ON SUNDAY, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky sacked his defence minister Oleksii Reznikov in what has been described as the biggest shake-up of his defence ministry since the Russian military action in February 2022.
Reznikov is credited with securing billions of dollars from the US, UK and other NATO countries, but unfortunately for him the continued allegations of graft and corruption engulfing the Ukrainian defence ministry had become too open even for Zelensky and his backers to ignore.
Someone has to go, as Zelensky tries to appease his imperialist masters who are demanding that some gesture must be made to placate the growing anger amongst the working class at home that all the billions spent propping up the Ukrainian regime are going straight into the pockets of the multi-billionaire oligarchs who run Ukraine.
The defence ministry run by Reznikov has been hit with allegations that it had inflated the contracts for food meant for troops and winter coats paid for by NATO countries had just disappeared, along with weapons that had never been delivered but instead sold on to the highest bidder.
Reznikov is to be replaced with Rustem Umerov who is being portrayed by Zelensky as a ‘clean pair of hands’ untainted by allegations of corruption.
In fact, Umerov’s corruption is as deep as the corruption that marked the very origins of the coup in 2014, financed and organised by the imperialist powers and carried out by Nazi-supporting militias.
It was Umerov, a former investment banker, who was put in charge of Ukraine’s State Property Fund which was responsible for privatising state assets and property.
In the first three months of 2023 alone the Fund, under Umerov, raked in $24 million from the sale of state property.
Umerov stands with Zelensky telling reporters last year: ‘We will not give up our people or our land.’
Instead, Umerov favours flogging off the land and state assets to the highest bidder – no wonder this man has the seal of approval from imperialism.
On Saturday, one of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs, Ihor Kolomoisky, was detained for two months on suspicion of fraud and money laundering involving $14 million.
Apart from being one of the wealthiest ‘businessmen’ in Ukraine, Kolomoisky’s claim to fame was in promoting Zelensky, then a struggling comedian, on his TV channel and greasing his climb to power.
None of these revelations about high level corruption at the heart of Zelensky’s regime will come as any surprise. These oligarchs, who made their fortunes plundering the banks and industries, played a pivotal role in aiding and abetting the imperialist-backed coup in 2014.
This coup had only one aim – to break Ukraine away from Russia and transform it into an armed outpost of imperialism right up to the border, and so provoke a response from Russia.
The US, supported by the UK, deliberately started this war to return capitalist domination and overthrow the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
To this end, they have no problem with propping up a Ukrainian regime that is nothing more than a cesspit of corruption.
What is worrying them, is that all the billions of taxpayers’ money and all the military supplies handed to the Zelensky regime have failed completely to break Russia either militarily or economically.
Instead, the imperialist strategy of weakening Russia to the point where capitalism can dominate it has backfired spectacularly. Russia has not been brought to its knees, but a world capitalist system that is drowning in inflation and diving into recession has.
The working class in Europe and America have had enough of being told they must willingly make sacrifices and see their children go hungry for an imperialist war against Russia.
The enemy of the working class and masses of the world is not Russia but the ruling class at home. The way forward for workers today is to turn imperialist war against Russia into a workers civil war against the real enemy at home.
The historic crisis of capitalism requires the working class in the west to support Russia and defend the gains of the Russian Revolution by going forward to extending the socialist revolution to the rest of the world.
