Back issues

No 1607 6th April 2022

Imperialism’s black-is-white lies on Ukraine, supporting the losing Kiev Nazis, now reaching demented proportions. Total lies on non-existent Russian “war crimes” cover up Ukrainian atrocities and fascist terrorising. Western coaching and hyping of Kiev underlines its OWN fascist nature, the universal condition of bourgeois rule as its slides into insoluble Catastrophic economic breakdown. Bourgeois democracy has only ever been hidden capitalist DICTATORSHIP, now forced into the open, imposing censorship as it heads for world war (the real point of Ukraine). Trot, Labour and revisionist capitulation to hollow hypocritical “freedom and democracy” lies exposes opportunism and treachery of most of the fake-“left”. Defeat for the West but Stalinist defencist support for Russia one-sided and misleading too; Putin’s bonapartist balance with oligarch $billions offers no future for the working class. Leninism must be built

An admission by a British general that “NATO has been defeated” (for the moment) inadvertently torpedoes a massive hole in the sick Western propaganda structure pretending that the Ukrainian war is the result of an “unprovoked attack” by Russia whose army is “now being driven back”.

Neither of these grotesque fabrications is true – as the brief interview, with the general Sir Nick Parker, let slip on the morning Today news programme, flagship political propaganda instrument of the state-owned and controlled BBC (the Bullshit Broadcasting Corporation):

Nato’s bluff was called. We were unable to stop the Russians trampling all over Ukraine and now Nato is holding the line of the 2004 expansion, along the line of the Baltic states and Poland and Hungary and Romania.

And what it has to do is to defend that line, it’s in what in military terms we would call a defensive position.

And I don’t think it has the capacity to move on to the offensive with its 30 nations all with slightly different views.

We need to have a smaller coalition of nations who can start to develop an offensive counter-strategy to Putin.

The general gives away the truth about at least three major lies in this answer (there are plenty more);

a) that the war is all about “plucky little Ukraine” when its openly fascist regime is really part of a colossal and aggressive World War buildup over three decades involving the whole of NATO corralled by a desperate US-empire trying to divert attention from its Catastrophic economic and political breakdown;

b) that the targeted Russians’ defensive war response has “gone badly”, a propaganda lie aiming to spread demoralisation both with “the enemy” and in the working class and anti-imperialist world masses (see below). It also serves to prop up the non-stop Goebbels “warcrimes” garbage bucketed out by the imperialist state-controlled or billionaire owned and dominated media (all under instruction from the Western intelligence agencies) which turns upside down the real atrocities and warcrimes being perpetrated by the Ukrainians with a sly story alleging that Moscow is “in desperation as it attempts to recover a deteriorating situation” and has “turned to” “deliberate civilian slaughter” etc); and

c) that the “international community” ie the world imperialist powers, the smaller fry capitalist states and the Third World are all united both in “abhorrence” of such “terrible crimes” and in the necessities to impose sanctions on Russia.

Not only are these all complete garbage but they are calculatedly and consciously so, turning reality on its head in order to steamroller public opinion into the war frenzy that capitalism needs to escape its great cataclysmic collapse, under the lying pretence of “defending freedom and democracy” – even as it shuts down media like Russia Today and demonises and censors all reporting and information which does not swallow its stinking tidal wave of lies and jingoist hysteria.

The entire Western ruling class could not give a damn about the suffering and death of ordinary people anywhere, as the horrifying destruction and famines being deliberately imposed on Afghanistan and the Yemen right now, courtesy of Western money, arms and military, make sharply clear; not to mention the non-stop genocidal persecution of the Palestinian people by Zionist occupation of their land, slaughter of the benighted masses in the Sahel, the agonies forced on bankrupt Lebanon, and even more for ten years on Syria and Libya through deliberately fomented civil war and chaos;the sick and depraved invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; the 2013 toppling of Egypt’s newly achieved “Arab Spring” presidential democracy by a violent coup (butchering 3000+ civilians in the street), reimposing torture and murderous repression ever since; Latin American counter-revolutions, “constitutional” coups and sanctions sieges, (Brazil, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, Bolivia, Ecuador and more plus brutal repression following decades of horrific massacres in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina and Chile, and the endless sabotage and disruption of anti-imperialism in Venezuela and Nicaragua); the drug cartel nightmare civil war created in and paralysing Mexico with endless murder; the brutal blockade of Cuba’s workers state and North Korea’s likewise as well as endless disruptive sanctions on China and non-stop subversion and lying “democracy” counter-revolution.

As the EPSR has already made clear (last two issues No 1605 and No 1606), the notion that this war was begun for reasons of Moscow “expansionism” is a breathtaking inversion, painting black as white.

Putinism’s bonapartist Russia, is not communism and is not supportable as such (any more than were Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein or Assad) as explained.

But this war was generated and instigated by the overwhelmingly dominant force of US-led imperialism fomented by an orchestrated fascist lie campaign that makes Goebbels’s efforts look amateurish, and it is the defeat of imperialism which the world needs in order to move forwards.

It is about slump and unstoppable imperialist world war to escape it, to divert and mislead the masses with jingoist divisions and hatred and prepare them for the most horrifying destruction to come – everywhere.

Ukraine is just the latest in a string of worldwide military blitzings and/or economic siege wars by “sanctions”, all of which have butchered or starved millions and destroyed at least half a dozen countries over two decades (since the 1999 blitzing of tiny Serbia) as the monopoly capitalist world desperately tries to divert attention from its endemic failure and to head off the inevitable tumult and upheaval it is producing.

Ever spreading spontaneous stirrings of rebellion and “terrorism” foreshadow the inevitable revolution to come, either emerging directly from these revolts, trying to throw imperialism off their backs, or displacing and advancing them with better more scientific class-war leadership.

The world needs to urgently wake up to this mind-numbing breakdown which can only be ended by class war revolutionary overturn to establish planned socialism, possible only with the firmest dictatorship of the proletariat, led by revolutionary leadership guided by Leninist understanding fought for in non-stop polemical struggle in a purpose built party and particularly battling against all the anti-communist treachery of the fake-“left” (now showing their true colours over Ukraine).

Catastrophe faces the ruling class everywhere, losing all control as the long post-war boom implodes into terrifying inflationary Slump disaster, magnified hugely by ten years of insane dollar-printing QE which was supposed to rescue the system from the great global credit breakdown of 2009 but only makes its failure far worse.

That in turn was only the final surfacing of total crisis of the capitalist world system, which has been repeatedly shaken by multiple partial, regional and sectoral crashes, gigantic bankruptcies, “Black Mondays”, currency meltdowns, national defaults, and stagnation for decades.

Time after time huge credit creation programmes have just about salvaged imperialist rule (at huge cost to devastated proletarian and often petty bourgeois lives too).

The latest insane QE credit creation came after decades of dollar printing economic pollution all the way back to Richard Nixon in 1971, forced by the fabulously expensive Vietnam War to abandon the post war dollar-gold parity, (which was supposed to stabilise the world economy and end forever the chaos, slump conflicts and trade war of the 19th century and the much greater Depression and World War disasters of the early 20th century and rise of imperialism (see Lenin, and to some extent Bukharin on Imperialism).

But it is impossible to stop the relentless build up of multiple antagonistic contradictions in a class divided world in which all human existence and social productive capacity is channelled into producing ever greater mountains of privately owned and controlled accumulated capital, as Marxism has long understood (see page 6 the Communist Manifesto, Capital and, 100 volumes of Marx, Lenin and Engels collected works, as well a the EPSR’s own advances in the struggle to keep Leninism alive).

Breakdown of everything is coming, in a perfect storm of capitalist crisis heading into the most ruthless degeneracy in history, reviving all the grossest viciousness and small-minded chaos of past slump periods multiplied one hundredfold.

To keep their out-of-time and moribund private profit system going the capitalist multi-billionaires and monopoly corporations, who grow ever fatter on the backs of the exploited working class, must now impose cutbacks and brutal penury on a scale far beyond the food bank and homelessness austerity seen so far, if they are to survive the bitter trade war conflicts and their own sweet power and indulgent luxury is to continue.

None among the major powers show this reality as much as Britain, more degenerate and corrupt in its almost completely parasitical grovelling international finance spivvery than any other ruling class, which is saying something.

The crisis has undermined every aspect of its former “empire glory” leaving an arrogant and callous ruling order ever more sleaze ridden and ever more despised.

At home the incompetence, croneyism and profiteering of the callous Covid responses, the broken “promises” of Brexit and the joke pretence of “levelling up” (impossible while capitalism continues) reflect sick cynicism and incompetence, while overseas the disastrous “Kate and William” “Royal Tour” of the Caribbean has just shown the total breakdown of its establishment authority and the parasitical pomposity of the joke “aristocracy”, facing demonstrations, hostility and rejection everywhere it went.

For the moment the anti-imperialist independence sentiment in Jamaica, Belize and the Bahamas is headed off by petty bourgeois opportunist black nationalist posturing around “reparations for slavery”, which even if ever became more than an unrealisable fantasy, would do nothing to transform the exploited lives of the majority in the Caribbean (who need to end capitalism, taking a Leninist revolutionary path like everyone else) but it reflects the explosive hostility to the arrogance of the imperialist ruling class growing everywhere.

Domestically the crisis in Britain is teaching brutal lessons as the ever more covertly privatised NHS reaches near collapse, all public services are savaged, any restraint on labour exploitation is torn up (one of the reasons for Brexit), and massive tax increases are piled onto food bank and homelessness “austerity” just as prices rage out of control.

As the suddenly sacked workers on the P&O ferries have been learning in a lesson of stunning viciousness, the Catastrophe will involve tearing up all the supposed “welfare” gains and “job security” achievements ostensibly “regulating” capitalism and “slowly improving life for ordinary people” in a “free and prosperous” market system, where “everyone gets to have a say” in “democracy” (the greatest con-trick in history sold to the working class by TUC-Labour class collaborating reformist opportunism).

The ferry workers will not be the last to face such savagery – and not just in the working class.

There is no bottom to the decline; the once empire-privileged working class, deeply corrupted with notions of being a “cut above” the colonial or neo-colonial masses elsewhere (full of “British jobs” racist delusions and consumerist complacency) is facing now a plunge into the Third World levels of exploitation and poverty necessary for the bankrupt British ruling class to have any chance of surviving the cutthroat trade war maelstrom unfolding.

All pretence of “dealing with” capitalist caused global warming, pollution poisoning the planet and saving the earth’s resources, mineral and living, now goes out the window too.

World war, mixed with open bourgeois dictatorship repression is the end point as it was twice at the beginning of the twentieth century.

As always in times of crisis, the whipping up of chauvinism, scapegoating and crude finger-pointing blamemongering, – constantly in preparation as a key weapon for the ruling class to head attention away from the revolutionary perspectives that must eventually develop, – has been brought to boiling point, reaching demented levels of Goebbels lies and stampeding hate fostering.

All attachment to the real world has been completely abandoned in favour of lurid lies, and to hell with logic, consistency or coherence.

Every intelligence agent planted in the Western political and media system (and there are thousands if not tens of thousands) is in full operational mode along with the “useful idiots” of the anti-communist brainwashed petty bourgeoisie.

Nazi level propaganda rules the day, whipping up a frenzy of self-righteousness over Ukraine in manipulated “popular opinion” around staged “atrocities” while ignoring the growing evidence of grotesque fascist atrocities by the Ukrainians.

It has worked for the moment as posturing liberal “anti-Tories” and “lefty luvvies” suddenly line-up with the most reactionary figures in the British and American establishment and in full coordination with even the most reactionary regimes like the clerical Catholic backwardness running Poland, with their censorship, near feudal fundamentalism and anti-democratic dictatorial measures overlooked.

Sick and deluded self-righteousness is on full display in the establishment approved “marches” (as in London organised by the ultra-opportunist Labourite Sadiq Khan), in stark contrast to the complete indifference shown over years to the butchery, repression and starvation horrors imposed on the Middle East and Africa, like Yemen at present, as well as Afghanistan, constantly on the Palestinian masses in Zionist-occupied Palestine, in Somalia, in Africa, and against attempts to build socialist orientated economies in Latin America.

But it is going disastrously wrong as the general admitted.

His propaganda slip could not have come at a worse moment, just as the British and American disinformation (lie) machine was putting out coordinated “Russian defeat” propaganda, involving extraordinary and unusual worldwide distribution for a speech in Australia by Sir Jeremy Fleming the chief British spook at the multi-billion funded GCHQ spying and “Big Brother” surveillance centre, synchronised with statements from Washington too.

These completely unelected secret police figures of the British state are rarely seen or heard, since that would give too much away about the total fraud that is the reality of bourgeois “democracy” (dictatorship of the capitalist class) and the “freedom of speech” garbage still swallowed by the petty bourgeoisie (and most of the fake-“left” too).

But propaganda needs must.

The West is losing, firstly in its twenty year long imposition of the “war on terror” with “shock and awe” to cow and intimidate the growing world rebellion (mostly labelled “terrorism”) by making an example of rogue states.

And now in Ukraine.

A desperate Kiev has already been pleading for “talks” and offering concessions – Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky declaring that it will “never join NATO”, and will possibly back-off the brutal suppression of the eastern provinces which has kept warmongering on the boil with Nazi bombardments of the civilians there for eight years since the CIA leveraged the fascists into power with the 2014 Euromaidan “populist” coup.

Washington and Britain’s world psyops operation wants to cover this retreat with yet more lies pretending Ukraine has the “victory” – (so why offer “concessions”??) – with the GCHQ speech painting Vladimir Putin as “an out of touch dictator who does not know he is losing because his minions are all too fearful to tell him”.

Except the Russian military operation has gone well, as explained by American military expert Scott Ritter, formerly one of the UN weapons inspectors looking for the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq prior to the 2003 Iraq war, and having found none, well educated in the scale of the lies imperialism uses for its wars:

1/ Big Arrow War—a primer. For all those scratching their heads in confusion, or dusting off their dress uniforms for the Ukrainian victory parade in Kiev, over the news about Russia’s “strategic shift”, you might want to re-familiarize yourself with basic military concepts.

2/ Maneuver warfare is a good place to start. Understand Russia started its “special military operation” with a severe manpower deficit—200,000 attackers to some 600,000 defenders (or more). Classic attritional conflict was never an option. Russian victory required maneuver.

3/ Maneuver war is more psychological than physical and focuses more on the operational than on the tactical level. Maneuver is relational movement—how you deploy and move your forces in relation to your opponent. Russian maneuver in the first phase of its operation support this.

4/ The Russians needed to shape the battlefield to their advantage. They needed to control how Ukraine employed it’s numerically superior forces, while distributing their own smaller combat power to best accomplish this objective.

5/ Strategically, to facilitate the ability to maneuver between the southern, central, and northern fronts, Russia needed to secure a land bridge between Crimea and Russia. The seizure of the coastal city of Mariupol was critical to this effort. Russia has accomplished this task.

6/ While this complex operation unfolded, Russia needed to keep Ukraine from maneuvering its numerically superior forces in a manner that disrupted the Mariupol operation. This entailed the use of several strategic supporting operations—feints, fixing operations, and deep attack.

7/ The concept of a feint is simple—a military force either is seen as preparing to attack a given location, or actually conducts an attack, for the purpose of deceiving an opponent into committing resources in response to the perceived or actual actions.

8/ The use of the feint played a major role in Desert Storm, [the 1990 first Gulf War - ed] where Marine Amphibious forces threatened the Kuwaiti coast, forcing Iraq to defend against an attack that never came, and where the 1st Cavalry Division actually attacked Wadi Al Batin to pin down the Republican Guard.

9/ The Russians made extensive use of the feint in Ukraine, with Amphibious forces off Odessa freezing Ukrainian forces there, and a major feint attack toward Kiev compelling Ukraine to reinforce their forces there. Ukraine was never able to reinforce their forces in the east.

10/ Fixing operations were also critical. Ukraine had assembled some 60,000-100,000 troops in the east, opposite Donbas. Russia carried out a broad fixing attack designed to keep these forces fully engaged and unable to maneuver in respect to other Russian operations.

11/ During Desert Storm, two Marine Divisions were ordered to carry out similar fixing attacks against Iraqi forces deployed along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border, tying down significant numbers of men and material that could not be used to counter the main US attack out west.

12/ The Russian fixing attack pinned the main Ukrainian concentration of forces in the east, and drove them away from Mariupol, which was invested and reduced. Supporting operations out of Crimea against Kherson expanded the Russian land bridge. This phase is now complete.

13/ Russia also engaged in a campaign of strategic deep attack designed to disrupt and destroy Ukrainian logistics, command & control, and air power and long-range fire support. Ukraine is running out of fuel and ammo, cannot coordinate maneuver, and has no meaningful Air Force.

14/ Russia is redeploying some of its premier units from where they had been engaged in feint operations in northern Kiev to where they can support the next phase of the operation, namely the liberation of the Donbas and the destruction of the main Ukrainian force in the east.

15/ This is classic maneuver warfare. Russia will now hold Ukraine in the north and south while its main forces, reinforced by the northern units, Marines, and forces freed up by the capture of Mariupol, seek to envelope and destroy 60,000 Ukrainian forces in the east.

16/ This is Big Arrow War at its finest, something Americans used to know but forgot in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq. It also explains how 200,000 Russians have been able to defeat 600,000 Ukrainians. Thus ends the primer on maneuver warfare, Russian style.

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Russia has largely achieved its objective of neutralizing the Ukrainian military, but Western governments mistakenly believe the deliberate progress designed to avoid civilian casualties reflects weakness and are funneling weapons to prolong the fighting, a former top Pentagon adviser has said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has given strict orders from the outset to avoid civilian casualties and extensive property damage, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor told the Grayzone.

This has slowed the Russians’ advance “to the point where it has given false hope both to the Ukrainians … but seized on by people in the West, to try and convince the world that a defeat is in progress, when in fact the opposite is the case,” Macgregor said.

“The war, for all intents and purposes, has been decided,” the retired colonel said. “The entire operation from day one was focused on the destruction of Ukrainian forces. That’s largely complete.”

The Ukrainian units still active “are completely surrounded, cut off and isolated in various towns and cities,” said Macgregor, including as many as 60,000 on the border with Donetsk, whose supplies are likely running out by now.

Media coverage of the fighting, however, ignores this reality and paints a picture of the Russian military being “inept” – in the words of some US senators – because it didn’t defeat Kiev in mere days. This is then used as an argument by advocates of NATO intervention and a “no-fly zone,” but also those who wish to send more weapons to Kiev.

Purely military analyses like these do not make all the political and philosophical connections needed to the crisis, nor explore wider strategy of the Western encirclement of Russia, and possibilities mooted by various bourgeois commentators that Putin is being drawn into a long term entrapment.

That might be in Western minds – though such suggestions, drawing a parallel with Washington’s Afghanistan plot of the 1980s, arming the tribalist rural reaction with advanced weaponry to fight the socialist regime which was in power in Kabul and to pull in Soviet support to an unwinnable vortex (unwinnable without a full fight to take on imperialism that is) may themselves be psyops disinformation too, making the best of a bad job.

Nor do they explore the hamstringing effect of Putin’s backward anti-communism and Russian nationalism; videos of Russian Orthodox priests blessing young soldiers on the front line are not encouraging.

But the overriding issue at the moment is defeat for the imperialist system, which is overwhelmingly that of the US empire and its stooges.

Setbacks and failures for that, combined with the crisis savagery, will ultimately open up the space for the crucial rebuilding of Leninism which alone can take the world forwards, in Russia as much as everywhere else.

What these reports do manage, like the Radio 4 general, is to undercut the laughable nonsense of a “retreat from north Kiev” so panicky it leaves evidence of “atrocities” behind, in suburbs like Bucha, now elevated to the latest invented “warcrime” accusation by Kiev (coached by the CIA).

First a general point: Why would the Russian “invasion”, supposedly hell bent on “destroying Ukraine as a country and slaughtering all its people in a near psychotic genocidal frenzy before doing the same to the rest of the world”, (as the most reactionary Ukrainian fascists are repeatedly allowed to say unchallenged on all the Western media), have limited itself to a few (alleged) street shootings and not have totally destroyed Kiev?????

After all it has had the capital surrounded for three weeks with heavy artillery and tanks, supplemented by unchallenged air power and the use of long distance missiles, including hypersonic weaponry.

It could have pulverised it.

Ditto for Kharkov which despite some fighting and damage, remains largely intact (as constantly not reported or misleadingly reported by showing sectors where there has been military fighting with Ukrainian forces using tank weapons and snipers deliberately holed up in apartments and other “civilian” buildings – as demonstrated in a video from Mariupol of an attack on a tank (which failed), put out for reasons of fascist bravado, but which actually shows the anti-tank launcher being used in an upstairs flat).

Where meanwhile are the “thousands” of victims allegedly butchered every single day – as again bucketed out on unrestrained world media “interviews” with the fascist authorities, without a single murmur by the “intrepid” Western journalists to query the figures or even to tackle the glaring inconsistencies.

Allegations that “five hundred were killed today in this place” or “there are 300 in a mass grave” are repeated without any checking and only very occasionally is the weasel phrase “we have been unable to verify this statement” tacked on – which anyway does not stop the allegations being repeated as fact forever more.

Where for example were the multiple casualties from the alleged bombing of a maternity hospital and scenes of frantic rescuers? - one injured woman on a trolley is all that has been seen, of course a tragedy but hardly genocide.

But there have been subsequent witness accounts of the Azov military forcing people out and then bombing the hospital themselves.

Ditto for the supposed Mariupol theatre “atrocity” where 10 days afterwards some video emerged of allegedly dazed people escaping from the second floor (virtually impossible if this had been a missile strike or shell coming from above), but to date there are no scenes of the chaos and mayhem such an incident might be expected to produce, with people scrabbling in the rubble to find bodies or still-living injured victims being recovered and so forth.

In modern days when every mobile phone has a video, it is not just incredible but impossible that there would not be footage of such a disaster (especially considering the local mayor’s office asserting that at least “300” people were killed and more injured).

Both incidents are put up jobs, as is the carefully timed and theatrically staged Bucha “atrocity” - again riddled with inconsistency.

No questions have been asked about why there are bodies randomly strewn in the street (a sign of firefight combat) and why they were “left there” - especially as there are more allegations of “mass graves” presumably to allege there was “hiding of the evidence” - again entirely unchecked or verified, as to whether they even exist and what is in them.

How did they get killed? And who can prove that?

Mere assertion proves nothing and is certainly no basis for theatrically emotive demands by the trained actor Zelensky at the US-stooge United Nations for escalating the warmongering because wild “warcrime” accusations are flung around.

Forensic examination by experts is crucial to even begin to know how people died and often is not full proof – it gives little or no indication of what might have happened to bodies in the meantime.

It can identify additional gunshots to simulate “atrocities” or tying the hands of the dead for similar purposes just as the Finnish investigation team did eventually at the scene of the infamous non-existent Recak “massacre” in Yugoslavia used as an excuse to precipitate the NATO bombing and blitzing of Serbia in 1999 (along with the non-existent “genocide” in Srebrenica where even now the full eight and a half thousand alleged bodies have not been found (meaning that giving this figure was always a propaganda nonsense).

At Recak Albanian bodies from a KLA-Serb police civil war shootout were moved, re-dressed in local civilian clothing and some, further shot at close range, before being arranged in a ditch and instantly denounced by the US OSCE emissary as an “unacceptable atrocity” etc. (EPSR No 992 31-03-99 No 995 21-04-99).

The full forensics team report did not come until later by which time its doubts and caveats were far too late to alter the fait accompli of NATO blitzed buildings and hundreds killed.

There is even less basis for world wide hysteria now and even more reason to declare outright that this is a total fraud especially as the forensics team to be sent in is from Kiev itself – a cynical joke on a par with the police investigating themselves when accused of corruption.

And the “exclusive” coverage fed to the New York Times amid much hype of satellite images showing that the “bodies were there already” before the Russians pulled out proves nothing either.

It shows nine - just nine - apparent bodies allegedly in the same position for some time but again - so what? Nobody can check what happened in the meantime, how they died, what were the circumstances – it is a war.

And it hardly amounts to evidence for “demented psychotic racist butchery”.

Jut the opposite - the very small scale of the alleged “killings” and the random scattering along a street suggests this was some kind of firefight, in which these particular “partisans” were caught.

Thousands of civilian volunteers were issued with guns in the first week of the war, and much hype was made about evening “partisan training classes”.

Or they could have been shot by their own side – plenty of stories have emerged about nazi intimidation by the fascists, not least in turning back all young men from the railway stations and border posts for forced call-up.

They could have been “foreign legion” fighters from those encouraged to join up, in a sick and degenerate parody of the International Brigade of heroic communists from around the world who fought against General Franco’s fascist onslaught in 1930s Spain:

One poster who allegedly survived a Russian missile strike on a training center for foreign recruits last month described how his commanding officers were “sending untrained guys to the front with little ammo and s**t AKs and they’re getting killed.” The Reddit user said that he fled to Poland after the attack with a number of foreign veterans, as “the legion is totally outgunned as has a few crazy Ukrainian leaders. After the attack one officer wanted to march everyone to Kiev and fight. Absolute insanity. Stay home.” Other posters have told similar stories, involving unprepared recruits receiving several days’ training before being sent to the front with inadequate equipment.

Volunteers who’ve already made the journey have told horror stories of being sent to the front lines unarmed and untrained. Following the Russian offensive, videos emerged online of people claiming they joined the fight against Moscow’s forces, but were given no ammo or weapons by the Ukrainian side.

Ukraine’s ‘International Legion’ no longer wants foreign recruits to fight Russia, a spokesman told Canada’s National Post on Friday. Despite Kiev once welcoming Westerners with open arms, it has now been revealed that supplies are low, and inexperienced volunteers aren’t ready for combat.

Within days of Russia’s military assault on the country, Kiev promised visa-free entry for foreigners willing to take up arms against Moscow’s forces. Westerners could already enter the state, for 90 days, with just a normal passport.

Potential recruits visited Ukrainian embassies across the west and signed up to fight – often with the blessing of their own governments – and made their way to the battlefield.

However, the Ukrainian military was soon forced to be more selective about who could join its ‘International Legion’. Recruitment was narrowed last month to those with “live combat experience,” and a ‘legion’ spokesman told the National Post on Friday that enlistment had been paused entirely.

“There are multiple reasons (for halting recruiting) with one of them being the lack of firearms,” the spokesman said. Boris Wrzesnewskyj, a former MP from Canada who had been helping the ‘legion’ screen applicants, told the newspaper that inexperienced recruits were of no use on the front lines.

“Some people assumed they would arrive, they would get quick training, be given a gun and head off to the front,” he said. “There are all sorts of consequences if untrained people head in.”

“The Ukrainian military guys I’ve talked to don’t want to sacrifice young Canadians or young Brits for dramatic effect,” Lubomyr Luciuk, a Royal Military College (RMC) professor, added. “Very quickly it becomes obvious that some of these well-intentioned volunteers are not ready.”

The ‘International Legion’s website is still soliciting recruits, explaining the step-by-step process for anyone interested. On Reddit’s ‘VolunteersForUkraine’ forum, potential recruits and those already in Ukraine swap advice, encouragement, and sometimes horror stories.

After the strike on the training center, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said that the destruction of foreign mercenaries arriving in Ukraine “would continue.”

“All locations of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine are known to us,” Konashenkov said in a statement. “I want to warn you again – there will be no mercy for the mercenaries, no matter where they are on the territory of Ukraine.”

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Emílio Teixeira Alarcón thinks he knows exactly how he will feel after slaying his first Russian soldier.

“Mission accomplished,” shrugged the Brazilian army reservist. “In war, it’s either kill or be killed.”

“If I get someone in my crosshairs and don’t shoot, he might shoot me. It’s just like a game of paintball,” he added, as the mid-morning sun bathed his home in north Rio.

Paintball is the closest Alarcón, 43, has ever come to active combat. He served in his city’s 21st Field Artillery Regiment in the late 1990s before throwing himself into political activism and the battle against what he calls “the scourge of communism”. He has never left Brazil.

But with the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, Alarcón said he saw an unmissable chance to wage real-life war on the ideology he believes Vladimir Putin represents. “What’s happening is surreal … It’s put the whole world in danger,” said the Rio-born nationalist who runs an anti-communist group called ‘O Pesadelo de Qualquer Político’ (‘Any Politician’s Nightmare’). “That’s why the whole world’s mobilising to go there – Brazilians included.”

Alarcón, who has been fundraising for his mission since day one of the war, is not the only Latin American making plans to travel thousands of miles east to Ukraine’s frontline.

From Brazil and Argentina to Mexico and Colombia, volunteer fighters have voiced interest in joining – or already joined – Ukraine’s international legion for what they describe as a mix of ideological, humanitarian and financial reasons.

The volunteers range from battle-hardened veterans of Colombia’s US-backed “war on drugs” to Argentinian students who have never picked up a gun and Brazilian Instagram influencers who have been criticised for putting lives at risk by using the conflict as clickbait.

Uriel Saavedra, a former member of the Colombian police unit that protects government officials and VIPs, said he hoped to reach the battlefield within a fortnight after signing up to fight through a Colombia-based security firm.

“If someone wants me to go to war in Ukraine, well, obviously they’re going to have to pay – because the risk of coming back dead is so high,” said Saavedra, 40, who expects to receive $10,000-a-month from the company which recruited him and about 30 other veterans.

Saavedra, who saw the job advertised on a WhatsApp group for military and police veterans, recognised it was dangerous. “But we’re prepared. We can use any weapon they give us,” said the soldier of fortune who sees the war as a way of supplementing his $1,000-a-month state pension.

Brazilian reservist Isaías Diogo da Boa Morte said he was driven by anger at Putin’s ruthless assault on civilians. “It’s just so cowardly,” declared the 43-year-old who served with Alarcón and is part of his collective.

[...]how such bravado will hold up in the face of the horrific realities of Ukraine’s conflict is unclear. Rossi said he had retreated into Poland after Russia bombed the Yavoriv military base where he was staying. He said he had no plans to return and would instead seek to help South Americans in Polish refugee centres. “I think I’ll be more useful here than over there [in Ukraine].”

***********

The Britons and their brothers in arms – from countries including the US, Canada, Norway, Italy and France – have completed their five weeks of training and will be sent to the frontline as part of a fighting force known as the International Legion for the Territorial Defence of Ukraine.

They know full well from those who have already served of the horrors that lie ahead. US officials have spoken of a major fresh assault on the capital, Kyiv, despite claims from the Kremlin that they are withdrawing in the north of the country out of respect for the ongoing peace talks.

“If anyone says they’re not scared they are lying,” says James, 22, from Salford. “But I have come this far, I’m not going to turn back now. I’ve seen too many sad things to turn my back on these people…

“The Russians say they are pulling back, but as you can see the alarm is going off – they’re not pulling back and, even if they are, they’re just going to pull back because they’ve been absolutely hammered, regroup, and attack somewhere else or attack here.”

Since Volodymyr Zelesnskiy, Ukraine’s president, announced the formation of his foreign legion at the start of March, tens of thousands of people from around the world, some with a military background and many without, have arrived in Ukraine in what now amounts to the most significant international brigade since the Spanish civil war.

The legion last week temporarily stopped recruiting those who lack experience due, in part, to a scarcity of firearms. But there is a sense among the British contingent that are already here that their presence, while not publicly endorsed, is privately accepted in London.

Comments from the foreign secretary Liz Truss at the start of the war in which she said she would “absolutely” back those volunteering to fight only confirmed that feeling, despite her later backtracking.

[..]James says he was stopped at Manchester airport on his way out and told he would be arrested for terrorism on his return should he fight, but he is not concerned. “I’m doing nothing illegal,” he says.

“According to my contacts in military intelligence, they are grateful for the veterans signing up,” says Paul, 27, from Greenwich, who served in the Mercian regiment of the British army between 2011 and 2016.

One of three declined to be interviewed. But James and Paul, polite, personable and switched on, were willing to talk about their motivations and background, although their true identities have been disguised.

They both spent time in care as children, they say. James, who had no military experience before leaving for Ukraine a week after the Russian invasion on 24 February, says he had lost his job working in a warehouse and had spent time on the streets.

He was initially in the hands of former US special forces personnel who gave him some basic training before he joined the current unit. It has been a hard five weeks. “It’s all alien to me,” he says. “It’s new. But it is basically common sense. Once you get the hang of it, most things now just become natural to me. I hope that I remember that in combat”

Other reports, attempting to bolster up the “patriotic spirit” hype have shown how the young Ukrainians persuaded or forced to join up, have also had only a cursory two or three days of training before being sent to fight – making them essentially canon fodder (the very accusation thrown at the Russians).

Meanwhile real warcrimes by the Ukrainians are completely ignored, dismissed or downplayed by the Western media.

Multiple videos of savage beatings and kickings of Russian speakers or supporters have been posted and most degenerately of all, of multiple Russian prisoners being shot in the legs after capture.

Had such images been posted by Russians or of Russians they would have been all over the front pages of the world press for days.

The Guardian (one of the few to post anything)?? A sceptically toned story – note the “grainy footage” comment – buried well inside the paper and that days later and only because a UN investigator would not quite let it go:

A senior UN official has said they have seen videos purporting to show the abuse of prisoners of war on both sides in Ukraine, as Russia raised the mistreatment of its soldiers at the first day of the latest peace talks.

Matilda Bogner, head of the UN’s human rights office in Ukraine, said a number of videos of the abuse of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners were being examined, adding that “on the face of it, it does raise serious concerns”.

“It is important that these types of videos and that any ill treatment that may happen is stopped immediately,” she said, following the broadcast of footage that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting three captive Russians in their legs.

In the grainy footage, which is being investigated by Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government in Kyiv, three prisoners are seen being brought in from a car. A man with a blue armband then approaches them and says: “Hi” before shooting each of them in the leg.

The Ukrainian government has said it is taking the footage “very seriously” although there is no independent evidence of its veracity yet.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Zelenskiy, said: “If this turns out to be real, this is absolutely unacceptable behaviour.”

One of the biggest promoters of the video was Maria Dubovikova, a political commentator at the Russian International Affairs Council.

The BBC reported that the footage of Russian soldiers being shot took place in a dairy plant in Malaya Rohan, to the south-east of Kharkiv, which had been recently been retaken by Ukrainian troops from Russian forces.

Analysis of the weather conditions and troop movements further suggested that the video could have been shot in the early hours of Saturday 26 March.

***********

Ukraine has asked Britain, and other Western nations, to help after it came under pressure due to the alleged the mistreatment of prisoners of war, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said on Friday. Moscow believes Ukraine is in damage control mode after footage of the alleged torture of Russian soldiers in Ukrainian custody became public.

The Ukrainian government has informed Britain that “it has no intention to abide by the Geneva conventions when treating Russian prisoners of war,” the SVR claimed. In particular, Kiev informed London that it was not going to “offer enough food and medical assistance” to Russian captives at a time “when many Ukrainians lack them,” the statement said.

The SVR claimed it was part of a larger Ukrainian effort to deal with the negative publicity it faces over the mistreatment of prisoners. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized Kiev for its policy of exposing Russian soldiers to public appearances, in some cases while being humiliated.

This week, footage of the apparent torture of Russian POWs by Ukrainian troops sparked condemnation worldwide. The graphic video was initially published on social media last Sunday. An aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged to investigate the apparent crimes, stating that as a “European army,” the Ukrainian military does not harass prisoners.

According to the SVR, Kiev has secretly launched an effort to prevent leaks of similarly incriminating videos in the future.

The Russian agency also claimed that the Ukrainian government asked its Western counterparts to help limit the exposure of Russian POWs to foreign inspections.

“We have specific intelligence of Ukrainian authorities convincing Western sponsors to influence the International Committee of the Red Cross and various international humanitarian NGOs so that they stopped attempts to gain access to Russian prisoners of war,” the statement said.

Britain, the SVR claimed, advised Kiev to organize a tour for international organizations to showcase its ability to treat prisoners well. This would help counter the bad publicity from the torture video, London allegedly suggested.

This intelligence indicates that Western governments are aware of war crimes being committed by Ukrainian forces and are willing to help Kiev cover them up, de facto becoming accomplices, the agency alleged.

But not to worry, the Ukrainians are going to investigate it themselves!!!!! Presumably they will also arrest the state-honoured doctor who posted orders to have Russian prisoners castrated???

Russian soldiers captured by a Ukrainian volunteer medic unit will all be castrated, its founder and commander declared on national television on Sunday. The combat medic, whose volunteer team has been described as “medical angels” by the Western media, said “cockroaches” don’t deserve the right to procreate.

The shocking confession came from Gennadiy Druzenko, a constitutional lawyer-turned-volunteer frontline medic in Ukraine. Speaking to Ukrainian media in a live interview, he condemned the US for its reluctance to go to war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, before commenting on the Russian military.

“Trust me, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s military hardware burns well. The corpses of ‘putinoids’ may stink, but they become unthreatening,” he said.

Druzenko said that, during the conflict, he had diverged from the principle that requires an injured enemy combatant to be treated as a regular patient.

He further implied that, at the hands of his unit, Russian prisoners of war “will die in very large numbers” so that surviving Russians remembered Ukraine with terror “like the Germans remembered Stalingrad.”

At this point, the host cut the interview short, stating that Russian soldiers would be “held accountable.” Her co-host reminded the audience that Russia was being investigated for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

Druzenko heads the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital, a unit of civilian medics that has been providing services to Ukrainian troops since 2014, when post-coup authorities in Kiev sent the Ukrainian military to quash a rebellion in eastern Ukraine. He is an acclaimed figure at home and has received numerous awards for his work from the Defense Ministry and the National Security Council.

A darling of the Western media amid the Russian attack on his country, Druzenko is fluent in English and has been readily speaking to the likes of CNN and the New York Post about the work of what these outlets have dubbed the “medical angels.”

Before the conflict, Druzenko undertook several stints at various Western institutions, serving as regional director for a USAID-funded project in Ukraine in the early 2010s, according to his CV. He also worked as a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in the US, from 2009 to 2010, and at the Max Planck Institute, in Germany, in 2010.

These revelations dramatically undermine the steamrollering Goebbels propaganda being used by US-led imperialism to drag petty bourgeois public opinion behind this warmongering mayhem, the only way it knows to reimpose its faltering and ever more challenged world domination.

So too does the suppression of all opposition in Ukraine, making a mockery of all the petty bourgeois sanctimony about “fighting for democracy”:

Ukraine has moved to suspend the activities of almost a dozen opposition parties, including the parliament’s second-largest group, Opposition Platform – For Life, for as long as the conflict with Russia continues.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the decision of the country’s National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) on Sunday.

It was made “given the full-scale war and the ties of some political structures with this state,” he said, apparently referring to Russia. According to Zelensky, the activities of the opposition parties will be put on hold “for the period of martial law.”

“Any activity of politicians aimed at division and collaboration won’t be successful, but will instead be faced with a harsh response,” the president warned.

A total of 11 parties were blacklisted, including Opposition Platform – For Life, which is the second-biggest in the Verkhovna Rada with 39 seats; Party of Shariy, founded by harsh critic of the Kiev authorities, blogger Anatoly Shariy; and Nashi party, headed by Evgeniy Murayev.

Opposition Platform – For Life said the suspension was “illegal” and promised to challenge it. “Instead of political dialogue [and] attempts to search for compromise and ways to unite the country, the authorities are relying on raiding, intimidation, repression and reprisals against their opponents,” the party said, urging its MPs and activists to continue working.

But this is true not only of Ukraine - throughout the “free world” there is a massive censorship under the fascist excuse that it alternative views are “just disinformation”, or “just conspiracy theories”:

As social media companies promise to crack down on Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine, studies show they continue to fall short, allowing disproven narratives to reach millions.

Facebook failed to label 80% of articles on its platform promoting a fast-spreading conspiracy theory that the US is funding the use of bioweapons in Ukraine, according to a study released Friday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

The nonprofit disinformation research group studied a sample of posts from between 24 February and 14 March sharing external articles containing baseless claims about bioweapons. It found Facebook in 80% of cases failed to label posts as either “missing context”, containing “partly false information” or “false information” outright.

“If our researchers can identify false information about Ukraine openly circulating on its platform, it is within Meta’s capability to do the same,” said CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed. “But we found that in the vast majority of cases, conspiracy theories are given a free pass.” “

“Disproven”?? “Baseless”?? Says who?? And how could the working class judge??

The petty bourgeois Labourites, Trots and revisionist fake-“left” like the CPB still swallowing this lying “democracy” garbage wholesale are exposing themselves for the total traitors they are to the working class.

But it does not help to paint Putinism as an extension of the Soviet Union, as some of the more wishful thinking Stalinist revisionists wish to see it.

Vladimir Putin runs a restorationist capitalist state dominated by oligarch billionaires, and needs toppling too. Just not right now - defeat for the main enemy first.

And build Leninism.

Don Hoskins

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