Ukraine - November 15, 2024

With Zelensky and the bourgeoisie leading the war against Moscow's counterrevolutionary occupation, with the IMF and the war merchants doing business on workers' blood, Ukraine sinks into catastrophe and colonialism...

To defeat Putin's invasion and liberate the nation…
The working class must take the lead of the war…

We must unify the ranks of the working class from the Donbass to Kiev and expropriate the expropriators of the people to put all the wealth at the service of defeating the invader!

We must break with the IMF and revolt the Russian
and European proletariat!

The national liberation struggle will only succeed with a united,
Soviet and independent Ukraine

Today, as we approach the third year of war, the Ukrainian masses are exhausted and sinking into a brutal crisis. Ukraine is a broken nation, with the eastern region occupied by Putin who does not cease his siege of massacre and destruction. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie treats the workers at the front as it treats them in the factory: they have been there months and months without rest, without even ammunition and they do not even receive the insurance and benefits stipulated by the same martial laws with which the labor flexibilization was imposed. These are the battle conditions of an occupied and oppressed nation: imperialism plunders it with the fraudulent debt and sucking its wealth, Russia occupies it, the workers are sent to the trenches to die like dogs and the entire bourgeoisie continues doing and increasing its business. The nation has become more and more subjected to imperialism and plundered by it, and more and more colonized. Under Zelensky's leadership the struggle for the national liberation of Ukraine has only been weakened!

This is already being discussed in the trenches of the resistance. Recently from the FLTI-CI we participated in a meeting with sectors of the Ukrainian vanguard and the discussions that took place there reveal the real situation that everyone wants to hide. There are already sectors of the rank and file which propose that it is necessary to self-organize and throw out all the corrupt officials who surrender the national struggle for a few coins, either from foreign "aid" or from Putin himself, and guarantee him the business of the occupied zones.

The only way out is for the working class, which is the only national class that is not bound by any business with either imperialism or Putin, to take control of the war to bring to victory, that is, the defeat of the invader and the liberation of the nation with a program of social reforms, expropriating imperialism and the entire oligarchy, putting all the wealth at the service of winning the war.

Putin, with his military bases in the former Soviet republics, crushes the oppressed masses in order to be the guardian of the imperialist business in Eurasia….

There are those who claim, like the British SWP and its PTS followers, that a "proxy" war is being waged in Ukraine, by which imperialism would use the oppressed nation as a mere staging ground for war with Russia. This is throwing dirt in the eyes of the workers of the world.
First of all, to present Putin as an enemy of imperialism is a bad joke. Putin is very careful not to harm a single imperialist interest either in Ukraine or in Russia itself where despite having announced their withdrawal, Shell, Total, BP (which still holds 20% of the shares of Russia's Rosneft, the largest oil company in the country) continue to make fabulous profits even in Russia itself. Not to mention the sidereal fortunes amassed by large food companies such as Bunge, Dreyfuss and Cargill, with the wealth of Russia and plundering Ukraine. In 2024 alone, 80 million tons left Ukrainian ports in the midst of the war, of which 49.5 million tons were grain. Meanwhile in Kivvy Rih not a bullet has grazed the huge infrastructure of the French giant Arcelor Mittal.
 
The fact is, Putin is in charge of taking care, with his military bases and troops in Eurasia, as in Crimea, also Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and other former Soviet and Muslim republics and even in Belarus itself, of the bourgeois order and imperialist plunder. And imperialism maintains him insofar as Putin guarantees its business, but at the same time it seeks to weaken "Great" Russia insofar as it also needs to advance over it and its immense wealth in order to colonize it. That is why, as we shall now see, imperialism has only given Ukraine defensive armaments, in dribs and drabs and at the cost of a millionaire debt, so to be able to wear down and weaken the Russian troops but without inflicting on Putin a defeat that would weaken him and end up falling into the hands of the masses who hate him.
Putin is today the one on charge of keeping the "prison of nations" that the tsars held yesterday and then the Stalinist bureaucracy continued oppressing with an iron fist, returning to subjugate all the nationalities that "Great Russia" oppressed and that only the socialist revolution liberated, by proclaiming the right to self-determination of the peoples that made up the USSR. That was when peoples of Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Abkhazia, etc. were voluntarily federated to USSR. Imperialism assigned the former Stalinist bureaucrats, after they had consummated the capitalist restoration, the role of disciplining, subduing and crushing the masses of the former worker states.

It was Putin who exterminated in Chechnya all the men over 10 years of age for having revolted for the right to national self-determination; he was the one who invaded and massacred in Georgia, North and South Ossetia, and who crushed, before invading Ukraine, the anti-capitalist rebellion of the workers of Kazakhstan and Belarus.
That is why we affirm that Putin's role as gendarme and hitman of imperialism is to be the guardian of the transnationals and finance capital in the Caucasus, in Eurasia.
The reformist and neo-Stalinist left today pictures Putin, the former KGB agent of Stalinism who sold the USSR out to Citibank and Wall Street as the enemy of imperialism. Enough of deceiving the working class by passing off its greatest enemies as allies!

Ukraine would be a strange "NATO army": it does not even have ammunition to confront the invader

But furthermore, to say that it is the US which is fighting in Ukraine is indeed the vilest of lies. The reality is that imperialism gives Ukraine enough armament to keep the war trenches, leading to Putin's attrition but without being victorious. That is why it gives Ukraine defensive armament... And still less than that. Today we see that the Ukrainian army no longer has any ammunition.
Are we forced to listen to the neo-Stalinist left saying that this Ukrainian army of starving men, without ammunition or offensive weapons, which has not been able to recover the east of the country for almost three years, is a NATO army to confront Russia? Who are these people kidding? Let us look just for a second at the fascist Zionist state of Israel, armed to the teeth by the US imperialists and Germany and with the latest technology to massacre the Palestinian people and we will really see what a NATO-armed army is. At a meeting of former Trotskyist and neo-Stalinist currents held recently in Buenos Aires we had to hear from the mouth of a leader of the Partido Obrero of Argentina (member of the FIT-U) that the US wants to turn the Ukraine into a new State of Israel. This of course they say without blushing, riding on Putin's tanks.

Meanwhile, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are deserting the front, already more than 60,000 have already done so, because of the terrible conditions in which they are pushed to defend the nation from the occupier.
Yet there are currents of the social-imperialist left who claim that the US is spending its funds and budget to "support" Ukraine. Really, the cynicism of imperialism and its supporters exceeds all limits. The only thing the US has done is to put all the money seized from the big Russian oligarchs into financial gambling and with the fabulous profits it makes, 90% of it is kept in its pocket and 10% is thrown to Ukraine, so that it can buy armaments from the US itself and then pay back the loan with usurious interest. Whoever believes in the "humanitarian and beneficent character" of US imperialism has not understood half a word about imperialism!
What is really exposed here is that Ukraine, in the heart of Europe, is an occupied and oppressed nation, a matter that all the false leftists want to hide from the world proletariat. But it is also a question of life and death to all the workers of the old continent.

U.S. imperialism sold Ukraine out to the Russian massacre as a pawn to isolate and wear down Moscow, and to destroy the European market by weakening the Franco-German axis....
Thus it seeks to have a Ukraine enslaved and subjugated by the IMF, guaranteed by Putin's bayonets

What is clear is that NATO's objective from the beginning has been to sold Ukraine out as a pawn for Putin to massacre it without Moscow winning the war, and at the same time, to split the European market and spoil European business with Russia. With a massacred and crushed Ukraine, the US is in a good position on its way to encircle Moscow.

This war served so well to split the European market and its ties with Moscow, that at the beginning of the conflict, Germany was left without two key gas pipelines that had been supplying it with cheap Russian gas without intermediaries: the US imperialism blew up the Nordstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines (the latter did not even come into operation). Today, Europe is forced to cover this lack of gas supply from Russia by buying it from the USA at a much higher price, which added to the economic recession that is already hitting the largest European economy, Germany, and has caused inflation rates to rise. And this is one of the main reasons for the huge economic and political crisis that has already started in Europe and is now only deepening. So today we see Germany entering its second consecutive year of recession, with its export power reduced and against the backdrop of the decline in its competitiveness in the powerful automobile sector in the face of subsidized Chinese electric vehicles, with a growing decline in industrial production. This triggered a political crisis that has led to the breakup of the ruling coalition, and the call to early elections.
The imperialist Maastricht response to the crisis was to deepen by a thousand the attack on the European workers.

On the other hand, also in Russia this almost chronic war is bringing hard crises that are downloaded on the working people and the masses. Almost 2 million men have fled since 2022, when the invasion of Ukraine began. As a consequence of the war, millions have been forcibly sent to the front, and there are almost 300 thousand dead and 400 thousand wounded. In the meantime, famine is devastating the domestic economy, because inflation has made all basic products and services more expensive. And although the average salary has increased to U$740, 2/3 of the population earns less than U$300 a month, which is not enough to cover basic daily needs. And in addition to the high cost of living, the persecution of young people and workers who dare to confront the regime of the butcher Putin has deepened.

So far, the enormous war expenditures (40% of the Russian budget - $142 billion), keep the Russian military industry at high levels. And this is made possible by Russia's record oil and gas production and sales (projected at $250 billion in 2024).
All this reaffirms that, while the workers lay the dead and suffer the consequences of war, for the bourgeoisie war means big business, in Lenin's words, the most important business of the imperialist epoch.

The Ukrainian working class, by uniting itself from Donbass to Kiev, must take political and military control of the war and carry out the program of the social revolution to defeat the invasion and liberate Ukraine

From sectors of the trade unions and civil defense organizations in Ukraine, a declaration has been launched for a "peace of the peoples; not an imperialist peace". There they have correctly stated that the way out to win the war is the unity with the Russian workers. The Ukrainian trade unions together with the committees of rank-and-file soldiers, must take the leadership of the war and elect their officers. It is necessary to unify the workers' ranks from Donbass to Kiev in defense of the nation for the demands of work and dignified life! It is necessary to conquer the generalized armament of the people, with the workers' trade unions and the mass organizations taking control! It is already clear that with Zelensky’s lead it is impossible to fight, much less to win! Out with Zelensky! 
The victory of Ukraine will be won at the hands of the exploited masses, with civil war in the cities and not with the NATO puppet generals, always ready to negotiate and surrender the nation for a few coins. A program of social reform, of attack on the business of the capitalists and imperialism is necessary to attain victory.

It is necessary to break with imperialism, to disown the debt with the IMF, to recover the land for the hungry people to eat, putting all the forces of the nation at the service of winning the war and defeating the invader! It is necessary to expropriate both the oligarchy and imperialism! It is necessary to expropriate the expropriators of the people in order to win!

We must set up the committees of Ukrainian workers and rank and file soldiers and committees of Russian workers and rank and file soldiers for the defeat of Putin in Ukraine, and that in the whole Russia they rebel the Russian people against the butcher and gendarme of imperialism Putin. Because the only way to achieve "peace of the peoples" is with a Soviet and independent Ukraine, a bastion for the Soviet restoration of the former USSR and the European revolution, without the Stalinists who sold it out and betray the world working class.
A dilemma has opened again in the Ukrainian question. We are facing a war where what is being defined is whether the oppressed nations that Stalinism of the former USSR stepped on are a link in the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat, where national liberation struggles against imperialism and Great Russia will be combined with socialist tasks.  If the imperialist plan advances, the partitioned and colonized Ukraine will be the beachhead of the imperialist pirates on their way to recolonize all of Eastern Europe and Russia.

On the contrary, if the proletariat succeeds in re-uniting its ranks to take the leadership of the war and re-establishes the revolution as in 2014, it will be a bastion of the European revolution and also of the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in all the former Soviet republics, from Kiev to Moscow. Let the cry of the Ukrainian workers who rose up in 2015 resound again with the cry: WE WANT THE USSR BACK !

That is why the lives of the world working class and the working class of Europe and the US in particular, depend on the non-triumph of imperialism in Ukraine and the region. It is necessary a decisive intervention of the workers of the imperialist powers, like that of the youth of the USA who continue in the streets against the genocide of Zionism to the Palestinian people, in favor of their class siblings of Ukraine and Russia.
Russia out of Donbass, Crimea and the whole Ukraine!
Down with NATO and imperialist Maastricht!
For a workers', Soviet and independent Ukraine, from Kiev to the Donbass and Crimea!
For the United Socialist States of Europe! For the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary ways in Russia and the former Soviet republics!