RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin has visited Mariupol and vowed that new comfortable residential quarters for the people will continue being constructed in Mariupol in the future when speaking with a local resident, who referred to the place as ‘a small corner of paradise’.
Mariupol was seized from the fascists of the Azov Brigade after a fierce struggle on April 21 2022.
It is the largest city on the shore of the Sea of Azov, one of the key steel manufacturing centres in Donbass, and is also a major seaport.
The battle for Mariupol started on February 25, 2022. Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu informed the President on April 21, 2022 that the city had been liberated by the Russian military and the forces of the People’s Militia of the Donetsk Peoples Republic.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin reported yesterday to President Vladimir Putin: ‘The airport building will be reconstructed at the end of 2023, it is also planned to be a fully fledged airport, with the possibility of flying to all Russian cities and abroad.
‘It is planned for 2025. Now the nearest airport is in Rostov and Taganrog, 150km away. So far it is used to hit military targets,’ he said in video footage of Putin’s working visit to Mariupol posted on Sunday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in his address to the Russian parliament before the battle started in 2022, lay the responsibility for the Russian military action and intervention in the Ukraine entirely with the imperialist NATO powers. Putin insisted that the fascist-backed Ukrainian government at the urging of the imperialist powers was ready to launch a large-scale attack on the eastern Donbass region.
Following the 2014 fascist coup in Kiev, Putin signed the Minsk agreement with the leaders of France and Germany that was supposed to guarantee the security of the Donbass region.
Instead, the Minsk agreement was nothing but a fiction from the very beginning, purely designed to give imperialism the time to arm Ukraine in preparation for war on Donbass and to push the war right up to the borders of Russia.
The Donbass region was subjected to sustained bombardment by Ukrainian forces killing 14,000 men, women and children.
As Putin explained in his speech in December 2021: ‘It became clear that they had greenlighted (Kiev’s) aggressive plans,’ adding that it became clear to him that Ukraine’s imperialist masters were preparing ‘for a big war’.
Putin’s speech met with a predictable response from the US government with president Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan telling reporters: ‘Nobody is attacking Russia,’ dismissing the very idea that US imperialism ever went to war or invaded another country as ‘absurd’.
What is absurd is to deny that US imperialism has a long record of invading countries resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and creating millions of refugees across the world.
Along with ignoring the crimes against humanity carried out by the US and imperialists powers, is an increasingly desperate attempt to convince workers that ‘plucky’ little Ukraine is driving back the Russian monster, and all it needs in order to win is more planes and more missiles and many more billions in aid, paid for by the working class of the world.
The war provoked by the NATO powers has always had one objective – to destroy all the gains of the Russian Revolution and return the country to the domination of capitalism.
Having failed to crush Russia through sanctions and spending billions of weaponry to arm Ukraine, the demand is now going out for Europe and Britain to be put on a permanent war footing, in preparation for a massive military escalation and an invasion of Russia, to topple Putin’ and restore capitalism.
The US, UK and NATO are now on a war footing.
Meanwhile, the workers are starving after the massive inflation that their bosses’ war has caused.
The way forward is for the working class and people of the world to turn the war against Russia into a civil war against its own ruling capitalist class to smash capitalism and imperialism and go forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution.
