AS the Russian government explained yesterday, the attack by Georgia on South Ossetia was expected, was well prepared and was a declaration of war, for which Russia will retaliate.
Currently, the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, is under a coordinated attack from both the land and the air, and there have already been reports of Russian ‘peace keeping troops’ killed, and that Russian jet fighters have retaliated by attacking Georgian army positions.
As is well known, the inhabitants of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were opposed to the break up, by Boris Yeltsin and Shevardnadze of the USSR, and wish to join the Russian Federation.
The Russian Defence Ministry said yesterday that it knew that there were plans afoot to deliver to Georgia 145 armoured vehicles, 262 guns and mortars, 14 combat aircraft, including four Mirazh-2000 destroyers, 25 combat helicopters, 15 American Black Hawk aircraft, six surface-to-air missile systems and other arms.
It pointed to a list of countries that were arming Georgia and giving it military assistance.
The list included the USA (which has also been training the Georgian army) Bulgaria, Great Britain, Hungary, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, France, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Israel, Bosnia, Serbia and the Ukraine.
The list is made up of the members of the NATO alliance and those that are allied to it, such as Israel, and those states whose governments wish to join it, including the Ukraine, Bosnia and Serbia.
Of course, the United States has made no secret of the fact that Georgia is one of its prime allies and is right at the top of its list of the next group of states that are to be recruited into NATO, as the organisation continues its thrust eastwards, into the Caucasus and into Central Asia.
Up till now NATO has pushed right up to the western borders of the Russian Federation, establishing missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic. The US has made no secret of its desire to overthrow the Lukashenka regime in Belarus, the state that plays a decisive role in the western defensive line of the Russian Federation.
Likewise, it has urged the Ukraine to break with Russia and join both NATO and the EU. This has led to a situation of near civil war within the Ukraine.
In Central Asia, the US is using Georgia as a tool to destabilise the oil rich Caucasus, with a view to detaching that region from the Russian Federation.
The great prize is the enormous oil and gas resources of Central Asia, without which imperialism and capitalism will not be able to survive.
The reply of the Russian government to these open war preparations has been limited to discussing whether it should seek to reopen the Russian bases in Cuba that were shut down by Gorbachev and Yeltsin when they left Cuba on its own confronting a vengeful United States.
The position of the News Line on this issue is that we support the right of the Russian Federation to defend itself against imperialism, and we are for the victory of Russia in any conflict with Georgia and other pro-Nato states in the region.
In fact, we stand for the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian workers taking the lead to reconstruct the USSR by revolutionary means, through political revolutions to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and the new bourgeoisie that it has spawned and restore rule through soviets.
However, this struggle cannot be resolved just within these territories. This is the major lesson from the entire period in which the Stalinist bureaucracy sought to build socialism in a single country and was prepared to live and let live with capitalism everywhere else.
It is the world crisis of capitalism that is driving the US and NATO to attack the Russian federation.
This same crisis is causing the sharpest class struggles in the US and EU states.
The solution to this crisis, which is a world crisis, is through the smashing of capitalism and imperialism on a world scale, especially in its US-EU centres. This will be done through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This strategy for victory requires the building of sections of the Fourth International in every country to lead this struggle to victory.