THE OSCE has revealed the 12-point roadmap behind the September 5 truce signed in Minsk. The document, titled ‘Protocol on the results of consultations of the Trilateral Contact Group’ and signed in Minsk on September 5, outlines what needs to be done for the ceasefire to stay in place.
‘To decentralise power, including through the adoption by Ukraine of law on provisional procedure for local government in parts of Donetsk and Lugansk regions (law on special status),’ states one of the provisions in the document.
Another point emphasises that ‘early local elections’ are to be held in light of the special status of both regions. The early elections must be held in accordance with the same proposed law, it says.
Kiev must then continue an ‘inclusive nationwide dialogue,’ the document stresses. The roadmap also implies an amnesty for anti-government forces in Donbass: ‘To adopt a law, prohibiting prosecution or punishment of people in relation to the events that took place in individual areas of Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine.’
At the same time, it notes that all ‘illegal military formations, military equipment, as well as militants and mercenaries’ have to be withdrawn from Ukraine. A ‘safety zone’ is to be created with the participation of the OSCE on the Russia-Ukraine border, the document says.
The ceasefire agreement brokered by President Putin concedes the legitimacy of the regime in the Ukraine that was established by the February 21 coup, which ran President Yanukovych out of the country, and was immediately recognised by the EU and the US (who were the forces behind the coup in the first place).
The US-EU struggle for the Ukraine, to bring it into the EU and into NATO, comes out of the depths of the capitalist crisis, which is driving forward the imperialist powers to reorder the world, to smash the gains of the October revolution, and to restore the whole planet as their private property.
That this has not been accepted by the workers of eastern Ukraine is to their everlasting credit, as is their determination to bring down the coupist regime in Kiev, an aim that more and more workers in the west of the country are adopting as their own. The position of Putin is not the same as that of the eastern Ukrainian workers.
He accepts the Poroshenko regime as legal, and looks at the struggle just from the point of view of the Russian state and what is to its advantage. He boasted that his forces, if they wished, could be in Kiev in a week, to remove the coupist regime, but has refused to do just that, preferring to try to make a deal with Germany and the USA instead.
He has also established his credentials in this respect by condemning Lenin and the Bolsheviks for being for the defeat of Czarist Russia in the First World War, and as Stalin did before him opposing world revolution.
Instead, in the supposed interest of the Russian state, he seeks to keep his trade agreements with Germany, the US and France intact, by taking steps to try and convince the imperialists that he is controlling the revolutionary working class in the east of Ukraine, is their partner and colleague, and that they should drop all sanctions.
However, imperialism remains imperialism. They will regard the ceasefire in the Ukraine as a useful pause while they rearm and rebuild the Ukrainian armed forces for further action. The real strategic aim of the EU-US is overthrowing the degenerated workers state that is Russia and restoring the world rule of US and EU capital.
This aim cannot be defeated by treaties and deals with imperialism. The Stalin-Hitler pact proved that. It led directly to the German invasion of the USSR, much to Stalin’s shock and astonishment at the actions of his partner and colleague.
The only way that Russia can really be defended is through proceeding with the organisation of the world socialist revolution, to smash capitalism and imperialism. In the case of Ukraine, this means the restoration of Soviet Ukraine with Kiev as its capital. The real defence of Russia requires the building of sections of the Fourth International in every country to lead the world socialist revolution to its victory.
