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Ukraine - May 11, 2022

In the ongoing Russian invasion… it is the workers who lay the dead in the slaughter and destruction of the nation!

Only the unity of the Ukrainian working class from Donbass to Kyiv and fighting alongside their Russian and European siblings can stop the massacre and liberate the nation

In the last days, the siege and the massacre spread in the Ukraine, and especially in the city of Mariupol, have occupied the scene. This city, which houses the largest commercial port in the Sea of Azov and is recognized as "the capital of steel" for being one of the most important metallurgical and machinery production centers in the country, has an estimated population of 400,000 people, and it is believed that more than 100,000, that is, a quarter of its total population, are surrounded and besieged in the already whole demolished Mariupol.

To know the magnitude of this true workingclass city, one could start by saying that among the large steel mills in Mariupol is Azovstal, a plant that employs 11,000 workers in a huge 11km2 industrial establishment. Azovstal is one of the largest steel plants in Europe, producing 4 million tons of steel per year and exporting most of its production to the world. Of these 11,000 workers, it is estimated that only around 4,500 of them managed to emigrate, fleeing from the criminal siege imposed on them by Russia, stating that Azovstal should not be destroyed, but rather closed so that "not even a fly could get out or enter". While Russia uses the false rhetoric that it is waging a battle against fascism to liberate the nation, more than 2,000 steel workers with their families, wives and children find themselves locked up in the steel mill trying to survive, with a lack of water, food and communications.
Between the Azovstal plant and the giant Illich (the second largest steel company in Ukraine, lso located in Mariupol) alone, they sum up 40,000 workers, that is, 10% of the total population of the city. Azovstal and Ilyich accounted for about a third of Ukraine's crude steel production in 2019.

Both steel plants belong to the Metinvest Holding conglomerate, whose owner is the great Ukrainian oligarch Akhmetov, who until the Maidan Square uprising (in 2014) was a "pro-Russian", an ally of Putin, but since then he has been financing the party of the current president, Zelensky.
In turn, Mentinvest belongs to System Capital Managment which includes 100 companies, whose largest conglomerates are Mentinvest (mining and metals) and DTEK (energy and heavy engineering). System Capital Managment has a number of employees amounting to 200 thousand. Ukraine is the 12th largest steel producer in the world and Metinvest accounted for 45% of the country's crude steel production last year.

Now, if we are talking about the large factories in Ukraine, we cannot fail to mention the largest integrated steel company in the country, the ArcelorMittal plant, in the city of Kryvyi Rih, just 400 kilometers from Mariupol. This plant has 24,000 workers, covering the entire production route, from iron ore extraction and coke production to the manufacture of finished metal products and profiled steel rolled material, among others.
The Kryvyi Rih steelworks was privatized in 2005 and bought by the French company ArcelorMittal, for just 4.8 billion dollars, a derisory figure. Until its privatization in 2005 it had 57 thousand workers, it had farms, hospitals and schools, and the entire city of Kryvyi Rih with its 650 thousand inhabitants was organized around this huge factory. In 2011, only 37,000 workers were left producing, and at the beginning of 2022, only 24,000 workers had to organize themselves to guarantee the entire production cycle: from ore extraction, in open pit mines and underground extraction, to steel smelting, for Russian oil and arms industry and for the world market. And when Russian forces threatened to reach the city of Kryvyi Rih, all the managers fled to Poland, leaving the workers alone to defend the plant, their source of employment, organize production under siege and, in early March when it was required, they went through the complicated process of shutting down the blast furnaces. It is noteworthy that Putin did not even touch a sheet of metal in this ArcelorMittal plant of French imperialism and it was soon back in production.
They are the same super-exploited ArcelorMittal workers who went on strike in 2018 demanding investment in machinery renovation, better working conditions and salary increases, because they have one of the lowest industrial salaries in the world, earning 20 times less than their brothers in the imperialist countries, and that in 2021 they had just a derisory 1% increase that was devoured by Ukrainian inflation. That is why it is not surprising that, already before the Russian invasion, 20% of Ukrainian workers had been forced to migrate to imperialist Europe to carry out the worst jobs, since Ukraine has the lowest average salary (USD 420) and the lowest average pension (USD 110) in Europe.
As we have said, Mariupol is also a port city, the second largest in Ukraine, strategically located on the Sea of Azov, a subsidiary to the Black Sea. With its deep quays, it is the largest port in the Azov Sea region. In normal times, Mariupol is a key export center for Ukraine's steel, iron, machinery, coal and corn that are exported to the world. Through the ports of Mariupol, Odessa, Mykolaev and Kherson, 95% of these exports are shipped. The number of port workers in Ukraine exceeds 80 thousand.

Despite the fact that the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, product of the laziness of the Stalinist bureaucracy, contaminated more than 150 thousand km2 of the black lands of Ukraine, it is still considered "the breadbasket of the world", with the capacity to feed 600 million people.
Ukraine is the country with the largest arable land in Europe (more than 56% of its territory). In 2020-2021 it was the world's fourth largest exporter of grains and fifth world producer of wheat. In 2019 it was the main exporter of sunflower seeds and sunflower oil, and is also among the largest producers and exporters of barley, potatoes, corn, rye, honey, wheat, among others. In the field and fishing, more than 2 million workers work.

And to this enormous weight of the working class, we must add the more than 500 thousand mining workers who feed the world with their production. Ukraine, recognized for its production and coal reserves for the domestic market and Russia mainly, has 12% of the world's manganese reserves and the largest iron reserves of which it is the third largest producer in the world, as well as titanium and shale gas. Also, 20% of the gas that feeds Europe passes through Ukraine and the country has the third largest gas production in the continent.
Ukraine is the country with one of the largest concentrations of workers in Europe, and in the world. With 44 million inhabitants, it has 15 million workers, 2 million 300 thousand of which are industrial workers. And we are only talking about officially registered workers; though, we know that in Ukraine there is an abundance of unregistered workers in precarious or casual jobs. And in turn, these data do not consider the workers of Lugansk and Donetsk, who are around 3 million, concentrating more than 200 thousand only in the coal mining industry. This is the Ukrainian working class that the bourgeoisie and the imperialist press, and also the currents that speak in the name of the working class, want to hide.

The currents that speak on behalf of the workers and do not state what is the path and the tasks for the working class to stop the massacre of Putin, the assassin hired by imperialism, are letting the Ukrainian working class die.

U.S. and European imperialism and Putin's white army are preparing a new pact for the partition of Ukraine, leaving the nation even more subjugated and looted as a protectorate colony. So they need to crush and defeat the working class, which they will only be able to do by dividing their ranks between the workers of Donbass and the workers of Western Ukraine, as they already did to defeat the Ukrainian revolution of 2014.
Russia has begun to deepen this policy of division of the Ukrainian masses. Donetsk and Lugansk have been under their control since 2014, as well as in the cities recently occupied by Moscow and that it administers in a relatively stable way, such as Kherson; they have already appointed regional authorities, they want to impose the ruble as currency, they have began to pay pensions and subsidies that did not come from Kyiv due to the war and regulations and administrative forms typical of Russia are applied, as well as the reopening of schools under the Russian curriculum and with the Russian language.

The bourgeois gangs, Putin and imperialism lick their teeth thinking about the partition and sharing of Ukraine. To do this they manipulate the national feelings of the masses, using them to their advantage and exacerbating these feelings to face the working class against each other.

But the Ukrainian working class has nothing to defend, only chains to break. And it has the same demands for work and decent wages, from the Donbass to Kyiv. He has the same need to defend his home and his family. It is the working class, therefore, the only one that, uniting its ranks and leading all the exploited masses, can break with imperialism, break with the IMF, expropriate the land, the factories and the banks and liberate the nation with the worker and socialist revolution.
It is even the Ukrainian working class that can truly give the right to self-determination to the masses of Donbass. Thus, the whole Ukrainian working class would overcome the division and weld its unity.
The Ukrainian working class needs to unite in defense of the nation by attacked Moscow and threatened by NATO!
But they can't do it alone.
The traitors leaderships, Stalinism and the workers' bureaucracies divide the ranks and the struggle of the workers of the oppressed countries from those of the workers of the central countries. This is how they separate the Ukrainian workers from their European and Russian siblings. This allows the imperialist powers and Putin to unload a brutal attack against the masses, in Western Europe, in Russia and against the Ukrainian nation.

The European and Russian working class must take it into their own hands and fight together with their siblings in Ukraine to disarm NATO, stop Putin's war machine, expel the IMF from Ukraine and nationalize without payment and under workers' control all imperialist companies and the millionaire oligarchs allied either to Moscow or Frankfurt in the plundering of the Ukraine and the super-exploitation of their working class.

The Russian proletariat in particular has it in their hands to stop this massacre. The task is none other than to set up a movement to defeat Putin's white counterrevolutionary troops and the fascist Orthodox Church, of equal or greater magnitude than the one that was set up in the United States against the U.S. massacre in Vietnam and then in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A key battalion of the European proletariat is bleeding to death in Ukraine. There is no time to lose.
Throughout Europe, from Portugal to the Russian steps: the same class, the same enemy, the same struggle!

Eliza Funes and Nadia Briante

Mariupol destroyed

Factory of Arcelor Mittal

Workers of Arcelor Mittal

Crackdown in Russia in a protest against the war

Occupation of southern and eastern Ukraine:
From the Donbas to Transnistria passing through "Taurida"?

After a first stage of the war, a few weeks ago Putin said he had withdrawn from Kyiv to concentrate on the Donbas. But we see that the Russian occupation goes somewhat further than the Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts in the Donbass. A true occupation with a horseshoe-shaped extension unfolds from Kharkov, in the northwest of the country, almost to Odessa, in the south, passing through the east and intermediate territories. Meanwhile, we learned of incidents and threats in the pro-Russian territory of Transnistria in neighboring Moldova, to which Putin could tie his Ukrainian horseshoe, giving rise to an internationalization of the conflict.
In the intermediate territories that go from Donbas to Odessa we find the Oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhia, from whose large cities not only have Putin's troops not withdrawn but, in addition, the Russian flag is already flying in them. To justify this fact, there is the circumstance that the Governor of Crimea, occupied since 2014 by Putin, has proposed in the Russian Duma to restore the old province of Taurida in the Russian empire , which is the current territory of the Crimean Peninsula plus a big area that extends to the south of the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhia. These are the oblasts that connect with Donetsk to the east and to the right with Mariupol. Thus, if occupying this imaginary "Taurida", Putin would have under his power a true annexation, the three great industrial cities of the Ukrainian south: Kherson, Melitopol and Zaporizhia that would join the three ones of the Crimean Peninsula: Sevastopol, Simferopol and Yalta.
This excuse of Putin's imperial Taurida serves to get closer to Odessa, from which he would have access to Transnistria, in Moldova, where the largest arsenal of the cold war is located and where Russia already controls said separatist territory of Moldova. That is why the Kremlin's intention goes beyond limiting itself to Lugansk and Donetsk in the Donbass.
That is the reason why he wants to be in control of all of southern Ukraine. His eyes are set on liberating the pro-Russian territories of Moldova, in which perhaps in the future there could be a military escalation.