THE war preparations by the imperialist nations against Russia took a giant leap forward this week with NATO and non-NATO troops massed in north-western Poland for what is the biggest ‘war game’ in Eastern Europe in decades.
31,000 troops drawn from 24 countries are engaged in a 10-day military exercise, named Anakonda-16, which involves ground troops, aircraft and warships, and will culminate in a massive live-fire event.
The US is providing the largest number of troops – 14,000 – with Britain sending 800.
A separate naval exercise by NATO and its allies, codenamed Baltrops-16, will see NATO warships provocatively patrolling the Baltic Sea.
Next month Poland will host a NATO summit to approve permanently stationing more troops in Eastern Europe. The US intends to quadruple military spending in Europe to $3.4 billion, and station armoured brigades and heavy weaponry throughout the region.
This massive ‘war game’ on Russia’s border comes weeks after the US activated two missile sites in Eastern Europe as part of a larger ‘European Shield’. At the time as these sites were activated, NATO insisted that, although the missiles were pointed directly at Russia, they were intended to defend Europe from a missile attack from the Middle East.
The thought that the Middle East poses a threat to Europe when it is systematically being smashed up by wars inspired and led by NATO defies belief, standing alongside non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a lying cover for war preparation.
In the case of the latest military war games no such excuse is possible. Instead, the imperialists are coming out into the open with NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, declaring that all these war preparations are aimed against Russia, and claiming they are ‘a defensive and proportionate response to Russia’s actions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.’
This is a ‘big lie’ worthy of the Nazi propaganda expert Joseph Goebbels himself. Russia did not invade Crimea or annex Eastern Ukraine. In the Crimea the people voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia – to which they had always belonged, while in Eastern Ukraine the working class of Donetsk and Lugansk rose up and refused to accept rule by the illegal, fascist-led coup inspired and orchestrated by the imperialist powers and to prevent Ukraine from being turned into a semi-colony of the EU – a struggle that is today being taken up by millions of Ukrainian workers across the country.
Russia has not invaded a single country, unlike the imperialists. It was US imperialism supported by NATO that invaded Iraq and smashed up that country, before going on to arm and support a murderous campaign of ‘regime change’ in Libya leading to the destruction of that modern, advanced country at the hands of their jihadist allies.
Imperialism has rampaged around the world carrying out wars by proxy in Syria and Yemen at the cost of millions of lives in its frenzied drive to reconquer the world, seize the mineral wealth and open up these countries to direct control and exploitation of the capitalist class.
It has long dreamed of taking control of Russia with its vast mineral wealth and markets – land it was driven out of by the Russian Revolution in 1917. With the world crisis of capitalism deepening by the hour, with another international banking collapse now recognized as inevitable even by bourgeois economists, this dream of conquest is becoming an absolute imperative for the ruling class.
So much so, that they are prepared to risk nuclear war in a desperate attempt to keep a decaying and historically bankrupt capitalist system tottering on. These ‘exercises’ are taking on the appearance of a dress rehearsal for war against the people of Russia. At the same time, the crisis is forcing capitalism to wage war against the working class at home.
What is clear is that there is an identity forged between the working class in the West and the people of the East – the common enemy of both is capitalism in its final death agony of imperialism. The only solution is to put it out of its agony through a worldwide struggle for the victory of the world socialist revolution.