A photo of Kiev’s destroyed Maidan Square went viral days after last year’s Russian invasion on 24 February. But this photo was taken 8 years earlier, during the so-called Euromaidan events in 2014, when an alliance of pro-Western nationalists and fascists overthrew the then Yanukovych government. Then, a slogan appeared against the background of that photo which proved to be quite insightful: “Tomorrow blood will be shed again. Enough!”.[1] However, the blood never stopped flowing for eight whole years, in Odessa, Kharkiv and the Donbass.
The war in Ukraine actually began at a lower intensity then, after a coup in Kiev backed by the US and EU governments that ended with the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in February 2014. A brutal crackdown on those who rose against the new regime followed; massacres of anti-fascists in the “House of Trade Unions” in Odessa and other massacres and assassinations of leftists in Mariupol and Kharkiv. Para-military battalions, formed by fascist organizations, such as the “Right Sector” and the “Social National Assembly” (the latter’s leader Bilyetsky founded the notorious Nazi “Azov” battalion), later joined the National Guard. This situation sparked the uprising in the Donbass and the civil war that followed with at least 14,000 casualties, mostly civilians.
Why did the Russian invasion happen last February?
There is often a question why the invasion took place last year and not in the first period of the civil war in the Donbass, when the regime in Kiev was still unstable and the army relied mainly on fascist battalions. At that time, the Donbass militias had managed to trap the most important forces of the regime in an enclave in Ilovaisk. However, Putin intervened to secure their release, believing that an agreement could be reached with Kiev. What followed were the Minsk agreements, which provided for a ceasefire and autonomy for the Donbass. But the agreements remained on paper, as the fascists threatened with a new coup in case of their implementation. However, the recent statement by Merkel, a mediator at the time, together with Hollande, that the agreements were “an attempt to give Ukraine time to become stronger” is also characteristic.[2]
Until the last moment, the Kremlin hoped to “resurrect” the Minsk agreements and not without reason, as Zelensky had been elected President promising to implement them. The leaderships in the Donbass after the assassinations of its most important political and military leaders were now under Russian control and this would ensure their compliance for a final Moscow-Kiev deal, even on less favourable terms. But the US, as the main patron of the Kiev regime, did not intend to put a brake on the plans for further NATO expansion to the East, and this is exactly what the declared goal of Ukraine’s integration into the imperialist alliance serves.
The Russian leadership, for its part, considered that it could take the risk not only to shift the balance after the Maidan coup, but also to take advantage of the US failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and assert to upgrade Russia’s position, by regaining partial control in the former Soviet space. However, until the last moment it was far from certain whether Russian forces would invade Ukraine or not. The resurgence of the Ukrainian army attacks in the Donbass, but also the Kremlin’s mistaken assessment that the EU countries will differentiate themselves from Washington due to their energy dependence on Russia certainly played a role in making the final decision.
“De-Nazification” and oligarchs
One of the Kremlin’s alleged goals to justify the invasion is the so-called “de-Nazification” of Ukraine and an end of the war in the Donbass. However, apart from the Ukrainian government, those who have funded and used the Nazis, are the Ukrainian oligarchs. Therefore, in order to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, the oligarchs will also have to be crushed. This is exactly what Alexei Mozgovoi, commander of the “Prizrak” brigade, stated before his assassination, explaining why the oligarchs are the main enemy.[3]
However, it is certain that Putin does not have the slightest intension to harm the Ukrainian oligarchs, because if he did, he would strengthen the fight against the Russian oligarchs. In Russia, after all, he suppresses the leftists who fight against his neoliberal policy. As for “de-Nazification” itself, if the Russian leadership achieves the concessions it wants, Russia will withdraw, leaving anti-fascist Ukrainians at the mercy of the Kiev regime. The release of the prisoners of the Nazi “Azov” battalion, despite initial statements that they will be put on trial for war crimes, is highly revealing of the Kremlin hypocrisy.
Consequently, Ukrainians who hate the far-right regime, even if they live in areas under the control of the Russian military, are reluctant to speak out, knowing well that this would mean they would be targeted when the war is over and Russian troops withdraw. Zelensky’s ban on all but nationalist political parties and the arrest of at least 600 people in Kiev alone is a picture of a future Ukraine, where not being a staunch nationalist will be tantamount to high treason.
Does the glorification of Stepan Bandera mean that the Kiev regime is Nazi?
Ukrainian nationalism over the past hundred years has served various imperialist powers. In the First World War Ukrainian nationalists fought in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian army, commanded by Duke Wilhelm of Habsburg, who was nicknamed Vasyl’ Vyshivanyi (the one who wears the traditional Ukrainian shirt vyshyvanka).[4] After the October Revolution they fought in the nationalist army of Symon Petliura, who excelled in exterminating at least 50,000 Jews. In 1941, 800 fascists, members of Stepan Bandera’s “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN), led by Roman Shukhevich, participated in the Nazi invasion of the USSR, as part of the German army. The day after the capture of Lviv they organized a pogrom and murdered at least 4,000 Jews. The OUN then drafted the “Declaration of Independence of Ukraine”, which stated among other things:
“The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Moscovite occupation.”[5]
The OUN’s military wing, the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) exterminated 150,000 Poles in an attempt at ethnic cleansing, while OUN members were also recruited into the Hilfspolizei (collaborationist police) and the Ukrainian SS which participated in the extermination of 1.6 million Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera and Sukhevich are hailed by the Ukrainian government as “national heroes”, while October 14, the founding day of the UPA, is celebrated as “Defenders Day” of Ukraine. Zelensky himself awarded the title of “Hero of Ukraine” to Myroslav Symchych, a 99-year-old UPA veteran who had been convicted of murdering Poles during World War II and spent 32 years in the Gulag.[6]
The construction of a Ukrainian national identity based on the glorification of Nazi collaborators inevitably led to rifts within Ukraine, a country where millions of people fought against Nazism. Recently, a Ukrainian communist stated that “Lenin created Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalists destroyed it.”
Nevertheless, the Kiev regime cannot be characterized as Nazi, just as the post-civil war regime in Greece cannot be characterized as such, although it massively recruited Nazi collaborators. Even today, the “New Democracy” [t.n. the ruling right wing party] has gathered a bunch of far-rightists in the party, including some of them in the government. However, we understand very well that to characterize the current government as “fascist” would be out of line with reality.
Ukrainian fascists have manned the state apparatus, especially the police and the army, but have not seized power. At the same time, the official state propaganda presents Bandera and his collaborators as allegedly having engaged in a “two-front struggle against the Soviets and Germans”, concealing the fact that they collaborated with the latter. A similar kind of rewriting history is observed in other countries of the former USSR, like in Latvia, where the Latvian SS are often portrayed to have fought against the “Soviet occupation”. This is a continuation of the imperialist propaganda of the US and their allies after World War II, who recruited Nazi collaborators or facilitated them to establish anti-Soviet “unions” in the West.
The post-Maidan regime banned the Communist Party of Ukraine and all communist organizations. The rest of the parties operated legally and had representation in parliament. However, after the Russian invasion, all non-nationalist parties were banned, including that of the official opposition. This means an enormous intensity of repression, but it does not amount to the establishment of a “Nazi regime”. All this is very important to be understood in order not to be led to wrong political assessments.
US war against Russia with China as the ultimate goal
Recently, US Republican Senator William Mitt Romney cynically stated: “Putin’s Russia is not our friend and is China’s strongest ally. Supporting Ukraine weakens an adversary, enhances our national security advantage, and requires no shedding of American blood.”
This statement clearly means that the US politicians believe that whatever the outcome of the war, US imperialism will win, because Russia will be weakened and this will come at the expense of China, which is the main competitor of the US on a global scale. For this reason, the USA, the head of the Western bloc, is waging a bloody war against Russia on the territory of Ukraine, with the Kiev regime as a “proxy”, the blood toll to be borne by the Ukrainians and the economic costs, except for Ukraine whose economy has collapsed and Russia, to be shouldered by the US’s European allies, as the energy crisis accelerates the economic crisis they have been in for the last fifteen years.
The defeat of Russia, however, apart from its weakening, will also reopen the scenarios of the dissolution of the Russian Federation, a multi-ethnic state whose inter-ethnic problems intensified after the dissolution of the USSR. For over a decade the Caucasus region had been a field of conflict between the Russian state and the new Russian bourgeoisie trying to maintain control and various ethnic groups seeking self-determination, but also fundamentalist groups boldly declaring their aim to establish in the region the “Caucasus Emirate”, on the model of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The brutal repression of the Chechens in the 1990s opened the way for fundamentalist groups with links to Al-Qaeda, whose bloody terrorist activity frightened the majority of the population in the Caucasus and gave the Kremlin an opportunity to make overtures and eventually ally with sections of the local bourgeois classes, including Akhmad Kadyrov, the first President of Chechnya, who in the second Chechen war sided with the Kremlin and was eventually assassinated by fundamentalists. His son and current President, Ramzan Kadyrov, is one of Putin’s staunchest allies and heads the Chechens fighting alongside the Russian army in Ukraine.
Despite this, the political situation in the Caucasus has not stabilized. A Russian defeat in Ukraine will destabilize Russia and possibly might open the Aeolian bag of winds again. This would facilitate plans to fragment the Russian Federation, expand NATO further eastwards and encircle China.
Deadlock in military operations and further escalation
Wars do not follow scripts, and in Russia’s war against Ukraine and its Western allies, the adversaries are facing unexpected setbacks, as a result of which military operations have become bogged down and everything shows that neither side can prevail by force of arms.
At the beginning of the war the tactics of the Russian army were flexible attacks spearheaded by tanks. As the front got bogged down and the Ukrainian army, reinforced by NATO in armaments and mercenary forces, appeared to be able to withstand, [Russian] tactics changed and the missile attacks intensified in order to slow down the shipment of Western weapons and destroy the infrastructure. The Ukrainian counteroffensive forced Russia to retreat, withdrawing from the Kharkiv region and the right (west) bank of the Dnepr, leaving areas such as Zaporizhia, where in autumn they had voted in a referendum to join Russia. At the same time, the Kremlin announced the mobilization of 300,000 reservists, while the main goal is now to control the left bank of the Dnepr, namely, the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporizhia. But even that goal doesn’t seem easy, as NATO dispatch of weaponry is soaring.
So far, there have been no centrifugal tendencies within the Western bloc, as the European governments, despite their dependence on Russian energy and heavy economic losses due to the war, are still aligned with Washington.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote about it: “The United States, NATO and the European Union wrapped themselves in the Ukrainian flag, shelled out billions for arms shipments, and imposed draconian sanctions intended to severely punish Russia…. Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the West’s response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across the Global South.” [7]
And they continue: “For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey… Russia was ready to withdraw from all of Ukraine, except for Crimea and the self-declared republics in Donbas. Ukraine was ready to renounce future membership in NATO and adopt a position of neutrality between Russia and NATO.”
But as Ukrainian and Turkish sources revealed, Britain and the US “played decisive roles in torpedoing those early prospects for peace… U.S. Defense Secretary Austin, who followed Johnson to Kyiv on April 25th and made it clear that the U.S. and NATO were no longer just trying to help Ukraine defend itself but were now committed to using the war to “weaken” Russia,” while Zelensky pledged that “Ukraine would fight on, possibly for many years, in exchange for the promise of tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons shipments, military training, satellite intelligence and Western covert operations”.
As the effects of the war began to become visible, disagreements emerged, among US allies and even within the US media. On May 9, French President Macron said: “We are not at war with Russia… Europe’s task is to stand by Ukraine to reach a ceasefire and then build peace.” The next day meeting with Biden, Italian Prime Minister Draghi said negotiations should start again, while German Chancellor Scholz tweeted that he told Putin there should be an immediate ceasefire.
On May 19, the day Congress approved $40 billion for Ukraine, including $19 billion for arms shipments, the New York Times ran an editorial headlined as follows: “War in Ukraine Begins to Get Complicated, and America Is Not Ready». Even more characteristically, Henry Kissinger publicly questioned US policy, telling the Wall Street Journal: “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.” .
But no change of tactics is in sight in Washington, while the EU is still fully aligned with the transatlantic “Big Brother”, even though the economic toll turns out to be unaffordable.
Germany, which is Europe’s most powerful economy and has invested billions in the Nord Stream gas pipelines, watched in dismay at the NS2 blow-up in September, as the sabotage had been foreshadowed before the invasion by Biden, who had declared that “ If Russia invades Ukraine there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring end to it,” clarifying that the US has the will and ability to do so.[8] Also, despite early diplomatic differences, Scholz brought in a “mammoth” military budget of 100 billion euros, breaking the post-war “taboo” on limiting German armaments.
Zelensky and “Azov” in the Greek Parliament and the tasks of the internationalists
Zelensky’s choice to present “Azov” Nazis to the Greek Parliament last April [t.n. in 2022] was not a surprise for the New Democracy government. It was a conscious choice to whitewash fascism at the behest of Washington. The peoples of Europe must accept that if necessary the bosses will use any means to defeat the enemy, which today may be Putin’s capitalist Russia, but tomorrow it will be the working class and the left of any country, if they dare to raise their head.
The Greek bourgeoisie has recently shown that in order to deal with the “enemy people” and the Left is willing to use the fascists, as it did in the recent past by promoting the “Golden Dawn” Nazis, turning a blind eye to their criminal activity and advertising them through a section of mass media as “patriots” who “escort old women to the ATMs so as not to get robbed”. If the anti-fascist movement had not awakened after Pavlos Fyssas’s assassination, today the fascists would be a major political force and instead of them hiding, with their leadership in prison, the activists of the Left would be hiding, like in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, the deadly threat of fascism was quickly forgotten by many. Thus, we saw the sad spectacle of SYRIZA appearing in the miserable show of whitewashing Ukrainian fascism in the parliament, while there are also some voices, at the moment marginal in Greece, who in the name of the left support the dispatch of weapons to Ukraine, claiming that it is “the right of each country to decide to join NATO” and calling those who say that the “Azov” military formation is Nazi “Putin’s useful idiots “.
The ND government’s alignment with the US is not restricted only on a propaganda level. They have sent weapons to Ukraine, offered the military base in Alexandroupolis to the US army, supported the total ban on Russian culture, while in September the Greek PM Mitsotakis declared that “we are at war with Russia”. The reason for this dangerous warmongering policy is the government’s desire to have the support of the imperialists in the confrontation with Turkey over the EEZs and to secure a greater share for Greek capital. From this point of view, what they call “national interest” is the interest of the Greek capitalists and is completely intertwined with the plans and wars of the imperialists.
Today, the task of every left-wing and progressive person is to stop the war. But this cannot be done with abstract appeals for peace. A basic principle of the communist-internationalists is that we fight “our own” government, just as the Bolsheviks did in 1917 and more recently the millions of workers and youth who did not believe the pro-war imperialist propaganda and demonstrated in all Western capitals against the invasion of the US and their allies in Iraq. One hundred and nine years after the start of the First World War, Karl Liebknecht’s dictum that “the main enemy is in our own country” is a necessary condition for the regrouping of the anti-war movement and must be written in large letters in the red flags of the working class of all countries!
References:
[1] Poster of the Ukrainian communist organization “Borotba”
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24TC4rSiGdo
[3] https://liva.com.ua/lastinterview-mozgovoi.html
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams,_archduke_of_Austria
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Act_of_restoration_of_the_Ukrainian_state
[7] https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/07/peace-talks-essential-as-war-rages-on-in-ukraine/
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoomA4wSeUE
