In the Caribbean, the US is threatening to force regime change in Cuba, something it dared not do for nearly three quarters of a century because the island was under Russian protection. If Cuba does fall under American control, it will join Syria and Venezuela on the list of close Russian allies whose overthrow Moscow has done nothing to prevent over the last three years.
In a sign of President Donald Trump’s confidence that he can crush a sovereign nation, the US has indicted Cuba’s 94-year-old former president, Raul Castro, and is gathering military forces in the Caribbean. Trump boasts that US presidents had considered intervening in Cuba for decades, but it looks like he will be “the one that does it”.
As the US navy blockades Cuba – a country for which the Soviet Union once risked nuclear war with the US – Russian President Vladimir Putin was paying court to the Chinese leader, President Xi Jinping, in Beijing. China is Russia’s great and only ally, but the meeting confirmed that these days Russia is very much the junior partner in the alliance, needing China more than China needs it.
This is a huge change from five years ago when Russia aspired to regain its superpower status, which it lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This ambition vanished with Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 2022, which rapidly became the greatest military failure in Russian history, demoting it as a leading power in the world for all its giant nuclear arsenal.
Today, the Russian army is locked into a bloody stalemate not far from its starting line four and a half years ago, despite losing over one million soldiers (dead and wounded). Ukrainian losses are also horrific, but the stalemate works in Ukraine’s favour because Putin must win a decisive military victory to achieve his war aims, while Ukraine needs only to avoid defeat.
While making meagre advances on the ground, Russia has paid a political price for its war. It has provoked a remilitarisation of Europe and an expansion of Nato with Sweden and Finland joining the alliance. The nation has become the target of severe economic sanctions, and, whatever happens on the battlefield, has left an irreparable legacy of fear and mistrust of Russia among its European neighbours. Intended as a proof of Russian military might, the war has become a demonstration of its feebleness.
As a war leader, Putin has outdone his Tsarist and Soviet predecessors in calamitously poor judgement, persuading himself that the Russian army would win a swift victory and Ukraine would collapse under the weight of the Russian assault. In the event, the ill-prepared Russian advance on Kyiv bogged down into a giant traffic jam. Russia stopped the Western-backed Ukrainian counter-attack in 2023, but has since stuck to attritional warfare that wears down Ukraine – but also wears down Russia. Superior though Russia may be in population and resources, Putin was never able to mobilise these sufficiently to overwhelm the enemy.
Drone warfare means that today the defence has the upper hand over the attack, giving the advantage to dug-in Ukrainian troops over Russian advances at prohibitive cost. Hovering over and behind the front line on either side for 20 or 30 miles, drones make it impossible to evacuate the wounded by helicopter or ambulance, so injuries are untreated for hours or days, reducing the ratio of wounded to fatalities from 10 to one, to three or four to one.
Putin’s Ukraine war surpasses, as a military blunder, the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5 and Stalin’s attack on Finland in 1939. Despite his can-do swagger and his well-publicised shows of decisiveness, Putin appears isolated from the realities of the conflict. In comparison with past European warlords, he most resembles the German kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914 when he launched a surprise attack on France in expectation of a quick victory. He failed to win, but did manage to unite most of Europe against him.
Yet, the failure of Putin is not simply that of an individual, but that of the entire Russian kleptocratic, oligarchic elite over which he presides and which has ruled Russia since the 90s. My friend, the sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, argued from the beginning of the Ukraine war that Russia would inevitably lose it because the wealthy oligarchs and corrupt bureaucrats who controlled the Russian state used it primarily as a money-making machine to enrich themselves.
Loyalty among them is prized over competence and all state institutions – including the army and military industries – have been hollowed out by systematic looting over decades. The spectacular greed and egotism of the few makes it difficult for Putin to appeal successfully to Russian national solidarity. Kagarlitsky was imprisoned for his anti-war stance, but his predictions have been borne out by the course of the conflict.
Symbolic of Russia’s diminished international influence is its marginal role in the Iran war crisis, though nominally an ally of Iran. Russia has seldom been mentioned in the media in relation to the Strait of Hormuz, an exception being when a Russian-owned 464ft-long superyacht, the Nord, owned by Russia’s richest oligarch, Alexey Mordashov, sailed through the strait with Iranian permission. A steel magnate loyal to Putin, Mordashov has assets worth $37bn according to the Russian press and is sanctioned by the EU and US.
Given Putin’s dismal record of incompetence and wishful thinking in the Ukraine war, it is absurd that his image in the West is that of a demon king, a modern day Stalin, whose armoured columns might one day pour unstoppably into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. This is most unlikely since Russian tanks have so far failed to advance the 20 miles from the Russian frontier to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
With all the evidence that Putin is a military nincompoop, why is he portrayed as a mortal threat to the West? I believe that this is because of pervasive Russophobia and beleaguered governments, such as in the UK, want to wrap the national flag around them while armies and intelligence services furiously demand an astronomic increase in their budgets.
An inflated, but sincere, belief in the Russian threat affects much of Europe with toxic consequences. It means unnecessary reliance on an unstable US President for military protection. It means no serious European effort to end the war so far, though tentative talks with Russia are in the pipeline, because this might be misinterpreted as appeasement of the devilish Putin. It means putting peace negotiations into the hands of Trump and his weird minions, whose sporadic and amateur negotiations produce unnecessary panic in European capitals who fear the US will do some dirty deal with the Kremlin, though Trump is too erratic and unrealistic to do any such thing.
Russia’s spectacular failure in Ukraine should long have been obvious, though anybody suggesting a peace deal is denounced as horribly blind to the Russian menace. Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever was predictably criticised in March when he said “we must end the [Ukraine] conflict in Europe’s interest…we must normalize relations with Russia and regain access to cheap energy. In private European leaders tell me I am right, but no one dares say it out loud.”
Further thoughts
In Andy Burnham’s campaign video launching his bid to be the next MP for Makerfield in Greater Manchester and – if he wins the by-election – the next British prime minister, he speaks grandly of “Manchesterism” as marking “the end of neoliberalism”. He says that what he and Labour have done for the 2.8 million people living in Greater Manchester might be repeated in the rest of the country after he enters Downing Street.
Viewing the forest of tower blocks in central Manchester, a mini-version of Manhattan skyscrapers, it is easy to see that the claim has some substance, with 100,000 residents living in the rejuvenated centre of a city where there were only a few hundred a few decades ago. Burnham’s local popularity owes much to his taking the bus service back under public control and exuding practical optimism which appeals to a country short on self-confidence and is half-convinced it is slipping into terminal decline.
But how far does Burnham’s claim to have regenerated Manchester match the reality on the ground? A few months after the general election in 2024, I spent time in Salford, the largest borough in Greater Manchester with a population of 280,000, writing a long essay on it for The i Paper in which I attempt to answer this question.
Impressive though the city centre development is, how much did it benefit the rest of the wider metropolitan city? Could Greater Manchester be a template for the UK as a whole? I found that not all the arrows were pointing in the same direction and, while there were concrete improvements, they did not solve the deep problems of deindustrialisation and deprivation – though in over-centralised Britain this would be too much to ask of any regional authority.
Not everybody was happy with the fruits of “Manchesterism” as it affected them personally. “I grew up in the shadow of the dark satanic mills, at a time when they made textiles, and now I live in the shadow of dark satanic apartment blocks,” said George Tapp, 75, a retired electrician and former councillor, who lives in Ordsall in Salford.
He complained that 10 new blocks of flats planned for Ordsall would charge rents unaffordable for local people. They were to be built where there were already too few doctors, dentists and opticians to cope with local demand. He said that “a lot of the new tower blocks already built have no car parking, so the residents park on the pavements which are collapsing”. He added that the shops that once lined the streets had long gone, but now the cheap retail shopping centres that replaced them would be displaced by the new tower blocks.
Though the urban renaissance in Greater Manchester is oversold as a successful escape from the moribund legacy of deindustrialisation, it is not entirely a delusion. As of 2024, Greater Manchester had 32 towers over 100 metres (330 feet) in height already built, or under construction with cranes perched on their tops. Salford Quays, once the site of the docks on the old Manchester Ship Canal, is one of the largest urban regeneration projects in the UK. The BBC moved part of its operations there, ultimately including 3,200 jobs, starting in 2011, while The Quays development includes The Lowry Arts Centre and the Imperial War Museum North.
Greater Manchester is the most successful example in the UK of “city centrism”, a development strategy also pursued in cities like Newcastle and Cardiff, which seeks to modernise and direct public and private investment into city centres in the belief this will ultimately spread prosperity outwards.
Paul Dennett, Salford’s mayor and number two to Andy Burnham, spoke to me about what he saw as the benefits and failures of “Manchesterism” in the era of Margaret Thatcher and George Osborne which has deprived local government of the levers and resources to save their communities. As a result, the only option realistically available since the 80s onwards has been to go into partnership with property developers able to invest the vast sums necessary for rebuilding on a heroic scale.
“From a puritan point of view, the growth that we see here is not entirely where we want to see it,” Dennett said. “But it has enabled this city council to do a Robin Hood, to use the increase in council tax and business rates [because of property development] to put in place programmes to deal with deindustrialisation, poverty and inequality.”
Some 800 libraries have closed in the UK since 2010, but all Salford’s 16 libraries remain open. Dennett argued that, as of now, there is “no alternative” to this partnership with property developers. Population, jobs and output are up and the regeneration has attracted international private capital to a greater degree than elsewhere in Britain. “Manchesterism” may be limited in scope, but it has had real successes.
Beneath the radar
When reporting wars, I have always found it more productive to head for military hospitals rather than the front line where active fighting is going on. Armies keep a close eye on anybody talking to soldiers in the combat zones for obvious security and safety reasons. They worry that soldiers may be too frank about the outcome of the latest fighting and contradict whatever upbeat propaganda line the military officers are peddling to the press. Soldiers themselves can be frustratingly discreet about what is really going on.
I have almost always learned more in military hospitals where the wounded are bored and happy to describe how they got their wounds. Medical expertise was usually of high quality and most of the wounded, even the most serious injuries, knew they would survive. But this has now changed because in the age of the drone hovering lethally overhead, treatment of wounds may be delayed by hours or days until amputation is the only option. Helicopters and ambulances face inevitable destruction if they approach within 20 miles of the front line. Evacuation is delayed so the so-called “Golden Hour” after a wound is inflicted – when a life might still be saved or permanent physical damage mitigated – has disappeared.
These points about the mounting horror of the Ukraine war are well made by Sylvie Kauffmann in the Financial Times, who writes that “the ratio of deaths to injuries on the front line is now close to that of the Great War,” when there was one fatality to every two to three wounded – compared to one to 10 in the Afghanistan War after 2001. Western estimates of Russian casualties say they may total 35,000 per month – though these figures must be suspected as war propaganda – and Ukraine releases no figures for its own losses. But they do give an order of magnitude for the number being killed or maimed, something worth remembering when watching arm chair generals on Western television demanding that this horrific war be fought ad infinitum.
Cockburn Picks
This interview with New Statesman editor Tom McTague is the best account I have heard about the politics of Andy Burnham.
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