THE Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, travelled to Brussels yesterday morning to sign, along with Georgia and Moldova, the ‘partnership’ agreement with the European Union.
It was the refusal of the last democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to sign this agreement last November that led to the imperialist-backed, fascist-led coup.
Now Poroshenko – who is waging an all out war against the working class in the south and east of Ukraine, who have refused to accept being handed over to the EU and US imperialists for exploitation – has gone ahead, hailing the signing as a ‘symbol of faith and unbreakable will’.
European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, described it as a ‘great day for Europe’, going on to pledge: ‘The EU stands by your side, today more than ever before.’
What has been presented as a deal that establishes a free-trade area and opens up Ukraine and the other countries to all the markets of Europe, is nothing more than opening them up to be raped and pillaged by the European and US banks and multi-nationals.
It introduces a whole raft of measures that are designed to ‘synchronise’ their economies with EU nations. The Ukrainian working class only have to look to Greece to see what synchronisation means for capitalism.
It means a mass campaign of privatisation – a massive fire-sale of public assets at knock down prices to European capitalists – it means huge cuts in pay, pensions and jobs for every single worker in industry and agriculture as the capitalist class and bankers carve out their profits.
Already the coupists in Kiev have been forced to go to the IMF for a bail-out of $15 billion to be repaid at exorbitant interest rates.
In order to synchronise their economy, they will be forced to seek even further bail-outs and incur the imposition of austerity measures that will dwarf those imposed on Greek workers in order to pay back these ‘loans’.
The consequences of the agreement were hinted at by the EU Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, who said it was of ‘huge strategic importance’.
He went on: ‘We will need to remain active and vigilant regarding our eastern neighbourhood, in particular after the signature of the association agreements where our responsibility increases and not diminishes.’
What Barroso is talking about is the integration of the three countries into NATO, a further step towards the encirclement of Russia in preparation for the long-held desire of imperialism to carry out a grand coup against the Stalinist bureaucracy and gain the real prize – the restoration of capitalism in the home of the first socialist revolution.
In the face of this attack on the working class of Ukraine, all the Stalinists could do was to offer purely verbal condemnations.
Senior Kremlin adviser Sergei Glazyev described Poroshenko as a ‘Nazi’ and said his presidency was illegitimate because parts of Ukraine did not vote in the May elections. He also said that Poroshenko had no constitutional right to sign the treaty, which would damage the Ukrainian economy.
Putin wouldn’t even go this far – he repudiated Glazyev’s comments saying they did not reflect the official Kremlin position. Putin restricted himself to saying ‘efforts to force Ukraine into an artificial choice between Russia and the EU had pushed Ukraine towards a split, a painful internal conflict’.
All his attempts to appease imperialism, by assuring them he would not order Russian troops into the Ukraine to defend the working class, have been treated with contempt by the imperialists.
The reality is that this ‘painful internal conflict’ will now become spread throughout the Ukraine as the working class throughout the country will be forced to fight against the ruination that capitalism will try and inflict on them.
The only way out of this situation for the Ukrainian working class, is to rise up and overthrow the Kiev junta to restore rule through soviets in the Ukraine, as part of the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy throughout the other states of the Soviet Union.
With capitalism gripped by the deepest world crisis in its history, the only way out for the working class of the world is to complete the world socialist revolution begun in 1917 in Russia, with the victory of the socialist revolution throughout the EU and the USA.
