UKRAINIAN president Volodymyr Zelensky turned up in Britain on Wednesday to address Parliament in a speech demanding that the UK supply fighter planes for an all-out war with Russia.
Zelensky finished his speech saying that he would be leaving London ‘thanking you all in advance for powerful English planes’, causing MPs from all sides to cheer and applaud.
Immediately after his speech, the government announced that while no decision had as yet been made on supplying fighter planes to Ukraine, the matter was being ‘actively’ considered by defence secretary Ben Wallace.
Even before the visit, the Tories had announced that the UK would be training up Ukrainian pilots to fly sophisticated NATO fighter planes, in anticipation that Zelensky’s demands would be met.
The next stop on Zelensky’s whistle-stop tour to drum up fighter planes and heavy arms to use against Russia was Paris where he met president Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, before addressing the EU Parliament.
Zelensky said on arrival in the French capital: ‘The sooner Ukraine gets long-range heavy weaponry, the sooner our pilots get planes, the sooner Russian aggression will end and we can return to peace in Europe.’
Peace is the last thing on the mind of Zelensky or his imperialist masters.
Their interest is solely to ramp up the war on Russia, to weaken it to the extent that the imperialist nations can re-order the world and exert their domination of the vast lands of Russia – land they were denied for all time by the 1917 Russian Revolution.
All the war plans carried out by imperialism, from the US orchestrated coup that installed a fascist supported government in Ukraine in 2014, have had this aim of provoking a military confrontation with Russia, to reopen its people and massive resources to ruthless capitalist exploitation.
The Ukrainians and their imperialist backers actively pushed Russia into its special military operation by breaking the Minsk agreement, reached with Russia following the coup that was supposed to guarantee the safety of the eastern regions, where workers had rejected overwhelmingly having anything to do with the coupists.
After the coup, thousands of workers were killed in the Donbass region by Ukrainian fascists, with hundreds of thousands more forced to flee into Russia to escape the massive and continuous artillery bombardments by Ukrainian forces.
None of these facts behind the Russian security intervention have been reported in the Western media, as it stampeded to join the propaganda war to convince workers and young people that ‘plucky’ Ukraine was fighting for peace and that the imperialist war was being fought for the security of workers in Europe.
In fact, this war has led to a massive explosion in the cost of living as oil, gas and food prices have been driven through the roof, leading to poverty and starvation throughout the world.
With the escalation of the war, by supplying Ukraine with fighter jets that will be used to strike at Russia, along with the long range artillery rockets that can reach inside Russian territory, imperialism is preparing for a war that will engulf all of Europe and the UK, while the population of the world starves with its Ukrainian granary ablaze.
The working class and people of the world are expected to accept a war that will see the use of nuclear weapons, that will cost their lives and starve those that remain, as a price worth paying to rescue the world capitalist system from its economic collapse, returning the whole planet to the domination of the bosses and bankers.
The enemy of the working class of the world is not Russia but the ruling class at home.
The enemy of the working class in Britain is this Tory government that is leading the drive to war against Russia, alongside a war against workers at home to impose super-austerity while lavishing unlimited billions on the Zelensky regime.
The only way to defeat this war on two fronts, is for the working class to force the TUC to call an immediate general strike to bring down the Tories, and bring in a workers government, that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and build socialism.
This will have the support of the working class throughout Europe and the US, who will eagerly join the struggle, and will complete the victory of the world socialist revolution.
