The Main Enemy is at Home
No U.S. war on Russia over Ukraine!
The whole world has been on alert about the possibility of a Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and now it has happened. This raises the very dangerous possibility of a war between Russia and the U.S., the two strongest imperialist powers in the world, possessing 90 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world between them, capable of wiping out all of humanity in a matter of minutes.
This is the biggest, and most dangerous, military mobilization in Europe since the Second World War.
U.S. propaganda would have us believe this is all due to an aggressive Russian military buildup along its border with Ukraine: over 130,000 troops and still going up, with tanks, naval and air power, and more in neighboring Belarus for war games. This, on top of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and its support for separatists in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, centered in Luhansk and Donetsk, amounts (allegedly) to aggression.
Talks between the
“deaf and the dumb”
Russia attacked, despite a rash of diplomatic exchanges, between Biden and Putin and many other high-level interchanges in which Putin insisted there is no intention or plan to invade Ukraine, the U.S. has been moving troops and creating a deafening war hysteria. Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, after a meeting with the British foreign minister, referred to these discussions as talks between “the deaf and the dumb,” i.e., useless. Russia had demanded that U.S./NATO forces pull back to where they were in 1990, and insisted that Ukraine never be allowed to join the NATO alliance.
Russia’s military invasion is dangerous and aggressive. And the U.S. has been doing the same thing for decades. In 1990, as the Soviet border states were crumbling, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that there would be “not one inch” of U.S./NATO advance into the Russian border states. Since then, the U.S. has done exactly the opposite. There are now U.S. and NATO military incursions into all those countries, including bases and missiles pointed at Russia. Biden is actively deploying more, particularly to Poland and Romania, both of which have borders with Ukraine.
Russia, the EU, and the pipeline
Before the invasion, there were some cracks in the EU’s NATO-member countries when it comes to conflict with Russia. France’s president Emmanuel Macron seemed more open to dialog with Russia, while U.S./NATO ally UK, under the clownish Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was more aggressive. Germany, on the other hand, refused to send defensive weaponry to Ukraine, no doubt due to its massive dependence on Russia for its supply of natural gas. The U.S. (and the UK) are the most aggressive; and this includes Biden’s threat that if Russia invades Ukraine, the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline designed to carry more natural gas to Germany and EU countries, will be stopped. Now, it has been stopped. That being just one of the dangerous financial sanctions the U.S. imposed on Russia.
Ukraine itself, in statements by President Zelensky, said that war is not imminent until recently. As of February 12, 2022, there were warnings about the possible blockade of all Ukrainian ports because of planned Russian naval maneuvers in the Black Sea and the Azov Sea. This would be a war measure.
The fascist threat
Meanwhile, while saying for some time that war is not imminent, Ukraine has been building trenches and patrolling soldiers in the Donetsk region, which Russia has recognized as independent states, and encouraging far right militias to be ready, despite the danger they pose to the Kiev government itself. According to the leader of one of these groups, Democratic Ax, they are mobilizing, but will not tolerate any peace deal with Russia. “We’ll deal with Russia one way or another,” said spokesperson Yuri Hudymenko, but if the government signs a peace document with Russia that gives away too much, “a million people will take to the streets and that government will cease being the government.” 1
A little history is necessary to understand this very real fascist threat, as well as Russia’s interests in Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russian history
After the counterrevolution in 1991, Russia was a disorganized mess, completely incapable of maintaining a stable economy or military structure. Now, however, Russia is a formidable power which, I believe, has no intention of starting a war with the U.S. But, Ukraine is a different story and Russia does have considerable interests in Ukraine, particularly in Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and in the separatist movement centered in Donetsk and Luhansk.
First of all, Ukraine is basically Russian, right from the beginning. The first Russian state was Kievin Rus, a loose assembly of local tribes and Vikings who evolved into today’s Russians, with the latter generally given credit for founding the city of Kiev (now called Kyiv in the U.S., in order to more closely resemble its pronunciation in the closely related Ukrainian language.) As a province of Russia under the czars and then Soviets, Ukraine was the most important “breadbasket” of Russia. Today, most Ukrainians are ethnically Russian speakers, particularly in the East and South of the country. But now, Ukraine is being torn apart by an East-West imperialist contention and threat of war for which the U.S. is principally responsible.
Ban on Russian language
While Ukraine has been part of Russia, both ethnically and politically, for centuries, and still has a majority of Russian speakers, it is more or less evenly divided between more Russian speakers east of the Dnieper River, and fewer to the west of the river.2 There is considerable intermingling of Russian and the closely related Ukrainian speakers, but now the “centrist” government of President Volodymyr Zelensky is presiding over a regional ban on “public use of Russian-language cultural products in all forms.” The province of Lvov wants this to spread nationally “to protect the Ukrainian information space from hybrid action by the aggressor-state [Russia] and reverse the consequences of many years of Russification.”3
“Many years of ‘Russification’”? Besides being of Russian origin, Ukraine today is still ethnically Russian; and that is strongest in the Donbas region and Crimea. The two big municipalities of the Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk, are the most important industrial areas of Ukraine. Their origin goes back to the Russian Empire of the Czars, as it was frantically trying to catch up with the West economically prior to World War I.
Independence in the Donbas
There was continued industrial development in the Donbas by the Soviet Union after the October Revolution of 1917. Donetsk and Luhansk have declared their independence, and are in a state of war with Ukraine, complete with World War I-style trenches surrounding the borders of these urban areas. Russian volunteers, not in the Russian army, but mostly coming from it, are aiding in defense of this area.
That’s not the case with Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, after an overwhelming vote—more than 90 percent—of the Crimean population supporting it. A U.S. orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine was the reason.
The coup of 2014
After Ukrainian independence following the Russian counterrevolution in 1991, there were a few administrations in which Ukraine shifted from one side to the other—West-leaning and Russian-leaning—in elections. Then there was a big disruption.
In 2013 elections, Ukraine chose Victor Yanukovych, a former governor of the Donetsk region, as president in a vote that was certified as accurate by international observers. Yanukovych was then presented with a decision: should Ukraine accept a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which was going to require a 40 percent increase in natural gas costs, or accept a loan from Russia with the inclusion of cheap oil and gas? Note here that Russia is the main source of oil and gas for Europe, and the European (EU) IMF offer to Ukraine amounted to the insertion of a “middleman” between the Russian source of the gas and oil and Ukraine as the customer. Naturally, Yanukovych picked the Russian offer. That was in late 2013.
U.S. meddling in Ukraine
Enter the U.S., in the person of Victoria Nuland, who from 2000 through to 2005 was the U.S. permanent representative to NATO, and then the foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney. She helped manage the removal and sickening assassination of Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, under Hillary Clinton, who said “We came, we saw, he died,” paraphrasing Julius Caesar after conquering Gaul.
By January of 2014, Nuland was on the job meddling in Ukraine affairs, and a leaked phone call proved it. In a conversation with the U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, she was heard declaring, “fuck the EU!” This was not because she favored the Russian loan offer that Yanukovych had picked. It was because she wanted to sink the EU’s offer to negotiate on their more expensive offer to Ukraine! She was working with right wing opponents of anything Russian, including the Right Sector, the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, and militias such as the Azov Brigade, who had begun demonstrating in the Maidan—Independence Square—in Kiev. The U.S. wanted to “glue” the toppling of the Yanukovych regime. The government had tried to suppress the anti-Russia protestors with police, so the neo-Nazis organized sharpshooters on roofs above the Maidan that killed about 100 people, in an attempt to blame the government for allegedly using terror.4
The writing on the wall
Yanukovych saw the writing on the wall and fled to Russia. But the U.S. wasn’t done. In the phone call, Nuland announced who the new president would be. Instead of another candidate, she said, “I think Yats [Arseniy Yatsenyuk] is the guy.” Guess who was installed as Prime Minister of Ukraine? The first act of the new government was the establishment of Ukrainian as the only official language of Ukraine. This was the first part of the effort, now in full swing, to ban Russian usage.5
The fascist influence in Ukraine goes back to the Ukraine as part of the USSR. The revolutionary government of 1917 under Lenin and Trotsky saved Ukraine from Czarist restoration and German invasion in 1918-19, but as Russia degenerated under Stalin, Ukraine suffered, including by expulsion of the Tartars, an indigenous Turkic people, and the famine of 1932-33. This treatment was enough to make many Ukrainians, particularly in Galicia in the West, welcome the invading Germans in 1941 as they sought to conquer all of Russia. The cheering died down quickly and resistance ramped up as the Nazi forces partitioned parts of Ukraine to Poland, among other oppressive measures. But the anti-Russian fascist influence lived on, with the Svoboda Party, Azov Brigade, and other organizations.
What ever became of the right of nations to self-determination?
If the Ukraine is not a strong case for the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, nothing is. After the Great War (WW I) when the big empires, like Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had crumbled, many nations of Europe needed recognition. The Russian Revolution, which had already sent the Czarist empire into the dump heap, was the leading force in promoting the right of self-determination for nations. The Bolshevik government was the first to grant independence to Ukraine, which was a former property of the Czars. This happened in 1918, when the Germans were pressing Russia from all sides. The independence of the Ukraine was included in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of that year, which ended the war between Germany and Russia.
Soon German troops poured into the now independent Ukraine, but the German army collapsed later in 1918, and these soldiers retreated. World War I was soon over. After the Germans fled, a Czarist-restorationist army entered Ukraine, but it was soon defeated by the Red Army, as part of its war against the counterrevolutionaries throughout the former empire. The Ukrainian population welcomed the revolution and became part of the USSR when it was formed in 1922. Meanwhile, the principle of the right to national self-determination gained international acclaim to such an extent that even U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was obliged to acknowledge it in his meddling in European affairs after the devastating war, and left many nationalities freed from dead empires.
Self-determination is still needed…
Today, one never hears about the right of self-determination, largely because in many places (India, Africa, etc.) colonial empires have disintegrated since WW II, and the new imperialist superpower controls just about everything on the planet through the export of capital, imposition of puppet regimes, military interventions, and sanctions. All these countries, though technically independent nations, need self-determination in the sense of revolutionary liberation from the superpower and its puppets. But Ukraine needs to pay attention to the original meaning of self-determination.
...Minority nationalities included
Note here that self-determination not only gives that right to Ukraine, but it also gives it to minority nationalities within another nation, such as the Donetsk/Luhansk separatists in Ukraine. This part of the East includes the areas around Donetsk that Ukrainian troops were patrolling. Ukrainian citizens can vote (in an honest election; hard to come by now) to remain a nation, but the separatists have the same right, either to be an independent nation, stay with Ukraine, or merge with Russia. This area could include much more territory east of the Dnieper River, due to the domination of Russian ethnicity. And it certainly applies to Crimea, which voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.6
Make no mistake, all this is not in any way to be misconstrued as a support for Russia and its regime. Russia today, though driven back in many ways by the overthrow of the USSR and the reinstitution of capitalism, is now a capitalist imperialist state. It is a threat to any minority nationalities within it, and it is an oppressive fake “democracy” under a would-be dictator who just recently abolished the largest human-rights group in the country.7 In any direct conflict between Russia and the U.S., our slogan is: “Turn the guns the other way! No support to either side! The main enemy is at home!”
The only solution is revolution
But Putin is too smart to get himself into a direct conflict with the superpower: he knows he would lose (along with the rest of the planet.) And Biden’s threatened sanctions could be too much for Russia, I think. The U.S. is too much of a superpower. Putin’s strategy is to stand up to the U.S. and the EU to a point where they pay attention. He knows he will not get satisfaction over his demands of a NATO pull-back to 1990 levels, and a ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO. But he also knows that there is much reluctance in the EU to extend NATO to Ukraine. Putin intends to establish the fact that Russia can do the same aggressive border protections that the U.S. has imposed against Russia for decades.
The U.S. is the actual aggressive factor in this sad scenario. The U.S. is now the world’s only superpower, and it is intent on keeping its “full spectrum dominance” in place throughout the globe. Hence the intense cold war treatment of both China and Russia in today’s news. Ukrainians are caught in the middle of an inter-imperialist conflict, the fascist menace at home, and the internal divisions which should be treated with the principal of self-determination. The imperialist dominated world will never accept a fair and proper solution to the national question in Ukraine. The whole world needs a socialist revolution, one that sends the imperialists and capitalism itself to the dustbin of human history.
Author’s Postscript: This article was submitted for publication on February 13, before the Russian incursion into Ukraine. On February 24, the editors made some revisions to the article. Now, on February 25, the author would like to note that he supports the right of the separatists to request Russian military aid, as they did, but would oppose any attempt by Russia to conquer all of Ukraine, or to impose a new regime on Ukraine against the peoples’ will.
1 “Militia Units Pose Threat, For Russians and for Kyiv,” New York Times, February 11, 2022.
2 The Dnieper is one of the major rivers of Europe, rising near Smolensk, Russia, before flowing through Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea, essentially dividing Ukraine in half.
3 Zelensky himself was a Russian speaker who switched to Ukrainian. And Lvov is an historic center of the hard right in Ukraine. https://www.rt.com/news.
4 The rightists sacrificed some of their own supporters to do this, although they also hit police officers.
5 Nuland is now confirmed in the third highest position in the U.S. State Department as Under Secretary for Political Affairs by President Biden. Quotes from Nuland’s phone call and more on her crimes are from “Why Victoria Nuland is Dangerous and Should Not be Confirmed,” Rick Sterling, February 13, 2021, https://dissidentvoice.org.
6 The media ignores the fact that this vote took place before the Russian assimilation of Crimea. Also incorrect is the not-so-subtle implication that Russia must have rigged the vote. Why should they? They already had unanimous support.
7 December 28, 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled to dissolve Memorial International, Russia’s oldest human rights group.