US imperialism has reacted to the breakdown of talks at the weekend of the Contact Group on Ukrainian reconciliation with threats to massively intervene militarily in the Ukraine to put down the resistance by the workers in the east to the puppet ‘government’ in Kiev.
Claiming that these ‘peace talks’ had been scuppered by a renewed fighting in the east, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, joined with the US joint chiefs chairman, Martin Dempsey, in saying that they were open to the idea of sending huge quantities of weapons to the Ukrainian army.
Kerry’s call for hi-tech weaponry for the Ukrainian army was echoed in a report issued yesterday by eight former senior US officials demanding $3 billion worth be sent immediately to counter the resistance of the Ukrainian working class in the region saying that it ‘requires providing direct military assistance – in far larger amounts than provided to date and including lethal defensive arms’.
This orchestrated campaign to step up military intervention by the US and Nato was openly prepared back in December – long before any breakdown of peace talks – when the US senate passed unanimously a bill called the Ukrainian Freedom Support Act – which called for $350 million of military ‘aid’ to be sent to the illegal regime in Kiev with the aim of ‘re-establishing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine’.
In fact, the fiction that imperialism has so far provided the puppet Kiev regime with only non-lethal military equipment so far, was exploded by its own defence minister, Valery Heletey.
Last September, he reported that NATO countries were sending arms, saying: ‘I have no right to disclose any specific country we reached agreement with, but the fact is that those weapons are already on their way to us. That’s absolutely true. I can officially tell you.’
While imperialism and its propagandists in the bourgeois media constantly bang on about the Russians arming and supplying the working class resistance, they themselves have been arming, supplying and completely financing the Ukrainian puppet regime and its army.
The aim is to crush the Ukrainian working class, physically dominate the country, bring its missiles right up against the borders of Russia and restore by conquest the capitalist property relations denied imperialism by the Russian revolution of 1917.
A physical war accompanied by the economic warfare of sanctions is designed to smash the Russian economy and pave the way for a right wing coup against the Stalinist regime of Putin.
This strategy, however, has run into the brick wall of working class resistance in the east of Ukraine, a resistance that is now spreading throughout the country as workers in the western regions are up in arms about the forced conscription of their young people into the army to fight and die for the imperialist cause.
Far from being crushed, the workers army and militias of the east are not just surviving the onslaught but defeating it militarily.
By NATO’s own account, these fighters in the past four months have captured nearly 200 square miles of additional territory in eastern Ukraine.
With its proxy army facing defeat, imperialism is preparing to pour billions of dollars of weapons into the hands of its puppets followed by ‘boots on the ground’ probably in the form of US military ‘advisors’.
While the Stalinist Putin constantly seeks dialogue and agreement with imperialism, the historic economic crisis of capitalism is driving these same imperialist powers to war against Russia, China and the people of the world in order to seize their markets and resources for capitalist exploitation.
Imperialism has never been weaker but in its death agony it is preparing to wage war in order to survive.
The answer to these war plans lies in building sections of the Fourth International in every country to smash imperialism and capitalism through the organisation of the world socialist revolution.
Immediately on the issue in the Ukraine, the Russian working class must insist that imperialism’s war preparations be defeated, that the Red Army marches on Kiev and re-establishes Soviet Ukraine.
