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
Nov 11, 2024
Now that Trump has been elected president, there has been endless speculation in the news media about what kind of impact he will have on the Russia-Ukraine War. Will Trump “sell out” U.S. interests to his supposed buddy Vladimir Putin? Or will the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including the Pentagon, State Department and CIA (what Trump likes to call in his cartoonish language, the “deep state”) simply ignore Trump, like they did during his first term, when they increased sanctions against Russia and sent U.S. weaponry to Ukraine, despite Trump’s supposed warm and fuzzy feelings for Putin?
One thing is sure: this war is not about to end. Even if there is some eventual peace treaty, and one side or the other declares victory, it will only be to allow enough time for both sides to rearm and regroup in order to continue the war down the road.
Because this war is not really about Russia versus Ukraine. It is a war in which the U.S. imperialist super-power is using the Ukrainian population to try to impose U.S. domination over the bureaucracy and oligarchs based in Russia. It’s a war for control over an entire, rich and valuable region of the world, between two sets of murderers and thieves.
Right now, the big worry on both sides is that they are seeking much more cannon fodder to feed their respective war machines. Estimates cited in the Wall Street Journal are that over a million people have already been killed or wounded on both sides in close to three years of war.
That high rate of casualties, death and destruction dictates a high rate of troop replacements. Videos online show Ukrainian troops and cops dragging men out of concert halls, bars and restaurants, as well as off of street corners, and forcing them at gunpoint “to enlist.”
In Russia, which has a much bigger population, Putin has not yet had to resort to a draft. Instead, the Russian government is offering big enlistment bonuses, worth more than two years of workers’ pay, in order to entice hundreds of thousands of working people and the poor to enlist. Thus, Putin can rely on the rotten economic conditions to force enough working people to enlist and take their chances in the murderous war.
In Ukraine, 60,000 former soldiers face criminal charges for fleeing their posts since the war started. Low morale caused by mental and physical exhaustion is said to be the main reason, as the soldiers go from battle to battle, with little rest since Russia’s invasion in 2022. Many of these former soldiers say they prefer prison to having to go back to battle, because at least they know when their prison sentence ends. At the same time, an estimated 600,000 men have fled Russia since 2022, in order to avoid having to sacrifice for a war that is not theirs.
All this shows is that what Biden, Trump, Putin and Zelensky all have in common is their willingness to sacrifice generations of ordinary peoples’ lives, like it’s nothing. They are all rotten to the core. To end this madness, they along with the ruling classes, cliques and parasites they represent, all have to be overthrown by the working class.