THE decision by the Ukrainian government to offer joint use of missile attack and space early warning systems to the Western powers is not just a move calculated to anger Russia, it will also split Ukraine, and bring it to the brink of civil war.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has said that its ‘withdrawal from the treaty on missile attack and space control early warning systems of 6 July 1992 will grant Ukraine an opportunity to establish active cooperation with European countries for the purpose of integrating the Ukrainian missile attack and space control early warning units with systems and possibly foreign states interested in receiving data on the space situation.’
As well, the head of the Ukrainian parliament’s security and defence committee, former Ukrainian Defence Minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko, has said that there are ways to implement President Viktor Yushchenko’s decrees which tighten rules for the stationing of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine’s Crimea.
Asked what Ukraine will do if ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet engage in military action and how Ukraine can implement its statement about banning the ships from returning to Crimea, Hrytsenko said the following.
‘I would not want this to be taken as an act of provocation. Any decision can be carried out, including the ban for the ships to leave or to return. One should simply be able to take this decision and be prepared to take responsibility for any of its negative consequences. Then this will be done. There are many ways. I do not want to specify them.’
Hrytsenko added that he is going to send an enquiry to the special services, asking them to find out the number of Ukrainians with dual citizenship.
What is he going to do? Deport the vast majority of Crimeans who are Russian speakers out of Ukraine? Or deport the 40 per cent of all Ukrainians who speak Russian?!
Hrytsenko also agreed that Ukraine did supply arms and military equipment to Georgia. He, however, rejected statements being made about Ukrainian nationals’ involvement in the war in South Ossetia and illegal supplies of air defence systems to Georgia.
In fact, the Ukrainian working class and the majority in the east of the country support Russia and are for the reconstitution of the USSR.
The majority of Ukrainians will not stand for measures that are seen to be seeking to isolate the Russian Federation, preparatory to military action against it.
The Ukrainian workers will take general strike action and rise up to overthrow the Ukrainian pro-Western regime in this event.
The issue facing the states of the USSR under threat from imperialism is going forward to the revolutionary reconstitution of the USSR and forward to socialism.
This issue cannot be settled by events just within these states themselves or by their ability to militarily stand up to the West. This can only be settled on the world stage through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This is the lesson of the past 90 years. The Red Army tore the guts out of German Fascism, only to see, as Trotsky predicted, the Stalinist bureaucracy dump its own theory of socialism in a single country, in many cases seize state property, and then attempt to restore capitalism, and completely liquidate the gains of October 1917.
What is driving NATO eastwards to seek to seize the vast oil and gas bearing resources of the Russian Federation and Central Asia is the rapidly deepening world crisis of capitalism.
This crisis is sharpening the class struggle qualitatively in the major western capitalist states to the point of revolutionary explosions.
The workers of the East and the West and the oppressed nations are now in battle against the same enemy, worldwide capitalism and imperialism.
The way forward therefore is through the building of the Fourth International to unite the working class of the world to overthrow capitalism and smash imperialism in the major capitalist countries, and to remove the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore soviet power in the territories of the USSR.
This is the way forward to a world socialism that will know no frontiers.