On February 24, 2022 the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Once again in history a power struggle between empires will be paid for with the blood of proletarians and peoples. At this moment, as we all know, the revolutionary proletariat still lacks the capacity to intervene on the stage of the great class struggle, let alone in the geopolitical manifestation of this stage. However, in order to one day achieve this agency it is essential to understand the situation and to maintain a clear position in the face of all those interested in distorting it. In future analyses we will delve deeper into the context and the tangled factors that have led to this situation, but for now this position allows us to highlight several fundamental points.
Starting with what has already been indicated, we can state that we are basically witnessing an inter-imperialist struggle in which the peoples only play a significant role as providers of cannon fodder and suffering, with Ukraine being a mere pawn in a larger game. Nothing of what is happening today can be detached from what happened in 2014 around the Maidan square in Kyiv. Nothing in this story can be understood without references to sinister characters such as Victoria Nuland or to no less sinister events such as the shootings of February 2014 in that square, still not clarified (although their beneficiaries are clear). These dark events broke the compromise agreement that had just been reached among the different factions of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie to address the political crisis and led to the armed seizure of power and the expulsion from the political playing field of any faction of this bourgeoisie not aligned with an anti-Russian foreign and domestic policy. This meant breaking the status quo, both internally (a playing field, as corrupt as you like, either for the Russophile factions or for the pro-Western ones) and externally (related to the latter, the country's neutral status regarding the major powers), which had governed Ukraine since 1991. The rupture of this order, which had lasted for a whole generation, cannot be explained without the political and financial backing of the Euro-Atlantic imperialist bloc. This initial rupture of the status quo and of the rules of the game on which it was based (i.e. the change of regime in Ukraine) was the short-term cause of the succession of events that have brought us to the present moment.
From the point of view of great power imperialist geopolitics there is a clear beneficiary of this situation: Atlanticist imperialism with its capital in Washington. The U.S. Pivot to Asia to confront the rise of China can now be made with a European Union (EU) disciplined by a new cold war against Russia. The axis of EU foreign policy will take place more through Warsaw than through Paris. Precisely, if this crisis and this war highlight anything, it is (once again) the chimerical nature of the idea of the EU as an imperialist power with autonomy regarding Washington. The possibility that the EU, without major strategic assets involved in the Asia-Pacific, could see the scenario of growing Sino-U.S. rivalry as an opportunity to advance its own imperialist autonomy is thus dismissed before it is even seriously considered. Relations between the EU and Russia will develop in strategic-military terms, with a new arms race that is already being announced and justified these days. Not by chance, these are the terms that best guarantee the influence of the still only military superpower with global projection: the United States. A rejuvenated NATO, not so long ago considered as brain-dead according to Macron, takes off over the European continent. This is the necessary result, the calculated self-fulfilling prophecy, of three decades of uninterrupted Atlanticist advance eastward, breaking all commitments, disregarding all Russian complaints and warnings and threatening to absorb areas that Russian imperialism considers geopolitically existential to its great power status. A small note to point out the role of Spanish imperialism in this matter as an active part of the Atlanticist imperialist bloc. If the pre-war crisis has shown anything, until the escalation to open war has imposed a bloc discipline, it is that a certain non-monochord voice was possible, as has been staged by governments as reactionary as the Croatian or the Hungarian ones, but which represented powers less powerful than the Spanish State. Contrary to the sovereigntist illusions of the Iberian social-chauvinists, if this different intonation has not taken place, even with the most progressive government in history, it is not because there has been some hidden hand, wearing a glove with stars and stripes, aiming in the shadows at "our" progressive leaders, but becausethey actively and sovereignly participate in the imperialist order promoted by the United States, in whose bosom they have grown and from which, even in a secondary position in accordance with their power, they benefit themselves. There is no way to break the link of the imperialist chain represented by the Spanish State from the demagogic-victimist preaching of the alleged lost sovereignty. No, this is imperialist sovereignty: participation, to the extent of one's own power, of the share of the benefits derived, as a metropolis, from the membership of a certain bloc. Of course, in order to collect this income, it is necessary to play the sovereign role of slaughterer of peoples, as the Spanish State gladly does, sending its mercenaries beyond its borders, to the Black Sea or the Baltic Sea today, as it did yesterday to the Hindu Kush or to the Balkans... or the day before yesterday to the Rif...
Of course, let it not be thought that the other imperialism in conflict, the Russian one, is innocent in all this game. Today's aggression against Ukraine is being perpetrated by it, incapable of advancing its interests in any other way than through a blatant military attack, precisely because of the little attraction that its already unveiled and putrid czarist-imperialist face exerts on the peoples of its surroundings. Russia has been driven into this situation by the expansion of the Atlanticist imperialist bloc, but to this pressure it has not responded with an anti-imperialist policy that could provide an emancipatory alternative to the neighboring peoples; rather, in accordance with its own nature, as the imperialist bully determined to protect its sphere of influence with whatever military violence and oppression is necessary. If the Ukrainian people have been and are victims of the Banderite putschists backed by Atlanticist imperialism, today it comes to the foreground that they are also victims of the aggression of Russian imperialism. The proletarian vanguard cannot for a single instant temporize with this fact.
In more concrete terms, it is interesting to note the change of strategy of Russian imperialism. Given the absolute lack of political will of the Ukrainian nationalist regime to implement the Minsk agreements (a product of its military defeat in the high-intensity war of 2014-15), the Kremlin has turned the page on this path (which represented a kind of return to the status quo ante of a neutral Ukraine, albeit with a strengthening of Russophile influence and with Crimea irretrievably lost for the Ukrainians) and has opted for massive military intervention. The attack, carried out around the large arc that goes from Belarus to Crimea, passing through the eastern border of Ukraine, is designed to outflank the most prepared elements of the Ukrainian army, entrenched around the Donbas, and to ensure a quick victory with the conquest of Kyiv. Pending the development of events, it seems that the objective would be a change of regime in Ukraine, which, much more dependent on Moscow, would guarantee the non-integration of Ukraine into the structures of Euro-Atlantic imperialism. In short, Putin's bet is that the final result of the process opened by the Maidan color revolution will be that Ukraine will go from being a neutral buffer state to an unquestionable part of the sphere of influence of Russian imperialism. A word of warning for the entire ex-Soviet space and evidence that conventional military power, beyond all the pseudo-liberal preaching on the "interdependence of trade as a guarantor of peace", the end of the "old diplomacy" or of the "spheres of influence", continues to be the ultima ratio in the relationship between bourgeois states. Precisely, the rise of multipolarity represents nothing more than the intensification of imperialist competition for areas of influence and the intensification of the arms race, increasing the likelihood of a major imperialist war. There is therefore no room for the idea of a civilized imperialist competition, without war and without suffering for the peoples, as proclaimed by the spokesmen of this multipolarity, where Russia or China would represent the rational balance to the undoubted arbitrariness of Yankee hegemonism. The missiles exploding in Kyiv, no less noisy than those that exploded in Belgrade or Baghdad, show that this counterweight is no more rational and has no other limits than those of the imperialist power that sustains it.
Obviously, the aggression of Russian imperialism cannot and will not be answered with a national liberation struggle. The indicated origin of the conflict, the multinational composition of the Ukrainian state and the fact, historically reiterated, that Ukrainian nationalism has never been able to develop without the support of the imperialist enemies of Russia, make it impossible, even beyond the notorious ultra-reactionary credentials of this nationalism, to transform the Ukrainian defense into that liberation struggle. The absence of a revolutionary proletariat with capacity for action also greatly weakens the approach of a democratic policy on the national question, a policy which is a prerequisite for any development in this sense. Eloquent proof of this impossibility is the fact that, on the ground, the inter-imperialist struggle only appears as a reactionary chauvinist conflict between nationalisms .
Little can be added with respect to the nationalist Banderites, who bear irredeemable sins such as having worn the black of the SS, which, in their recalcitrance, they are still capable of vindicating today with the liberal complicity of Atlanticism. It is not that Ukraine is a fascist country, although undoubtedly since 2014 it is a less free and democratic country (in the sense, we pointed out, of the reduction of the playing field and the number of bourgeois factions allowed to participate in it); it is rather that this chauvinist ideology was the credo of the Maidan regime: no one who did not profess it could claim to hold the government of the new state, prodigal in its repression of opponents and Russophiles. A policy of Ukrainization in a country that, before the national discord mediatized all its political life (something that already came from the Orange Revolution of 2004), showed in its censuses that just over 80% of its population used Russian as their first daily language, could only be implemented and prosper in one way: in a state of permanent war against Russia. This is how it has been posed since 2014, while the shots have not ceased to be fired in the Donbas. Objectively, the geopolitical pretensions of Atlanticist imperialism converged harmoniously with the interests of Ukrainian nationalism, which has once again honored its collaborationist tradition, and these were none other than to turn Ukraine into the first trench of a war, more or less cold, against Russia. There is no possible way to lead from here a national-democratic struggle. The struggle of Ukrainian nationalism, whether on the ground or in exile, will continue to feed the strengthening of the competition of imperialist military blocs, irreconcilable with any aspiration to internationalist solidarity among peoples.
However, with his speech on February 21, Putin made it clear that confronting this exclusivist chauvinism there is only another equally repugnant chauvinism . On that day, Putin overtook the Banderites on the right lane in the chauvinist competition to see who would most and best abjure and sully the democratic and internationalist legacy that once found its bastion in these Slavic lands. Putin blamed the current situation on nothing less than the Bolsheviks' democratic policy on the national question, literally showing himself ready to show the Banderites how a policy of "decommunization" is really done and, consequently, questioning the historical legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. To the embarrassment of those who have once labeled Putin as "Sovietist", he has starkly shown what was already evident: that the sources of the present Russian State do not derive from any Soviet tradition, but, on the contrary, from the imperialist-czarist one; that Putin is not a people' s commissar, but a Great-Russian blackhundredist ready for national stirring. It is not surprising that the neighboring peoples do not feel any attraction towards today's Russia House, nor is there any room to be duped by the demagogic use of the "denazifying" phraseology of theGreat Patriotic War (rhetoric and aesthetics which is the only element that today's Russia takes up, as part of the cocktail of the refounded Russian nationalism, from the former Soviet Union). This imperialism will not free the Ukrainian people from the important influence which today the Banderites and more or less fascist elements have in this country, but rather, as always happens in the struggles between nationalisms, it will feed them back and justify them more. In summary, this attack is a terrible blow to the unity and internationalist confidence between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.
In this respect, as is well known , the Line of Reconstitution is a tireless defender of the Leninist line on the national question . Of course, the Marxist position, masterfully represented by Lenin, of democratic treatment of the national question, with the fundamental importance in it of the notion of the right to self-determination of nations, is not only not responsible for the present situation, but, on the contrary, it rebuilt an internationalist confidence, seriously damaged by the policy of national stirring and Russification that Putin's predecessors implemented before 1917. This allowed coexistence among many of the peoples oppressed by the former Russian empire to be possible for a few more decades. By the way, some of the most prominent patriotic social-chauvinists did not take long to boast about Putin's words, which seemed to confirm their particular assessment that "self-determination was the cause of the disintegration of the USSR". It is a historical lesson that only three days after this Putinian denunciation of the Bolshevik democratic legacy, a full-scale war broke out between two former Soviet peoples: it is clear where the paths we each propose to the working class lead to. Moreover, we are proud that on both sides of the inter-imperialist trench this Leninist tradition is equally fired upon, which shows clearly, once again in history, what is the only historical alternative to imperialist barbarism. Ironically and unintentionally, the nationalists and the imperialists, in their reactionary struggle, have given for a moment a referentiality to communism which, unfortunately, it cannot provide for itself today. Working for the reconstitution of communism remains the only way in which this referentiality can genuinely open up and illuminate for the peoples the internationalist solution to the barbarism of imperialism and its inevitable wars.
Down with imperialism and its wars!
Long live proletarian internationalism!
For the ideological and political reconstitution of communism!