RUSSIAN troops have completed their training drills in Belarus, very close to neighbouring Ukraine, and will begin returning to their bases, the Ministry of Defence in Moscow has announced, amid the fear by the Western powers that the exercises were a precursor to an invasion.
Major General Igor Konashenkov, the chief spokesperson for the ministry, delivered the news yesterday.
‘As the forces complete their military exercises, they will, as always, complete a multimodal march back to their permanent bases,’ he stated. ‘The divisions of the South and West Military Districts have finished their tasks and have already begun loading the rail and automobile transport, and today will begin moving back to their military garrisons.’
Konashenkov explained that different divisions would be moving separately in military columns.
Russia began conducting the joint ‘Union Resolve’ drills with Belarus last week, and they are scheduled to last until February 20.
Western leaders, with their economies in deep crisis, have been shrieking for months that Russia was planning a full-blown invasion of the Ukraine to stop it joining NATO.
Moscow has consistently denied that it plans to attack, and has called for security agreements that would limit the activity of NATO, the US-led military bloc, in Eastern Europe.
Russia also, correctly, will not tolerate the US and the UK planting pro-western regimes in any of the former states of the Soviet Union.
Last Wednesday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki called the drills ‘concerning,’ while US President Joe Biden had previously warned that Moscow could order an offensive at any moment.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had declared February 16 – the day that the US claimed Russia might ‘invade’ Ukraine – a day of national unity. In a decree signed on Monday, he ordered the playing of the national anthem and display of flags and ribbons around the country.
‘It is said that February 16 will be the day of the attack. We will make it a day of unity,’ Zelensky said on Monday evening in an address to Ukrainians.
Zelensky’s comments about the date of the ‘invasion’ – quoted by some US outlets at face value – reportedly triggered a massive sell-off on the US stock market and a rush on gold and crude oil, prompting the president’s office to clarify that he had said it ‘with irony’.
The truth is that world capitalism is in a desperate crisis and is seeking to grab back the territories it lost forever after the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
Zelensky vowed that Kiev will ‘return’ both Crimea and the Donbass to Ukraine eventually – but exclusively through diplomacy and negotiations.
Crimea voted to return to Russia in 2014, following a US-backed coup in Kiev that overthrew Ukraine’s elected government. The Donetsk and Lugansk regions in the east of the country also declared independence and beat back attempts by Ukraine to retake them by force.
After the hysterical western response to the Russian military manoeuvres Zelensky also announced the establishment of a state information platform, UArazom (‘Ukraine Together’), to ‘ensure the public is informed daily about the real state of the security situation, measures taken to strengthen the state’s defence capabilities, as well as the organisation of appropriate outreach work on public safety.’
This was after hysterical US and UK claims of an imminent Russian invasion had brought the whole Ukrainian economy to a standstill, with its would-be capitalists fleeing westwards at full speed.
The truth is that Ukraine is part and parcel of the lands that Lenin and Trotsky established as the Soviet Union in the period following the Russian revolution. The Soviet Union was strong and powerful enough to smash the Nazi war machine and to march on Berlin to finish the Second World War in Europe.
With world capitalism now in an enormous crisis, its death agony in fact, the time is fast approaching when the masses of the region will take action to reconstitute the USSR and rule through workers’ soviets, as part of the struggle that is developing worldwide for the working class to put an end to capitalism and establish the World Socialist Republic.
