For a unified Ukraine free from Russian oppression!
Ukraine out from the clutches of the USA, NATO and the European Union from!
Statement by IWL-FI
After signing his decree recognising the self-styled republics of Lugansk and Donetsk as independent states, alien to Ukraine, Putin deploys his troops. The massacre of the Ukrainian people is underway. The IWL-FI denounces and calls on the workers and peoples of the world to mobilise and defeat the Russian invasion and expresses solidarity to the Ukrainian people attacked by Putin’s criminal action. We call on especially the Russian, European and North American peoples and workers to take to the streets and stop the massacre started by the invading troops. The Ukrainians have the right and duty to defend the territorial integrity of their country, they have the right to defend themselves against the destruction of a whole country carried out by the Russian military, an invading army reminiscent of the invasion of the Nazi-German troops. The IWL-FI expresses solidarity and support to the resistance! Let us defeat the invading troops!
Playing on the recognition of the fake independent republics in eastern Ukrainian (Donbas), Putin had shelled about 10 Ukrainian cities and kept the capital Kyiv under military siege at the time of writing this statement. The air, land and sea attacks have gone beyond incorporating the Donbas, the excuse of the invasion, they have no other aim than to destroy an entire country with untold numbers of victims. Let’s take to the streets, as the population did in several Russian cities, defying Putin’s dictatorship. In Moscow, around 10,000 demonstrators were repressed and more than a thousand arrested. The European and North American peoples must join their Russian brothers in taking to the streets to defeat the Russian military aggression!
The excuse for the Russian invasion is the recognition of the territories of Donbas, the puppet republics of Donetsk and Lugansk controlled by pro-Russian paramilitary groups that occupy a third of the region. However, Putin now claims it all by force of arms and has not stayed in eastern Ukraine, adding that the political aim of his barbarism is to destroy a Nazi government, a lie reproduced by his Stalinist satellites elsewhere.
But what Putin is doing in Ukraine is reproducing Nazi barbarism when its military invaded the former USSR and Ukraine as part of the Soviet republics. Putin’s action pushes Ukraine into the clutches of the US and European imperialism because the Ukrainian government is incapable of keeping the country under its political influence. The present aggression is rooted in the weakness of Russian capitalism in relation to the big consolidated imperialisms, which is dependent to a large extent on its role as an oil and gas supplier but is at the same time a military superpower inherited from the USSR. Its aspirations rest first and foremost on the subjugation of the former Soviet republics that formed the USSR.
Putin, a friend of the entire European far-right, which admires his ultra-nationalist and authoritarian regime, has been very clear in saying that Ukraine was “a creation of the Bolsheviks” but that it should once again become, as it was in previous centuries, i.e. during the tsarist empire, an integral part of Russia. He has viciously attacked Lenin’s principles on nationalities: “We gave them the right to leave the USSR without terms and conditions. This is madness.” Instead, he extolled Stalin, who repressed in blood all national aspirations of the Soviet peoples and imposed ferocious oppression of Great-Russian nationalism, linked directly to the tsarist policy that Lenin fought head-on. That policy is now reproduced by the remnants of world Stalinism, who, like Putin, will have their hands stained with the blood of the Ukrainian population, like the Nazis.
For Putin, the collapse of the former USSR, which in its revolutionary years allowed the national freedom of the peoples subjected to Great-Russian nationalism, was “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century” – a catastrophe that must be reversed. And since he cannot do otherwise, he seeks to do so by military force. In addition to Ukraine, there is the case of support for Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime in Belarus in the face of a popular uprising. Or the recent intervention of Russian troops in Kazakhstan (blessed on that occasion by the US, the EU and China) aimed at crushing the popular uprising against the regime and carried out under the umbrella of the CSTO military alliance (formed by the Russian government and those of the former Soviet republics).
One of the arguments for the Russian invasion is the military encirclement to which Russia is indeed subjected by NATO. However, Putin and the Russian oligarchs are in no position to defend the masses from NATO and the advance of the USA and the EU in the region, since they themselves are oppressing the peoples of the former Soviet republics. It is on the shoulders of the peoples and workers all over the world to call for mobilisations against NATO and CSTO in order to secure the right to self-determination of the peoples. The possibility to stop the massacre of the Russian troops is in their hands. The Russian war of aggression on Ukraine will never be able to stop the advance of NATO, on the contrary, it gives the excuse and reason to the USA, NATO and the EU before the peoples of the world to appear as defenders of Ukraine, only to turn Ukraine into a military semi-colony of NATO.
Out with the clutches of the USA, NATO and the European Union!
While Putin is blatantly lying about his aims in this war, Biden is not telling the truth either, claiming that “Putin wants to re-establish the former Soviet Union.” [1] Stalinists may believe that, but Biden does not. Beset by the political crisis in the USA, with falling popularity (40%) and without fulfilling any of his campaign pledges, he uses this nonsense in his attempt to distract the attention of the American people and to hide the real objectives of the USA, the EU and NATO, which have nothing to do with the defence of Ukrainian sovereignty, cynically manipulated according to the interests of two counter-revolutionary sides: Putin’s Russia on the one hand and, on the other, US imperialism, NATO and its European partners. Both sides are using the Ukrainian conflict to defend their stands, to strengthen militarism in Europe and the world and to push forward an arms race at the cost of the massacre of the Ukrainian people.
The Ukrainian conflict is also a theatre of operations in which the US seeks to assert its authority in relation to the European Union, particularly Germany, at the expense of the latter’s relations with Russia, its major natural gas supplier. Ultimately, the US wants to rigidly discipline Germany in its fierce dispute with China.
Defeat the Russian military invasion of Ukraine!
Russia has no right over Ukraine! Support and solidarity to the resistance against the invasion!
Russian troops out of Ukraine! Russian paramilitaries out of the Donbas, return Crimea to Ukraine!
For the right to self-determination of the Ukrainian people, free from all Russian domination. Out with the clutches of the USA, NATO and the EU! Let’s take to the streets en masse against the intervention of Russia, NATO, the USA and the EU!
Dissolve NATO. American troops and bases out of the countries of Western and Eastern Europe.
Dissolution of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation), the military alliance of the Russian state with the former Soviet republics, used to send troops to crush popular uprisings and prop up submissive oligarchs, as in Kazakhstan.
Stop the militarization and arms race. Not a penny for war. Destruction of nuclear arsenals and weapons of mass destruction.
International Workers League-Fourth International (IWL-FI)
24/02/22
Note:
[1] https://elpais.com/internacional/2022-02-24/biden-anuncia-una-nuevo-arsenal-de-sanciones-y-acusa-a-putin-de-querer-restablecer-la-union-sovietica.html
