cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/46440

This was posted as a question on stackexchange and many subreddits, but was quickly downvoted, taken out of sight and then deleted. So this is a new attempt to post it as a discussion. Actually there are not so many evidences that the war in Ukraine is a permanent war, the title was meant to give the idea of the war that is convenient for the great powers who pretend to fight a fake cold war. Many evidences point to the fact that the US, or better say corporate America is complicit.

A small premise, this post ignores the European (EU) leaders since I suspect that in this story they are just puppets.

The war in Ukraine has been very convenient for both, the US corporations that could exploit the war to speculate on food prices and push up the inflation and the Russian government that could silence the opposition and send to the front, or push to hide abroad, young people who could have fuelled rebellions.

For the first part of the above statement please note that while the media claimed that Ukraine and Russia together sold more than 27% of the wheat produced in the world, it later turned out that the claim was about the wheat sold on the international market, not the whole world production, therefore it was misleading. Furthermore notwithstanding the war that share is actually increasing, so the war did not reduce the supply of wheat, however it is enough to give an excuse to raise the prices again. In the meantime in Eastern EU countries there have been many protests because the flood of grains coming from Ukraine pushed down the prices paid to the producers while at the same time the prices to the consumers doubled.
Who benefits from this speculation? Obviously the food industry, but not only those selling to consumers. The international market for grains is almost an oligopoly dominated by Cargill and ADM.

Grain is not the only sector that took advantage from the war. Although fossil fuels are produced all around the world most of them are traded on the US markets and American traders gain a commission on each sale. The war allowed a lot of speculation even in this sector and it also allowed "emergency" plans that drew huge amount of state funds into gas infrastructure, like the REPowerEU (don't be misled by icons and pictures of wind turbines).

On the Russian side the war allowed the government to issue strong censorship laws. Furthermore the threat of being sent to the front pushed a lot of young Russians to flee abroad, and they are the ones who could have supported rebellions against the government, for more information any search engine with the keywords russian abroad avoid draft will return a lot of results. Another point is that the news told that many detainees were forced to enrol of the army and go to fight on the front lines. But although the news hinted that those detainees might be common criminals chances are that there were a lot of political prisoners among them.

Until here I mentioned the hints that this war might be convenient for both the US and Russian side, to this I can simply add that restarting the cold war might be a very useful propaganda tool. But there are are also hints that this might be a permanent war.

The first hint are the many claims by Western leaders about the intention to keep it a low intensity conflict.

The second hint is the failure of the Russian sanctions. Those sanctions were full of holes from the beginning. So much that Europan and US companies did or are still doing business with the Russians. A comment to this question migh point out another hole.

Another factor weakening the sanctions is the unwillingness of the US to enforce them strongly. Many small countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America still trade with the Russian. The US showed that when they want to really enforce some sanctions many of those countries fall into line. It happened with Iran or Cuba, but not now even if the case should be stronger.

Another hint is that the Russians are saving their best equipment and used the war to dump the old one. To this the Western media turned a blind eye, they made great news of the sinking of the Russian "Flagship" in the black sea pretending not to know that it was 40 years old and due to be scrapped. The other ships destroyed in the conflict like the Saratov were even older.

Even on the Western side the conflict has been a dumping ground for outdated equipment. Although the promised F-16 have been modernised it is still a plane designed almost 50 years ago. Even the Leopard tanks are quite old by now.