UKRAINE’S President Viktor Yanukovych announced early yesterday the terms of the agreement that he had made with the Ukrainian pro-EU, pro-US opposition during talks overnight Thursday.
These talks were supervised by a number of EU foreign ministers and other envoys, with a Kremlin mediator also present.
Yanukovych announced that there would be early elections, a return to the 2004 constitution, as demanded by the opposition, and that steps would be taken to form a national unity government and hold presidential elections. The opposition had won, or had they?
Since then, the opposition has not publicly declared its agreement to carry out this agreed programme, while the armed gangs that have been killing police officers have been reinforced and rearmed from outside Kiev, including by hundreds of police officers from the city of Lvov and other western cities. They have even set up their own hospitals for treating their own wounded in the city!
Elsewhere, throughout western Ukraine, city halls and government buildings have been occupied and/or burnt down, while large numbers of police officers have handed their weapons and armouries over to the neo-fascist, pro-EU, pro-US insurgents.
This movement has emerged fully formed, prepared and fully organised to go all the way to seize power.
There is nothing spontaneous or accidental about it.
It emerged out of the failure of the two Orange governments to carry through the bourgeois counter-revolution by parliamentary means. The second fell in 2010 when Tymoshenko and others were defeated in a parliamentary election.
Having failed to do the job by parliamentary means, the counter-revolutionary movements have organised to do the job by a coup d’etat.
Thus, when the elected Yanukovych government turned down the EU’s terms for association as terms that would permanently ruin the Ukraine, the battle for Kiev began with a mass, permanent demonstration despite the very severe winter.
This then rapidly developed into an insurrection and armed struggle, with the US and the EU deciding on the sidelines who was to be in the new Ukrainian government when the current government had been brought down.
These efforts were orchestrated and directed by the US and the EU, who were nevertheless in competition over who was to be the major occupier of the Ukraine.
A leaked recording of a telephone conversation between US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and the US envoy to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, discussing who should be in Ukraine’s next government, shows just who was really in charge of the coup operation.
Nuland says: ‘I think Yats (Yatsenyuk) is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience,’ Nuland says. ‘What he needs is Klitsch (Klitschko) and (Oleh) Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in, he’s going to be at that level, working for Yatsenyuk, it’s just not going to work.’
Pyatt agrees. ‘Let me work on Klitschko,’ he can be heard saying, ‘and I think we should get a Western personality to come out here (to Ukraine) and midwife this thing.’
The midwifery process of counter-revolution is now under way!
In the same transcript, Nuland says ‘Fuck the EU’ when its wishes are raised with her.
What is taking place in the Ukraine is an imperialist-organised and backed coup d’etat designed to detach the Ukraine from Russia and open up the way into the Caucasus, and prepare the way for a coup d’etat in Russia.
In fact, after the first Orange victory in the Ukraine all of the imperialist powers were out to replicate it in Russia.
Likewise with the current project.
This is why workers in the West must oppose the imperialist intervention into the Ukraine and any attempt to export it to Russia.
It is in Russia’s interests to support and arm the workers and youth of the Ukraine who are determined to fight fascists and reject domination by the EU and the US imperialists.
The workers and youth of the Ukraine must be armed to drive the fascists off the streets and to drive the agents of the imperialist powers out of the Ukraine.
