In recent months there have been important developments on the front lines and in the aerial war between the Nato imperialist bloc and Russia in Ukraine. However, the most significant developments are taking place in the political arena, where European nations, particularly Britain, Germany and Poland, are relentlessly escalating their drive to war.
The increasingly hostile and bellicose rhetoric of imperialist Britain and other Nato powers reflects a deliberate escalation of their proxy war against Russia, and is clearly aimed at preparing the citizens of Europe to accept and participate in a direct confrontation at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Nothing reveals the delusional groupthink of European governments better than the ravings of Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Tomasz Sikorski, who recently told the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference: “If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly. We have overwhelming superiority over Russia in air power.” (Kiev, 13 September 2026)
Britain a leading participant in Nato’s proxy war
Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov pointed out recently that “the shelling of Bryansk with British Storm Shadow missiles was impossible without the participation of specialists from Britain.”
The operational use of these Franco-British long-range cruise missiles by Ukrainian forces requires British intelligence and satellite mapping to provide precise targeting coordinates and to enable evasive manoeuvres in any attempt to defeat Russia’s air defences.
Peskov called out Britain’s role in the war and underlined that it is going far beyond simply supplying weapons to Ukraine. Despite all the propaganda and diplomatic games, Russia now has plenty of evidence that British forces are directly participating in attacks on Russian territory.
Indeed, an article published by the Guardian on 4 March 2024 had already provided corroborating evidence of Britain’s operational role in the use of Storm Shadow. An authenticated recording of senior German air force officers described British mission planning as being conducted “completely in reachback”, with specialist personnel providing operational support remotely from outside the theatre, alongside British personnel on the ground in Ukraine.
The officers also discussed British provision of the satellite data required to programme Storm Shadow and assistance in the missiles’ technical preparation.
Luftwaffe chief Lt Gen Ingo Gerhartz explicitly distinguished the British approach from the French: “[The British] also have a few people on the ground; they do that, the French don’t.” This was reinforced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who stated in February 2024: “What is being done on the part of the British and French in terms of target control and accompanying target control cannot be done in Germany.”
The German officers described a distinct British operational model involving remotely-based mission planning and technical support functions alongside on-the-ground operatives in Ukraine; functions that the German government explicitly ruled out undertaking.
While there is as yet no leaked conversation confirming British involvement in the operational use of the drones it has been supplying to Kiev, Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) has several times reported that British specialists are uploading flight missions into Ukrainian drones, and there is no reason to doubt their information.
In order to fulfil its mission deep inside Russian territory, the 19/20 September drone attack on a Moscow refinery required just such precise intelligence and targeting information as British operatives are known to have been providing for the Storm Shadow missile attacks.
Already in July, Russian intelligence had accused Britain of masterminding other such attacks: “According to the information received in the SVR, the resonant blow to the Sevastopol Defence Museum in June was a detailed provocation by London and its special services.”
The statement went on to allege that while “Ukrainian military personnel prepared drones and launched them … the Ukrainians were most likely unaware of the true purpose of the attack. Flight missions to weapons systems were uploaded by British specialists acting under the guise of military advisers.” (Our emphasis)
Taken together, the evidence is mounting regarding Britain’s direct role in planning, targeting and programming the increasingly frequent long-range drone attacks being launched from Ukrainian territory. Britain, in fact, is a major protagonist in Nato’s proxy war against Russia.
Article 51: Russia’s legal right to retaliate
As with Britain’s participation in the aggressive imperialist war against Iran, such direct involvement in attacks on Russia have put British military bases directly in the firing line, should Russia decide at any point to take that option.
Article 51 of the United Nations charter states: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”
Russia now has the right under international law to respond militarily against Britain – subject to the requirement that any such response be proportionate and directed against appropriate military targets.
Ukraine’s deepening manpower crisis revealed
Polish prime minister Donald Tusk made a diplomatic blunder recently when he inadvertently alluded to the true scale of Ukraine’s mounting losses, stating on 19 September that 27,000 Ukrainian troops were being killed or wounded every month. This is particularly significant because Ukraine keeps its casualty figures classified, while the numbers occasionally admitted to by actor-stooge president Volodymyr Zelensky have been absurdly low.
Tusk’s disclosure caused considerable annoyance in Kiev because it was made at a time when the Ukrainian government is trying particularly hard to conceal the severity of its manpower crisis. At that rate of attrition, the pressure on Ukraine’s already badly depleted frontline forces is bound sooner rather than later to reach a tipping point.
The scale of these losses helps explain the increasingly desperate methods being used to replenish Ukraine’s ranks. The activities of the press gangs conducting forced mobilisation are now widely documented, with men being stopped in the streets, forcibly bundled into vehicles and taken to recruitment centres. Ukrainian social media is awash with footage of these confrontations, alongside growing anger and resistance by the wider population towards the recruitment gangs.
The pressure to expand the pool of available troops is increasingly visible, with public discussion around lowering the mobilisation age and extending mobilisation to women. The Ukrainian government has denied that compulsory mobilisation of women is under consideration, but the very fact that these questions are being publicly debated reflects the growing panic in Kiev and a need to prepare the public to accept such an eventuality.
Another indication of the pressure on Ukrainian manpower is the recruitment of large numbers of Colombian mercenariesto bolster the army’s depleted ranks. Colombia’s military has been fighting for decades as part of the US imperialist force that officially opposes ‘drug cartels’ but whose main target has actually been the country’s various guerrilla liberation forces.
Over 10,000 battle-hardened soldiers retire every year, hundreds of whom have been lured by the promise of big bonuses (should they survive) to join the imperialist war effort in Ukraine.
War intensifying as Russia tightens the noose
1. Aerial war escalation
Following the escalation of Ukrainian drone attacks against targets inside Russia, Moscow has taken the gloves off in its aerial war, unleashing increasingly large waves of drone and missile strikes against the Kiev regime.
The scale and frequency of these attacks are exposing what appears to be a complete collapse of Ukraine’s air-defence system. Russian jet-powered drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles are dismantling all the infrastructure that support the Ukrainian war effort – degrading military facilities, weapons production, energy infrastructure, transport and logistics networks etc.
This includes the systematic destruction of Ukraine’s fuel station network and power stations – targets that Moscow had carefully avoided for several years given the impact it would inevitably have on Ukraine’s civilian population.
Previously, strikes on such facilities were in the nature of a warning to Ukraine not to continue its escalations, but now, after all such warnings have been ignored and the western aggressors have made it clear they will stop at no crime against the Russian people in their bid to bring down the Russian government and destroy the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, a (still moderate in relation to Russia’s capabilities) steady escalation on the Russian side has been the response.
As a result Kiev, whose people and politicians have until now been cushioned from the effects of the war in the east, has become a defenceless frontline zone, with heavy strikes taking place daily that are steadily degrading infrastructure and industry. Most damagingly, as winter approaches, is the destruction of the city’s energy sector, which is likely to lead to a mass evacuation of residents, and to acute suffering for those who remain.
2. The Zatoka bridge
As part of its targeting of the infrastructure needed to sustain Ukraine’s war effort, Russian missiles have repeatedly attacked the Zatoka bridge over the Dniester estuary, putting it out of action.
The bridge connects Odessa oblast to Romania and the European Union, and is thus both economically and strategically vital to the Kiev regime.
3. A difference in targeting
It is notable that while Russia has shown a great reluctance over the last four and a half years of war to inflict too much damage on ‘dual use’ infrastructure (ie, that which is necessary to civilian life as well as for military purposes), it has been forced by Nato/Ukrainian intransigence and repeated terrorist attacks against its own people to escalate the scale and nature of its attacks.
Even so, Russian long-range strikes into Ukraine are measured, aim to create as few civilian casualties as possible, and are directed against military and economic infrastructure that sustains Ukraine’s war effort. Meanwhile, the Nato/Ukrainian side’s ever more frequent deep strikes into Russia are aimed only at causing maximum disruption to civilian life and putting pressure on the government by making the Russian population suffer.
Ukrainian drone attacks have struck residential buildings, retail distribution warehouses and other civilian targets, with the openly stated intention of creating fear and making ordinary Russians feel the effects of the war. Most notable have been the strikes against online retailer Wildberries, which Ukraine officially claims to target for carrying “dual-use” products that could be used by Russian soldiers on the front line.
However, an adviser to the head of Zelensky’s office has admitted to Germany’s DW that a significant objective of the attacks on Wildberries is to “affect its creditors, including Sverbank and VTB”, and to “bring back war to its sender” by disrupting civilian life. Companies owned by western capital have not been similarly targeted.
Fabrice Pothier, CEO of the geopolitical consultancy firm Rasmussen Global, told the same newspaper that “if the company were to go bankrupt, it will probably have a domino effect on the Russian economy”. (Why Kiev keeps attacking Russian retail giant Wildberries by Oleg Loginov, 16 August 2026)
As Ukraine’s air defences collapse, the imperialist strategy is increasingly shifting towards such acts of terrorism and sabotage against the Russian people, hoping in this way to cause demoralisation, undermine the population’s support for the war effort and, ultimately, to further the imperialist aim of regime change from within.
4. Russian advance accelerating
Russian forces have continued to advance in multiple frontline zones in recent months. The pattern is not one of a continuous advance along the entire line, but of sustained pressure being applied at different points.
When Ukraine is forced to move reserves to threatened sectors, its positions are weakened elsewhere – Russian forces then exploit these weaknesses and advance. The process is being repeated across the front, steadily stretching and further depleting the Nato army.
In recent months, there have been huge Russian territorial advances in Sumy, Zaporozhye and Kharkov. In Kharkov, a section of Ukraine’s forces are trapped in a cauldron in the Volchansk-Velikiy Burluk area, northeast of Kharkov city.
In the Donbass, Russian forces are steadily tightening the noose as they approach the Kramatorsk-Slavyansk agglomeration, with neighbouring Dobropolye now surrounded and certain to fall. The battle for Kramatorsk-Slavyansk will be the final hurdle in the battle to liberate the entire Donetsk region – a struggle that has now been ongoing for 12 years.
The significance of these advances is not simply the capture of individual towns and territory, but the increasing danger for Nato that its defensive line will soon be broken into separate pockets, making the remaining positions progressively harder to supply and to hold. Elsewhere, the strategic city of Orekhov in Zaporozhye is on the verge of falling.
In the Lyman sector, Ukrainian forces launched a counter-offensive that recaptured some territory and a few settlements. Experience indicates that this push, launched largely for PR purposes (ie, to make a noise in western media and convince populations and politicians alike that Ukraine is still ‘in the game’), is bound to suffer the same fate as all previous Ukrainian offensives: an initial advance followed by mounting casualties, loss of momentum and eventual exhaustion, followed by a humiliating (but much less reported) retreat.
5. Black Sea blockade
Russia has effectively crippled the Ukrainian economy with its blockade of ports on the Black Sea, which has effectively put a stop to all maritime cargo traffic through Odessa, Chernomorsk and Yuzhnyi. These ports were the main artery for Ukraine’s international trade, handling not only grain and other agricultural exports but also metals, ores, manufactured goods, containers, fertiliser, weapons and other military supplies.
With maritime shipping stopped, what remains of Ukraine’s external trade and supply lines is being forced onto the much smaller-capacity Danube, rail and road routes, including through Poland. The economic consequences are devastating for an already battered Ukrainian economy, cutting deeply into vital export revenues while disrupting the movement of essential supplies.
This is epitomised by the recent admission that the Ukrainian steel industry has ceased production. The irony will not be lost on Brussels: years after EU president Ursula von der Leyen shamelessly declared that Russia’s economy was “in tatters” as a result of western economic sanctions it is Ukraine’s economy that is being systematically dismantled and Russia’s that continues to withstand the strain of extended warfare.
War mutating as Ukrainian battlefield capabilities decline
The significance of these developments goes beyond the immediate battlefield. Ukraine’s collapsing air defences, mounting pressure on its frontline forces, its deepening recruitment crisis and depleted arsenal are forcing the imperialist powers to look for new ways to prolong the war – an outcome they are clearly dead set on achieving by any means.
Rather than accepting their military defeat, they are attempting to transform the conflict into forms that they hope will be sustainable over a longer period: terroristic long-range drone attacks, assassinations and sabotage inside Russia, and the expansion of the war beyond the existing battlefield. The logic of the imperialist war drive is relentless and incontrovertible.
Even as the war moves onto a new footing, the imperialist objective remains the same – to keep Russia fighting for as long as possible and hope that something gives. Yet the rapid collapse of the Ukrainian economy, the destruction of its infrastructure and air defences, and the growing shortage of weapons available for supply from European and US suppliers are exposing a deeper problem.
The war has laid bare the fatal weakness in the west’s finance-based economies: a serious lack of secure industrial and manufacturing capacity. After decades of deindustrialisation (in the case of Britain, this process has been ongoing for well over a century), outsourcing and the prioritisation of stock-market gambling activities over productive investment, the imperialist powers are discovering that their ability to reliably produce the weapons, ammunition and military equipment required for a prolonged modern war has been severely degraded.
While they are working hard to find replacements, all these come with their own vulnerabilities. Extended global supply lines are increasingly vulnerable to disruption, particularly now that their middle-eastern war fronts have created major disruptions in the flow of energy and goods around the world. And colonial territories and populations that have previously acted as reliable manufacturing and manpower bases for the imperialist war machine are beginning to show serious signs of mass discontent – growing antiwar agitation in south Korea being an extremely significant case in point.
The end of the Ukrainian state?
Ukraine is losing on all fronts, and its economy is only kept afloat by continual western stipends. In a clear sign that the prospect of defeat is causing rising tension, internal divisions within the ranks of the Kiev gangster regime are becoming increasingly difficult to conceal.
On 2 September, a gun battle took place in the capital city between personnel from the SBU security and the HUR military intelligence services, exposing serious contradictions within the Ukrainian security apparatus. The Banderite regime is living on borrowed time and the rats are turning on one another as their ship goes down.
It is difficult to reach any other conclusion than that we are witnessing the final, tragic chapter in the history of Ukraine as an independent state. The precise timescale is unknown, but the end itself seems increasingly clear. It is looking likely that most of the country will become part of the Russian Federation – no doubt to the great relief of those war-weary inhabitants who remain; people who have suffered most egregiously over the last decade and more of imperialist-engendered warfare on their territory.
The Kremlin administration headed by President Vladimir Putin appears to have accepted that negotiating a just peace with imperialism is an impossibility; the war will have to be settled on the battlefield. After years of accepting western promises regarding the eastward expansion of Nato (1990), of engaging proactively with the Minsk I and II (2014 and 2015) peace process for the Donbass, of continuing to give the west the benefit of the doubt during the duplicitous Istanbul negotiations (2022) and the empty Anchorage meeting (2025), Russia has at last received the message.
It is clear that this war will only end when Kiev has been forced into an unconditional surrender and its current west-backed junta regime has collapsed entirely.
Moscow clearly understands that fighting the special military operation while wearing kid gloves will only help the imperialists achieve their secondary objective: semi-permanent war to wear down Russia’s social, economic and military fabric over a prolonged time period. While this remains a danger, it is by no means a given that such an objective can be realised, any more that their previous one was.
The western imperialists’ primary objective of bringing about a rapid collapse in the Russian economy and a regime change in Moscow has proved to be delusional in the extreme.
We are seeing the turning of the imperialist tide, both in Ukraine and in west Asia. Step by careful step, always trying not to give the imperialists the excuse for a drastic escalation and doing whatever they can to preserve the lives and livelihoods of their own peoples, it is the nations of the free world that are now pushing forward. The states that have broken free from imperialist economic domination – Russia, Iran, China, the DPRK, the Sahel states, Cuba etc – in their struggle to maintain their sovereignty and independence, are leading the charge on behalf of all humanity.
Our job in Britain is to join with this effort, working urgently to build a movement capable of disrupting the war machine on the home front.
Imperialism must be smashed!
