WITH the shelling and bombing of eastern Ukraine still taking place, and with tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees in southern Russia, President Vladimir Putin has proposed that the upper house of the Russian legislature rescind the March 1 resolution allowing him, as head of state, to use the Russian armed forces on the territory of the Ukraine.
Deputy Head of the Federation Council’s International Committee Andrey Klimov confirmed the upper house will back Putin’s proposal and repeal the resolution today.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called the proposal a ‘first practical step towards settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine.’
The Federation Council’s resolution of March 1 agreed on the president’s right to use military force on the territory of the neighbouring Ukraine ‘until the normalisation of the social and political situation in that country.’
Meanwhile, hundreds of men, women and children are being killed either by the Ukrainian National Guard or by right wing mobs in cities such as Odessa, where up to a hundred people were burnt to death in the Hall of the Trade Unions.
In fact, ‘On Monday, mortar attacks launched by the forces backed by the Kiev junta were taking place in Slaviansk throughout the day. Systematic, though not mass, fighting still continued. It would be wrong to say that the attacks were carried out by our forces,’ according to Miroslav Rudenko, a co-chairman of the republic’s government, who is also a deputy commander of its self-defence forces.
The withdrawal of the military option is a brilliant example of how even a much weakened imperialism still has the upper hand over the remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy whose fear of the working class dominates it and drives it, as it desperately seeks to make a partner of imperialism.
The refusal of the imperialists to be ‘partners’ merely makes Putin ever more desperate to achieve that exalted status. After the House of Commons vote not to go to war with Syria, Cameron and Obama were reeling. Along came Putin to the rescue of his ‘partners’ with the scheme to disarm Syria of its wmds. This has now been completed 100%.
Driven forward by their desperate economic crisis the imperialist powers thanked Putin with the fascist-led coup in the Ukraine and the move to align Ukraine with the EU and the US.
The massive attacks on the workers in the east, and threats of sanctions, have now seen Putin give up the ‘right to intervene’ when all acknowledge that if the Red Army marched into Donetsk there is little that the US could do about it.
The current situation in Iraq gives additional proof that this is the situation. The performance of Putin confirms Trotsky’s thesis that fear of the working class dominates the Stalinist bureaucracy, and drives it into the arms of the imperialist powers, whether in the form of peaceful coexistence or ‘partnership’ with a section of the ruling classes of the world.
Poroshenko will be gasping with delight at Putin’s new retreat, and will see it as a green light to create a series of provocations that will allow him to proceed from Plan A to Plan B and all-out repressions in the east.
In fact he will consider that with more pressure from the imperialist powers even the recovery of the Crimea is possible. Putin’s tactics are very similar to Stalin’s in the period before the German ‘surprise attack’ on Russia.
The Stalin-Hitler pact allowed the fascists an extra two years to prepare the invasion of Russia which they saw as their historic duty to wipe out the communists and the Jews.
In fact, the 1941 surprise attack was no surprise, since a number of warnings were given to him that this was being prepared, including the date of the invasion by Richard Sorge. Stalin ignored the warnings. Putin is now treading down the same or a similar road.
The only real defence of the Russian and Chinese revolutions is through smashing imperialism and capitalism on a world scale.
A well prepared military defence cannot complete this job, it can only enable the Russian and Chinese working classes to hold out, until the world socialist revolution comes to its aid, as it is beginning to now!
Central to this task is the building of revolutionary parties, sections of the Fourth International, in every country to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
