A RUSSIAN foreign ministry statement issued on Tuesday evening said: ‘If a US strategic anti-missile shield starts to be deployed near our borders, we will be forced to react not in a diplomatic fashion but with military-technical means.’
This was Russia’s response to Tuesday’s signing by the US and the Czech Republic of an initial deal to base a radar system on Czech territory.
At the G8 summit Russia’s president Medvedev also responded saying: ‘We will not be hysterical about this but we will think of retaliatory steps.’
Earlier, the Pentagon had criticised the ‘bellicose rhetoric’ from Russia which it said was ‘designed to make Europeans nervous’.
However the very thought of a US missile system aimed at Russia on their territory has made the Czech people very angry – two thirds of the population are opposed to it, while the US has failed to reach agreement with Poland on placing the other parts of the system there.
The plans involve citing the tracking radar system in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland. The US wants the sites to be in operation by about 2012.
The US Secretaries of State and Defence, Rice and Gates are seeking to maintain that the missile bases being moved right up to the Russian border are nothing to do with Russia as such, but are purely defensive against an alleged threat from Iran, which the US insists has got to be prevented from firing long range missiles, which it doesn’t have, at the capital cities of Western Europe.
However, ever since Thatcher and Reagan broke their pledge, made to Gorbachev, that if the Red Army withdrew from Eastern Europe, Nato would not fill the vacuum and move eastwards, Russia has been progressively surrounded by the NATO alliance whose front line now stretches from Poland and the Baltic States along Russia’s western borders to Turkey, and then eastwards to Georgia and Azerbaijan.
It is also no secret that Bush wishes to recruit the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
The source of this behaviour is more than obvious. It is the capitalist crisis. With oil at $137 a barrel, and gas and metal prices rising rapidly, the Russian Federation is a treasure trove of these resources whose possession by the Western powers is a life and death question for capitalism.
Already the Ukraine has been brought to the brink of civil war by the NATO question, while the Western powers have made no secret of their desire to overthrow the Lukashenka regime in Belarus and to use the right-wing Georgian regime to try and loosen Russia’s grip on the Caucasus.
The plans for the next world war have already been laid and advancing the Western Powers missile arsenal eastward is just a part of them.
No wonder the Russian leadership is angry.
However the enemy of Russia is not just US imperialism, British imperialism is very much on the front line.
In the heady days of the drunkard Yeltsin’s regime when Russia seemed to be about to fall into the hands of the US and UK capitalists, it was only the massive resistance of the working class and its hatred of the ‘capitalist shock therapists’ who said that they were going to restore capitalism in 100 days, that kept the wolves at bay.
This revolutionary resistance forced Putin to take a different road from Yeltsin and saw Berezovskiy, and the openly comprador wing of the new bourgeoisie driven out of Russia, leaving Putin to balance between the working class and a section of the new bourgeoisie that was willing to leave politics to the Kremlin.
It is now obvious that you cannot have an independent Russia, without the state ownership of the gas and oil industries.
This is why first Shell owned, and now BP owned oil holdings are under attack, with the latter heading for expropriation through a transfer to a state owned company.
This is why relations between the Brown government and Russia are set to worsen, even to breaking point.
The workers of the world must defend Russia against imperialism and help create the conditions for a political revolution in Russia to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the new bourgeoisie, to restore rule through workers and peasants soviets. Workers in the West must support the Russian workers by rising up and taking revolutionary actions to overthrow ‘their own’ ruling classes.