NATO’S military commander in Europe has issued a warning to Russia about the build-up of its forces on Ukraine’s border.
Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Gen Philip Breedlove, said NATO was in particular concerned about the ‘threat to Moldova’s Trans-Dniester region . . . The (Russian) force that is at the Ukrainian border now to the east is very, very sizeable and very, very ready,’ he told the German Marshall Fund think-tank.
The president of ex-Soviet Moldova warned Russia last Tuesday against considering any move to annex Trans-Dniester, which lies on Ukraine’s western border, in the same way that it has taken control of Crimea.
However, the speaker of Trans-Dniester’s parliament had urged Russia earlier to incorporate the region, which has always wanted to be part of Russia and was in full support of the USSR.
Trans-Dniester split away from Moldova in 1990, one year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, amid fears that Moldova would shortly merge with neighbouring Romania.
Said Breedlove: ‘There is absolutely sufficient (Russian) force postured on the eastern border of Ukraine to run to Trans-Dniester if the decision was made to do that and that is very worrisome.’
NATO had tried to make Russia a partner but ‘now it is very clear that Russia is acting much more like an adversary than a partner,’ he said. However, the facts of the matter are clear.
The NATO powers deliberately lit the fuse for this crisis when the US-EU organised the Kiev coup, the object of which was to bring Ukraine into the EU and NATO, convert Sevastopol into a NATO Black Sea base and prepare the way to overthrow Lukashenka in Belarus, to really open up the road to Moscow and regime change, to the right, in the Kremlin.
The driving force for this was the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system, pushing the imperialist powers eastwards.
All Russia’s actions have been defensive. In fact, it was the determination of the Crimean masses to break with the Kiev fascist bands that required Putin either to watch a bloodbath in the Crimea or intervene.
In fact, Putin and Co feel betrayed by their western ‘partners’. After all, Russia did not veto the assault on Iraq in 2003, did not veto the assault on Libya in 2010-11, and when Obama and Cameron got into trouble in Syria, Putin rescued them with his plan to scrap the Syrian wmds.
In an act of treachery unparalleled since Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941, Putin was repaid by the US-EU-organised coup in Ukraine. He had to either lie down and die in front of the imperialists, and risk being overthrown by the Russian workers or put up some resistance.
This is what he has done in the Crimea – ‘annex’ a people that were determined to be ‘annexed’! He is still hoping against hope that the February 21 agreement can be put back together again to pacify Ukraine.
The imperialists now find themselves in the uncomfortable situation where all over Eastern Europe workers, including huge Russian minorities, are hankering to go back to the USSR and go forward to socialism. This feeling has been sharpened by a taste of the massive unemployment and austerity that comes with EU membership!
Battles are now raging in Donetsk, Karkov, Odessa, and Lugansk in the east of the Ukraine, where the working class defence forces are fighting the fascist bands, while workers in Trans-Dniester want a return to the USSR.
In this situation, it is vital that the Fourth International is built all over Europe, East and West, and in the USA. It must lead the struggle for the victory of the World Socialist Revolution, including the reconstitution of the USSR by revolutionary means, and the overthrow of the European Union, replacing it with the Socialist United States of Europe.
These will be giant steps forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution and the ending of capitalism and imperialism by the establishment of a World Socialist Republic.
