IT HAS become clear over the past days that Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky have been unceremoniously dumped by the imperialist powers and are now desperate to secure some kind of ‘peace deal’ with Russia.
All his demands for the NATO powers to impose a no-fly zone over the Ukraine have been rebuffed while Zelensky is now insisting that he has ‘cooled’ on Ukrainian demands to join NATO and that he is ‘open’ to dialogue on the future of Crimea, Lugansk and Donetsk, the three regions that refused to bow down to the fascist led coup that took power in 2014.
The Ukrainian regime were certainly not interested in dialogue during the 8 years that it bombarded the workers in Lugansk and Donetsk (the Donbass) killing over 14,000 people including children.
Zelensky said last week that he was not willing ‘to beg on my knees’ to be allowed into NATO but he is certainly prepared to beg for a no-fly zone.
On Monday he again urged NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine and got the same short shrift from the US and its allies, that any attempt to establish a no-fly zone would mean NATO coming into direct conflict with Russia and spark a world war.
The imperialist powers are quite happy to keep the conflict going by pumping billions of weapons and thousands of mercenaries into the Ukraine, but are terrified of any direct involvement that will inevitably result in another humiliating defeat for them.
Zelensky, hailed in the capitalist media as the hero of Ukraine, is finding out the brutal fact that he is a mere bit player in the machinations of the imperialist drive to carry out regime change in Russia and open the way to restore capitalism to that country.
He is now desperate to get a deal with Russia, hence all the talk about being open to dialogue and a negotiated peace deal. Russia has made it clear that the only deal acceptable is a demilitarised Ukraine which will never become a member of the NATO war machine.
The imperialist powers have other pressing worries arising from the consequences of their war against Russia.
The economic sanctions they imposed are driving forward a massive crisis for the economies of the advanced capitalist nations creating revolutionary conditions at home.
Workers in Britain, Europe and the US are facing crippling bills for energy as oil and gas supplies from Russia are being hit, while the cost of food is massively increasing as a result of supplies of grain, vegetable oil and fertilisers that the food industry relies on, dwindling to zero.
Russia and Ukraine are the world’s biggest suppliers of these agricultural products and the effects not just in the West but throughout the world, are increasingly becoming dramatic and threatening starvation for millions across Africa and the Middle East.
Zelensky wasn’t the only one to be begging on his knees this week. Prime minister Boris Johnson was in the Gulf for meetings with leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia begging them to pump more oil to relieve the shortages and avoid a catastrophic confrontation with the working class.
Johnson prostrated himself before a Saudi regime responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the Yemen, and on Saturday executed 81 people in one day in the largest mass executions in modern history.
Johnson is jumping into bed with these bloodthirsty Gulf monarchies, driven by the crisis that has been accelerated by imperialist designs on Russia and increasingly scared that the working class will not sit idly back and pay for this crisis by seeing workers’ lives shattered – unable to afford heating and eating under a capitalist system that is dying.
Not strong enough to defy Russia, world capitalism is now facing its most powerful adversary, the working class at home.
This strength of the working class must be mobilised in a confrontation to put an end to capitalism in its most barbaric imperialist phase and put it out of its misery with socialist revolution.
This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every capitalist country to lead the struggle for workers power to victory, and building sections of the ICFI in the degenerated and deformed workers states to fight for rule through Workers Soviets.
