By Clara Weiss and Andre Damon, wsws.org
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Sunday, Ukrainian naval vessels entered waters claimed by Russia near Crimea, leading the Russian Coast Guard to fire on and seize three Ukrainian ships. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has responded by declaring martial law and putting the army on full alert, declaring, “Ukraine is under threat of full-scale war with Russia.”
Poroshenko: Washington's man in Kiev. A dangerous psychopath and billionaire, but we repeat ourselves. Trying to drag Russia into a big brawl with the West. One of his many crimes.
The ongoing crisis is the most significant direct military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, the countries with the two largest standing armies in Europe, since early 2014, when a far-right coup in Kiev, orchestrated and financed by the European Union and US imperialism, plunged the region into a state of perpetual crisis.
As with every provocation by the Poroshenko regime against Russia in recent years, NATO, the EU and the US immediately took the side of Ukraine in the current confrontation, decrying Russia’s action as an act of “aggression” and “violation of international law.”
Washington’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. Just one day earlier, the Trump administration had whitewashed the brazen murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, declaring there was no evidence that the Saudi crown prince had done anything wrong.
Poroshenko announced that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had assured him Washington would provide “full support, full assistance, including military assistance.”
Ukraine’s provocation comes just days before a planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina, to be held on Friday and Saturday.
The Democratic Party-aligned media, which for more than two years has been engaged in a hysterical campaign against Trump on the basis of his alleged “soft” stance on Russia, immediately seized on the incident to pressure the US president to “stand up to Putin,” as the New York Times put it.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n an editorial published Wednesday, the Times called on the US and its allies to “impose stronger sanctions, bar their ships from entering Russian ports in the Black or Azov Seas or increase military support for Ukraine.” It acknowledged that “these actions all carry risk,” without spelling out the danger of a military confrontation that could quickly involve the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.
The Washington Post, for its part, declared, “Mr. Putin’s aggression ought to affect the reception he receives from Mr. Trump at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires... Mr. Trump could send a message by refusing to meet Mr. Putin; if he does go ahead with a bilateral meeting, he ought to begin it by telling the Russian leader that his assault on Ukraine is unacceptable and will have consequences.”
Elements within the US state and the corporate media are determined to prevent a repetition of this summer’s Helsinki Summit, which triggered denunciations of Trump as a “traitor” and “Russian agent.” Since then, the Trump administration has pulled out of the INF Treaty with Russia, which prohibited both countries from developing short- and medium-range nuclear missiles.
The editors disagree with the original text of this analysis, which, while correct, as usual, in almost all aspects, assumes an equivalence of evil between both Washington and Moscow, regarding them as bourgeois imperialist "regimes". Further, however capitalist the Russian system may be under Putin these days, it's in the current context a bit imprudent to go around using the insulting word "regime" on foes of the first and most urgent threat to world peace just because it does not conform to Trotskyist principles. Not to mention that Vladimir Putin won his post as President of Russia by a large margin in an undisputed democratic election and his popularity is the envy of Western politicians.
Poroshenko manufactured this crisis just a few months before presidential elections in Ukraine, which the unpopular president is almost certain to lose. The declaration of martial law gives Poroshenko and the military sweeping powers, including the right to raid apartments and search cars, curtail press freedom, censor the internet and ban demonstrations. Poroshenko’s actions are directed at Ukraine’s own population no less than at Russia.
As a result of this week’s events, Ukraine and Russia are now on the brink of a major war that could quickly draw in the imperialist powers. Time magazine wrote that the Azov Sea crisis had the potential of becoming a second Gulf of Tonkin crisis, which became the pretext in 1964 for the direct involvement of the US military in Vietnam.
On Wednesday, Russia announced that it would deploy another S-400 surface-to-air missile system to Crimea. Russian media have warned of a “major war” that would cost thousands of lives on both sides.
The Azov Sea crisis fully confirms the warning made by [Marxist analysts] that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would open up a new historical period of imperialist wars. The undermining of Russia’s influence in the Black Sea region, which has historically been of major geostrategic significance to Russia as a water gateway to the Mediterranean and the energy-rich Middle East, has been a central component of US imperialism’s efforts to bring all the resources of the vast landmass previously covered by the USSR under its direct control.
If in 1991 Turkey was the only NATO member-state bordering the Black Sea, today all states bordering the Black Sea except for Russia itself are either NATO members or have right-wing, anti-Russian and pro-US regimes that were installed by imperialist-orchestrated “color revolutions” (Ukraine and Georgia).
The Putin administration has no answer to the ever-increasing pressure of imperialism except a combination of attempts to strike a deal and the whipping up of nationalism and militarism at home. As the direct outcome of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union, this regime, representing a criminal oligarchy, fears a movement of the Russian working class more than anything else, including a potential assault by imperialism.
The extraordinary recklessness of the imperialist warmongers and their far-right stooges in Eastern Europe can be explained only by the profound crisis of US and global capitalism and the growth of the class struggle. This year has seen an upsurge of working class struggles in Iran, India, Europe and the United States, the center of world imperialism.
These struggles provide the material basis for opposing the war aims of US imperialism. What is required is the building of [working class activism], including in Ukraine and Russia, as the leadership of a socialist anti-war movement of the international working class.
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^0America's Goal...
Make every homeless tranny
gender comfortable!
Revolutionary wisdom
Words from an Irish patriot—
| People in the center are cowards. They are sheep. They don’t want to offend, or to think. They have no opinions of their own. They agree with the last person they spoke with. And they presume that the center is safe. How can anyone criticize a moderate? Easily, it turns out. Moderates are the casualties in all conflicts. They are the enemy of both the right and the left. They are without morality, conscience, principles, or common sense. They are like a stumbling drunk in the middle of a highway, at risk of being run over by cars going in both directions. —Roland Vincent, Armory of the Revolution |
Typical of its Trotskyite stance, it moralizes about the evils of Stalin’s USSR, which Trotsky did his best to destroy out of egoistic spite, it seem to this observer. Now it complains about today’s Russia. So its analysis is often correct but only half so. To put it bluntly, the Socialist Equality Party is a joke, never accomplishes anything but complains about true leftists who have to deal with the real world, not its ideological fantasyland.
Yes, Trotsky represented the Zio-fascist, Jewish mafia (hijacking, evil) part of ‘Communism,’ and they (agents of RotSchild/RoggenFeder & Co.) typically project their own crimes on the genuine (Jewish, Russian, Soviet, and so forth) Communists, i.e. Marxist-Leninists, such as Lenin and Stalin.