By IWU-FI
In the early hours of 24 February, Vladimir Putin ordered a military operation over Ukraine. “I decided. I aimed the operation at protecting people, ” he justified himself. He was referring to the pseudo-separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. But news reports and the Russian government’s statements confirm that this is a generalised attack on Ukraine. There was shelling near the capital and other major urban centres such as Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mariupol. Some 20 missile attacks on Ukrainian military and air force bases are reported to have been launched so far. Some are close to the capital, Kyiv. The news reports speak of dozens of deaths, and that some Russian planes and combat helicopters have been shot down. Russia claims to have destroyed Ukrainian airbases. Putin warned: “Whoever interferes will pay the consequences”.
After more than a month of back and forth, of declarations and threats between Putin and Biden, between Russia and the United States and the European Union (EU) and NATO, an armed conflict has finally broken out which we as socialists repudiate. The Ukrainian and Russian people with more misery, deaths and social crisis will pay for the consequences of a war in Ukraine and the region.
There is nothing progressive in this armed confrontation. Sectors of the reformist left, together with countries of false anti-imperialism and socialism such as China, Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, support Russian aggression and Putin as if he were a “victim” and an “anti-imperialist” fighter because he is confronting the USA. Putin heads a capitalist-imperialist regime in Russia, backed by repression and a mafia of oil and gas oligarchs. His dispute with US and European imperialism is simply for the political and economic control of Ukraine. A country that is rich in natural resources (food and mining). This dispute has been going on since the 1990s when the former USSR was dissolved and capitalism was restored in Russia and all the former Soviet republics. Since then, US imperialism and the EU have been semi-colonising the countries of Eastern Europe with their multinationals and banks. Including NATO as an imperialist military alliance. Now the Ukrainian government, a partner of European imperialism, had approved Ukraine’s entry into NATO. Taking another step in its subordination to American and European imperialism. Putin, as the head of an economically and politically weakened capitalist and imperialist Russia, is questioning this.
That is why it is a fight between bourgeois-imperialist sectors that questions the independence of Ukraine and its national self-determination. Putin recognised the independence of the Donbas republics. And he argues that they are Russian-speaking peoples who have asked him to defend them. That would be the pretext for attacking Ukraine. The argument of the right to “self-determination” of this region is false. These are fictitious republics created in 2014 with financial and military support from Russia. Areas that were Russified (transferring population of Russian origin) since Stalin’s time and continued under Putin. In reality, these are enclaves of Russian imperialism on Ukrainian territory. As is the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. An enclave is an artificial creation of imperialism to divide nations and dominate strategic points. Imperialist enclaves are, for example, the Malvinas (Falklands for the UK), the Rock of Gibraltar, Israel, Northern Ireland, among others.
But Putin has been clear that the matter in question does not end in the Donbas region. Putin does not recognise the whole of Ukraine as an independent nation and wants it under his control. As it was under the tsarist empire and Stalin’s dictatorship. To the point of saying, in his speech on 22 February, that Lenin and the Bolshevik government of the 1917 revolution were to blame because they recognised the Ukrainian people’s right to their nation and that they could decide voluntarily whether they wanted to join the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with their rights of autonomy and with the possibility of separating from it. Indeed, it was the revolutionary government of Lenin and Trotsky who recognised Ukraine and the various nationalities, which comprised the Tsarist bourgeois empire, with all their rights. Putin recalled Stalin had opposed this and when he assumed his dictatorship in 1924, he repressed Ukraine and other peoples of the USSR into what was called “a prison of the peoples”.
Now Putin, a former KGB member of the Soviet bureaucracy, turned restorer of capitalism, vindicates Stalin and indeed Tsarism, to crush and bring under his control the whole of Ukraine. As internationalist socialists of the IWU-FI, we will keep on fighting for real self-determination for the Ukrainian people, which will only come with a workers’ government in Ukraine.
But on the other side, there is nothing progressive or democratic. It is the US and European imperialism and its NATO, who simply want to control Ukraine themselves to continue to over-exploit it for their multinationals’ business. Both sides handle this new calamity. It is the responsibility of all imperialist powers for their predatory fight. It shows once more the social and humanitarian debacle caused by the crisis of the capitalist-imperialist system.
That is why from the IWU-FI, we have been denouncing the danger of a reactionary war in Ukraine and the region, with no progressive side. The advance of Russian military aggression and an extended war won’t be favourable for the workers and peoples of Ukraine and Russia. The people must come out to demand an end to the Russian aggression, the bombings, and the beginning of a war. The fundamental way out of this crisis is for the Russian and Ukrainian working classes to confront their governments and impose workers’ governments.
From the IWU-FI, we call to mobilise and repudiate the Russian military aggression on Ukraine. No more bombing. No to the interference either of Russian imperialism or American and European imperialism. No to NATO in Ukraine; for the immediate withdrawal of all nuclear weapons and missiles from Russia and NATO; For the self-determination of the Ukrainian people.
International Workers’ Unity-Fourth International (IWU-FI)
24 February 2022
