The false counter-offensive and the refusal of good offices
The false counter-offensive and the refusal of good officesVoltairenet - June 21, 2023
It's a fool's game. Communication from kyiv says that its army has launched a counter-offensive for two weeks. But this does not correspond to what can be seen on the battlefield.
She also affirms to welcome with hope the two missions of good offices of China and the African Union. But Volodymyr Zelensky interrupted the negotiations he was conducting with Moscow and promulgated a law prohibiting their resumption.
According to the authorities of kyiv, the Ukrainian army would have launched since June 8 “a vast counter-offensive against the Russian aggressor”. The counter-offensive does not exist Military literature prefers to speak of counter-attack than of counter-offensive. The counter-attack consists in taking advantage of the momentary weaknesses of the enemy to go on the attack. One thinks of Napoleon at Austerlitz who made some of his troops retreat to make his adversaries fall into a trap from which he emerged victorious. Choosing the term "counter-offensive" is not neutral. It is a communication device suggesting that the Russians have launched an "offensive" to take over Ukraine. Moreover, they fought at the airport in the north of the capital, before withdrawing. In reality, the Russians have never tried to take kyiv and do not want to invade Ukraine. So said their president, Vladimir Putin, in the first week of his “special operation”. Taking a military airport, even north of kyiv, is only a battle to ensure the Russians air superiority. This does not indicate that they intended to take the capital. The expression "special operation" is not neutral either. Moscow thus underlines that it is not waging a war of invasion, but is implementing its "responsibility to protect" the Oblate populations of Donetsk and Lugansk who have been officially the targets of a punitive operation by Kiev since 2014. Questioning the merits of the Russian special operation would be like questioning the French army's operation aimed at putting an end to the massacres in Rwanda. Both special operations were authorized by United Nations Security Council resolutions (Resolutions 929 of June 22, 1994 and 2202 of February 17, 2015). Except that the resolution on which Moscow relies was not taken in a hurry. It is the one that endorses the Minsk agreements and gives Germany, France and Russia the ability to intervene to enforce them.
