Russia, Ukraine, NATO: Pimps of Death
(Anonymous, 1st of May, 2022)
“It is not a secret any longer that there has been a diplomatic arrangement between the Ukrainian oligarchs (represented by Volodymir Zelensky) and NATO: Ukraine delivers the human cannon fodder and NATO delivers the explosives and other hardware to reduce the military pretense of Russia to [the size of] its actual economic power (comparable, for GDP, to Benelux).” (Anonymous message, 26 April 2022.)
It is an official NATO goal now; it was announced 28 April 2022 by the democrat Lloyd Austin, American secretary of state of defense, to have a long war in which as much as possible Russian military potential will be destroyed. The aim is not any longer to provide the Ukrainian state with just enough means to defend itself, but to provide it with far more means to defeat Russia.
In return, Vladimir Putin threatens with a Third World War and Atomic Bombs; yet on the condition that his entourage and the Russian population accept this, which is unlikely but not at all to be excluded. However, the Soviet-Union is death and cannot be revived.
After the 2014 war in Ukraine, ending temporarily with the occupation of the Crimea and the separation of a part of the Ukrainian Donbas region, inevitably in bourgeois-logic, the Kremlin was bullied and provoked: restrictions on the use of the Russian language, rupture with the Russian orthodox church, ever more effective military attacks on the separatist parts of Donetsk and Luhansk; cutting off the water supply of the Crimea, constitution of links with European electricity networks at the expense of the Russian, presence of hundreds of NATO-instructors in the country, and much more. All this was consciously accelerated since the election of Zelensky in 2019, who replaced the more “moderate” and “hesitant”, but equally western orientated Ukrainian oligarch Petro Poroshenko.
At the same time, in 2020 in Belarus there were anti-Russian and pro-Western manifestations (with support of the Albert Einstein Institute and the C.I.A.) which Putin had to “pacify” before he could try to begin some counteroffensive in Ukraine.
Putin was put into power by the Russian oligarchs, but then Putin subjected the oligarchs to his own will, and imprisoned or tried to assassinate those who opposed him (like Khordokovsky and Berezovsky) or pushing them into asylum. In December 2021 Zelensky too has tried to have the Ukrainian oligarch and former president Poroshenko imprisoned for “treason” as he was not ready to provoke Putin into a whole scale war (his evident corruption was not the main problem as he had it in common with the other players); whereafter an “anti-oligarch law” was passed to neutralize this danger. Both men, Putin and Zelensky, have taken control of all public information and silenced all opposition. The main difference between Putin and Zelinsky is that Putin disposes of hundreds of atomic bombs which he is probably ready to use, while Ukraine had to hand them back to Russia (under American and European pressure), which Zelensky must regret a lot, as he would no doubt like to have them at his disposal as much as Putin.
Evidently, in 2022, the Russian ruling class didn’t hesitate to start murdering and destroying in Ukraine in order to defend it’s sordid “vital interests”. Vladimir Putin, Sergej Lavrov and Dmitry Peskov, this triumvirate of madness that reigns by terror, was stupid enough to start a hopeless and desperate military counter-offensive in which they accepted to confront the full fire power of NATO. They miscalculated a lot: the Russian army, not less corrupt than the rest of the country, was in a very bad material en mental state, and when the Russian soldiers found out that in Ukraine they were not welcomed with flowers and kisses, moral got even worse: there was a lot of rebellion and sabotage, and, as could be expected, a lot of “unwanted excrescences”, for which, of course, the unhappy triumvirate bears “no responsibility”.
By contrast, the Ukrainian army, since 2014 under NATO-supervision, was well trained and well equipped while patriotism reached new heights thanks to the delusional perspective of being integrated into “The West”.
Well, Ukraine is one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in Europe (the working population is moving out by the millions since 2014, and even more since the war started, while the fugitives have nothing to go back to), and no one in “The West” is waiting for such a territorial “candidate”; yet it can happily serve as a reservoir of cheap labor and cannon fodder.
Although after 1990 the Russian state was promised that NATO and the EU would not be expanded to the east, over the years more and more states from the former Warsaw Pact were economically integrated into western commercial and military alliances. There were certainly considerations, especially from the German and French side, that through a rapprochement with Russia it could confront American “Unilateralism”/“Unipolarism”, something to which the USA needed to react from 1991 onward, and which resulted, among many other things, into the two Iraq wars in order to discipline “old Europe” into American world domination.
An incalculable danger emanated from the newly founded states after the self-dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, for example, agreement was reached on the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in favor of the successor state of the USSR, Russia. In return, these states were promised territorial integrity after their partial disarmament, something Russia has just as little respected as previous agreements were respected by the West. No arguments on “democracy” or “human rights” were invoked; it was all about “spheres of influence”.
By 2014 when Ukraine finally turned towards the EU and NATO, Vladimir Putin, Sergey Lavrov and Dmitry Peskov launched a politically hopeless and desperate counter-offensive. (The genesis of the conflict confirms the thesis of the Communist Left that a distinction between offensive and defensive wars no longer makes sense.)
We have seen such a situation earlier in Georgia, where a president provoked Russia into war, something that ended badly for Georgia. But Ukraine is not Georgia: it has a well equipped and highly motivated army which is very difficult for Russia to defeat in a huge territory difficult to control. And Ukraine has proven to be capable of recruiting by force the whole male population of 18-60 years old, something Putin is not even trying, just like he is not calling in his reservists.
The struggle for “spheres of influence”, which is the sole concern of this war, is garnished with euphonious demands for “democracy” or “human rights”. Well, once again, Ukraine is one of the poorest and most corrupted countries in Europe, where, just like in Russia, all “opposition” has been silenced. In bourgeois international martial law it is perfectly fine to murder millions of people when they are dressed up in uniforms. The people’s democratic approval of their rule boomerangs when they are called upon to do bloodthirsty service for their motherlands and under compulsory conscription. The sole purpose of insisting on respect for “human rights”, especially in times of war, is to put the enemy in the wrong in the worst possible way. As if there were a difference between a “clean” and a “dirty” war!
On both sides of the front workers in uniform, or civilians without, are now being killed and maimed. As a rule, it is wage workers who throw themselves into the fray of war for a rule that even in times of “peace” has obtained the means to wage a war of annihilation through the capitalist exploitation of the workforce.
There are no good reasons for anyone to take part in the war on either of the sides. All need to turn against their exploiters and fraternize with the workers on other side of the front. It is a matter for the whole world proletariat to turn against the world bourgeoisie. Their motto’s must be:
Workers of the World, Unite!
No War between the “Nations”, no Peace between the Classes!
Transform the Imperialist War into a Civil War!
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