Ukraine - April 18, 2023

More than a year after the Russian invasion…

A nation oppressed, occupied and massacred by Putin. A colony increasingly indebted to imperialism and the IMF

The working class is paying with their blood for the cost of this war of invasion imposed on it by Moscow

For a proletarian leadership of the war to defeat the jackal Putin and break with the IMF!

The oppressed nation and the Ukrainian proletariat cannot be left alone!
Russian youth are upsurging and refuse to go to their deaths for Putin and his autocracy!

In Maastricht Europe and the US, the working class is already confronting the imperialist governments. They hold the key to defeat NATO and come to the aid of the massacred Ukraine!

The French workers lead the way!

The sufferings of the Ukrainian masses continue to worsen more than a year after the Russian invasion. The most aggressive attacks of the butcher Putin are today in the Donbass area, centrally in the cities of Bajmut and Avdivka. However, Russia is pounding Ukraine with aerial bombardments, missiles and rockets also in the provinces of Kharkov, Zaporiya, Odessa, attacking the entire infrastructure, and increasing day by day the number of dead under the rubble, as well as the unheard-of hardships of the masses. It is the working class that is fighting the war. The Ukrainian oligarchy and bourgeoisie have been on leave and enjoying their luxury resorts outside the country for a long time.
Thousands of workers and their families are still living in the bombed cities, hiding in cellars, without water and electricity. According to official figures, more than 200,000 people have already died. The economic cost of the war for Ukraine is enormous: its GDP contracted by 35% in 2022 and in 2022 alone, the state budget deficit exceeded 25 billion dollars. Damages are estimated at $138 billion.
The war is taking on a chronic character: Putin has become bogged down and fails to control the entire territories of the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, even though a region of these territories were placed under his control in the so-called "Minsk Agreements" with which Russia and imperialism had split the Ukrainian nation. This "failure" of the Kremlin is largely due to what we can call "the most powerful weapon" that the Ukrainian working class has: the refusal of the Russian soldiers to die and kill for the interests of the butcher of the Kremlin. In other words, Russia still has its hands tied by its own people and the world working class to go to a war of total extermination by aerial bombardment, as Moscow's "Attila" did alongside al-Assad in Syria.
Russia's policy seems then to be concentrating on trench warfare, occupation of territory, which it had before the invasion, and a siege and gradual destruction of Ukraine's infrastructure by air with drones, and from the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.
Russia is estimated to having destroyed about half of Ukrainian energy infrastructure, plunging the population into darkness and cold in the harshest northern winter months. And this Putin's offensive included invading Belarus, with the support of that nation's government, carrying troops and nuclear weapons. Right there, in 2020, the jackal Putin had played his role as imperialism's hired gun and gendarme, propping up the hated Lukashenko regime and suffocating the uprising of the workers with his murderous troops.
Belarus and Kazakhstan, then, have been where Putin massacred workers' and poor people's uprisings and insurgency in recent years. These counterrevolutionary adventures were the "beachhead" of Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.
We are facing a war of invasion of "Great Russia" against the oppressed nation of Ukraine. Putin, still wanting to prove himself necessary as a gendarme of imperialism in the region, seeks to take a part of the Ukrainian nation, while the US and NATO, without firing a single direct shot, seek to be the ones to take the lion's share of the spoils of a Ukraine indebted to extreme degrees and offering a juicy multi-billion-dollar reconstruction deal, for which the whole of imperialism is rejoicing.
Thus, as the months go by, it becomes clearer that imperialism's policy in Ukraine is for Putin to massacre and devastate the nation, but not to win the war.

Contrary to the NATO lackey left, which clamours for NATO to send it more and better weaponry, imperialism does not want to arm Ukraine to the level that it would defeat Moscow. Moreover, the US is not a force for national liberation. To claim otherwise is not only a fallacy, but an outright infamy.

The US is forcing Russia into a defensive trench war, where zones are already beginning to be demarcated with war borders, both in the Donbass and in the Crimea.

In this war of attrition, the US is careful not to weaken Putin and his counterrevolutionary forces to the extreme, since the US still cannot with its own army restrain the workers who in successive uprisings rose up as we saw in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, yesterday in Georgia and in the Caucasus, against the worst of the imperialist plunder and attack to the masses by the capitalists. The US still needs their hitman, including in Syria, to continue to play a vital role in sustaining al-Assad, who guarantees the partition of that nation and a huge plunder by all the imperialist powers, both the US and Europe as well as Turkey itself.

Hence this war of attrition that the US is provoking against Russia in Ukraine and the economic siege it is imposing on the former so that a bourgeois faction in Moscow can emerge as a direct agent of Washington. This is what Wall Street needs, which has just broken the balance, the trade and the living space that Franco-German imperialism had in the whole of Europe, which was largely based on the extraction of minerals, gas and raw materials from Russia.

For its part, Moscow cannot give up the Donbass and Crimea, at the risk of a new implosion, crisis and even a mass uprising. The uprising of thousands and thousands of young people who refuse to go to fight and die for the jackal of St. Petersburg and his business, anticipates what would come with the fall of Putin.

On the other hand, as we can see, the massive withdrawal of imperialist capital from Russia is causing serious damage to its currency, as the transnationals are withdrawing by selling their shares and companies and taking their dollars with them. In the course of the war, 25 billion dollars have left Russia. The crisis there has already begun.

What a weird "anti-imperialist" Putin is!... while the US imposes an embargo on the foreign assets of the Russian oligarchy and their businesses for more than 300 billion dollars, Putin lets the imperialists to take theirs freely abroad when they liquidate their companies, banks, etc., in Moscow.

The devaluation of the rouble has already reached Greater Russia and with it, the increase of hunger and misery of the masses.

As we will see in this article, far from the claims that the jackal Putin is "liberating" Ukraine, and far from the claims of the "NATO club of friends" who want to present this organizations as the savior of the nation, the more Putin massacres in Ukraine,  the more the Ukrainian nation and  working class are tied down and subjected to imperialism. To tell the truth, Putin's massacre and imperialist plunder are the two ends of the same rope strangling the Ukrainian nation and its working class.

Ukraine: A nation plundered by imperialism and destroyed by Putin's bombs
Either Ukraine will be Soviet and independent, or it will be a overseen colony.

Since the Russian invasion, Ukraine has spent more than $32 billion on national defence, almost 10 times more than in 2021. Despite record levels of unemployment, several regions already face labour shortages due to the forced exodus of almost 8 million people who left Ukraine and 5 million internally displaced persons. High inflation and rising prices for food, essential goods and electricity have produced a severe wartime cost-of-living crisis.
Meanwhile, the banks and enterprises remain in the hands of imperialism and Zelensky's oligarch associates doing fabulous business.
Let us remember that, in the midst of the war, Zelensky applied against the workers a brutal flexibilizing labour reform that no president before (neither Yanukovych, Moscow's partner, nor imperialism's puppet Poroschenko) had managed to impose. This law allows workers to be fired without justification and without the consent of the trade unions, increased the working week to 60 hours and abolished the inviolability of the right to wages. In addition, Zelensky exempted the employers from holding the job in reserve and continuing to pay the wages of the workers enrolled on the battle front.
As the bourgeoisie always does, the costs of the war and the crisis have been dumped on the workers. Even the soldiers are seeing their pay affected, and some of them are still waiting for their bonuses from November or December, generating a wave of unrest and even demoralization among the soldiers.
Imperialism rejoices: the business of debt and reconstruction
The deal that the US and the European powers are rejoicing over: the future reconstruction of Ukraine, valued at 750 billion dollars.
Against the leftist NATO servants, it is worth clarifying that the imperialist pirates do not give Ukraine even a single rifle ammunition, they charge for it. It is their business. Let's see:
Ukraine's foreign debt keeps growing with every "aid" package, every shipment of war materiel, the vast majority of which is nothing more than the leftovers and remainder that the imperialist states had lying around, which is to be repaid. Since 24 February 2022, when the Russian invasion began, Ukraine has received more than $20 billion from the World Bank and more than $110 billion from the US, including military support. A real plunder of Ukraine's veins. In 2022 alone Ukraine was due to repay nearly $18.5 billion in foreign debt. In addition to the interest that multiplies with each postponement of this fraudulent debt, new million-dollar loans - subject to new political and economic reforms - will continue to increase Ukraine's mortgage.
Meanwhile, Cargill, Monsanto and the big grain companies continue to make fabulous profits from Ukrainian grain. The blast furnaces of the ArcelorMittal steelworks in Kyrvoi Rih continue to operate, while the mines and deposits of coal, graphite, titanium, manganese (the world's third largest reserve) and other riches have not ceased to be plundered. Everyone make big business on the blood of the Ukrainian proletariat and  impoverished masses of the city and countryside.

While Putin drowns in blood and destroys Ukraine, Russia is more and more encircled and economically suffocated.

As we have already seen and demonstrated, Russia's bogging down in Ukraine has impacted heavily on its economy. The government's energy revenues have falken by almost half, while the fiscal gap reached $34 billion in the first two months of this year, equivalent to more than 1.5% of the country's total economic output. Russia's current growth rate stands at 1%, which in a country like this is not even a maintenance rate, with a contraction of around 2% of its GDP.
Russian banks have also been hit by the economic crisis resulting from the war, with the Central Bank's losses running into the millions and the profits of Russia's largest banks declining.
Meanwhile, Russia's import restrictions are having an impact on industry. Russia's defense industry remains heavily dependent on parts and components imported from the West. And in this war Russia has lost substantial quantities of weapons, ammunition and equipment. By mid-December 2022, Russia had lost 4,500 armored vehicles, 63 fixed-wing aircraft, 70 helicopters, 150 unmanned aerial vehicles, 12 warships and more than 600 artillery systems.
Not less than a third of Russia's budget is estimated (because much of the budget is classified or unlisted) to be earmarked for the invasion: 31 billion dollars. But while it is the arms industry that is "booming" in the Russian economy, this corresponds to its own consumption as it is leading an invasion, while Russia as a "major arms exporter" is no longer in that position. Russia's share of global arms exports fell from 22% to 16%. Undoubtedly, the biggest beneficiary of this drop were the US: their market share has grown by up to 7 percentage points to 40%.
We insist, in this war, Putin is destroying Ukraine, devastates it and massacres and drowns in blood the Ukrainian working class, which will be absolutely crushed if Putin wins the war - another of the great objectives of this invasion - to impose the partition of the nation and its definitive colonization. And, if the proletariat does not prevent it, we will see new global confrontations between the imperialist powers to recolonize Russia and China (see box).
But today the US policy is, as we have said, for Russia not to win the war, instead it would be worn down to such a level as to go bankrupt economically... without NATO firing a single shot. This is what the strength of Biden's and NATO's policy is all about.
Contrary to those who claim that this is an "inter-imperialist war" between the US&NATO and Putin, they are lying through their teeth. This is a rare "NATO war" in which NATO delivers missiles that go no further than 80 kilometres, some drones and absolutely defensive equipment, just so that Russia does not advance by taking more territory. The US war against Russia is commercial; its aim is to break it, and to push militarily by NATO. Finland recently joined NATO, adding 1300 kilometres to its border with Russia.

The Marxist position on war: a working class policy in defense of the oppressed nation
Ukraine is already partitioned, it is occupied by Russia in the Donbass and in the Crimea, and the "peace pact" is being imposed that had already been signed in the Minsk agreements and is now being upheld manu militari.
Sectors of the world left claim that the character of "national struggle" has been liquidated and that it is now a war between two reactionary sides. Thus they erase any class line in the war, hiding the Ukrainian working class and the rank and file of the Russian soldiers, workers forced to go to the fratricidal war, who are in the trenches and do the killing, while the big oligarchs and the whole bourgeoisie continue to do fabulous business, far away from the battle fronts.
They are also trying to erase the Ukrainian national question. But Ukraine is an oppressed nation, subjugated in double and triple chains by a semi-fascist native oligarchy, agent both of Moscow, with which it had and still has huge business deals, and of the IMF. Today Putin's bayonets have occupied the Ukrainian nation. He is tearing it apart, taking great care not to attack the big industries, ports, mines, and lands that are under imperialist control.

They hide the fact that the war in Ukraine is about Putin's partition, plunder, pillage, massacre and destruction of that nation today, in order to open the way tomorrow for an open colonisation by imperialism. We are dealing with a nation plenty  of wealth and strategically located for the transit of goods throughout Europe. A nation subjugated for centuries, by the Tsars, by Hitler, by Moscow…
As we put it in our book, Ukraine at war: "Any policy in this war that does not start from fighting for the national liberation of Ukraine, crushing the Russian invasion and breaking with imperialism, under the leadership of its working class allied with the workers of Europe, is not a Marxist policy, but one belonging to the lackeys of imperialism and favoring the plunder of the Moscow oligarchy".

The massacre against the Ukrainian working class must be stopped now!
For a proletarian leadership of the war!

While Putin's bombs are falling on the heads of the workers and the poor people, while he is bleeding the nation to death and bringing it to ruin, Zelensky in the rear is taking away pensions, not paying wages, enlarging the working day, imposing a brutal flexibilization of labor, and not even guaranteeing that the workers on the front line can have boots, binoculars, not even toilet paper. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to get into debt and in the middle of the war is paying 7.5 billion dollars to the IMF. This way we cannot crush the invader and win the war!

In this war the exploited cannot continue to give up their lives for the exploiters and executioners in order to continue to live in hunger and misery. A programme of social reform, of attacking the business of the capitalists and imperialism is necessary to win the war:
All resources, every Ukrainian dollar, every factory, every grain of wheat must be at the service of the people and the workers to eat and to have the best supplies and the best armament to win the war!
It is urgent and indispensable for the working class to take the lead in this war to defeat the invader.
For committees of workers and rank and file soldiers in every neighborhood, city, region and at the national level! The workers, the poor people and the rank and file soldiers must take control of the armaments of all the barracks in Ukraine, putting under their control and subordinating all the officers, always ready to negotiate with Moscow and imperialism.
Out with the IMF from Ukraine! Not a single dollar to pay the fraudulent foreign debt! Out with Cargill and Monsanto, and all the expropriators of the people! Expropriation of the banks and the big properties of the millionaire oligarchs and imperialism, without compensation and under workers' control!
The workers in the Moscow-occupied Donbass are not even paid their wages, as we saw recently in the strike in Zaporiya. Only by uniting the forces of the workers of Kiev and Donbass we will be able to expropriate and take back under workers' control all the mines privatized by the lackey governments of imperialism in Kiev, and also by Putin, to put all the mining, all the profits for all the workers and their families, from Donbass to Kiev to be able to eat and live in peace.
Also in Russia it is the exploited who pay for the cost of the war with high living cost, unemployment and workers not being paid their wages. While thousands of sons and daughters of the working class are persecuted, tortured, and imprisoned for evading forced conscription and denouncing it, and thousands more are dragged to the front to die in a fratricidal war. Therefore, Russian soldiers, workers and poor peasants under arms must desert and go over to fight alongside their Ukrainian brothers. For no people that oppresses another can liberate itself.
The unity of the working class of Petrograd and Odessa, with the triumphant workers' revolution, achieved at the beginning of the 20th century the most heartfelt demands of the exploited, for bread and a dignified life. Thus, today more than ever, in the face of imperialism's offensive to recolonize the region, we must fight for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the working class, under revolutionary forms, without sold-out bureaucrats like those who turned the USSR into a prison of nations and handed over the wealth of the people and their enormous gains to imperialism.
For a united, soviet and independent Ukraine, let the USSR return!
Only a Red Army of workers and peasants can defeat Putin and NATO's counter-revolutionary White Counter-revolutionary Troops, as it did in 1917 against the imperialist armies. But this is a task for the world working class.
The cynical social-imperialist and Putin-friendly left tells the martyred Ukrainian people that, while dodging the bombs that every day kill their families and destroy their cities, while liberating the workers of the Donbass who are under Putin's boot, and fighting on the front lines to fraternise and unite with the Russian soldiers, … they must defeat Putin, Zelensky... and they must also at the same time defeat NATO in Britain, Germany, France, USA. They are scoundrels!
NATO would be defeated only by spreading and generalizing the Commune throughout France and Europe, by raising up the workers against the imperialist Maastricht, to set up the United Socialist States of Europe!
NATO would be defeated only by the workers and youth winning back the streets in the US, making the US imperialist pirates tremble!
Either under Putin's boots or under the boots of the US and the EU, Ukraine will be a partitioned and a overseen colony. Only the socialist revolution can stop this merciless fate.

For a united, soviet and independent Ukraine, for the return of the USSR of the workers and peasants, without bureaucrats and sellouts!

Eliza Funesn and Nadia Briante