Who will be the last man to die on the killing fields of Ukraine?

Private George Edwin Ellison is not a name that will stir the memory pot of many people today, but it should. You see, Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was the last British soldier to be killed in World War I, shot by a German sniper just hours before the Armistice was signed in France to bring hostilities to an end on 11 November 1918.

British casualties during the Great War amounted to some 880,000 dead and tens of thousands more wounded and maimed. But being the very last man to perish at war’s end, Ellison’s death resonates like no other, a reminder perhaps of the fragility of human life and the ease with which the lives of the poor and the working class are dispensed with by the rich and connected who rule over them, people who get to decide on matters of life and fate.

In our time, the conflict in Ukraine has been the bloodiest and most consequential conflict fought on European soil since WWII. Begun with the Maidan Coup of February 2014, involving a democratically-elected government led by Viktor Yanukovych being overthrown in the name of Ukrainian ethno-nationalism, its current iteration began with Russian invasion of the country on 22 February 2022.

In the over two years that have elapsed since, countless Private George Edwin Ellison’s on either side have been killed, young and not so young men whose names are known only to their loved ones. Meanwhile, the Great Game of our time, of which the Ukraine conflict is a major plank, is being played out in the palaces and staterooms of the rich in Moscow, Kiev, London, Washington and Brussels et al.

In the here and now, Ukrainian forces are struggling to contain a determined Russian offensive in the north east of the country in the Kharkov region, which as these words are being written is encroaching on the city of Kharkov itself, Ukraine’s second city.

The subvention of an additional $61 billion of military aid to Kiev may well have come too late to allow the Ukrainians to successfully defend Kharkov, which if it were to fall would change the entire course of the conflict on the ground.

Both Volodymyr Zelensky and Joe Biden’s political fortunes now hinge on the next few vital weeks of fighting around Kharkov — Zelensky due to his rule over Ukraine being coterminous with his ability to argue to his people that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian who thus far killed did not die in vain. Biden over his bid for a second term in this crucial election year being hugely contingent on the avoidance a second foreign policy disaster, after the Afghanistan debacle of August 2021.

But Biden and his administration’s stance and posture when it comes to Ukraine has already failed. It is a failure measured in the ocean of blood spilled and still being spilled as Kiev’s military forces struggle to contain a Russian offensive that has been months in the making.

Overarchingly, the underestimation of Russia’s military capability after the initial failed attempt to take Kiev between 25 February and 2 March 2022 has proved catastrophic, as has the over estimation of Ukraine’s military capability, drawn from the same event.

The failure to understand that Putin has from the beginning been fighting the conflict with one hand tied behind his back — starting Russia’s military campaign as a police operation more than the kind of blitzkrieg with which the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003; and going out of his way noot to inconvenience the cafe, nightclub, and designer boutique lifestyles of the children of the rich in Moscow and St Petersburg, etc — has underpinned the slavish commitment in the West to the prolongation of the conflict in the vain hope of a Ukrainian victory.

Perhaps, however, on a certain level this is understandable, especially in the wake of Evgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny with his now largely defunct Wagner private army. But given Washington’s vast intelligence community with its vast budget, the underestimation and over estimation is more inexcusable than understandable.

The decision to supply the Ukrainians with cluster munitions on the back of the critical admission that the US and its Western allies have reached their limit of available conventional munitions to supply the Ukrainians with stands in sharp and grim contrast — at least from the West and Ukraine’s standpoint — to the fact that the Russians have been able to produce a near unending supply of such.

Further still, the tsunami of Western sanctions imposed on Russia at the start of the conflict has had the complete opposite of the impact intended. In a March 2024 Al Jazeera article, Alexander Kozul-Wright reveals that

Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian economy has consistently defied the dire predictions of critics.

With the judicious re-purposing to the Russian economy to service the requirements of a prolonged conflict, Putin has succeeded in absorbing the initial shock of the sanctions barrage, which along with the implementation of import substitutions has made the Russian economy more durable and self-sufficient than it had been hitherto. Moreover, huge new trade agreements with China, Iran, North Korea and other countries across the Global South has produced the ‘Turn to the East’ that many Russian nationalists had long been calling for.

Ukraine’s failed offensive of last summer should have been the time for Western ideologues to accept that there could be no military solution to a conflict the seeds of which were planted with the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO’s eastwards expansion in its wake.

This eastwards expansion is evidence that in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise triumphalism rather than reality colonised the hearts and minds of Western ideologues. The result has been the calamitous failure of Western foreign policy vis-a-vis Russia.

The conflict in Ukraine is now effectively over. The further sacrifice of more Ukrainian lives is more about rescuing Joe Biden’s political legacy and reputation in Washington than it is about defeating Russia on the battlefield. Despite Zelensky’s now beyond tired Khaki-clad action-hero shtick, there is now no escaping the fact that Russia has again proved itself a rock upon which Western notions of supremacy and domination have come unstuck.

Joe Biden is America’s Claudius. Like his Roman counterpart, he is the accidental leader of an empire in decline, though blindly refusing to recognise the fact and continuing to act and make decisions according to the realities of yesterday rather than today.

Claudius’s reign, it should be noted, was succeeded by that of Nero.

Donald Trump says hello.

End.

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