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
Dec 16, 2024
This article is translated from the December 13 issue, #2941 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
When Trump met Zelensky in Paris, he declared that 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers, and many more civilians, had died “unnecessarily” and that it was therefore necessary “to reach an agreement as quickly as possible” to get out of the war.
The Ukrainian president felt compelled to respond to Trump with his own figures on what had previously been a state secret. According to him, Ukraine has so far suffered 43,000 deaths and 370,000 injuries. Has Zelensky downplayed these military and civilian losses, for fear of offending the Ukrainian population? It wouldn’t be surprising. But, in any case, this assessment can only be provisional, as fighting and bombing continue. They are even intensifying, precisely because Washington seems intent on obtaining a ceasefire sooner rather than later.
Nevertheless, this bloody toll alone is enough to indict the organizers of this butchery. That is: American imperialism and its Ukrainian ally, in their drive to marginalize Russia even further in the former Soviet space, and the Kremlin, through its warmongering response. They bear responsibility for the criminal policy that has pitted two peoples, united by a thousand historical, cultural and even family ties, against each other in a fratricidal war.
Shortly before Kyiv acknowledged its losses, Moscow had also done so, albeit clumsily. It happened, at the end of November, during a round-table discussion in the Russian Chamber of Deputies, the Duma, on “social support measures for members of the armed forces and their family members.” There, the Deputy Defense Minister announced that the authorities would satisfy “the requests of 48,000 families of missing soldiers” by “offering free DNA tests” to identify the unknown dead.
The head of the Duma’s Defense Committee immediately demanded that these “figures not appear anywhere in the minutes,” as “this closed information is very sensitive.” Bad luck for him: the Duma website doesn’t breathe a word about it, but the recording fell into the hands of an independent media outlet, which published it.
The deputy minister doesn’t risk much for her blunder, since she’s related to Putin. It may be “sensitive information,” but the public has no shortage of clues. Rosstat, the official statistics agency, reports that the average price of a cemetery plot has risen from 4,400 to 7,700 rubles in the two years of the war, with the cost of digging a grave reaching 10,000 rubles. It’s only a short step to conclude that prices are keeping pace with exploding demand. And it’s all too apparent in the provinces: on television screens invaded by advertisements for funeral monuments, while undertaker’s stores open in fancy shopping districts in cities such as Perm in the Urals.