A
socialist perspective…
UKRAINE:
No to the U.S.-orchestrated fascist coup
By Jeff Mackler
April 10, 2022
Serious
political analysis on the left always begins with the facts. Substituting
abstract theories not based on facts is always a deadend
for the socialist movement, today terribly divided over how to evaluate and act
on the unfolding and complex events attendant to the Ukraine War and the Russian
invasion.
Let
U.S. begin with some hard facts and context that are today tragically absent
from the assessments of large sectors of the left and antiwar movements in the U.S.
and worldwide.
2014
Maidan Square fascist rooftop snipers
The
Ukraine tragedy began in February 2014 when rooftop fascist snipers opened fire
on Maidan Square Kiev protestors assembled to resist the Victor Yanukovych
government’s austerity measures. The fascists murdered almost 100 in cold
blood, including some of their own for good measure. Yanukovych, the elected
president, was instantly blamed and pilloried by the world’s corporate media,
paving the political road for what followed. He fled for his life.
These
facts were attested to by U.S. representative to the European Union, Victoria
Nuland. They were based on her taped remarks. No one has denied them. Nuland
revealed that the rooftop assassins were of the fascist Svoboda Party and Right
Sector ilk and not Yanukovych’s police or military. The armed thugs had come
from across Ukraine and beyond to dominate the Maidan events. U.S. Senator John
McCain shared the stage with fascist orator and Svoboda Party leader, Oleg Tyahnybok, while Nuland handed out U.S. friendship cookies.
McCain roused the crowd with promises of “democracy,
freedom and independence,” contingent, of course, on Ukraine’s reversing the
government’s already-approved bail out agreements with Russia.
The
fascist Svoboda Party leader, Andriy Parubiy led the
storming of the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, barring the two largest and
majority parties from entrance. Some were previously armed and trained at
U.S.-organized training camps in western Ukraine. Others secured weapons by
storming local police stations. The fascists declared themselves the new
government. The March 5, 2014 on-line British
Channel 4 news account told the story well: “The man facing down Putin’s
aggression as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy.
He oversees national security for the nation, having previously served as
[self-appointed] ‘security commandant’ during the anti-government protests in
Kiev.”
Channel
4 identified Parubiy as a member of fascist Svoboda
Party and a founder of its pro-Nazi predecessor, the Social National Party,
which traces its roots to the pro-Nazis Ukrainian movements of WWII. The
British television station’s account continued: “Overseeing the armed forces
alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National
Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of
the Right Sector—a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were
ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine.”
Other
Svoboda neo-Nazis leaders instantly “elected” to the top echelons of the coup
government were Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych,
Ecology Minister Andriy Mokhnyk, Agriculture Minister
Ihor Shvaika, and acting
Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitsky. In 2016 Parubiy became Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament.
The
fascists in power instantly banned the Russian language from schools and public
institutions. They ordered the Ukrainian Army, replete with its now formally
integrated fascist Azov, Aidar, Dnipro and
Tornado battalions, to march on the Donbass in the east to take control of
this largely Russian-speaking population. Now with “government” approval, they
attacked anti-coup demonstrators across the country. In Odessa, they murderer
48 coup protestors outright, setting a trade union building afire and
slaughtering survivors who were compelled to leap off the flaming edifice. The
coup “government” and its subsequent manifestations, formally “rehabilitated”
the infamous. WWII era fascist leader Stephan Bandera, designating major
streets in his name, despite the objections from European Union leaders.
Bandera was a Nazis collaborator whose troops slaughter tens of thousands of
Ukrainian Jews at the onset of the war when Hitler’s troops entered Ukraine.
All
leftwing parties were banned by the coup government. The bailout agreements
negotiated by the Yanukovych government with Russia, on terms far less onerous
than those offered by the European Union, were revoked, and instead, an
economically punishing “Association Agreement” with the European Union, that
largely subordinated Ukraine to the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund,
was approved.
U.S.
appoints Ukraine president
The
question then was immediately posed. Who would take Yanukovych’s place?
Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt,
made that decision. Again, in her own taped remarks, Nuland named Arseniy
Yatsenyuk, a hard right member of Fatherland, the ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian
formation. The Europeans, especially the Germans, wanted a more moderate
figure to head Ukraine. They favored Vitaly Klitschko, a boxer turned
politician with more moderate views than Yatsenyuk. During the hacked
call, Nuland blurted out, “F***K the EU,” and, of course, the U.S. pick,
Yatsenyuk, became the Prime Minister of Ukraine, forming a coalition governing
majority with the fascist Svoboda Party. The coup’s finance minister was U.S.
citizen and high-ranking diplomat, Natalie Jeresko,
who was granted Ukrainian citizenship the day after the coup. Joe Biden’s son
took a position on the board of Ukraine’s largest natural gas company earning a
monthly salary of $50,000.
The
U.S.-backed rump government declared itself the leader of the nation. Nuland
remarked in her intercepted phone call, that Vice President Joseph Biden, in
charge of the Ukraine events at that time, would give the ultimate "atta
boy" to the coup leaders. The U.S. had previously laid the ground for the
coup, pouring $5 billion into Ukraine over the years to support hundreds of
NGOs aimed at moving Ukraine into its orbit, one way or another. To our
knowledge, none of the facts above have been refuted.
U.S.
military base established in Ukraine
Shortly
after the 2014 coup, in 2015, the coup makers established the so-called
International Peacekeeping and Security Center, a U.S.-run western Ukraine
military base, near the Polish border, that had been, according to the March
14, 2022 New York Times, “a hub for Western
military troops to train Ukrainian forces since 2015.” The
Times added, “Troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland,
Sweden and Denmark, among others, have trained 35,000 Ukrainians there under a
project called ‘Operation Unifier.’” This is the “operation” that aimed to
forcibly “unite” western Ukraine, with the Russian-speaking eastern and
southern populations that rejected the fascist coup. U.S. paid troops included
the modern-day descendants of the privatized Blackwater forces of Erik Prince that slaughtered civilians in Iraq during that “weapons of
mass destruction” regime change war that killed 1.5 million Iraqis. Need we
note that with the exception of Sweden, all the above
nations are NATO affiliates, training, arming and financing non-NATO Ukraine to
wage war on behalf of NATO’s U.S. puppet master?
Ukrainian
Army desertions
Here
we add that the official Ukrainian armies in the east and south also rejected
the 2014 coup as they did orders from the coup government to turn their guns on
the Russian-speaking populations. Indeed, with near zero exceptions the
Ukrainian soldiers deserted the Ukrainian Army and joined the Russian Army
without a shot being fired. The same with the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking
population in Crimea. They voted 97 percent to affiliate with Russia in a
referendum result contested by virtually no one. The turnout was 87 percent.
The
March 14, 2022 Times article concludes, “But
Western nations withdrew their forces ahead of Russia’s [February, 2022]
invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the base has been used by Ukraine to train and
organize the thousands of foreigners [from 28 nations] who have arrived in the
country and volunteered to help defend it.” This single paragraph comes close
to defying rational explanation, unless, of course, it is The
Times’ explanation of the instant transformation of a secret U.S./NATO
military base operating on Ukrainian territory into a solely Ukrainian-run base
aimed at training the Ukrainian version of jihadist terrorists. No doubt these
instantly discovered “foreign fighters” suddenly flocking to defend “Ukraine’s
freedom” are akin to those jihadists murderers armed, trained, financed and deployed by the U.S./NATO/Gulf State monarchies
to take down the Syrian government in that ten-year failed U.S. regime change
war. 500,000 Syrians died in that U.S. regime change horror. By all accounts,
today’s Ukrainian “freedom fighters” were drawn from the ranks of Europe’s
growing fascist and far right fanatics. Ukraine has become their central focus.
Imperialist
obfuscation
From
2015 to just before the Russian invasion, that is, for seven years, the U.S.
and NATO forces have been arming, training and
financing, inside Ukraine, the coup government’s war against the Russian-speaking
population. That war has killed some 14,000 people in the Donbass and wounded
50,000, mostly civilians. That the victims are pilloried for defending their
lives and for seeking Russian aid, constitutes yet another travesty of
fundamental human and democratic rights, not to mention the right of an
oppressed people to self-determination, that is, to be free from annihilation
at the hands of the U.S.-installed fascist coup government.
Refugee
crisis
We
will add here that in addition to the refugee tragedy of some two-plus million
Ukrainians fleeing the war to the west, mostly to Poland, almost 800,000 Russian-speaking
Ukrainians have fled to the east, that is, to Russia. We stand in full
solidarity with the terrified war refugees fleeing to the east and west. Yet we
aim our main fire against the U.S. government and its U.S.-dominated NATO
imperialist alliance, centrally responsible for the still unfolding Ukraine
catastrophe. We add that we categorically reject the coup government’s
segregating out Ukrainians of African and Middle East origin, who have been
shunted to the end of the line in the face of NATO ally’s racist, white supremacist
policies refusing to accept immigrants “who don’t look like U.S.” Yesterday’s
Polish and Hungarian NATO governments, whose, virulent anti-immigrant venom
helped power them to office, have become today’s instant converts to the U.S.
“humanitarian” orchestrated agenda!
Russian
public opinion polls
An
April 2, 2022 front-page article by Anton Troianovski, Moscow Bureau Chief for The New York
Times, previously Moscow Bureau Chief of The Washington Post,
who spent nine years with The Wall Street Journal in Berlin and
New York, apparently missed the eye of U.S. government censors. Entitled,
“Shaken at First, Many Russians Now Rally Behind Putin’s Invasion,” Troianovski wrote, “The public’s endorsement of the
war lacks the patriotic groundswell that greeted the annexation of Crimea in
2014. But polls released this week by Russia’s most respected independent
pollster, Levada, showed Mr. Putin’s approval rating hitting 83
percent, up from 69 percent in January. Eighty-one percent said they supported
the war, describing the need to protect Russian speakers as its primary justification.”
That some three-quarters of a million Russian-speaking Ukrainians, mostly from
the beleaguered Donbass region, have fled the fascist-led attacks, undoubtedly
weighed heavily on the poll results. That Levada is described as “Russia’s
most respected independent pollster,” is even more revealing. For the past
eight years, prior to the Russian invasion, a state of perpetual war has
prevailed in the Donbass region, with the U.S. government backing the
reconstituted and ever U.S./NATO reinforced Ukrainian Army’s unrelenting
attacks – spearheaded by fascist troops that have been formally incorporated
into the Ukrainian army and National Guard.
Putin’s
current popularity notwithstanding, there can be no justification for his
repression of dissent, including those who disagree with his war policies,
including some of our own comrades in Russia. In the U.S., Biden’s repression
takes on the character of the classic iron fist in a velvet glove, wherein the
virtual monopoly of the corporate media enforces an Orwellian consensus. And
even here, when a rare ray of light breaks through the social media blockade,
it is increasingly stamped out by the online agencies resort to exclusion and
banishment. Even here, we must add, that
Biden’s approval ratings, at less than 50 percent, tells us in Shakespeare’s
words, “All is not well in Denmark.”
The
Minsk Protocols
The
early post-coup years were punctuated by a series of negotiations referred to
as the Minsk Protocols. Signed on Sept. 5, 2014 and
Feb. 12, 2015, after negotiations between the Ukrainian coup government, Russia,
Germany and France, they were purportedly aimed at stopping the
bloodshed via a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front
lines, release of prisoners of war, and a Ukrainian constitutional reform
granting self-government to specified areas of Donbass. In practice, none of
these Minsk Protocols were implemented, as the Ukrainian Army’s ceaseless
incursions into the Donbass region aimed at subjugation and conquest as opposed
to pursuit of a negotiated settlement. Some 100 “ceasefire” agreements were
repeatedly violated, while the fascist-led Ukrainian military wreaked untold
horror and devastation on the population. Pressured by the U.S., the
Ukrainian government refused to implement the Minsk-projected elections
in Luhansk and Donetsk. Endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution,
the gist of the Minsk accords was to preserve the territorial integrity of
Ukraine via a federalization process that would return the breakaway republics
in exchange for their local autonomy. The latter implied that the resources of a
federated Donbass, especially its vast fossil fuel reserves, and access to
pipelines, would be under the control of local/regional governments, a
proposition that the U.S. outright rejected. U.S. imperialism has since shifted
the Ukrainian goalposts, in essence, moving to obliterate controlling Ukrainian
capitalist fossil fuel interests in the east in favor of the U.S. corporate oil
monopolies – yet another U.S. imperialist oil war if there ever was one.
Welcome
to the embrace of the imperialist war machine
Today,
admission to the good graces of the U.S. imperialist establishment requires
hailing the “democratic” U.S.-led NATO imperial war pact. We decline the
invitation. We decline to condemn the Donbass people for asking for Russian aid
and receiving it. We decline to condemn the Ukrainian and Russian-speaking
populations’ opposition to the U.S.-engineered fascist coup and its U.S./NATO
perpetuation. We decline to condone NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and its
establishing nuclear weapons along Russia’s 1500-mile border. That 27 million Russians
died in fighting Hitler’s fascist WWII invasion has not been obliterated from Russian
popular consciousness.
And
we decline to join the near-deafening bi-partisan war cries, echoed daily by
virtually every U.S. corporation, every military contractor, every oil
behemoth, every major media outlet and every politician to pursue war in
Ukraine without hesitation. If there is any U.S. debate over the war among the
corporate parties it is over whether to risk nuclear war via the U.S.
implementing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, a doomsday scenario if there ever
was one.
For
an independent socialist Ukraine
We
harbor no illusions in the class nature and politics of Putin’s Russia. We have
long ago characterized Russia as a capitalist-imperialist state headed by a
predatory capitalist class of Stalinist origin. Putin‘s
statements citing Czarist Russia’s Great White Russian Empire’s imperialist
claim to Ukraine and Putin’s repudiation of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and
Trotsky’s historic championing of an independent socialist Ukraine must be
condemned by all serious antiwar and socialist fighters. We have no truck with
Russia’s 83 billionaire capitalist elite as we have none with the 800+ U.S.
billionaires and China’s 1000! We note with revulsion that today’s
neo-fascist and far right newfound U.S. allies in Poland and Hungary were
yesterday’s Putin admirers. We note with contempt Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky’s newly-proclaimed affinity for Zionist
Israel’s model of a militarized state aimed at the subjugation of oppressed
people.
Vladimir
Putin’s government is no friend of working people. The recent Russian Army
intervention in Kazakhstan to crush a nationwide working
class rebellion informs U.S. once again that placing political
confidence in any capitalist government or leader is inimical to fundamental
socialist principles.
The
fight for an independent socialist Ukraine today resides only with the workers
of Ukraine and Russia and never with their capitalist oppressors, whether in
Ukraine, Russia or NATO. The construction today, of
mass socialist parties, however difficult, aimed at breaking the
capitalist-imperialist stranglehold on every aspect of public life, is the
starting point for a socialist future free from every form of exploitation, oppression and denial of human dignity.
Any
notion that political or military support to the present U.S.-puppet Ukrainian
coup government is the guarantor of Ukrainian independence is as fundamentally
flawed as granting support to any of the myriad U.S.-installed governments the
world over. The latest example of Afghanistan stands out as a classic example
where after 20 years of U.S. war and occupation, the U.S. puppet government
there lacked the slightest credibility among the Afghan masses. The same with
the U.S. puppet regimes from the Dominican Republic, Vietnam
and Chile in decades past, to Bolivia, Honduras and Haiti today, to name a few.
The right to
self-determination of Ukraine’s oppressed Russian-speaking minorities
The
U.S. imperialist government, with 1,100 military bases around the world in 110
countries is by far the world’s greatest purveyor of force and violence In contrast China maintains a single military base outside
its borders – in Djibouti, at the Horn of Africa, while Russia maintains some
seven military bases, mostly in the former Soviet Republics and one in Syria.
U.S. imperialism spends more on its military—at least $1 trillion annually,
including the CIA budget—than most of the world combined. That Russia and
China are capitalist/imperialist states does not negate our responsibility to
assess their actions in the context of unfolding events. Were we to blind
ourselves to the reality of the events that transpired in Ukraine since the
2014 U.S.-instigated fascist coup and place an equal sign between U.S. and Russian
imperialism, we would be gravely mistaken. We would be
substituting the proposition that whoever fired the first shot is to be
categorically condemned, rather than assessing what caused that shot to be
fired. That U.S. imperialism planned and orchestrated a fascist-led coup aimed
in part at obliterating the minority Russian-speaking people, 30 percent of the
population, and that the same U.S. government seeks to orchestrate Ukraine’s
affiliation to NATO, replete with nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep, cannot
be removed from any serious assessment of today’s unfolding Ukrainian war. We
are not neutral with regard to Ukraine’s oppressed Russian-speaking
population’s right to exist, that is, their right to self-determination. They
have legitimately sought Russian aid. We do not object to Russia’s providing it
even if Putin’s motives for extending it are dubious to say the least.
Without
the slightest equivocation, we support this right of all poor and oppressed
nations to be free from imperialist war and conquest. This principle fully
applies to all beleaguered nations, including Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
In
Syria, the Bashar al Assad government fell victim to a U.S./NATO/Gulf State
monarchy 10-year war that slaughtered 500,000 Syrians. With the U.S.-backed
jihadist armies occupying three-quarters of Syria, poised to take Damascus and
with the U.S. government’s Secretary of State at that moment, John Kerry,
preparing to install yet another coup government beholden to the U.S., the
Syrians, exercising their right to self-determination, asked for Russian aid.
The result was the defeat of that U.S. regime change horror.
History
of U.S. oil wars
The
same behemoth U.S. oil monopolies on whose behalf the U.S. government wages war
today against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Libya Bolivia, and beyond, were critical
players in the monstrous wars that killed millions and raped the planet in
years and decades past. Four-plus million were slaughtered in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; 400,000 in Guatemala by U.S.-trained
death squads; 50,000 slaughtered by Batista’s U.S.-backed dictatorship in Cuba;
60,000 murdered by Somoza’s Nicaragua dictatorship; 60,000 by Pinochet’s
Chilean death squads and tens of thousands more in Argentina, Panama, Haiti,
Colombia, Dominican Republic, Grenada and Brazil – all by U.S.-backed and/or
installed dictatorships! The modern era list of U.S. atrocities never ends; 1.5
million were murdered in Iraq; two million more in the U.S.-orchestrated
1980-88 Iraq/Iran War aimed at obliterating both nation’s competitive oil
resources; tens of thousands in the U.S.-backed El Sisi Egyptian coup; one
million in Afghanistan and today millions perishing in the U.S.-backed Saudi
Arabian genocide in Yemen.
Unprecedented
fossil fuel plunder in Ukraine
Today
the U.S. warmakers have scaled unprecedented heights in a scheme to monopolize
the world’s largest fossil fuel markets – Western Europe and beyond – by
eliminating cheap Russian oil and gas scheduled to be sent directly through the
undersea Nord Steam 2 pipeline. The U.S. scheme, forced upon reluctant German
and French officials, contemplates closing existing Russian pipelines and Nord
Stream 2 and substituting high cost U.S.-fracked
liquid national gas. The coup government’s U.S.-backed military conquest of
eastern and southern Ukraine was seen as a prerequisite to completing this
barely disguised and latest U.S. fossil fuel war – a first magnitude
confrontation at a time when the continued, if not expanded use of this deadly
resource, spells doom for all humankind.
•
We reject the imperial propagandists’ disgusting characterization of a U.S.-backed
fascist coup as a popular rebellion.
•
We reject the corporate media-created fantasy of a U.S. imperialism driven by
benevolent intentions.
•
We reject the absurd contention that the U.S.-installed Ukraine coup regime is
today an independent government beholden to the will of the Ukrainian
people.
U.S.
Out Now! Hands off Ukraine!
Abolish
NATO!
No
to U.S./NATO nuclear war-threatening “no-fly zones” over Ukraine!
Self-determination
for the people of Donbass!
For
an independent socialist Ukraine
No
to U.S.-backed fascist coups and the establishment of U.S. puppet governments!
No
to U.S. oil wars everywhere!
$Billions for
human needs; not a penny for war!
For a rapid
transition to a safe, clean, fossil fuel free energy system that guarantees
quality jobs and security for all!
Close all military
bases the world over beginning with the 1,100 U.S. bases in 110 countries,
followed by Russia’s seven bases and China’s single base in Djibouti!
[Jeff Mackler is a
staffwriter for Socialist Action newspaper. He can be
reached at socialistaction@lmi.net or
socialistaction.org]