RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin threatened on Friday in talks with top US administration officials, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, to abandon a key nuclear missile treaty unless Washington freezes its plans for a NATO anti-missile shield along Russia’s western border.
Russia has also threatened to withdraw from another treaty, the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, which limits the numbers of troops and tanks stationed in Europe.
Russia opposes the stationing of US interceptor missiles in Poland and a powerful targeting radar in the Czech Republic by 2012, and says that both are an obvious threat to the Russian Federation.
In fact, Russia looks upon the whole process of NATO expansion up to its borders, and NATO attempts to recruit the Ukraine as well as secure bases in Georgia and Azerbaijan, as a threat to it.
There is still great bitterness that the agreement that Gorbachev made with Thatcher and Reagan, that if the Red Army left Eastern Europe, the vacated states would become a buffer zone between NATO and Russia, was broken as soon as the Red Army retreated.
NATO filled the vacuum, and then began the struggle to destroy Yugoslavia and turn the state which had kept peace in the Balkans since 1948 into six states, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, all dominated by the US and the EU.
The US hasn’t finished that job. It still intends to detach Kosovo from Serbia, and turn it into the seventh ex-Yugoslav ‘state’, if it can get Russia to agree.
Now the Russian Federation border, from Poland to Georgia, has NATO pressing hard on it, seeking to break through its defences, through the ‘Orange revolution’ in the Ukraine and overthrowing the government of Belarus.
What has brought some respite to Russia is the insurgency in Iraq and the militancy of workers in the west who are fighting their own governments and giving support to the Iraqi people.
The defeat of US and UK forces in Iraq has seen oil prices rise to around $85 a barrel and gas to even higher levels, giving Russia, with its nationalised gas and oil monopolies a source of serious wealth, with which to renew and modernise its defences, and even to recommence its space programme.
The Russian workers have been given a breathing space from the threats of the encircling imperialist powers by the heroism of the Iraqi people. The US has had to pause to rethink its tactics for the strategic drive to break up the Russian Federation, so as to help itself to Russia’s vast mineral resources.
What they have come up with is the sending of Rice and Gates to Moscow to see if they can bring Putin on board to allow an imperialist assault on Iran, and to allow it to establish an independent Kosovo.
Memories are still fresh of the way that Yeltsin threatened action at the time of the projected assault on Yugoslavia, but then did nothing, except to press Milosevic to allow Nato entry into Kosovo when NATO could not force its way in by force of arms.
The prospect is that the Stalinist Putin will demand more than the imperialists are willing to give, although a deal cannot be ruled out.
The Russian workers, and the workers of the Ukraine and Belarus, must make use of the breathing space they have been given to mobilise to defend their gains won by the 1917 Russian revolution. This can only be done by organising a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and the new bourgeoisie that it has spawned to restore the USSR and Soviet power by revolutionary means.
Objectively, the developing movement for national liberation that can be seen from Palestine through Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, into Iran, is thus allied to the struggle of soviet workers to restore the USSR, and to the developing movement of the US, British and EU workers to defend the gains that they have made since the Second World War, in the only way that this can be done, by organising mass strikes that lead on to socialist revolutions.
The issue is that Gates and Rice are visiting the Kremlin at a time when the world revolution is set to erupt in a way that has not been seen since the Russian revolution and the period after it.