the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 9, 2023
On January 1, missiles launched by Ukrainian troops hit a vocational school housing Russian troops. This attack killed between 89 and 400 Russian soldiers.
But this was not just an attack by Ukrainian forces. They were using a highly sophisticated rocket-artillery system called HIMARS. Not only were these HIMARS systems built by the U.S., but the Ukrainian troops using them had to be trained by Americans. On top of that, these systems are guided by satellites—again, provided by the U.S.
Russia at first said its troops were targeted by intercepted cell phone communications that pinpointed their position. Maybe—though if so, Ukraine is certainly only able to do so with U.S. military technology. But as the Wall Street Journal reported on December 21, “The U.S. has been providing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces reams of data on the location and movement of Russian troops and equipment and other battlefield information under a vastly expanded intelligence-sharing arrangement….” This almost surely includes satellite imagery used in the January 1 strike.
In other words, for this attack that killed many Russian soldiers, the U.S. supplied the weapon and the training to use it and told the Ukrainians where to aim.
This HIMARS strike is just one step in the escalation of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. At first, the U.S. was hesitant to even send Ukraine older Javelin anti-tank missiles, but in March it decided to flood the country with 17,000 of them. In the spring, it began providing heavy howitzers. In June, the U.S. began providing HIMARS, but not yet the long-range missiles that would allow Ukraine to hit targets deep in Russia.
The U.S. recently announced it would give Ukraine Patriot missiles and aerial smart bombs. And now, in addition to long range HIMARS missiles, Zelensky is asking for more advanced tanks, fighter jets, and cluster bombs.
Ukrainians may be the foot soldiers doing the fighting and dying, but the accelerating level of U.S. military support shows that this is really a U.S. war against Russia, bought and paid for.