By Oleg Vernyk
November 19, 2024 was a sad date for the Ukrainian people: exactly one thousand days have passed since the aggression of Russian imperialism against Ukraine on a large scale. Of course, the language of numbers is not able to fully illuminate that tectonic fracture in the lives of millions of people who faced the biggest European catastrophe since World War II. However, it is the language of numbers that helps to properly immerse us in the context of the problems of the current Russian-Ukrainian war.
• During these 1,000 days, the fighting covered approximately 109,059 km2, 18% of the entire territory of Ukraine. Since February 24, 2022, they have been taking place on the territory of 11 out of 24 Ukrainian regions. They are currently continuing in five regions - Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. The Chernihiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk and other regions are also under regular attacks with high-precision missiles and bombs.
• Remaining under occupation are the 66,932 km2, 11% of the total territory, which the Russians captured after the start of the invasion. In total, since 2014, Russia has occupied 10,725 km2 of Ukrainian territory (18.3%), including the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
• According to UN reports, at least 12,162 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 26,919 wounded during the full-scale war as of the end of October 2024, figures that do not include deaths in Mariupol. The Russians have carried out more than 1,600 shellings of residential buildings in the rear or frontline areas with which as of November 18, 2024 they have killed at least 2,600 civilians.
• According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, at least 593 children have died, another 1,686 were wounded, many were deported and more than 20,000 Ukrainian children illegally taken to Russia have been identified.
• According to the Operational Data Portal, 6.79 million Ukrainians became refugees, the vast majority of whom found asylum in European countries. Another 560 thousand left for countries in North and Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia.
• According to the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, during the invasion, the Russians destroyed about 250 thousand residential buildings. This includes buildings destroyed by shelling and those washed away after the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station was destroyed on June 6, 2023.
One could go on for a long time with these horrifying statistics on Russian imperialist aggression. The language of figures is merciless in its verdict on the aggressor, but it is clearly insufficient to describe the heroism of the resistance shown by the Ukrainian people. Let us recall that at the beginning of the Russian aggression the Western intelligence services of the NATO countries predicted that the resistance would not last more than a week. Today, there is more and more information about the agreement between Western imperialism and Russian imperialism on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama categorically prohibited (“did not recommend”) post-Maidan Ukrainian authorities to offer armed resistance to the Russian army in the occupation of Crimea. Much later, i.e. in 2023, Obama tried to justify his policy by the significant number of pro-Russian people in Crimea. Russian imperialism, as is traditional for it, first sent troops and seized all strategic facilities in Crimea, achieved the withdrawal of Ukrainian units without resistance, under US guarantee, and only then organized a pseudo-referendum on the “annexation of Crimea to Russia”. Even according to bourgeois international law, referendums held under military occupation lack legal force and their results of validity. With the occupation Putin trampled on and annulled the right of the Crimean people to real self-determination. Not to see in the situation of 2014 the obvious complicity of Western imperialism with Russian imperialism is to “put on rose-colored glasses” and ignore the analogies with the Munich Agreements of 1938.
On February 24, 2022, when Russia launched the full-scale offensive against Ukraine, the U.S. High Command attempted to expel senior government officials out of the country to neutralize any attempt to organize resistance. However, in the spring of 2022, it was the resistance of the Ukrainian people to the Russian occupation that became the decisive factor in repelling the “blitzkrieg” and not the actions of the bourgeois high command of Zelensky and his U.S. “partners”. It was the popular resistance at the national level that forced Western imperialism to start supplying arms and financial aid to Ukraine in the summer-fall of 2022.
This aid was and remains grossly insufficient, as Western imperialism is panicking about a military defeat of Russian imperialism. Analysts have long argued that the basic idea of U.S. and European military aid to Ukraine is to supply weapons in the quantities necessary to ensure that Ukraine does not lose the war and, at the same time, does not win it. Donald Trump’s team, which came to power in the USA, has already declared that its main task is to destroy the military-political alliance between Russia and China and drag Russia to its side. Of course, this can be done only at the cost of giving concessions to Putin, i.e. at the cost of dividing Ukraine and occupying a significant part of its territory.
At this point of the analysis it is important to remember that at the world level imperialism continues to exist in its complex dialectic of unity and struggle of opposites coexisting simultaneously. Any aggravation of inter-imperialist contradictions also gives rise to various manifestations of imperialist unity. The unity of the imperialists is all the stronger as stronger is the unity of the working class iregarding the destruction of capitalism, and that is when imperialism is most afraid of the threat of a new and qualitative world spring of nations. Western imperialism is frightened by any prospect of the fall of the Putin regime, of chaos and disintegration of the Russian Federation in case of a defeat in the war with Ukraine, since it would provoke a wave of national liberation movements of the oppressed peoples which, probably, would follow the socialist version of its development.
THE SITUATION ON THE FRONTLINE OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR
Since the beginning of 2024, the Russian occupation army continued its offensive in the Donetsk region, trying to capture it completely, as it had already done earlier with the Lugansk region. On October 30, 2024, the large mining city of Selydove was finally captured. For many months, the town was defended, among others, by heroic mining warriors of our trade union organization Protection of Labor at the Selydove-Ugol company.
The Ukrainian army, in a situation of severe shortage of weapons and fighters, was forced to retreat. In October 2024 alone, Russian troops captured more than 470 km2 in eastern Ukraine. In August 2024, Ukrainian troops attempted to seize the strategic initiative with a strong attack on the Russian Kursk region and thus force the Russian army to transfer part of its forces and resources from the Donetsk region. However, this calculation did not come true. Despite the fact that the Ukrainian army captured more than 1,200 km2 in Kursk, the Russian army never moved its active units there from the Donetsk front and continued its offensive there. Then, Ukrainian troops were forced to take defensive positions in the Kursk region and today they control no more than 600 km2.
The situation on the front is not much affected by mutual missile attacks by the warring parties. The administration of outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden, as part of its dispute against newly elected Republican President Trump, has allowed Ukraine to use long-range American ATACMS ballistic missiles to attack military targets on Russian territory. The number of such missiles in Ukraine’s possession is negligible and unlikely to make significant changes to the situation on the battlefield. Neither M1 Abrams tanks nor F-16 aircraft have made any relevant change. These supplies are so meager that they have more of a propaganda effect than a significant one on the combat front.
At the same time, Putin took advantage of the propaganda background of the authorization by the USA, Great Britain and France for their missiles to enter Russian territory to use, for the first time, on November 21, 2024, the new medium-range Oréshnik (hazel, in Russian) missile system against the city of Dnipro. Both sides escalated the armed confrontation. In turn, Putin is trying to use the launch of the missile, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, to intimidate the world community with the threat that the Russian-Ukrainian war will escalate into an international nuclear conflict and trigger World War III.
It is clear that the situation in Ukrainian society has changed a lot compared to 2022. The general patriotic uprising of that year is gradually giving way to weariness and disappointment. It is important to note that this disappointment of the Ukrainian people does not refer to the very idea of resistance to Russian aggression, but to the actions of the bourgeois government. After 2022, when the resistance to Putin and Russian aggression was really grassroots and nationwide, gradually a layer of society began to form around Zelensky’s power vertical, corrupt from top to bottom, which not only adapted to the war, but became its beneficiary as it learned to earn very good money. After almost three years of full-scale war, the Ukrainian society became accustomed to witness endless scandals surrounding the theft of money from the budget, organized from above for almost everything: purchase of food for the army, construction of defensive fortifications, transfer of funds from the Ministry of Defense abroad, etc. Recently the country has been rocked by corruption scandals related to the so-called Territorial Recruitment Centers. The agencies in charge of mobilizing Ukrainians have turned out to be literally a mafia concentration which, in exchange for bribes, releases some from the army (generally representatives of the bourgeois class) and, often violating all laws, sends to the front representatives of the working class who, in conditions of war and total poverty, have no money to pay bribes.
The corrupt bourgeois-bureaucratic elite has defended Zelenski’s team in power, and will continue to do so because for them it is a guarantee of continuity of war and profits. It is clear that the main burden of the war, in conditions of corruption and robbery in all echelons of Ukrainian bourgeois power, falls on the shoulders of the working class, both those who dress up for mobilization in military “overcoats” and those sections of it who work selflessly in the rearguard.
IN DEFENSE OF MARXIST ANALYSIS
The analysis of the situation of imperialist aggression acts as a litmus test for the international Left. Their reflections, their application of the Marxist method, as well as their moral and ethical paradigms for the evaluation of the situation turned out to be very different and sometimes even diametrically opposed. The Marxist axiom that the public conscience does not usually keep up with the changing social existence in its reflection has been confirmed once again. Unfortunately, the qualitative transformation and complication of the imperialist world, the emergence of new young and aggressive imperialisms such as Russia and China, were not the subject of adequate reflection and analysis by a considerable number of subjects of the left camp. Traditional and largely obsolete formats and clichés of analysis were applied to both the radically transformed world situation and the aggravated inter-imperialist conflicts.
The ISL does not deny the planetary dominance of U.S. imperialism, but to ignore the dynamics of its transformation and significant weakening on a global scale is to deceive oneself, to make a false analysis and to disorient the world working class.
The flight of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, the displacement of French troops from North and Central Africa by Russian military units, the openly pro-Russian foreign policy of two NATO countries -Hungary and Slovakia-, the independent foreign policy of another NATO member country -Turkey-, the impotence of US imperialism in the face of the situation in Venezuela and Cuba and the growing presence of China and Russia there; are factors that are still subject to a more careful analysis in their complexity and dynamics. But it is clear that U.S. imperialism and Western imperialism as a whole, and its political-military bloc, NATO, are weakened and going through difficult times.
In this situation, any manifestation of campist analysis on the left takes on threatening characteristics for the development of the autonomy and independent politics of the world working class. Support for Russian or Chinese imperialism according to the formula the enemy of my enemy is my friend or within the framework of the traditional “anti-Americanism” of many expressions of the left is not only categorically unacceptable for us and our analysis, but also extremely harmful for the perspectives of the left. It is not surprising that the Stalinist camp has supported almost 100%, directly or indirectly, the imperialist attack of the Russian Federation (the second largest and most armed army in the world, possessing nuclear weapons) against a weak and dependent Ukraine.
It should be recalled that Ukraine was greatly weakened militarily after 1994, when under the simultaneous and synchronized pressure of Russian and Western imperialism it was forced to sign the so-called Budapest Memorandum. According to this document, all nuclear weapons located on the territory of Ukraine were transferred to Russia, as well as all nuclear weapon carriers (long-range missiles and strategic aviation). It is precisely these transferred missiles and aircraft that are now destroying the Ukrainian people and their resistance. The reaction of the Stalinists to the armed aggression of Russian imperialism was to be expected since their campism is well known. But what is really worrying is that several organizations claiming to have a Trotskyist political heritage found themselves in the same camp as the Stalinists. We will not enumerate these organizations; they are known and they are in all countries. But beyond the arguments they use to cover up their theoretical and political capitulation to campism, they coincide on two issues: total disregard for the right of the Ukrainian people to their independent and sovereign development, and complicity with Russian imperialist aggression.
In recent times, the key thesis of campism has been the following: “a real defensive war of national liberation is only possible with the seizure of power by the proletariat and under the leadership of a revolutionary party. And if the proletariat is not in power in a country subjected to imperialist aggression, then any call for resistance by that country will only play into the hands of the bourgeoisie of that country, and not its proletariat.” That is, the call to abandon resistance to imperialist attack disguised in a beautiful wrapper of pseudo Marxist rhetoric and rejection of the Leninist principle of unconditional support for self-determination and the right to independent development of all the nations of the planet. To be truly internationalist implies not turning a blind eye to national oppression and supporting in every possible way the national liberation struggle of peoples oppressed or subjected to imperialist aggression. Revolutionary Marxists understand the dialectical relationship between the national form of oppression and the basic form of oppression: class oppression. But we also understand perfectly well that to suggest to the workers that they should only fight for the power of the proletariat and to lie to them by telling them that proletarian power alone will automatically solve all the other problems of inequality, oppression and exploitation that accompany the world of capital is to mislead the proletarian masses!
It is to suggest that the Hindus in the 19th century fight for proletarian power and offer no resistance to the aggression of the British Empire.... It is to suggest that revolutionaries in Ireland renounce resistance to the British occupiers on the pretext that the Irish proletariat is still far from seizing power.... It is to suggest that 19th century Polish revolutionaries abandon resistance to the Tsarist/Russian occupiers and direct their potential for resistance solely against their feudal overlords.... It is to suggest that the Palestinian, Kurdish, Catalan, Basque, Saharawi and many other revolutionaries abandon the slogans of self-determination and independence of their peoples on the grounds that it is not yet the proletarian party that is in power in their countries...
But Karl Marx condemned the “British rule in India” and supported the resistance of the Indian people, even if it was not under proletarian slogans and was led by the feudal caste elite. He did not urge the Hindus to turn their arms against their Brahmins and abandon resistance to the British occupiers. In Poland, Marx and Engels consistently supported the uprising against the tsarist regime, and did not cynically call on the Polish rebels to “turn their arms” against their feudal overlords. As for Ireland, the position is reflected in a mirror! The fact is that the classics were excellent for setting the priorities of the moment and analyzing social processes in their internal logic and dynamics of development.
The conclusion is simple: class liberation cannot be achieved in a continuing situation of national oppression and imperialist attacks on the legitimate rights and interests of the peoples fighting for their independence and sovereignty. Campism’s latest attempt to support Russian imperialist aggression is linked to a profoundly false appeal to the legacy of the so-called “Zimmerwald left” of the 1915-1917 model and its calls for No war credits! No support for their governments in imperialist war! Only our deeply misleading and anti-historical campist opponents deliberately forget that these slogans were addressed by the Zimmerwaldites to the working class of the imperialist warring states!
In small Serbia, which was attacked by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the context of the analysis was different. In his famous work The Collapse of the Second International (1915), Vladimir Lenin noted that “the national element in the present war is represented only by the war of Serbia against Austria.... It is only in Serbia and among the Serbs that we can find a national-liberation movement of long standing, embracing millions, “the masses of the people”, a movement of which the present war of Serbia against Austria is a “continuation”. If this war were an isolated one, i.e., if it were not connected with the general European war, with the selfish and predatory aims of Britain, Russia, etc., it would have been the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisieas this is the only correct and absolutely inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the national element in the present war”. And, as is well known, Lenin’s refusal to support Serbia was ultimately connected precisely with the fact that Serbia in 1914 had already joined the imperialist Entente bloc and that the main armies comprising it (Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy) were already directly (!) engaged in military operations on the territory of Europe.
WHAT DO WE SEE IN THE SITUATION OF RUSSIAN IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION AGAINST UKRAINE, WHICH ENTERED ITS FIERCEST PHASE IN 2022?
- NATO has persistently and consistently rejected Zelensky’s requests for Ukraine to join the alliance.
- NATO has persistently and consistently avoided direct involvement in the war against Russia.
- NATO is significantly limiting arms deliveries to Ukraine, to the minimum it considers sufficient to prevent Ukraine’s defeat and clearly insufficient to defeat the aggressor.
This combination of factors belies the camp mythology that NATO imperialism is fighting Russian imperialism.
The ISL has repeatedly pointed out that if Western imperialism as a whole and its politico-military bloc, NATO, go directly to war against Russian imperialism, the situation will change radically for our analysis, we will immediately call for the defeat of both imperialist blocs and for transforming the imperialist war into a world proletarian revolution. But for now the perspective of NATO entering the Russian-Ukrainian war does not appear as the most probable.
For almost three years the Ukrainian people have been resisting almost single-handedly against Russian imperialism. And often when the resistance is effective it is not thanks to the Ukrainian bourgeois government but in spite of it. It is important for revolutionary Marxists to participate directly in the anti-imperialist resistance movement not to help their bourgeoisie to free itself from the attacks of the foreign bourgeoisie, but precisely to tirelessly expose their bourgeoisie before the working masses in this struggle, which is an integral part of the class struggle; to expose its inconsistency and its betrayal of genuine national interests.
Only by participating directly in the national liberation struggle of the masses against the foreign invader will the proletarian vanguard be able to travel the thorny road of unmasking its bourgeoisie. To turn away from this struggle leads to the self-liquidation of the proletarian vanguard as a true political force.
More than a thousand days have passed since Russia launched its full-scale aggression against Ukraine. For us, the international solidarity of the workers is the most important factor, it gives us hope and helps us to survive. Ukraine continues to resist. In spite of everything...
