Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action)
Warmongering Russia?
Broad background to the current conflict in Ukraine
We would like to outline below the background to the current conflict in Ukraine and demonstrate that Russia has always behaved sensibly and tried to avoid a major conflict. It was the imperialist countries that were never interested in a solution:
What we are experiencing today in Ukraine started 30 years ago. Since then, Russia has been trying to make it clear to NATO countries that it has security interests on its borders that should be respected. Despite Russia’s appeals and protests, since 1991, that is, since the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, NATO has inexorably expanded its infrastructure to Russia’s immediate borders[1]. In six waves of expansion, accompanied by wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and (albeit covertly) Syria, this war alliance has grown from 16 to 31 countries. The fact that Ukraine was officially recognized as a NATO candidate in March 2018 raised Russia’s concerns about its territorial security, something it repeatedly expressed publicly. Considering the war record of NATO and the United States in particular, these concerns can be described as justified. Despite Russian demands, the US signed a military cooperation agreement with Ukraine in November 2021.
These events were only made possible by the 2014 coup known as the Maidan, whose origins date back to November 2013, after then President Yanukovych refused to sign an association agreement between Ukraine and the EU in September of the same year. The agreement was presented in the Western press as merely economic in nature. However, the reality is different: Article 4, point 1 of Title II of the agreement states that the treaty aims to promote “gradual convergence on foreign and security matters” in order to achieve “Ukraine’s ever-deeper involvement in the European security area”[2]. Thus, it was not primarily economic relations that interested the EU in relation to Ukraine, but above all foreign and security policy issues.
The Maidan coup of 2014, which could only be brought to fruition by neo-fascist forces, not only triggered huge support from Ukrainian society, as portrayed in the Western media, but also enormous resistance in many regions in the south and southeast. In some regions, such as Donetsk and Lugansk, the population even managed to arm itself to defend itself against the paramilitary groups of the neo-fascist “Right Sector” and later also against the regular Ukrainian army. Elsewhere, as in Kharkiv, resistance was brutally crushed. Where protests against the coup government were more peaceful, they ended in massacres[3]. Following the violent overthrow of elected President Yanukovych, the new coup government signed the political part of the agreement on March 21, 2014 (and it entered into force shortly thereafter, in November 2014). The economic part was not signed until June 2014, which in turn did not enter into force until a year and a half later, on January 1, 2016. This shows that Ukraine’s political integration into Western security policy took priority over economic integration.
In a German-Foreign-Policy.com article dated February 21, 2022, i.e. a few days before the start of the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine, the following is stated:
“According to New York politics professor Nina Khrushcheva, the Biden administration has ‘far more interest in an invasion than Putin’: if it succeeds in enticing Moscow to invade, it can expect President Vladimir Putin to be overthrown.”[4]
The article is able to recognize what the CPG does not: in line with its aggressive doctrine, NATO managed to force Russia’s hand by threatening a massacre in the Donbass regions, which, as stated before, would have been similar to what the people of Palestine are experiencing today. Russia was obliged by its own law (the protection of Russians throughout the world is enshrined in the Constitution) to protect Russian minorities in the Donbass. Russia was faced with the dilemma of either allowing the massacre of the Russian-speaking population on its immediate borders or intervening. Since Russia decided to come to the aid of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine, it has been waging a war against the whole of NATO and the whole world subject to it. For example, mercenaries from all over the world are deployed in Ukraine. Among them are the feared Syrian terrorists. According to Syrian reports, hundreds of mercenaries, mainly Al-Nusra terrorists, have traveled from northern Syria to Ukraine through Turkish territory. But the CPG, which suffers from not inconsiderable myopia, accuses Russia of waging a war of aggression.
Prior to the Russian military operation, Ukraine had systematically violated the Minsk agreements, signed by the governments of Belarus, Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine itself[5].
However, despite the reluctant attitude of the “West”, Russia has shown its willingness to find a peaceful solution. Surely the CPG does not know that, in December 2021, Russia submitted a proposal for a security agreement to the US and the other NATO member states, in which it proposed to prohibit both its own country―i.e. Russia―and NATO member states from conducting military exercises in a strip around the borders of Russia and NATO member states (including the borders of countries that only have a military alliance with NATO), defined by all parties to the agreement. Russia also proposed that short- and medium-range land-based missiles should not be deployed in areas from which targets on the territory of other states parties could be attacked. In general, nuclear weapons should not be stationed outside their own country. Finally, Russia proposed a return to the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which prohibits the permanent stationing of NATO troops in Eastern Europe. This was Russia’s last attempt to build bridges of communication with “the West”.
What an imperialism that wants to avoid military conflict, that proposes to demilitarize its borders and that wants to reverse the deployment of nuclear weapons around the world. But surely the CPG would disqualify this with words like: it is not “because they stand with the peoples’ just cause but because they want to hinder the US plans”.
The context of the war
The strategic objective of the imperialist countries is to prolong their hegemony as much as possible, particularly that of the U.S. In 1997 Brzezinski wrote the following:
“In brief, the U.S. policy goal must be unapologetically twofold: to perpetuate America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still; and to create a geopolitical framework that can absorb the inevitable shocks and strains of social-political change while evolving into the geopolitical core of shared responsibility for peaceful global management.”[6]
Twenty-four years later, in 2021, another author wrote:
“Biden and Trump had different positions on many things, but they agreed on one thing, just as REPs and DEMs in Congress have always agreed on this issue, namely, the commitment to maintain or restore U.S. global hegemony.”[7]
From the two quotations above, a central point emerges: the end of US hegemony announced by Brzezinski[8] is taking place today. From this realization derives another equally fundamental one, namely, the fact that the US and its subordinate imperialist nations will do the imaginable (and also the unimaginable) to maintain and prolong their hegemony as long as possible―and to prolong they must expand it. The CPG idea that Russia (China and Iran) and the imperialist countries are equally striving to “divide” the world in the style of World War I is a serious misconception. Otherwise, it is imperialism that has reached Russia’s borders in its endeavor to maintain and expand its hegemony (the former is not possible without the latter), not the other way around.
Needless to say, the international capitalist economy is irremediably sick, particularly those economies that have based their accumulation of the last 3 decades or so on speculation. Inflation, the energy crisis and stagnant or negative economic growth in the so-called industrialized countries are accompanied by a colossal accumulation of fictitious capital, a financial system based on “toxic” assets and extreme over-indebtedness and a growing dissociation between the speculative economy and the real economy.
At the beginning of 2023, in order to avoid a chain reaction of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve (Fed) had no choice but to inject dollars back into the banking system of other countries, which in turn meant printing “unhedged” money, or rather, future indebtedness. The Fed thus faced and faces to this day the challenge of record inflation and a banking crisis (bank liquidity crisis) at the same time[9].
According to Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, after the closure and bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank (USA) and Signature Bank (USA) and the bailout of Credit Suisse (Switzerland), the US financial authorities (Fed and FDIC) had begun to inject dollars into the central banks of other countries: the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the ECB, the Bank of Canada and the Swiss National Bank. These banks thus had access to hundreds of billions of dollars at the end of April 2023 to help mitigate the banking crisis.
Credit Suisse was bought by UBS for only $3 billion, even though the Swiss central bank bailout had poured $100 billion into the bank, making it clear that the bank’s “hole” must have been huge and its assets very toxic (derivatives). Credit Suisse was an example of the whole unhealthy structure of finance in the NATO-dominated world[10].
Over time, these phenomena will repeat themselves cyclically in ever shorter and deeper periods.
Imperialism needs to find a way to avoid the total collapse of its economy in order to maintain its hegemony and conversely it needs to avoid the total collapse of its economy. Which countries are large enough and not subordinate enough to the US to provide it with sufficient quantities of lifeblood to feed the imperialist economies and prolong their lives for a century or two? The answer is quite obvious: the economies that are NATO’s ultimate target, namely Russia and China.
This is the central dilemma of the present: Russia and China are the only two countries in the world capable of stopping NATO, and at the same time they constitute its ultimate targets. Anyone who understands this situation will easily realize that an international war is inevitable, that such a war is already in progress and who is (and will be) responsible for it: US imperialism and its criminal instrument, NATO.
To underline the above, let us look at what Brzezinski pointed out:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”[11]
Without Ukraine, Brzezinski teaches us, Russia would cease to be a Eurasian “empire” and become nothing more than an Asian country[12]. To achieve this goal, imperialism must succeed in “separating”―in political, not geographical terms―Ukraine from the “Slavic” world, to which it belongs culturally and in which Belarus and Russia should be its natural allies. A possible coordination or alliance between the Slavic countries was successfully prevented by the EU and the US in 2014 with the coup against Yanukovych.
However, despite the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the goal of separating Russia from Europe did not succeed, as Russia managed to secure Crimea and prevent the “secession” of their country from Europe. This was a strategic coup for Russia. Despite the undisputed military power of NATO and its hegemonic country, the USA, it failed to “isolate” Russia from “Europe”.
However, this was not Russia’s reaction in the Donbass[13], despite the fact that the population there voted for its independence from Ukraine in 2014[14]. Great was our joy when the Russian state, under the leadership of President Putin, finally launched the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. In 2022, the same republics voted to join Russia[15].
Despite the tardiness of the Russian response in the Donbass region, we value it highly and support it because it confronts NATO and its leading country, the U.S., there and because it demonstrates their vulnerability. This gives us hope that the monster can be beaten. Better times await humanity once imperialism is defeated. We know the history of this monster: in its 247 years of existence (since July 4, 1776), the USA went only 16 years without going to war. How much peace the world would have if the US state and the hegemonic countries of the EU lost their imperialist character!
Finally, it remains to analyze Russia’s production structure, which we will do in the following publication.
Notes
[1] On February 18, 2022, Der Spiegel published a document confirming the Russian claim that NATO had promised not to expand eastward in 1991. “NATO will not expand eastward, neither formally nor informally”, U.S. representative Raymond Seitz is quoted in the document.
Der Spiegel, Author: Klaus Wiegrefe, “Neuer Aktenfund von 1991 stützt russischen Vorwurf” (in English: “Discovery of new 1991 file supports Russian accusation”.), 18.02.2022, 13.00 hours, in: https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/nato-osterweiterung-aktenfund-stuetzt-russische-version-a-1613d467-bd72-4f02-8e16-2cd6d3285295
[2] EUR-Lex, “ASSOCIATION AGREEMENT between the European Union and its Member States, of the one part, and Ukraine, of the other part”, Document 22014A0529(01), in: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:22014A0529(01)
[3] On May 2, 2014, right-wing groups brought peaceful protesters into a trade union building in Odessa and set them on fire. 42 people burned to death. To this day, Ukrainian state authorities refuse to investigate this mass murder. A war began in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions which, according to UN figures, had caused about 15,000 deaths by the day the Russian military operation began in Ukraine.
Five references to the Odessa massacre can be found on the CPG website. One of them reads:
“The heinous crime last Friday in Odessa where neo-Nazis of the “Right Sector” burnt Russian speaking protesters alive and the bloody operation of the coup d’état government of Kiev in the eastern regions are shocking our people and all the conscious people across the planet. The people of Ukraine are being slaughtered by the open intervention of the imperialists of the USA, the EU and NATO that support the government of the nationalists and the fascists of Kiev and come into conflict with Russia over the control of the energy resources, the pipelines and the market shares. Once again it is being proved that the imperialist alliances not only do not safeguard peace for the peoples but on the contrary they lead to war and misery.”
What is really remarkable about the above quote is that the CPG manages to contextualize Russia in a negative way, even though it has nothing to do with the issue. According to the quote, those responsible for the victims in Odessa are the fascists and the US, EU and NATO that support them, but also (guess what): Russia! How can Russia be responsible for the crimes of NATO-backed fascists, according to the CPG? The answer the CPG gives us is: because Russia is in a conflict over “energy resources, pipelines and market share”. Here we see another example of the CPG’s “masterful” ability to “optimally” link cause and effect.
Source of quote: Communist Party of Greece (CPG), “Speech by KKE CC SG Dimitris Koutsoumpas at a roundtable on ‘The Dangers of Fascism in Europe’” Friday, May 9, 2014, in: https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/Speech-of-the-GS-of-the-CC-of-the-KKE-Dimitris-Koutsoumpas-at-the-round-table-on-The-dangers-of-Fascism-in-Europe/
[4] German-Foreign-Policy.com, “The Ukraine and US Security Guarantees The USA continues to insist that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is ‘imminent.’ Experts repudiate this prediction. US security guarantees are proving ineffective.”, 21.02.2022, in: https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/news/detail/8847
[5] The cease-fire was not respected by the Ukrainian side.
– Until the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were recognized by Russia, these regions were not granted the special status to which the Ukrainian central government had committed itself in the Minsk Agreement.
– In addition, an amnesty should have been granted to all population groups in Donbass that participated in the political and military conflict.
The Normandy format states had committed themselves to implementing the Minsk Agreement when they signed it. However, instead of urging Ukraine to comply with the agreement, Germany and France accused Russia of aggression and fueling the conflict in the Donbass.
[6] Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “The Grand Chessboard―American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”, p. 215
[7] Elsner, Wolfram, “Die Zeitwende―China, USA und Europa ‘nach Corona’” (in English: “The turning point―China, USA and Europe ‘after Corona’”), p. 45
[8] Zbigniew Brzezinski was security advisor to U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
[9] The economic mechanisms to solve the problem contradict each other: solving the liquidity crisis by injecting money causes inflation, which leads to a rise in interest rates and, therefore, to a worsening of the banks’ liquidity problems.
[10] We are of the opinion that the financial capitalist economic system cannot be reformed. What is needed is an economy that serves the general social welfare and the integral development of all members of society. The basic requirements for such a society are an economy based on real production (and not on speculation), a strong planing state the most important areas of the economy, a fairer distribution of social wealth and aiming at the construction of socialism.
[11] Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “The Grand Chessboard―American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”, p. 46
[12] All this, of course, regardless of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, irrelevant in this respect as it is not a country that can enter into economic and political relations with European countries.
[13] The Russian government justified the years-long delay in rescuing the Donbass population by claiming that in 2014 there was not enough military power and that a military operation in Ukraine had to be militarily secured. We will refrain from assessing these facts here, as we believe that Russia’s decision to conduct the Special Military Operation in Ukraine was ultimately the right one. In this regard, our opinion on the delay of this event is no longer relevant at this point and it is only appropriate to express our sincere support for Russia’s actions.
[14] The results of such voting were:
– Lughansk: 96.2% of voters, considering a voter turnout of 80%, spoke in favor of the independence of the Luhansk People’s Republic.
– Donesk: 89.07% of voters, considering a voter turnout of 74%, supported the Donesk People’s Republic.
[15] The results of the vote were overwhelming:
– Donesk People’s Republic voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation in a referendum with 99.23% of the vote, with 97.51% voter turnout.
– Lughansk People’s Republic―98.42%.
– In the Zaporizhzhya region, 93.11% of voters voted in favor of the region’s accession to Russia, with a voter turnout of 85.4%.
– In Kherson, 87.05% of residents voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation (allegedly occupied by Russia), with a voter turnout of 76.8%.
