INTERNATIONAL UKRAINE ANTI-FASCIST SOLIDARITY

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 New Worker correspondent People’s China has launched a new initiative to end the war in Ukraine with a 12-point plan that calls for a cease-fire and the resumption of peace talks between Moscow and Kiev. The Putin government has broadly welcomed the Chinese initiative. The Germans say it needs to be seriously considered amid reports that Britain, France and Germany are proposing to send Ukraine a new tranche of weapons and economic aid as a sweetener for opening up a dialogue with the Russians. And even the Ukrainians are taking it seriously. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky says he wants to meet China's leader Xi Jinping to discuss Beijing's proposals on ending the war in Ukraine which he said showed that China was involved in the search for peace. But the Americans have already dismissed it out of hand.      China's plan calls for peace talks and respect for national sovereignty. However, the 12-point document does not specifically say that Russia must withdraw it

New Worker editorial The British government rolled out the red carpet for Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday who addressed Parliament, held talks with Sunak and had an audience with King Charles that was a Ukrainian PR dream. The British government promised to supply the Ukrainians with more heavy weapons and provide more training facilities for their fighter pilots in Britain so that Ukraine can achieve a "decisive military victory on the battlefield this year". Well, that’s what Sunak says. But what does it all mean?      Very little it seems given the parlous state of the British armed forces these days. A few Challenger tanks are hardly likely to change the balance of forces on the Donbas front as the entire Ukrainian army fights to stave off the advance of what is still only a Russian expeditionary force.      Sunak, like Boris Johnson before him, may like to pose as a world leader and the greatest friend of Ukraine in Western Europe. But at the end of the day the only powe

  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 Unit demanded the

by Theo Russell London comrades returned to Whitehall on Saturday to bring the crimes of the Ukrainian government to the attention of the British people. Some 30 protesters joined the picket opposite Downing Street organised by the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) campaign, to let the people “know that the regime in Ukraine, to which the British Government has given billions of pounds in financial and military support, has been committing horrific crimes against its own people, including Russian speakers, opposition activists and campaigners, journalists and Roma people, under the cover of accusing them of treason”. A IUAFS spokesman said: “Several mayors in eastern Ukraine have been summarily executed local along with elected civilian officials for "crimes" such as negotiating humanitarian corridors with the Russian military. They should have been entitled to a due process of law, instead of being tortured, shot, and then dumped in the street. “H

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 month because the US had planned an at

   Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega   "With all the sanctions they've imposed on the Russian Federation, which is waging a just war against fascism, against Nazism, which is entrenched in the power of the golpistas in Ukraine, they are destroying the European economy".  Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro  “The war in Ukraine is not a local military war, it is a global war, an economic war. Indeed, it is a world war. It is a war against Russia, its goal is to destroy Russia.”  Khulekani Skosana, ANC Youth League “Our position is that we side with the oppressed people of Donbas who have been bombarded for the past eight years, and they don't have the opportunity to appear every day on CNN, therefore it is our responsibility to speak for them. We commend President Putin and we commend President Cyril Ramaphosa for taking this posture and standing up against bullies who for years have thought the world belongs to them. For us it's very clear, NATO is re