Communist Party of the Russian Federation
by V N Tetekin
Many comrades are asking about the character of hostilities in Ukraine. The assessment prevalent so far has been imposed by the Western media. However, by now the nature of the Russian Armed Forces operation to liberate Ukraine from Nazism has become apparent.
What prompted the start of the special operation?
Beginning from December 2021 Russia had been receiving data on NATO’s plans to deploy troops and missile bases in Ukraine. Simultaneously an onslaught on the territory of Donbas was being prepared. About a week before the start of Russia’s special operation the plan was uncovered of an offensive that envisaged strikes by long-range artillery, multiple rocket launchers, aviation, to be followed by an invasion of Ukrainian troops and Nazi battalions. It was planned to cut off the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) from the border with Russia, encircle and besiege Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities and then carry out a sweeping “security cleanup” with annihilation of thousands of defenders of Donbas and their supporters.
The plan was developed jointly with NATO. The operation was scheduled to begin in early March of this year. Russia pre-empted Kiev and NATO, which enabled it to seize strategic initiative and effectively save hundreds of thousands of lives in the two republics.
The character of combat actions
The aim of the Russian army is not to occupy territory or seize the country’s economy and natural resources. It is a political war. Ukrainian society, under pressure from Neo-Nazis, has been moving toward turning the country into a NATO base for attacking Russia. It is incumbent on our country to ensure its security. The combat actions are essentially aimed at forcing the Ukrainian leadership to enter into negotiations on demilitarisation, denazification and a neutral status for Ukraine.
The second goal is to protect the citizens of historically Russian Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts which since 2014 have refused to live under the control of the pro-Nazi group which staged a government coup in February 2014. It is basically a civil war between two parts of one and the same people.
Not everyone knows that much of the fighting is conducted not by the Russian army, but by the forces of the people’s republics of Eastern Ukraine (DPR and LPR). The citizens of Donbas created their own army back in 2014. They are fighting for the freedom and independence of their “small motherland” whose citizens were in danger of being deprived by the West Ukrainian Nazis of the right to speak their native Russian language.
In reality the Russian army is conducting military operations only in the predominantly Russian-speaking eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. These are Russian regions which were included in the territory of Ukraine in 1918 in order to strengthen its industrial base. They had never been part of Ukraine. The Russian army is coming to the Russian-speaking regions and not to the regions of Central and Western Ukraine which are ethnically different.
As part of “demilitarising” Ukraine the Russian army is consistently destroying its military infrastructure. Strikes were delivered on airfields and landing strips to prevent the landing of US and NATO planes carrying arms; control points, air defense systems, radar stations, stores of weapons, ammunition and fuel were put out of action. But killing personnel – soldiers and officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces – is emphatically not the aim. Given the immense firepower in possession of the Russian army it would be easy to simply wipe out all the Ukrainian Forces strongpoints along with the soldiers defending them. But this aim had never been set because of the genetic kinship of our peoples. We are fraternal peoples. Brothers may quarrel and even fight. Such things happened over the course of our history. But seeking to destroy each other is unacceptable for us.
The state of the Ukrainian Army
It would be wrong to claim that Ukraine is weak and defenceless. During the Soviet times it had a huge group of Soviet troops, the most powerful in Europe. In 1991 the Soviet Army split up into the Russian and Ukrainian armies. Ukraine kept gigantic quantities of military hardware – thousands of tanks, planes, artillery pieces, and huge ammunition dumps. Although the greater part of this weaponry was sold abroad to conflict zones, Ukraine has no need for arms supplies. Until February 2022 the Ukrainian army was considered to be the sixth strongest army in Europe after Spain, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and France. Ukraine’s land forces are practically equal in strength to Russia’s.
After the February 2014 government coup the new pro-Nazi authorities, even despite the economic disarray, funnelled money into beefing up its army. The aim was not to protect Ukraine from external aggression, but to prepare to regain control over Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics by military means. The most combat –capable forces trained by NATO instructors were concentrated against Donbas. More than 120,000 army regulars and Nazi battalions were poised to attack Donbas, and powerful strongpoints were set up.
Kiev was actively supported in preparing the invasion by the USA and other NATO countries. It received hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase arms, instructors came to train its army and Ukrainian military personnel studied at Western military schools. The West’s aim was not merely to back Kiev in its effort to suppress Donbas. The main aim was to turn Ukraine into a springboard for NATO and its army into a force that would spearhead an attack on Russia. American servicemen are directly involved in hostilities in Ukraine. On 17th March the forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic which seized a Ukrainian Army post in Donbas discovered the bodies and documents of three US Army officers.
Of particular concern is the fact that the Ukrainian leadership has de facto committed itself to obtaining weapons of mass destruction. With US help 30 biological labs created on Ukrainian territory have been conducting research into lethal diseases and methods of spreading them. Kiev has been speaking about creating the nuclear weapon on the basis of Ukrainian nuclear power plants and its scientific and technical potential. All this poses a threat not only to Russia but to the whole world.
Different tactics
In entering cities the Russian army tries its best to avoid civilian casualties and to spare civilian infrastructure, in marked contrast to the Americans who within a few days suppressed an uprising in Iraq’s Falluja by wiping out the city as the “world community” looked on. Fifty thousand people died. Such thing is unimaginable for the Russian army.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Nazi battalions have different tactics. Most of them come from Western Ukraine and they despise the inhabitants of the eastern part of the country whom they do not consider to be fully Ukrainian. Accordingly, they do not consider it a crime to kill civilians and destroy the civil infrastructure in Eastern Ukraine. They position their troops not in open spaces but in residential neighbourhoods of cities. They set up firing positions in residential blocks, schools and nurseries.
All this is being done in order to make the Russian army avoid striking military targets located in residential blocks, or to accuse Russia of war crimes. In retreating the Nazis use the “scorched earth” tactics: they destroy the civilian infrastructure, above all blowing up bridges. The Nazis often stage hideous provocations blowing up residential houses in order to accuse the Russian army.
The Western media and politicians like to praise the staunch resistance of the Ukrainian army. But they omit an important detail. A large part of the Ukrainian army is made up by Neo-Nazi battalions notorious for their ferocity. The SS divisions were the hardest fighters in the Nazi army during the Second World War. The Nazi battalions in Ukraine today are the same SS units. They are indoctrinated, motivated and they hate the Russians. They have been prepared for war against Donbas and against Russia for eight full years being educated in the spirit of hatred for all things Russian.
The world cannot believe that fascism has again sprung up in the very heart of Europe. Yet it is worth recalling that respectable Germans who had given the world some of its greatest poets, philosophers and musicians, within eight years between 1933 and 1941 turned into a nation which exterminated in gas chambers, burned alive, hanged and shot tens of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Jews. The same is happening in Ukraine.
Incidentally, those who today are shouting loudest about the suffering of Ukraine’s population – Poland and the Baltic countries – bear the heaviest responsibility for the Holocaust. Not only the Germans, but to a large extent the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were exterminating their neighbours, Jews and Belorusians.
After the Second World War some countries that had fought on Hitler’s side conducted a policy of denazification. The decisions of the Nuremberg Trial which condemned Fascism and its chieftains, and the experience of cooperation of the international community in the struggle against that evil remain relevant to this day.
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