Johannesburg - With the little help from the US, Kyiv has inflicted the singular most devastating attack on Russia, killing no less than 89 Russian soldiers in the breakaway Donetsk region in Eastern Ukraine.
Using the US-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, the full-frontal attack on the Russian soldiers on the battlefield is certain to change and reshape the Ukraine war that broke out on February 24 last year.
The deadly attack by the Ukrainian soldiers will also sway the momentum their way. To what extent the mass killing will become a psychological blow to the Russian soldiers on the battlefield is unknown. However, the impact is too devastating to underplay.
The incident took place just after midnight on New Year’s Day at a temporary housing area in the city of Makiivka in Donetsk People’s Republic. Moscow says the area was targeted by at least six missiles from the US-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launchers. Four penetrated air defences and hit the building that housed the Russian soldiers.
The Defence Ministry also said that it had attacked and destroyed the launcher in a retaliatory strike. The Russian Ministry of Defence has confirmed the death toll and further revealed that among the casualties was the unit’s deputy commander.
Moscow explained the cause of the deadly attack as follows, saying whilst the fact-finding is still underway, “it is already obvious that the main reason for what happened was the turning on and mass use of mobile phones by personnel – contrary to the ban – within the range of enemy weapons”.
This allowed the Ukrainian forces to trace their coordinates. Russia’s foreign ministry has condemned Washington for not only supplying Kyiv with deadly sophisticated weapons but also providing the Ukrainian military with intelligence about the location of the Russian forces.
As Russia becomes more and more convinced and exasperated by its conclusion that the US and Nato are now fully and actively involved in the war, the conflict could well escalate into a Russia-NATO war. This will put the entire global community on a knife edge as the likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons will become real and the full outbreak of WW III probable.
The latest developments alter the complexion of the war frighteningly. Russia has previously stated that when a non-Ukrainian missile strikes a Russian territory, the response would be not to Ukraine but to the countries that had supplied the missile. Now, the ongoing “fact-finding mission” is likely to find the missile fragments and trace them back to their country of origin.
The headache will be when Russia finds that although the HIMARS launchers had originated from Washington, they could have been supplied by other Nato members. Whichever way the finding goes, it will inevitably lead to confrontation with Nato, which constantly dangles a threat of Article Five that refers to “an attack on one member is an attack on all”.
This is a conundrum that will shortly feature in the antagonistic geopolitics of our times, where multilateralism, as espoused by the UN Charter, has been gradually replaced by the self-serving Western-led unipolar world order that preserves the US hegemony.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has been buoyed by unprecedented military and financial backing from the US and Nato that has seen chances of a truce diminish by day as the government of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky vows to annihilate Russian forces with help from Washington and largely the Global North.
The war, which has caused the sky-rocketing of prices for goods and services around the globe, is likely to escalate as it becomes much clearer that Ukraine “is in it to win it”, to paraphrase President Zelensky.
But what does the escalation in the war mean for global peace and security, as well as the economy? In one word, “gloom”. As the situation grows desperate and more dangerous, the death toll on all sides will continue to rise sharply, and antagonistic posture increasingly regular from all the warring sides.
And then, as the international community is caught in the inescapable web of confrontational geopolitics, emerging economies, particularly in Africa and across the Global South, will bear the brunt of the war that has become international in every respect.
The recent US-Africa Summit in Washington was yet another example of how the protagonists in the Ukraine war are determined to woo Africa to their side in the ongoing conflict.
If not wise, Africa could find herself a real pawn in the seemingly rekindled continuation of the Cold War, which international relations scholars had thought ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the turn of the 90s.
Conflict inside Ukraine intensified in 2014 when the Donbas region voted in a referendum to break away from Ukraine after the toppling of a democratically-elected pro-Russian Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych.
Between 2014 and 2022, more than 14 000 people (troops and civilians) were reported killed in the Donbas region alone. Tens of thousands are feared killed since the start of the current war in February last year and infrastructure destroyed beyond repair through shelling from either side.
The international community has been insincere in its involvement in peace efforts in this part of the world. In a recent interview, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel revealed that when her country, together with France, played a significant part in the drawing of the Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015, which were aimed at ending the conflict in the Donbas region, they were merely bidding time to help Ukraine rebuild its military without the threat of Russian attack.
Such is the dishonesty in our geopolitics that the pursuit of a public good is often replaced by competing self-centred national interests and cantankerous foreign policy of inward-looking wealthy nations.
Whichever way the Ukraine conflict ends, Africa and the Global South should refuse to be turned into pawns in a war they never started, a war that truly is neither theirs nor in their best interest.
Above all, Africa should insist on choosing allies with the threat of Western sanctions if Africa “goes East” to China or anywhere.
Global peace can never be achieved through threats and coercion of weaker nations by their powerful counterparts.
In international law, all nations are equal and sovereign. The latter-day unilateral imposition of sanctions by powerful nations against the weak just to bring them into line with the foreign policy objectives is immoral, unlawful and at odds with the preamble of the UN.
The gradual decline of the power of the UN over the past decade is a matter of grave concern. As things stand, the world body is playing second fiddle to the EU and Nato and, if not careful, will become irrelevant and moribund. Mark my words.