THE MAYOR of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, has split the Ukrainian leadership over the issue of Russian sovereignty over the Crimea.
Rejecting President Zelensky’s refusal to concede territory to Russia, Klitschko said on Thursday that the Ukraine may have to give up land as part of a peace deal with Russia, following intense US pressure from President Donald Trump to do so.
He said Zelensky might be forced to take a ‘painful solution’ to achieve peace.
Klitschko is now one of the most senior Ukrainian politicians to indicate publicly that his country may have to ‘give up’ territory, albeit temporarily.
Earlier this week, Trump accused Zelensky of harming peace negotiations after the Ukrainian leader again ruled out recognising Russian control of Crimea. Trump wants to loot the Ukraine first, before seeking to extend the counter revolution in the direction of Moscow!
Trump said Crimea was lost years ago and ‘was currently not even a point of discussion’.
Again, in fact Trump wants ‘peace’ so that US imperialism can loot the Ukraine of its mineral resources, and after that job is completed carry out a counter-revolution throughout Russia, which got rid of its capitalist and feudal ruling class rulers in October 1917.
Ukraine and its European allies have in recent weeks expressed alarm over what many on the continent see as Trump’s warming of relations with Vladimir Putin.
After several sharp attacks on Zelensky by Trump recently for preventing a peace deal and for continuing the war, the US Vice-President JD Vance warned that the US would ‘walk-away’ from its deal-making role if no deal was agreed by the Ukrainian president. Again the US ruling class cannot wait to get its hands on the mineral resources of the Ukraine.
Last week’s PM Starmer’s conference of ‘the Willing’ held in London to discuss a peace deal collapsed when the US delegation boycotted it. The US has no intention of allowing the UK and the EU access to Russia’s mineral resources.
The UK PM bombastically contradicted Trump’s claims, denying that Zelensky was to blame for the war.
‘No, Russia is the aggressor,’ he declared. But his warmongering rhetoric about ‘British boots on the ground and jets in the air’ to enforce a peace deal has now been replaced by ‘advisors’ and rearmament for the Ukrainian armed forces.
By Thursday night, the plans of the ‘coalition of the willing’ had been diluted, with the risk of sending thousands of troops to protect Ukraine deemed ‘too high’.
One point from the conference was an attempt to wrestle back control of the negotiations from Trump and put Ukraine and the EU back at the heart of the ‘peace process’, to grab a share of the spoils of war, with the EU holding $42bn of war loan debt to the Ukrainian regime.
Instead, in western Ukraine, the focus is to be on the reconstitution and rearmament of Kiev’s army, with protection from the air and sea.
Starmer refused to state whether he would accept Russian sovereignty over Crimea in any peace deal and repeated his call for US security guarantees for British and EU peace-keeping forces which the US has refused to offer, without which his plans remain strictly on paper.
In the midst of a terminal world financial and economic crisis and now a global trade war, the imperialists are driven to war against their economic rivals and the working class at home and abroad.
The US is not alone in plunging into recession and dictatorship. Starmer’s Labour government is also waging war on British workers to attempt the impossible task of reducing the UK’s national debt.
The truth is that the world capitalist system is completely bankrupt, and must be replaced by a socialist revolution to bring socialist property relations, to be dominated by planned production, not to make huge profits for the few but to satisfy peoples needs.
There is not a moment to lose!
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to carry forward the victory of the world socialist revolution, putting an end to capitalism for ever.
Forward to the victory of the world socialist revolution!
