Defeat US / NATO War Drive and Sanctions Against Russia!
The following statement was issued by the Executive Committee, Boson Workers on 23 February 2022.
On February 21, 2022, after weeks of increasingly hysterical imperialist war propaganda and daily escalating attacks by Ukrainian government and fascist/nationalist forces against the breakaway Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin formally recognized the independence of these embattled self-styled people’s republics and sent in troops. The United States, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the European Union immediately condemned Russia for its defensive action and announced they would impose severe economic sanctions. Class-conscious workers and all opponents of imperialism should denounce the U.S./NATO imperialist war drive, which raises the spectre of world war. The imperialists seek to isolate, provoke and demonize Russia, which despite Putin’s supposed ambitions is an intermediate, regional capitalist power. Yet the imperialists’ ultimate aim is to spark counterrevolution in China, Cuba and North Korea.
The next day, U.S. president Joe Biden seized upon Russia’s action to declare it “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,” in order to declare economic sanctions against Russia, as was foreseen.
For years, Putin has complained of the increasing encirclement by NATO and its threatening military actions against Russia, to no avail. Two months ago, Moscow handed the U.S. proposed language for security guarantees, and for emphasis, it mobilized its armed forces for military maneuvers all around Ukraine’s borders. The imperialist media went into full Russia-bashing mode, calling up Cold War images of the Russian bear seizing Europe. Non-stop fear-mongering over a supposedly impending Russian invasion of Ukraine recalled the war propaganda over non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The Western powers responded to Putin with nothing but empty arms-control talks and flatly refused to rule out NATO expansion. With its almost 1,300-mile border with Russia, inclusion of Ukraine in the Western military alliance would be an act of war. By declaring any limitation on NATO’s eastward expansion a “non-starter,” Biden and his European allies are declaring that the imperialist alliance is gearing up for war on Russia, sooner or later.
Biden is beating the war drums against Russia in a desperate attempt to appear strong after the U.S. imperialism’s humiliating defeat and flight from Afghanistan, where two decades of U.S./NATO invasion and occupation could not keep the puppet government from collapsing. The current inhabitant of the White House is desperately trying to resuscitate a unipolar “New World Order” that was proclaimed by the U.S. with the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union three decades ago. But Washington no longer has the military and economic strength to impose its global hegemony, and instead has to rely on its European and Asian allies. In large part, the U.S.’ insistence on isolating and attacking Russia with economic warfare measures is driven by a determination to keep its imperialist ally and rival Germany in line, particularly by insisting on cancellation of Nord Stream 2.
In his speech announcing recognition of the two breakaway republics, Putin noted that in negotiations over the reunification of Germany in 1990, the U.S. assured Soviet leaders that there would be no expansion of NATO to the east. The existence of this pledge, which the U.S. now pretends was never made, is confirmed in a February 1990 exchange in which U.S. Secretary of State James Baker vowed to Mikhail Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction,” and in a classified German government document recently leaked by Der Spiegel. Yet NATO’s Drang nach Osten (march to the east) goes on unabated. And while Putin hails Russia’s “contribution to overcoming the legacy of the Cold War,” a handful of socialist militants fought tooth and nail against the capitalist reunification of Germany and the counterrevolution that brought down the multinational Soviet workers state.
The current crisis over Ukraine has been building for years. In 2014, Ukrainian fascists and ultra-nationalists staged a coup d’état that ousted the elected, pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich. This was a second attempt, after the 2004 so-called Orange Revolution, one of the U.S.-sponsored “color revolutions” for “regime change” in post-Soviet states. In 2014, the State Department’s Europe chief financed and directly coordinated with the nationalist fascists and hobnobbed with them in Maidan square in Ukraine’s capital.3 Ukrainian nationalists marched with portraits of Stepan Bandera, the infamous collaborator with the Nazi invasion of the USSR during World War II, who has now been officially declared “hero of Ukraine.” Following the February 2014 coup, its organizers launched a war on Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine and staged a pogrom in the south, burning dozens of people alive in the trade-union headquarters in Odessa. The use of Russian in schools and government was banned.
When an uprising against this murderous Ukrainian national chauvinism broke out in the east, the Kiev junta considered the army unreliable and dispatched fascist squads to try to put down the revolt. Yet the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts (regional divisions) voted overwhelmingly in a May 2014 referendum for independence from the central government, and after hard close-quarters fighting, the would-be ethnic cleansers failed. In Crimea (whose capital Sevastopol has for centuries been the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet), after Russian troops seized the peninsula in March 2014 without a shot being fired, the overwhelmingly ethnically Russian population voted in a referendum to exercise their self-determination by joining Russia. Many socialist militants called to support the eastern uprising and to defend the regional republics that have tenaciously resisted the Ukrainian nationalist/fascist attacks, as well as defending Crimea’s democratic choice to join Russia.
Russia’s move to recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk republics puts an end to the 2015 Minsk Accords between Russia and Ukraine for regional autonomy of the eastern oblasts. While the separatists sought independence, Putin preferred that the Donbass be an autonomous part of a neutral Ukraine that could be a buffer between Russia and NATO. But the Kiev government never undertook promised reforms providing security guarantees and a say in foreign policy to the breakaway regions. Recently, the prohibitions on use of the Russian language have been intensified, even though it is the predominant language in the cities of the east and south, and is widely used in the capital, in business and popular culture. Putin talks of “genocide” against Russians, which is an exaggeration, but Russian-speakers in the east are definitely threatened by the Ukrainian nationalist army and fascists that have besieged the region for eight years. As for the now-defunct Minsk Accords for autonomy in Ukraine, it was always hard to see how the central government could reassert control without a bloodbath.
The escalation of anti-Russian provocations by the Ukrainian government is a direct result of the election of Democrat Biden to the U.S. presidency. As Republican Trump sought to make nice with Putin and Russia, the Democrats whipped up the “Russiagate” frenzy, blaming the Kremlin for Hillary Clinton’s loss of the 2016 election. The Democrats have been tight with Ukraine’s anti-Russian nationalists for years, engineering the 2004 and 2014 coups, sitting on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, etc. As soon as Biden got in, the Ukraine government began a string of provocations, announcing a new military strategy in March 2021 centered on joining NATO and getting it to support Ukraine against Russia. Russian-language television stations were shut down, and the main pro-Russian “oligarch” business mogul in Ukraine was placed under house arrest on charges of “treason.”
The Ukrainian government and nationalist paramilitaries simultaneously launched a military escalation in the east, to which Moscow responded by beefing up its forces on Russian territory on the other side of the border. In the fall, Russia again mobilized for a series of military exercises, stating over and over that it had no intention of invading Ukraine. The purpose of those exercises was to make clear to the Western imperialists that if Ukraine joins NATO, it would be considered an act of war, and to indicate what would be the consequence. If Russia wanted to, it could easily take much of Ukraine. Even the Ukrainian top military brass admitted they would not last more than a few days against the modernized Russian military. So Putin’s point was made very clearly. The U.S. response was frenzied propaganda portraying the Russian leader as the embodiment of evil.
For all the feverish denunciation of Moscow’s military buildup, NATO has been intensifying aggressive military operations near Russia. “Trident Juncture” in 2018 was billed as “the biggest exercise since the end of the Cold War,” focusing on the Baltics, including a D-Day style landing in Latvia. This was followed up in May-July 2021 with “Defender Europe 21,” a joint exercise involving 28,000 troops and a giant landing of more than 1,000 military vehicles in Albania. This was linked to the simultaneous “Sea Breeze” naval exercises in the Black Sea, with ships of 32 countries (including Japan), along with ground exercises in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. None of these are ever mentioned in the imperialist media, and all are aimed at Russia. Since 1999, NATO has expanded to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Romania, encircling Russia. And now the imperialists want to tighten the noose by refusing to rule out entry of Ukraine and Georgia, which were told in 2008 they could join NATO if they got their houses in order.
Militant socialists call to defend self-rule in the breakaway regions of southern and eastern Ukraine and to defeat the war drive against Russia and China. We militantly oppose imperialist sanctions and denounce the U.S./NATO hue and cry over Russian troops shoring up the besieged Donbass republics as the bleating of frustrated warmongers and their social-democratic acolytes. The conductor of this orchestrated uproar is U.S. imperialism, with its record of countless bloody invasions. If clashes lead to a full-blown war between Russia and Ukraine, socialist militants would be for a policy of revolutionary defeatism in both of these regional powers, calling for workers to actively oppose the war effort of “their” capitalists and to wage intransigent class struggle against the capitalist rulers in Moscow and Kiev. But if it turned into a war by Ukraine’s imperialist backers against Russia that would be a very different matter.
Socialists warned repeatedly before the 2020 election that the Democrats were campaigning as “the more consistent warmongers against China, Russia and – of course – North Korea.”5 In an interview during the election campaign, Biden declared that the “biggest threat to America right now … is Russia,” while “the biggest competitor is China” (60 Minutes, 25 October 2020). And upon being named Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield called China “a strategic adversary” (AP, 27 January 2021). Thus the February 4 joint statement of Putin and Chinese president and Communist Party leader Xi Jinping proclaiming friendship with “no limits” between China and Russia, which explicitly opposed the expansion of NATO, caused great consternation in Washington. Facing the escalating threats and dangers, we call on the world working class to defend China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states against imperialism and counterrevolution.
Today, the overriding class issue is to fight against the aggressive U.S./NATO imperialist warmongers and their flunkeys in Kiev, as well as against the fascist and ultra-nationalist pogromists threatening the population in eastern Ukraine. In no case do Marxists give political support to the Ukrainian leaders or to the Russian nationalist and anti-communist Vladimir Putin, whose February 21 speech began with a diatribe against Lenin and the Bolsheviks for creating Ukraine in the first place. Putin was a lawyer for the Soviet security services and a memeber of the Communist Party. Putin has said that when the Soviet Union imploded many agents publicly burned their Communist Party membership cards. They were Stalinists who never believed in socialism or communism. Putin said he did not burn his Communist Party membership card and still has it at home in a draw.
A Soviet Ukraine in a multinational USSR could have overcome regional and ethnic tensions, although Stalin’s brutal centralization negated that. But ever since Ukraine’s 1991 independence as a bourgeois state, it has been a deeply divided country, ruled by an inveterately corrupt, self-dealing oligarchy using ultra-nationalist and fascist shock troops as a battering ram to enforce “Ukrainization” on the Russian-speaking east and south.
Socialist millitants should defend the democratic, national and linguistic rights of all sectors of the population, seeking to unite Russian and Ukrainian workers in common struggle together with the workers of East and West Europe. As the imperialists continue to whip up war fever and impose escalating sanctions that ultimately point to world war, those who follow the internationalist program of world socialist revolution against all the capitalist ruling classes. ■
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