Ukraine - February 11th, 2022

Ukraine: a nation split by Putin and imperialism,
a strangled revolution

Ukraine has once again become a “hot zone”, but this time it is not the masses with their revolutionary offensive that put Putin and imperialism in check, as they did between the end of 2013 and 2015, but rather the counterrevolutionary blows and the claws of U.S. imperialism that has come for everything, after strangling the revolution -with the invaluable help of Putin-, those who put Ukraine up against the ropes.
If today Anglo-American imperialism can go till the end over Ukraine, it is because they have been able to strangle and suffocate the enormous revolution of 2014.
Ukraine went up in 2014 as a "capital of the revolution", a key revolutionary focus, as we will see here, due to its strategic location, its genesis, its heroism with which it managed to set up true soviets of workers and soldiers. That is why it was one of the points where imperialism focused all its forces to crush it, just as it did in Syria. It was about dealing certain defeats to the proletariat so that the revolution does not spread like wildfire, as it did in the Middle East. Ukraine was a hinge revolution, which proposed expanding to Europe and Russia. Imperialism risked everything to stop this path and, as we shall see, it used its two agents: the actuvity of fascism whose role was to massace from Kiev to impose IMF's plans, but also that of the "popular front" in Donbass that Putin imposed together with the pro-Russian oligarchy from the east -which instituted a real hell of hunger and death on the masses-. They were the two ends of the same rope to strangle the revolution. The partition, the robbery and the distribution of the nation that imperialism imposed together with Putin is what allowed the development of the current situation.

The genesis of the current disputes and the events of 2014

At the end of 2013, Ukraine went into default, drowned by the fraudulent debt with the IMF. The then president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, was negotiating with the EU so that the latter lend him the millions of dollars for the repayment of the external debt. Putin offered to be the guarantor of the repayment to imperialism, with 15 billion dollars. A huge gap opened up between the different Ukrainian bourgeois gangs, the Western gang, which is linked with Europe both commercially and financially, and the Eastern gang, wholly linked to Russian industry. The conditions for the revolution to emerge in the midst of these gaps and brutal crisis were more than ripe, so the "pro-European" bourgeoisie of Kiev went ahead and took advantage of the just hatred of the masses against the Yanukovych government that had  unloaded the entire attack of the IMF on their shoulders. This cynical bourgeoisie rode on the mass movement in Maidan Square, promising that Maastricht would end the hardships they suffered out of their miserable $300 wages. As we said then, it was the brutal scourge of hunger, misery and exploitation of the Putin-allied government against the masses for imposing the IMF plans, which pushed the masses more and more into the arms of Maastricht that promised them the “paradise of goods displayed on full supermarkets shelves”, saying that this was their way out. The exploited masses then fled from the hot coals of Putin to the boiling pan of European Maastricht.
In the eastern part of the country, at that time the masses did not come out to defend the “pro-Russian” president as they had once done in 2009 in the so-called “orange revolution”. The reason is they felt the same hatred as their brothers in Kiev against the attack of the executor Yanukovych, on behalf of the IMF.
The bourgeoisie, imposing the democratic counterrevolution, closed the gaps at the heights with a policy of pacts in 2014, agreeing on the resignation of Yanukovych, the appointment of an interim president, and then calling for some early elections - supervised by NATO - that erected the puppet government of chocolate tycoon Poroshenko.

This new government deepened  IMF's attack already underway. But this time the masses of Donbass, the miners who saw that their mines were going to close, came out to fight in defense of their lives and their work. Poroshenko launched a ferocious counterrevolutionary attack against the workers and revolting masses of the east as early as 2014, but the army quickly split down horizontally by its base and the common soldiers of Kiev went over to fight on the side of the masses, with the emergence of true workers’ and soldiers’ committees. The Ukrainian workers refused to go to a fratricidal war and Poroshenko could not recruit soldiers. The policy of using the assorted fascist paramilitary from Kiev was then combined with a policy of class collaboration in the east, with Putin and the top Ukrainian “pro-Russian” oligarchs and businessmen framing the “republic of Novorossia” fallacy, separating the the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces from the rest of the country and leaving them under the Russian orbit. So they divided the Ukrainian proletariat, now promising that as allies to Putin, they would avoid the collapse of their lives that the "pro-European" Poroshenko was imposing. Just as in 2013, what the Ukrainian revolution had planned for succeeding was the unity of the East and West proletarians. What they sought to prevent with the partition of Ukraine was the joint fight of the workers from the east arriving in Kiev, together with their siblings from the west, raising the same demands that they had and still have for decent wages, work and bread, the only way to free Ukraine from IMF, the clutches of Maastricht and the jackal of imperialism, Putin.

To stop the mass offensive and strangle a revolution for bread that tried to stand up at every step, German, French imperialism and Putin signed the Minsk Pact, managed from behind by U.S. imperialism. In this way they split Ukraine in two: the western region was left in the hands of the Kiev gang, a NATO puppet, and the eastern region was controlled by Putin. Moreover the latter was left with the control of the Crimean Peninsula for his services to defeat the revolution. Stalinism, applauded by all the renegades of Trotskyism, sent "brigades" that strictly guaranteed the fulfillment of the Minsk pacts and the imposture of the "Republic of Novorossia", acting as a true fifth column, assassinating stealthily  those who dared not respect the pact and wanted to advance their offensive towards Kiev.
If this deception could be mounted on the masses, it was essentially due to the actions of the treacherous leaderships, i.e., the European labor aristocracies and bureaucracies -and the social-imperialist currents- that had assured for years that Maastricht "could be democratized" and so it was necessary to fight " for a more social Maastricht”. On the other hand, Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism painted the jackal of imperialism Putin as “anti-imperialist” and “friend of the peoples”. At the same time, they said that Biden was “progressive” and “democratic” and that he was the best option against “fascist Trump”. In this way they subjected the world proletariat to the bourgeoisie at every step, passing off their enemies as allies, separating the struggle of the central countries from that of their brothers and sisters in the semi-colonial world... And after imposing their outrages, they blamed and  still blame the masses "for not intervening independently in their struggles."
On the basis of a split Ukraine and with the revolution strangled, imperialism, as we see today, deepens its offensive.

The Ukraine alternative was and is clear: either the Ukrainian working class unifies its ranks and a Soviet, socialist and independent Ukraine succeeds, or Ukraine will become a colony or protectorate of the IMF and Wall Street. Ukraine, today as yesterday, either becomes a bastion of the revolution to the West towards Europe and to the East towards Russia, or it will be a bastion of the counter-revolution on the continent against the world proletariat.