On Friday, May 19th, 2023 President Joe Biden, who was at Hiroshima, Japan, the site the United States targeted with an atomic bomb during World War II, confirmed the decision to approve Ukraine’s request for F-16 fighter jets, escalating the war drastically on the eve of Ukraine’s “Spring” offensive.
In a clear indication of its backtracking from as early as February, the Biden administration’s approval comes as a clear repudiation of its earlier statements on the subject. During interviews in February, 2023, shortly after the Ukraine’s war’s first anniversary, the Biden Administration, for instance, stated unequivocally, “I am ruling [F-16s] out for now.”
“Today, President Biden informed G-7 leaders that the United States will support a joint effort with our allies and partners to train Ukrainian pilots on fourth-generation fighter aircraft, including F-16s, to further strengthen and improve the capabilities of the Ukrainian Air Force,” according to a senior administration official.
“As the training takes place over the coming months, our coalition of countries participating in this effort will decide when to actually provide jets, how many we will provide, and who will provide them.”
Although the official added that training will take place outside Ukraine at sites in Europe, requiring several months for completion, there is no reason to take stock of anything the Biden administration or its official relay to the public, especially in regards to Ukraine, Zelensky, or weapons supplied to his regime for prosecuting the Ukraine war.
The official stated: “We hope we can begin this training in the coming weeks.”
“To date, the United States and our allies and partners have focused on providing Ukraine with the vast majority of the systems, weapons, and training it requires to conduct offensive operations this spring and summer. Discussions about improving the Ukrainian Air Force reflect our long-term commitment to Ukraine’s self-defense,” the official stated.
Discounting the timetables is important. It is not the first time that the regime has lied about timetables, let alone about rejected requests, which the Biden administration has ultimately approved. These timetables, as well as many timetables spun out by Zelensky himself, are likely a ruse designed to achieve what military theorists proscribe as a fulfillment of Sun Tzu’s famous principle that “all of war is deception.”
The New York Times , for instance, recently admitted as much in an article published on May 12th, 2023. Entitled “Zelensky Says Equipment Gaps Make It Too Soon for a Counteroffensive,” the authors note how “[last] fall, the Ukrainian military let it be known that it was planning a counterattack in the south which led Russia to move troops to the south, leaving its defenses undermanned in the Kharkiv region in the northeast. The Ukrainian military command then attacked there, instead surprising the Russians—as well as many of its own troops—recapturing a vast swath of territory in a rout.”
Based on the previous act of deception with respect to the timetables, in whose success the leading newspapers (i.e., New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal) played a significant part, there is absolutely no reason to believe anything about Biden administration or Zelensky timetables, especially since the so-called “Spring” counteroffensive is edging much closer to summer than as originally heralded.
In a report published by NBC, the authors claim that an unnamed official said that the planes would not be used for Ukraine’s upcoming counteroffensive against Russia. These claims appear to support the deception.
The fact that the NATO Member Statess such as Holland are expected to deliver the jets is being portrayed as an indication that the American made F-16s, which are subject to American control upon export to Member States, “may not necessarily come from the United States,” as though the decision to approve the request for jets does not originate from Washington. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The decision to provide Ukraine’s air forces with F-16 jets likely comes as a result of the Pentagon’s analysis of Ukraine’s inability to counter Russia’s continuous, sustained, long range air strikes deep within Ukraine territory. Shortly after the installation of the Patriot missile defense system in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, Russia struck five of its missile launchers (where a battery of Patriot missile defense systems contains 12) together with its radar vehicle, indicating that Russia is capable of identifying, targeting, or destroying any weapon or defense systems within the country.
Together with Ukraine’s inability to prevent Russia’s continuous, sustained, long-range air strikes, the Pentagon’s analysis is likely in a state of alarm over Ukraine’s inability to man the firepower required for strikes, if not by HIMARs, then by artillery.
In a recent article entitled, “HIMARS Rockets ‘Increasingly Less Effective,’ which Military Watch Magazine Editorial Staff, published, Ukrainian ground forces are becoming less capable of accurately pinpointing Russian targets.
There is no shortage of early reports on the Ukraine’s military inability to sustain firepower equal or above Russia’s. In an article entitled, “Artillery Is Breaking in Ukraine. It’s Becoming a Problem for the Pentagon,” which New York Times published on November 25th, 2022, the authors noted how “Ukrainian troops fire thousands of explosive shells at Russian targets every day, using high-tech cannons supplied by the United States and its allies. But those weapons are burning out after months of overuse, or being damaged or destroyed in combat, and dozens have been taken off the battlefield for repairs.”
Without any mention of the debacle over munitions, which is visible from an article published as “Ukraine Arms Race,” in Times from the Week of May 8th – May 17th, 2023, the fact that Ukraine is not capable of meeting or beating Russian firepower points to the fact that a strategy beyond “America’s vastly superior firepower” must be developed against its negligible results.
In this regard, the Russian civil war, whose end is scheduled to reach its 100th anniversary on June 16th, 2023, is informative. the Biden administration is likely to reproduce an event from its history.
In a significant event during the Polish invasion of Ukraine, the United States prepared a cadre of American fighter pilots called the Fighting Eagles. The Fighting Eagles, whose extremely rare history Robert Karolevitz details in his book Flight of Eagles, sought to provide aerial manpower in the form of a Kosciusko Squadron during the Polish-Russian War, 1919 -1920 against the Bolsheviks.
The author, who appears to provide a generally honest appraisal of the events (c.f., pg. 206), describes how “one effect of the Pólish offensive and sudden capture of Kiev” resulted in a major shift in consciousness within Russia, whose advantage Lenin and Trotsky seized to spread the Bolshevik cause as widely as possible. In a proclamation made by the Central Committee on April 29th, 1919, the Bolsheviks widened their struggle: “You cannot allow the bayonets of the Polish lords to determine the will of the Great Russian nation. The Polish lords have shamelessly and repeatedly shown that they care not who rules Russia but only that Russia shall be weak and helpless.”
During the Russian civil war, many European nations attacked Russia not for the sake of installing democracy but to ensure their own strategic geopolitical interests in the regions surrounding the country, especially Poland.
It is not that the United Stats, NATO Member States like Holland or Poland, or the Zelensky regime care about the Russian people, its culture, language, heritage, or livelihood, let alone “democracy,” as a recent piece of propaganda issued by the Central Intelligence Agency would like people to believe from quotes repudiating the agency’s proclivity’s for regime change, as Biden once exclaimed, through a truncated quote against revolution made by Tolstoy. It is that the United States, NATO Member States (i.e., Poland), or the Zelensky regime, which is a NATO puppet, would like to dismember Russia in pursuit of its strategic geopolitical aims.
Against the pursuit of NATO’s strategic geopolitical aims, for which the Biden administration is now forcing the American working class to pay through the imposition of unconstitutional injunctions against the right to assemble general strikes, the working classes from one end of the nation to the other part of the world must propose its own opposition, independent from any other power except its own communist revolutionaries. As Trotsky notes in his book 1905, “the worst illusion of the proletariat throughout its history has always been reliance upon others.” (Botanc, pg. 326) The working class must declare its independence from the Biden administration in pursuit of a political general strike to shut down the war effort.