giving more than almost anyone else – including Storm Shadow missiles and £3 billion a year extra until 2030 – to keep the war going and the West united around it.

The best they can hope for now is to buy themselves a breathing space to rearm – with thousands more Ukrainian lives. In the meantime, they pray that America can be coaxed back into the fray, or that, by some miracle, Putin falls. The Chief of the Belgian Armed Forces stated it plainly:

“[By] 2030 [!!!], we must be able to tell Vladimir Putin that even without the Americans, he will not win a war against Europe. We still have a few years ahead of us thanks to the courage and blood of Ukrainians, who are buying us this time. That is why we support them so resolutely.”

What, if anything, will remain of Ukraine by 2030 is another matter. But by then, that unfortunate country will have served its purpose.

Turning the tide?

France, Britain and Germany’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’ picked up where Biden left off. Their latest strategy to bring ‘Putin to the negotiating table’ has been to ply Ukraine with the money, drones and intelligence to facilitate a constantly escalating campaign of strikes against Russian infrastructure. At sea, the Europeans are symbolically trying to enforce their sanctions by seizing Russian ‘shadow tankers’.

Militarily, they have achieved the opposite of what they intended. By inconveniencing and terrorising Russian civilians, they have managed to increase support for the Russian military operation. Nor has it affected the situation on the front. At the beginning of the year, drones and losing access to Musk’s Starlink satellite system slowed Russia’s offensives to a bloody crawl. Now it is advancing all along the line.

The real focus of Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks, like the costly adventure in Kursk, is to produce a string of seemingly spectacular PR ‘victories’ to keep up support for the next escalation, offensive, sanctions package, or multi-billion euro aid package – ideally from a suitably impressed America.

In this, they have the wholehearted support of our ‘free press’, who help sustain the illusion that ‘Ukraine can turn the tide’ by jubilantly plastering every burning Russian warehouse on their front pages.

Sacrificing a pawn

A whole generation has been slaughtered. Its industry and agriculture are ruined, and it survives on EU loans. It is facing an economic and humanitarian catastrophe.

Morale is cracking: only 24 percent still support fighting for victory. Hundreds of thousands have fled the front. 2 to 6 million are hiding from conscription. Millions more have fled the country to escape. One MP claimed that “some Ukrainian villages have no one to work the fields”.

To fill the ranks of the war machine, the corrupt, repressive Zelensky regime has resorted to what is popularly known as ‘busification’ – men are beaten, thrown in vans and conscripted to die at the front.

Now the drone campaign, which is costing $1 billion a month, has led Russia to escalate its own strikes against Ukraine. The difference is that Ukraine has no missile interceptors – and America, having fired most of its own in defence of Israel, is unable and unwilling to provide any more.

Kiev is being bombed nightly. Its Black Sea ports – which usually handle 60 percent of Ukrainian imports and exports – have been blockaded. As a result, grain exports are expected to collapse by half. Steel plants, with no way of getting their products onto the world market, are shutting down.

80 percent of its power generation has been destroyed. And Winter is coming: last year, as temperatures dropped below -10°C, millions were left without heating, electricity or water. Zelensky is warning that this year will be worse. Ukrainians have been advised to flee their cities.

Ukraine is not, as Andy Burnham claimed, “a vibrant democracy with a bright future ahead.” It is a graveyard, another country sacrificed in defence of the ‘rules-based international order’.

End the madness!

Burnham and the other representatives of European imperialism do not care about Ukraine. For them, Ukraine has become “the frontline in keeping Europe safe” – the country is a small price to pay to keep the Russians preoccupied.

The most ‘pro-Ukraine’ among them are calling for the draft age to be lowered and Ukrainian women mobilised. They would keep fighting until there is no Ukraine left.

But their belligerent policy has also backfired at home.

The West tried to strangle Russia economically. They sanctioned it more than any other country in the world, and Europe cut itself off from Russia’s cheap energy. Today, with the Strait of Hormuz blocked indefinitely, the Europeans – now dependent on American LNG – are paying a devastating premium.

Meanwhile, Putin – undeterred by European seizures of merchant vessels – has been signing countless energy and fertiliser deals with desperate Asian premiers.

The West’s politicians and capitalists are willing to make these sacrifices. After all, they are not the ones footing the bill. It is the workers who are suffering for a war they never voted for through accelerating deindustrialisation, spiking inflation, and a cost of living crisis – on top of €220 billion in war loans that will never be paid back, extracted through cuts in welfare, healthcare, pensions and education.

Nor do the consequences of their reckless brinkmanship particularly concern them. If anything, Russian threats of retaliation are an ideal justification for remilitarisation – as well as billions of euros worth of cuts they are preparing to fund it.

But the end is approaching. Burnham has chained himself to Ukraine’s war chariot just as it approaches the wall.

Ukraine is being torn apart by crisis, at the front and at home. In the West, the economic, military, and political costs of sustaining the war are becoming harder to bear. The politicians who based their authority on standing with Ukraine, like Macron, Merz and recently-deposed Starmer, are hated and may soon be wiped out by right-wing populist challengers – many of whom would prefer to deal with Russia.

The outcome of this bloody gamble will sooner or later become undeniable: the West has lost, and is emerging weakened and divided. Russia has grown stronger. In the wager, Ukraine has been destroyed.

In the meantime, they stubborly push on. The warmongering gangsters that sit in London, Washington, Paris and Berlin would drive us all to hell in defence of their own interests. If we are to end this madness, they must be overthrown.

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