<\/p>\n
by Pepe Escobar<\/p>\n
Ukraine is finished as a nation \u2013 neither side will rest in this war. The only question is whether it will be an Afghan or Syrian style finale.<\/em><\/p>\n One year after the astounding US humiliation in Kabul \u2013 and on the verge of another serious comeuppance in Donbass \u2013 there is reason to believe Moscow is wary of Washington seeking vengeance: in the form of the \u2018Afghanization\u2019 of Ukraine.<\/p>\n With no end in sight to western weapons and finance flowing into Kiev, it must be recognized that the Ukrainian battle is likely to disintegrate into yet another endless war. Like the Afghan jihad in the 1980s which employed US-armed and funded guerrillas to drag Russia into its depths, Ukraine\u2019s backers will employ those war-tested methods to run a protracted battle that can spill into bordering Russian lands.<\/p>\n Yet this US attempt at crypto-Afghanization will at best accelerate the completion of what Russia\u2019s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu describes as the \u201ctasks\u201d of its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. For Moscow right now, that road leads\u00a0all the way to Odessa<\/a>.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t have to be this way. Until the recent assassination of\u00a0Darya Dugina<\/a>\u00a0at Moscow\u2019s gates, the battlefield in Ukraine was in fact under a \u2018Syrianization\u2019 process.<\/p>\n Like the foreign proxy war in Syria this past decade, frontlines around significant Ukrainian cities had roughly stabilized. Losing on the larger battlefields, Kiev had increasingly moved to employ terrorist tactics. Neither side could completely master the immense war theater at hand. So the Russian military opted to keep minimal forces in battle \u2013 contrary to the strategy it employed in 1980s Afghanistan.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s remind ourselves of a few Syrian facts: Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, then lost and retaken in 2017. Aleppo was liberated only in December 2016. Deir Ezzor in September 2017. A slice of northern Hama in December and January 2018. The outskirts of Damascus in the Spring of 2018. Idlib \u2013 and significantly, over 25 percent of Syrian territory \u2013 are still not liberated. That tells a lot about rhythm in a war theater.<\/p>\n The Russian military never made a conscious decision to interrupt the multi-channel flow of western weapons to Kiev. Methodically destroying those weapons once they\u2019re in Ukrainian territory \u2013 with plenty of success \u2013 is another matter. The same applies to smashing mercenary networks.<\/p>\n Moscow is well aware that any negotiation with those pulling the strings in Washington \u2013 and dictating all terms to puppets in Brussels and Kiev \u2013 is futile. The fight in Donbass and beyond is a do or die affair.<\/p>\n So the battle will go on, destroying what\u2019s left of Ukraine, just as it destroyed much of Syria. The difference is that economically, much more than in Syria, what\u2019s left of Ukraine will plunge into a black void. Only territory under Russian control will be rebuilt, and that includes, significantly, the bulk of Ukraine\u2019s industrial infrastructure.<\/p>\n What\u2019s left \u2013 rump Ukraine \u2013 has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land \u2013 over half of what Ukraine still possesses. That translates de facto as BlackRock, Blackstone and Vanguard, top agro-business shareholders, owning whatever lands that really matter in non-sovereign Ukraine.<\/p>\n Going forward, by next year the Russians will be applying themselves to cutting off Kiev from NATO weapons supplies. As that unfolds,\u00a0the Anglo-Americans will eventually move whatever puppet regime remains to Lviv. And Kiev terrorism \u2013 conducted by Bandera worshippers \u2013 will continue to be the new normal in the capital.<\/p>\n The Kazakh double game<\/strong><\/p>\n By now it\u2019s abundantly clear this is not a mere war of territorial conquest. It\u2019s certainly part of a\u00a0War of Economic Corridors<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 as the US spares no effort to sabotage and smash the multiple connectivity channels of Eurasia\u2019s integration projects, be they Chinese-led (Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) or Russian-led (Eurasian Economic Union, EAEU).<\/p>\n Just like the proxy war in Syria remade large swathes of West Asia (witness, for instance, Erdogan about to meet Assad), the fight in Ukraine, in a microcosm, is a war for the reconfiguration of the current world order, where Europe is a mere self-inflicted victim in a minor subplot. The Big Picture is the emergence of multipolarity.<\/p>\n The proxy war in Syria lasted a decade, and it\u2019s not over yet. The same may happen to the proxy war in Ukraine. As it stands, Russia has taken an area that is roughly equivalent to Hungary and Slovakia combined. That\u2019s still far from \u201ctask\u201d fulfillment \u2013 and it\u2019s bound to go on until Russia has taken all the land right up to the Dnieper as well as Odessa, connecting it to the breakaway Republic of Transnistria.<\/p>\n It\u2019s enlightening to see how important Eurasian actors are reacting to such geopolitical turbulence. And that brings us to the cases of Kazakhstan and Turkey.<\/p>\n