PRESIDENT PUTIN has left the G20 summit in Australia early after a relentless attack on Russia was mounted by the USA-UK axis and its principal running dogs.
Cameron and Obama are angry that Putin has not allowed them entirely to get away with their coup in the Ukraine, whose elected government was overthrown on February 21 in a regime-change op organised by US-backed and financed fascist bands.
The east of the country opposed the coupist regime in Kiev and has been the victim of savage attacks by the Ukrainian army and different fascist-manned Kiev government militias.
In western Ukraine, ‘elections’ have just taken place, in which the Communist Party and the former ruling Party of the Regions were not allowed to have their names on the ballot papers!
Despite this attempt at brutal dictatorship many workers in west Ukraine are opposed to the war on the east and are opposed to the coupist regime and to the Ukraine being frog-marched into NATO.
The Russian government’s crime is that the Russian people have not allowed it to stand by and just watch the slaughter of the people of eastern Ukraine.
The Russian people have insisted that humanitarian convoys be sent into the east and that Russian volunteers be allowed to enter the Ukraine to halt the advance of the fascist bandits.
The essence of what is happening is that the desperate economic crisis of the capitalist West is forcing it into massive austerity at home and wars to reorder the world abroad. In this drive, smashing the gains of the Russian Revolution and grabbing oil- and gas-rich Russia is the number one target.
The regime-change that has been organised in Kiev is to set the basis for a similar operation in Belarus and then to engage in regime change in Russia itself.
This is why the G20 has seen so much anti-Russian propaganda spewed out by the leaders of the capitalist states.
Crude threats have been the order of the day.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told Vladimir Putin, ‘I’ll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine.’
President Obama said that the US was at the forefront of ‘opposing Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which is a threat to the world’.
Before the G20 summit began, UK Prime Minister David Cameron said there would ‘have to be a very different relationship’ between Europe and Russia if ‘we continue to see Russian troops’ inside Ukraine, adding that there was ‘the potential for further sanctions’.
On Monday, EU foreign ministers will consider whether to extend sanctions against Russia.
The measures that were taken in Russia in the 1990s by Gorbachev and then Yeltsin to end the state monopoly of foreign trade, allow Oligarchs to steal and privatise entire industries, and to float the rouble to make Russia part of the world market based on an oil- and gas-exporting economy have opened up the degenerated workers’ state to the intervention of the US, UK and EU and their banking and industrial sanctions.
Class pressures are being heaped onto the Putin leadership. On one side, there are the Russian workers demanding Red Army action to defend the Ukrainian workers and actions to expropriate the Oligarchs and restore the USSR.
On the other, there are the Oligarchs screaming about the losses that they are making and the western powers who are about to intensify their sanctions to seek to remove Putin from the right, and open up the way for regime change and the liquidation of all of the gains of the Revolution to the point of the dismemberment of Russia itself.
The issue is that the real defence of Russia against the imperialist assault requires that the working people of the world build the Fourth International to take advantage of the capitalist crisis to smash capitalism and imperialism, putting an end to the situation, described by Lenin, of Russia being a besieged fortress.
Of course, within this context of the decisive role of the world revolution, the Red Army is more than entitled to take decisive action to overthrow the Kiev coupists, and restore Soviet Ukraine.