The War in Ukraine: What It's Really About
This guest blog article is by Brother Eric Struch, unjustly-fired CTA worker and supporter of CTA workers.
The best way to grasp the situation in Ukraine is to begin with the understanding that the U.S. took up the role of the Third Reich after its defeat in WII as the main enemy of revolution and national liberation. It reoriented its foreign policy around the goal of destroying the Soviet Union and overturning socialism to artificially extend the life of the system of imperialist monopoly capitalism.
After the war, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators (called Banderites after their Führer Stepan Bandera) continued to try to carry out terrorist attacks on Soviet citizens in the northwestern part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
It took the combined strength of the Soviet
Red Army and the Polish Peoples Army to put down the Banderite
terrorists. Since the end of the war, the U.S. ran rat lines out of the
USSR to save their fascist Banderite buddies by finding them new homes
in the U.S. and Canada.
The Ukrainian Nazis didn't have much to do in north America until the
Soviet Union was overthrown from 1991-1993. After Ukraine got its
independence (which was actually Dependence on the U.S. as a neocolony),
the Banderites poured back in to the country and started organizing
themselves with U.S. help.
It's important to understand that Ukraine has never really had a
separate existence from Russia and Belarus. It is made up of pieces of
Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Before the secession of Crimea and Donbas,
more than 40% of Ukrainians spoke Russian as their first language and
are culturally Russian.
There are Hungarian Ukrainians, Romanian
Ukrainians, and even Greek Ukrainians. It is a multinational country, a
Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainian has no greater claim to the country than a
Romanian-speaking Ukrainian.
This is important to understand because Banderite fascism bases itself
on the idea that only people from Galychyna, Lvov, Volyn, and Kiev are
"real" Ukrainians.
U.S. imperialism in the early part of this century used characters like
Yulia Tymoshenko to conduct regime change operations like the so-called
"Orange Revolution" in 2005 in order to aid in its campaign to try to
surround Russia with hostile states.
In 2014, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Victoria Nuland prepared a plan for
a violent coup against democratically elected president Viktor
Yanukovych using Nazi organizations like Oleh Tynanebok's Ukrainian
Social-National Party, later rebranded as Svoboda. The coup, which
started as a right wing mobilization at Maidan square, quickly turned
violent with Nazi snipers shooting at Berkut riot police.
The new Nazi regime quickly targeted supporters of Yanukovych's Party of
Regions, which was popular among Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Soon this
began to grow into anti-Russian, anticommunist pogroms. One of the
worst incidents was in Odessa in May of 2015 when ultra-right football
hooligans and Nazis chased 46 anti-fascist, anti-Maidan activists into
the city's trade union hall and burned them to death, including a
pregnant woman.
The Nazi regime continued its attacks on Russian-speaking Ukrainians and
actually tried to ban the Russian language. Many Russian-speaking
Ukrainians in the Ukrainian military started disobeying orders and
prepared for resistance against the clearly anti-Russian regime, which
began to publicly declare itself in support of fascists like Stepan
Bandera.
The center of resistance was in Donbas, the Don river basin in
the southeast of the country which actually used to be part of Russia
until the late 50's. Donbas is the most industrially developed part of
Ukraine with the most Russian-speaking people.
The Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Donbas declared independence, forming
Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic.
Russian-speaking residents of Crimea voted to become part of the Russian
Federation.
The Kiev SS regime immediately attacked the Lugansk Peoples Republic and the Donetsk Peoples Republic (LPR-DPR). Their fascist Banderite ideology dictated their military strategy-- the viewed all Russian-speaking people as the enemy since these Nazis believe they are the superior "race" and all Russians are "subhuman".
Even in official military documents, the Ukrainian forces referred to Russian-speaking people as "Orcs". Most people near the front lines in the LPR-DPR fled further east or to the Russian Federation. The people left behind were mostly elderly, a fact that didn't stop the Banderites from targeting them.
Over the course of this undeclared war from 2015 to 2022, over
14,000 Russian-speaking civilians were killed by Banderite mortars and
drone strikes. Many of these casualties were children and the elderly. A
monument called the Alley of Angels was erected in the LPR-DPR to
preserve the memory of the children killed by the SS regime.
In
the beginning of 2022, Russian intelligence determined that the Kiev
regime was planning on launching a massive ethnic cleansing operation
against the LPR-DPR. The LPR-DPR leadership was warned about this plan
by Russia.
LPR-DPR authorities organized a referendum on joining the Russian Federation because Russia could not justify intervening in territory that did not belong to it. The Donbas people voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia.
The paperwork was speeded through the Russian Duma. In the U.S. and NATO countries, people are propagandized to believe that "Russia invaded Ukraine", but there was no such plan on the table.
The Putin leadership of the United Russia party
sought to avoid conflict with NATO at any cost, but the Communist Party
of the Russian Federation (KPRF) held Putin's feet to the fire, saying
that his inaction could cost hundreds of thousands of lives of new
Russian citizens if Russia did not act militarily to counter the
Ukrainian ethnic cleansing plans.
Russia planned what they
called a Special Military Operation (SMO) to defend the New Territories,
also referred to as Novorossiya (New Russia). The SMO intended to take
action by moving Russian troops into the New Territories to defend
civilians and make a feint towards Kiev with 60,000 to force the Nazi
regime to come to the negotiation table.
The Kiev SS regime in March of
2022 was close to signing an agreement with Russia recognizing Russian
sovereignty over the New Territories, but U.S. imperialism and their
British toadies promised Kiev unlimited access to weapons if they tore
up the agreement.
This is how we got to where we are now.
If
you look at the maps of the front lines of the SMO, you will see that
almost all of the front is on Russian territory. The Russian Federation
is fighting a defensive war to protect Russian civilians. The vast
majority of people fleeing the conflict (including Ukrainian soldiers
who don't want to die in an unwinnable war) head to the Russian
Federation. So it's clear this is not an aggressive war of conquest
against a defenseless people. It the U.S./NATO proxy Ukraine that is
targeting civilians, not Russia. The civilians that are dying in this
war are Russian, not Ukrainian.
The cities that are being destroyed in this war are Russian, not Ukrainian. This is an existential war for Russia. The U.S./NATO wants to use the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder to weaken Russia in order to prepare an assault meant to overthrow the sovereign Russian state and chop it into tiny statelets as they did to socialist Yugoslavia during the 90's.
They are already running a fake,
left(ish) campaign to promote this insane strategy, talking about
"decolonize Russia" as if U.S. imperialism isn't the single biggest
colonial power on earth.
The existence of the Russian Federation
is the result of the monumental defeat of the Soviet Union that set the
world struggle for revolution and liberation so far back in the 90's.
Putin represents the national bourgeoisie, the section of Russian
capital that wants to develop a sovereign Russia on a capitalist basis.
This section of the Russian bourgeoisie waged a struggle in the late 90's against the comprador forces that represented a section of the bourgeoisie that wanted to act as an intermediary between U.S./UK/German finance capital that sought to drain the Russian economy and strip it of its industry and natural resources for pennies on the dollar.
The Yeltsin era in the 90's was horrible for everyone except the most wealthy Russians, most of whom lived in London or NYC. Nobody in Russia wants to return to that dark era of food insecurity, runaway inflation, mafia wars, and complete lack of national sovereignty.
Putin put a stop to capital flight, made the wealthy pay their taxes, and put Russian industry back on a stable basis with state aid. Sovereignty for the Putin forces is not negotiable in any form. But since he represents the bourgeoisie, he still needs to wage war economically against the working class to secure his class's economic interests. Only the working class opposition concentrated in the KPRF can open the road to socialism.
Learn more about the roots of this war and the struggle against imperialism and neo-nazi regimes:
Resources on Ukraine: https://blackallianceforpeace.com/resourcesonukraine
Why and How to End the War in Ukraine: https://hoodcommunist.org/tag/ukraine/
The
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are not necessarily the opinion or sanctioned policies and actions by
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