INTERNATIONAL UKRAINE ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY

by Alex Miller Today most Ukrainians have lost their patriotic zeal. Guided by a common instinct of self-preservation and fear of serious injury or unwanted death they are not ready to sacrifice themselves. The new Ukrainian law on military mobilisation further aggravates the situation with conscription into the army. Numerous attempts of government to straighten out the mobilisation process have generally failed. Territorial Recruiting Centres (known as TCK) cannot meet the government’s recruitment needs. Large-scale military defeats, a high number of losses, an acute shortage of weapons, the complete absence of social benefits from the state, -- all these creates conditions when the majority of Ukrainian men prefer to flee to Europe and other countries.  According to the Belgian newspaper, Politico, during this time more than 650,000 Ukrainian men fit for service fled from the country. However, the actual statistical figures are much higher. The London Guardian on 29th June 2024...

 Zionist Holocaust backed by the West, aping Hitler. In Ukraine they fund open Nazis. Demonstrate for political prisoners and against child murderers in Palestine and Ukraine! Come and demonstrate outside Downing Street against the government’s support for Zionist Israel, and Banderaite Nazis in Ukraine. Both regimes engage in genocidal ethnic cleansing of populations they want rid of: Palestinians and Russian speakers. Both regimes murder, imprison and torture civilians, including many children, for being born into the ‘wrong’ ethnic group. Genocide is in full swing in Gaza. Israel is shooting civilians in homes and the streets, destroying and bulldozing hospitals, schools, UN refuge facilities, and more. Killing medical staff, patients, children, even babies, stopping incubators causing death and/or bulldozing them under the ruins. More than 20,000 are confirmed dead already, with many thousands more under rubble. Half are children; half Gaza’s population are under 18. Israel’s c...

  by Tatiana Desyatova  The decision to start the special operation of the Russian troops, taken by President Putin came like a thunderstorm out of clear skies for Russian society. The very first days of the war showed that the scale of what is happening goes far beyond not only Russia-Ukraine relations, but also beyond the European continent. It happens on the background of the most desperate struggle in the information sphere and severe economic sanctions.  A considerable number of Russian citizens are experiencing mixed feelings: from patriotism and to radical pacifism with demands for peace here and now. Our task is to analyse what is happening from Marxist-Leninist positions.  We are sincerely convinced that in difficult situations one should first of all look for answers in the ideological legacy of V I Lenin, since its power is so great that it still relevant and up to date. According to Lenin wars can be of different types. The first  is when wars ...

Steve Sweeney third from left at the top by New Worker correspondent A video conference was held last week between Steve Sweeney, a reporter for RT News now based in Moscow, and members of International Ukraine Anti Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) in the UK. Steve was previously International Editor of the Morning Star , and is also a member of IUAFS. He regularly reports from the Donbas and other regions of Ukraine which recently joined the Russian Federation. Steve visited polling stations in Donetsk during the recent elections for local and Duma representatives in the people’s republics which recently joined the Russian Federation, and said they appeared to be open, free and fair. He said he had witnessed "a return to democratic life".  He spoke to an old man who was in tears and said that it was the first time in nine years he'd been able to vote. However the Ukrainian Armed Forces deliberately targeted polling stations, and in one strike two civilians were killed. ...

  By Evgeny Glebov Prisoners of war are usually treated according to rank. Officers get better treatment. They can be used as camp supervisors. They can refuse to work at all. But other ranks often end up doing heavy, and sometimes meaningless jobs, poorly fed and treated quite cruelly. The Nazis and the Japanese militarists even carried out hideous experiments on them. POWs have, however, long been treated differently in Russia. In the 18th century Peter the Great set new standards. The Czar understood that they would have to be sent home when war ended . On his orders prisoners were well kept and paid the going rate for their work. Many retained fond memories of their days in captivity. It was the same in Soviet times. For example, there was a separate Main Directorate for Internees and Prisoners of War within the interior ministry (the NKVD) the GUIVP, and not the Gulag. The food standards in the GUIVP were higher than in the Gulag, set at the level of the norms for Soviet worke...

  By Theo Russell “ The immediate aim is the demilitarisation of Ukraine, and the removal of the current  leadership of Ukraine by any means” - Boris Litvinov On 28th May 2023 I met with Boris Litvinov, secretary of the Donetsk People’s  Republic (DPR) District of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), in  Moscow. His comments are reported below. “We have spent eight years fighting for the Donetsk People's Republic with volunteer detachments against the Ukraine Armed Forces (UAF). “ The Minsk and Normandy negotiations were cynically used by the Western Powers  to buy time for Ukraine to build up its armed forces, and in 2021 Zelensky declared  his intention to reoccupy the Donbas. “After 17 February 2022 shelling of the Donbas by the UAF greatly increased, and on  18 February the mass evacuation of children from the war zone to the Russian  Federation began. “The UAF launched an attack with 60,000 troops, and the Donetsk...

We support the victory not of Russia, but of the world against resurgent fascism in Europe by Theo Russell I represented the NCP and the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity campaign and met comrades and friends at a key-note conference in Moscow on the Ukraine crisis last month. I  joined campaigners from Holland, France, Austria, Italy, Brazil, the Basque Country and India, who overcame the difficulties in travelling to Russia imposed by the imperialist sanctions regime, to meet in the Russian capital for the sixth annual conference of the Red Square-Molotov Club. The Moscow conference which ran from the 23rd to 25th May  included members of Russian parties and Russian experts, Ukrainian political emigrants, and representatives from the Donbas  as well as members of the international peace, communist, socialist, and social democratic movements. The conference was organised by the M.A.R.T. Corp Radio & TV agency and the main topics were the conflict in...

by our Eastern European Affairs correspondent As Russian forces battle for control of the streets in central Bakhmut waves of Russian rockets and drones hit Kiev and other key Ukrainian cities last week in what the Kremlin says was a reprisal for a deadly Ukrainian commando attack across the border earlier in the month. Meanwhile reports claiming that the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged by the Ukrainians have appeared in the American press and security forces say they’ve foiled a plot to kill the pro-Russian leader of Transnistria, a breakaway republic that lies between Moldova and Western Ukraine, that has been under Russian protection since the early 1990s.      Wagner forces, Russia’s ‘foreign legion’, are fighting to root out Ukrainian troops dug in the ruins of Bakhmut with orders to delay the Russian advance for as long as possible regardless of the sacrifice. But the Ukrainian command has been blowing up bridges and pulling out their most experienced units fr...

by New Worker correspondent The leaders of People’s China and Belarus have expressed their "extreme interest" in a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine at a summit meeting this week. French President Emmanuel Macron says he’s going to China to call on Beijing to "help us pressure Russia" to end the war and the Russian foreign minister says his country will not allow the West to blow up any more gas pipelines.      Meanwhile Russia has halted oil supplies to Poland via the Druzhba pipeline a day after Poland delivered its first Leopard tanks to Ukraine. The Polish energy company says it was prepared for such a situation and that deliveries to its refinery can be made entirely by sea. "Only 10 per cent of the raw material came from Russia, and we will replace it with oil from other directions," Daniel Obajtek, the CEO of the Polish refiner, said.      Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko told Chinese president, Xi Jinping that his country "ful...

  By Theo Russell Irish campaigners stood by the people of the Donbas last Saturday in a demonstration outside the British embassy in Dublin to protest against Britain's role in Ukraine.      They accused the UK government of sabotaging the peace negotiations last year, prolonging the war with massive arms deliveries, the active involvement of British military personnel in the fighting in Ukraine, and years of training and arming Banderite Nazi battalions and covering up their horrific crimes against civilians in the Donbas and other Russian speaking parts of Ukraine. The action was organised by the Truth and Neutrality Alliance with support from the Social Democracy movement and a number of Irish republicans, members of Ireland’s Russian community and other anti-war activists including two who had travelled from England in order to take part in the action. In a blatant act of political interference, six members of Ireland’s secretive Special Detective Uni...

It is good that trade unionists are meeting to debate the attacks on working-class people resulting from the war NATO has been waging in Ukraine, and the war itself. But to be effective, we need a better understanding of what is at stake.      The government has been banging a jingoistic drum, denouncing strikers as doing “Putin’s work”. They only dare try this because of censorship of the real nature of the war. But truth is leaking out. The warmongers are increasingly not trusted. Too many lies.       This is not a predatory war by Russia against ‘poor little Ukraine’ but the result of a 2014 coup by the US using Neo-Nazis as their weapon. They started a war against almost half of the population: the Russian speakers in the South and East of Ukraine. This war has been going on since then: Russia’s intervention was simply defensive against a massive escalation of those attacks in mid-February. Biden ‘predicted’ the intervention at the end of the mont...

Over 2.85 million have fled to Russia with Poland a distant second  Ukrainian refugees fleeing their homeland in 2022 have resettled in Russia more than any other country, according to a report by Statista published last week. It revealed some 2,852,395 people had left their conflict-stricken homeland for the neighboring country as of October.      Trailing Russia in a distant second is Poland, which hosted 1,529,355 Ukrainian refugees as of December. Another 1,021,667 have fled to Germany as of November, while Czechia is home to 467,862, according to numbers from earlier this month.      While Russia and Poland border Ukraine and thus present closer destinations for its inhabitants, Germany has attracted an outsized number of displaced people with its large financial support payments, which amounted to €449 per month as of June. Poland, by comparison, offered just over €15.      Since the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine ...

An anti-imperialist position on the crisis in Ukraine The war in Ukraine is raging on with no end in sight. People are suffering, and fears are rising that the conflict could widen and even involve nuclear weapons. Many well-meaning people are calling for a ceasefire and negotiations. We all want peace, but it does no good to promote solutions that don’t take into account what led up to the war in the first place. Back in 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the U.S. government promised that NATO would not expand “one inch” eastward. But since then, all 14 new NATO members have been former Soviet states or allies. Sweden and Finland are expected to join soon. Both Georgia and Ukraine, which border Russia, have asked to join. That would complete the encirclement of Russia’s western flank. It would be as if Russia were building an anti-U.S. military alliance of all South and Central American countries and was about to admit Mexico. Obviously, the U.S. would see that as an ex...