Russian president Vladimir Putin, in his address to the Russian parliament yesterday, lay the responsibility for the Russian military action in the Ukraine entirely with the imperialist NATO powers.
Putin insisted that the fascist-backed Ukrainian government, at the urging of the imperialist powers, is ready to launch a large-scale attack on the eastern Donbass region.
Following the 2014 Ukraine coup, Putin signed the Minsk Agreement with the leaders of France and Germany that was supposed to guarantee the security of the Donbass region.
Instead, the Minsk Agreement was nothing but a fiction from the very beginning, purely designed to give imperialism the time to arm Ukraine in preparation for war on the Donbass and push right up to the borders of Russia.
The Donbass region was subjected to sustained bombardment by Ukrainian forces killing 14,000 men, women and children.
As Putin explained in his speech in December 2021, ‘It became clear that they had greenlighted (Kiev’s) aggressive plans’ adding that it became clear to him that Ukraine’s imperialist masters were preparing ‘for a big war’.
Putin’s speech met with a predictable response from the US government, with president Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan telling reporters: ‘Nobody is attacking Russia’ dismissing the very idea that US imperialism ever went to war or invaded another country as ‘absurd’.
What is absurd is to deny that US imperialism has a long record of invading countries resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and creating millions of refugees across the world.
Along with ignoring the crimes against humanity carried out by the US and imperialist powers is an increasingly desperate attempt to convince workers that ‘plucky little’ Ukraine is driving back the Russian monster and all it needs to win is more planes and weaponry paid for by the working class.
This narrative was dealt a blow in an article in Monday’s Daily Telegraph by John Bolton, former US national security advisor to Donald Trump.
Bolton is a vocal advocate for war against America’s ‘enemies’ and was a driving force behind the invasion of Iraq.
In the article, headed: ‘The West is in a world war in Ukraine and still lacks a strategy for winning it’, Bolton argues that sending planes and military supplies to Ukraine will not secure victory over Russia, writing: ‘This is the wrong way to win a war, a war whose objectives NATO leaders fear to state.’
The real objectives that imperialism fears to state is that the war provoked by the NATO powers has always had one objective – to destroy all the gains of the Russian Revolution and return the country to the domination of capitalism.
Although he doesn’t detail what he means by a ‘strategy to win the war’ it is clear that this must mean NATO troops on the ground to fight it out with Russia – even if this leads to nuclear war.
Having failed to crush Russia through sanctions and spending billions on weaponry to arm Ukraine, the demand is now going out for Europe and Britain to be put on a war footing in preparation for a massive military escalation and world war.
Two weeks ago, Tobias Ellwood, Tory chairman of the Defence Select Committee, told Sky News that the UK ‘Needs to move to a war footing’ warning: ‘We are now at war in Europe’.
Placing the country on a war footing means forcing the working class to make even more ‘sacrifices’ for the good of King and Country.
All rights, especially the right of workers to strike, will be declared illegal under conditions of a war economy dedicated entirely to the war effort.
Workers, who are already rising up against the massive cost of living crisis accelerated by the sanctions on oil and gas, will never accept being driven even further into the gutter by a bankrupt capitalist system that can only survive through wars to reorganise the world for its exploitation.
The way forward is for the working class and people of the world to turn the war against Russia into a civil war against their own ruling capitalist class to smash capitalism and imperialism and go forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution.
