US Vice-President Joe Biden told the assembled right wingers at the Ukraine parliament yesterday that the US stands with the country’s new leaders in facing ‘humiliating threats’.
The parliament has, since February 21 when the just-signed agreement with President Yanukovych was ripped up in favour of a Right Sector fascist-led coup, been occupied by the coupists, and their US-nominated government.
Both the coup and the government that it established are illegal. Their conduct showed that the Orange counter-revolutionary parties had no confidence that they would win the presidential election that Yanukovych had agreed to. They opted for a coup instead.
As soon as the police pulled back from their positions with the agreement signed and sealed – the coup government was imposed by force of arms.
Their lack of confidence in the Ukrainian people returning an Orange revolution president saw the US-EU leaders publicly recognise the coupist regime immediately.
Biden however was not in Kiev to laud the coup victory but, in his own words, to try and strengthen the coupists in the face of their ‘humiliation’.
They have been humbled by the fact that although Vladimir Putin was prepared to make a deal with the coupists to secure their position, the workers, particularly in the east of the country, defied them from day one of the coup.
The workers occupied government HQs in the big industrial eastern cities, fought off the riot police, and then, when the army was sent in, the different units wasted no time in going over to the workers and defecting.
What is humiliating for the coupists is that after all their huffing and puffing the army refused to fight for them and defected to the workers of the east as soon as they came face to face with them.
This left them with only the fascists of the Right Sector prepared to do their dirty work, leading to the murderous assault on the unarmed road bloc in Slavyansk.
This is the source of the humiliation of the coupists. Only the fascists are prepared to fight for them. The line of the workers in the East is crystal clear – they will not end their occupations and leave the streets until the coupists quit their illegal occupation of the parliament and Maidan Square in Kiev. Biden has rushed to Kiev to try and prop up the faltering puppets.
Yesterday, the funerals took place of the three defenders of Slavyansk, when tens of thousands turned out to bid farewell to the revolutionary heroes.
The working class of the Ukraine is determined to avenge their deaths at the hands of the Right Sector fascists. After the Slavyansk attack, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the Kiev authorities of breaking last week’s Geneva accord on resolving the Ukraine crisis.
He said the Kiev government had not moved to disarm illegal groups, especially the Right Sector.
Of course, they will not do this since they are their only defenders. The coup regime, the product of US-EU cash and diplomacy, cannot stand without them.
In a phone call, Lavrov urged US Secretary of State John Kerry ‘to influence Kiev, to prevent hotheads there from provoking a bloody conflict’, according to the Kremlin. The Kremlin is under the illusion that the matter of which class rules the Ukraine can be settled by diplomacy.
It will not and cannot be. The imperialist powers are being driven by the greatest economic and political crisis of capitalism ever to seek to take over Ukraine and Russia, with all of their gigantic agricultural, mineral and human resources. The people of Russia and Ukraine will not be free of imperialist threats until the working class of the world has got rid of capitalism and imperialism
What the world crisis requires is the building of sections of the Fourth International everywhere to lead both the political revolution in Russia and Ukraine to prevent the return of capitalism by restoring rule through Soviets, alongside the struggle to overthrow the ruling classes of the EU and the US to replace capitalism with socialism and lay the basis for a worldwide federation of socialist states.
