The successful Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv shows the way to victory in the war.
By: Ivan Razin
Ukrainian forces carried out a successful offensive in Kharkiv. For the second time during the war, the Ukrainian working class forced the Russian-fascist occupiers [1] into a humiliating rout. Within days, soldiers of the Ukrainian army and territorial defences liberated more territory than the Russian army had managed to capture since April. This included the liberation of important towns such as Kupiansk and Izyum, threatening supplies from Belgorod for the entire Russian military and forcing them to retreat precipitously. The population in towns and villages liberated from the occupiers greeted the Ukrainian fighters with joy.
This offensive is taking place under seemingly impossible conditions. On the front line, the Ukrainians face a much better-equiped army. Western governments are not supplying the necessary weaponry in the required quantity. At the rear, humanitarian aid, so badly needed in the front, is being traded. Zelensky’s government passes anti-worker laws in the interests of the oligarchs, confiscating the civilian wages of the fighters. The success of the offensive rests entirely on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people.
If everything depended only on heroism, Putin would have been defeated long ago. The Ukrainian offensive and the flight of the occupiers did not only show that Putin can be defeated. It also showed that defeating Putin militarily is the most urgent task, and it showed how it can be achieved.
Two armies
In the last edition of our newspaper Vyzvalnnaya [2], we wrote that there are two militarily distinct armed forces confronting each other in Ukraine. And that is precisely what was expressed in the recent events in the Kharkiv region.
Ukraine is being defended by its working class. They are fighting massively for their land, their homes and their families, whether in occupied regions or at the rear. But they lack heavy weaponry.
Putin’s army, for its part, possesses an enormous amount of armament but it has no people to fight, even to use these weapons. Even Russian workers, drunk with propaganda, don’t want to go to war. Putin is unable to mobilise them to the trenches. He is forced to recruit mercenaries among marginalised and very impoverished people from the corners of Russia, and from even more oppressed peoples of the Russian Federation. Putin’s military reserve is limited to that which results from a rotting society. Putin’s cook, Prigozhin [3], personally tours the prisons, collecting the roughest criminals to send to the front. The “military bravery” of this human scum is expressed mainly in the ability to occupy empty ruins, loot, rape, and use brutality against the population of the occupied territories. But when confronted with a living force, such an “army” begins to crumble.
Two tactics for war
The Russian army is incapable of mobile warfare: mobility implies either good training or motivation and willingness to die. Well-trained Russian units have already been wiped out, and the scum has no training, let alone commitment, dedication or encouragement. For the Russian army, classic 20th-century warfare is convenient, with a static front with little movement and the ability to continuously bombard enemy positions at long range and avoid a face-to-face confrontation. During the offensive in the Donbas, the Russian army managed to impose this type of warfare, resulting in heavy casualties among Ukrainian fighters.
The advantageous tactic for the Ukrainian side is mobile combat, with small, well-motivated units, acting at close range, reducing the role of artillery, with relatively simple weapons, imposing a face-to-face confrontation and tending to converge with resistance actions in the occupied territories. In the Kharkiv offensive, Ukrainian fighters successfully managed to impose exactly this type of warfare.
The extension of this victorious tactic on the front requires appropriate measures in the rear.
The victory in Kharkiv is an example of the great success of asymmetric tactics, suitable for superiority in fighters, but lacking in heavy weapons. And this successful asymmetric tactic needs to be expanded. For that it is necessary:
– To guarantee provisions for the main resistance force – the workers on the front – and their families at the rear, with everything they need;
– To expand the military organisation on the principle of mobile territorial defence units, which have proved their effectiveness, as well as universal military training of the people and arming of the people;
– Focusing factories on the production of armaments and all necessary products within the framework of a single national defence plan.
The Ukrainian government policy is the opposite
Meanwhile, the government uses the opposite tactic. Instead of asymmetrical tactics, it is betting on a symmetrical war in armaments, which means heavy losses and being doomed to defeat in advance. Instead of setting up its own arms production and a unified defence plan on a national scale, it waits for Western arms that never arrive in the necessary quantity, closing Ukrainian enterprises because they are “unprofitable” for the oligarchs, and laying off workers, dividing Ukraine into a military part and a part where “there is no war” as if there were two Ukraines.
Instead of guaranteeing provisions for workers at the front and their families in the rear, and helping refugees, the government enforces anti-worker laws, trades humanitarian aid and feeds a black market in housing. Instead of expanding the role of territorial defence squads, implementing universal military training and arming the people, we see bribes from the rich to avoid serving in the army and recruitment focused on labour activists, to weaken working class struggles in the factories.
For the success of the working class on the front, it is necessary to succeed at the rear as well
To implement the necessary measures, neither the Western governments nor the Zelensky government can be relied upon. It is necessary for the Ukrainian working class to take the task of defending the country into their own hands.
No to the closure of enterprises and sacking of workers! The working class must take the factories under its own control and, in contact with the workers on the front, organise the production of the products necessary for defence.
No harm to the interests of the workers by the factory owners! For the cancellation of the government’s anti-worker laws! For full provision for the workers on the front and their families! Imprisonment with confiscation of assets of all those who trade in humanitarian aid. For workers’ control of humanitarian aid.
For universal military training for the people, armaments and expansion of the Territorial Defence Units. Imprisonment with confiscation of property of those who “buy exemptions” from military service.
For Putin’s total defeat!
Ukraine can and must win!
All on behalf of the victory of Ukraine!
Glory to Ukraine!
Notes by the translator:
[1] In Ukraine, the aggressors are called “rashisty”, an untranslatable mixture of “Russian” and “fascist”.
[2] Liberation, in Belarusian.
[3] Russian oligarch, Putin’s right-hand man, owner of several companies, including a network of restaurants catering to the government, from which he got the nickname “Putin’s cook”. He is the owner of the mercenary Wagner Group, which fights in Ukraine and a number of other countries.
