As the rivalry between the U.S. and Russia is seemingly moving closer to open conflict, Ukraine’s strategic importance is re-emerging. In mid-December, Russian President Vladimir Putin successfully pressured cash-strapped Ukraine into remaining in Russia’s orbit and canceling its planned alliances with the U.S.-leaning European Union (EU) and the U.S.-run International Monetary Fund (IMF). Putin bought off Ukraine by pledging a $15 billion loan and a 33 percent cut in gas prices. In return, Moscow gets control of Ukraine’s energy pipeline network. But the stakes here run beyond economics. They have everything to do with military preparations for future wars.
On December 17, Stratfor, an intelligence analysis outfit that advises Exxon and other major corporations, warned its capitalist readers:
Ukraine is as important to Russian national security as Scotland is to England or Texas is to the United States. In the hands of an enemy, these places would pose an existential threat to all three countries….Neither Scotland nor Texas is going anywhere. Nor is Ukraine, if Russia has anything to do with it….Ukraine is Russia’s soft underbelly….Under the influence or control of a Western power, Russia’s (and Belarus’) southern flank is wide open…running from the Polish border east almost to Volgograd [originally Stalingrad] then south to the Sea of Azov,… [over] 1,000 miles, more than 700 of which lie along Russia proper….
For Russia, Ukraine is a matter of fundamental national security. For a Western power, Ukraine is of value only if that power is planning to engage and defeat Russia, as the Germans tried to do in World War II.
Putin Stops NATO Expansion Dead
Putin didn’t merely frustrate the EU and the IMF; he stopped the expansion of Pentagon-led NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in its tracks. Founded in 1949, four years after the end of World War II, NATO’s main mission was to prepare for a European war against the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). After the Soviet Union imploded, NATO expanded into a worldwide military operation across three continents. It invaded Eastern Europe (Kosovo), North Africa (Libya), Iraq and Afghanistan in order to maintain its dominance among imperialist rivals for strategic and economic goals.
In the 1990s, with the phony-communist Soviet empire a thing of the past, opportunistic U.S. rulers successfully enlisted 12 of Moscow’s ex-satellites into NATO. But Ukraine is a special case because it commands Russia’s warm-water Black Sea naval ports. These outlets do not freeze over in winter, a crucial advantage in wartime. Putin and the Russian capitalists he represents cannot permit Ukraine to join the military alliance led by the U.S., their bitter imperialist rival.
Putin’s Ukraine pushback signals a hardening Russian position that was anticipated by the more foresighted U.S. planners. In the late 1940s, diplomat George Kennan formulated the U.S. policy of “containment” of the USSR, the central Cold War strategy followed by U.S. presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Containment was the ideological basis for U.S. atrocities in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. At the same time, it allowed U.S. bosses to avoid a direct confrontation with the mighty Soviet forces that crushed the Nazis in World War II. Kennan warned that moving beyond containment and NATOizing the old Soviet bloc was a “tragic mistake.... the Russians will gradually react quite adversely” (New York Times, 5/2/98). He also pinpointed the critical failure of U.S. capitalists. While relying more and more on regional military actions, they have yet to mobilize the nation for global war. “We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries,” Kennan wrote, “even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.”
U.S. bosses by and large ignored Kennan. They thought they had Ukraine wrapped up after the Orange Revolution of 2004, one of the so-called “color revolutions” in former republics within the old USSR. Financed largely by various foundations controlled by liberal billionaire George Soros, the Orange Revolution brought pro-NATO Yulia Tymoshenko to power in a contested election.
Revolution = Working-Class Seizure of State Power
In reality, these “revolutions” had no revolutionary content. Revolution occurs only when the working class violently overthrows the ruling class, smashes the rulers’ state power, and establishes new class rule and its own state power. Neither capitalist-run elections nor an “Arab spring” can make a revolution. Only workers, led by a mass communist party, can accomplish that.
In 2008, Russian rulers dealt with the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia by invading its Black Sea neighbor. But Putin’s real target was Ukraine. On August 28, 2008, Agence France Press quoted the RAND Corporation’s F. Stephen Larrabee:
Georgia is a sideshow. What the Russians are really concerned about is Ukraine. Georgia’s entry into NATO wouldn’t have major strategic consequences for Russia. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a very different matter. If Ukraine joins NATO, Russia would not only be forced to remove its ships based in Crimea; it also would see dashed its hopes of founding a…union with Ukraine and Belarus. What’s more, Russian and Ukrainian defense industries are closely linked.
Tymoshenko is now serving a seven-year jail sentence on trumped-up charges of abuse of power and embezzlement. Her country, meanwhile, has become even more pivotal to ruling-class strategists with an eye to a potential Word War III. U.S. capitalists constitute the “Western power planning to defeat Russia” as Stratfor put it. Their top policy-shaping think tank is the Council on Foreign Relations, which is dominated by ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. The Council’s current Foreign Policy web page highlights two Kennan essays from 1939 and 1942: “Preparing Civilian America for War” and “Policy and Strategy in the War in Russia.”
Ukraine’s Workers Suffer Miseries of Capitalism
What the rulers omit from the equation is the working class in Ukraine and in all the other places victimized by the imperialists. Ukraine’s workers are voicing intense dissatisfaction with the miseries of capitalism. The country’s death rate exceeds its birth rate; Ukraine’s population has dropped from a peak of 52.2 million in 1993 to 45.5 million today.
While official unemployment has recently fluctuated between 8 and 9.5 percent, the actual jobless figure is closer to 25 percent. (Ukrainian employers do not report laid-off workers.) Often workers go unpaid for several months before being laid off. Wages are so low that a high percentage of families need at least two wage-earners to survive. The lack of job opportunities has driven 4.5 million Ukrainians — 10 percent of the population — to work abroad.
These conditions have fueled the workers’ mass protests since November 21, when the regime of Moscow-backed President Victor Yanukovich suspended talks on an “Association Agreement” with the European Union. The exploitation of Ukrainian workers reflects the worldwide fight for profits among the major imperialist powers. In Ukraine it pits Russian billionaires (known as oligarchs) against their European counterparts. U.S. rulers are backing the European Union; Yanukovich represents the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs. The western Ukraine in particular is a hotbed of anti-communism, and much media publicity was given to the tearing down of a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the capital, Kiev.
Rinat Akhmetov, the richest Ukrainian oligarch, owns a $250 million mansion in London and has taken much of his $15 billion fortune out of Ukraine. He’s a pro-Russian supporter of Yanukovich but appears to be hedging his bets. Recently he seemed to favor the protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square.
A Boss Is A Boss Is A Boss
An alliance with the EU is widely popular among Ukrainian workers, in part because Europe’s fake-democratic veneer seems more appealing than Putin’s more open fascism. The EU fosters a lot of talk about civil society, transparency and the rule of law. Much of this blabber comes from the same oligarchs who made their obscene fortunes by trampling over both society and the law. There is little or nothing in the Association Agreement that would benefit workers. In fact, both the EU and the IMF (following the Greek example) are demanding strict austerity measures in Ukraine, from tax increases to budget cuts.
All of Ukraine’s workers — east or west, Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking, industrial or agricultural — need communism. They don’t need more exploitation by the Putin-led capitalists or the anti-Putin gang. They need the Progressive Labor Party.
PLP Only Hope for World’s Workers
The struggle for communism is a long and hard one, but it’s the only solution. As inter-imperialist rivalry leads inevitably toward a broader and bloodier war, and the rulers attack wages and living conditions around the globe, the international growth of the Progressive Labor Party is the only hope for the workers of the world. We need to expand PLP to Ukraine so communist ideas can begin to take root there.
Most of all, we must rebuild the worldwide communist movement. In the past it was a beacon for the working class. It helped restrain capitalism’s murderous exploitation. It defeated fascism in World War II. With its retreat, the world’s capitalists have a freer hand to maim and murder for their profits. A rebuilt communist movement can take the next step and destroy capitalism forever. Spread communism and build PLP everywhere!