The corporate media claim that all Ukrainians support President Zelenskyy, who has banned most political parties except his own and the far-right. These news outlets also whitewash the fascist gangs―integrated into the Ukrainian army―that engage in torture.

The sleazy London Daily Mail even mourned the death of Maksym Kagal, a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

The real history of Ukraine includes a rich revolutionary tradition both in Europe and North America. Even the anti-communist “Encyclopedia of Ukraine” admits that 4.5 million Ukrainians were members of the Red Army that defeated Hitler.

Around 1.7 million Ukrainians earned medals for bravery. Over a million died in combat or were murdered in concentration camps.

One of the many sheroes was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who was born near Kiev. She was the most successful woman sniper in history with 309 confirmed kills. Among them were 36 enemy snipers.

Pavlichenko was decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union and made a tour of the United States. She spoke of how the Red Army was made of many nationalities on the basis of equality.

In contrast, the Jim Crow U.S. Army was so racist that even the blood supply was segregated. The folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song about  Pavlichenko. 

Oleksiy Fedorov was born in a Ukrainian peasant family. Federov was an outstanding leader of the partisan units that fought behind Nazi lines. 

By 1943 Federov led 12 guerrilla groups that included 5,462 fighters. They engaged in 158 major battles with the fascists, derailing 8,675 armored trains and blowing up 47 bridges.

Federov became a major-general and was one of only two partisan leaders to be awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal twice.

Another partisan leader who became a Hero of the Soviet Union was Pyotr Vershigora. He was a son of two Ukrainian teachers.

Ace fighter pilot Ivan Kozhedub shot down 62 Nazi aircraft. The son of Ukrainian parents, he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union three times.

Kozhedub became the first Soviet pilot to shoot down a Nazi Me-262 jet fighter. He later commanded a Soviet Air Division along the China-Korea border during the Korean War. The National Air Force University in Kharkov, Ukraine, is named after Kozhedub.

Millions of Ukrainians revere these anti-fascist heroes. They want to put a stop to the fascist gangs that worship Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera.

Bandera’s thugs helped the Nazis kill more than a million Jewish Ukrainians as well as tens of thousands of Polish and Roma people. The current Ukrainian regime has allowed memorials to Bandera to be erected while statues commemorating the Red Army have been torn down.

Ukrainian miners vs. Mounties 

Like other immigrants from the Tsarist empire, Ukrainians joined the labor movements in both Canada and the United States.

In the early 20th century, they founded meeting halls called labor temples. The Ukrainian Labour Temple in Winnipeg, Canada, still stands, though it was raided by police during the 1919 Winnipeg general strike.

Over its entrance are two clasping hands reaching across a globe with the slogan “Workers of the World Unite.” The pro-Soviet Ukrainian Labor News was published there weekly. (Manitoba Historical Society)

Another progressive Ukrainian publication was “Robitnytsia” (“The Working Woman”). 

It was Ukrainian immigrants who were the backbone of the communist movement in Western Canada. Jeff Kochan In “Canadian Dimension” (Jan. 3, 2020) describes some of their activities:

“In 1926, Ukrainian-Canadian leftists helped to elect Canada’s first communist politician, Winnipeg alderman William Kolisnyk. Ukrainian-Canadian communists served on Winnipeg’s council well into the 1930s, much to the alarm of the Ukrainian-Canadian right.

“Historian Orest Martyowych notes that when one Ukrainian-Canadian alderman urged the city to assist Jewish refugees, he was ferociously attacked in the right-wing Ukrainian-Canadian press. Ukrainian-Canadian leftists were denounced as the useful idiots of a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ plot.”

It’s the political descendants of these fascists who support the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector today.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) founded 25 branches in Saskatchewan alone. (Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan)

This association supported the 1931 coal miners’ strike in Bienfait, Saskatchewan. The workers were organized by the Workers Unity League, which was led by Communist Party members.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police killed three of these strikers on Sept. 29, 1931, in nearby Estevan. The inscription “Murdered by RCMP” is on their tombstones. Many more workers were wounded or arrested.

The Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association was shut down by the Mounties in January 1940. The Association of United Ukrainian Canadians continues the ULFTA’s progressive work.

This is the real tradition of Ukrainian working people.

From the Emergency Campaign to Stop the War Lies street meeting in New York City’s Herald Square April 2.

When I woke up this morning, I thought about the protest today and I asked myself: Why are we engaged in another war?

Look at the recent withdrawal of the U.S. military from Afghanistan. Are the Afghani people better off after years of a war that plundered their economy? If the U.S occupation improved the lives of those people would the U.S. forces have been driven out?

Did the U.S. war in Afghanistan benefit us here? Only a very small percent benefited. The rich are richer and we are poorer than before.

The U.S. has one of the highest death rates in the world from COVID-19. That is no natural disaster. It is because the U.S., with all its wealth, does not provide for a national health care system.

Now the U.S. Congress has withdrawn funds for fighting COVID in order to spend another $13.6 billion for the U.S. war machine in the Ukraine.

Inflation fueled by the U.S. war machine is cutting down our income. Prices of gas, food and rents are skyrocketing.

It is another U.S. war. The horrors on the evening news were conceived in the Pentagon. Leon Pantetta, former head of the Pentagon and the CIA, has declared this a U.S. proxy war against Russia.

NATO is not a peacekeeping alliance. It is a war machine commanded by the Pentagon, spawned by the U.S. to threaten the Soviet Union during the Cold War. During the last 20 years NATO has expanded into most countries along the Russian border filling them with ever more lethal weapons.

The Russians have seen the U.S. and NATO invade Afghanistan and Iraq. They saw it demolish Libya and attempt the same operation in Syria. In Iraq alone, the war and the embargo has killed about 2 million people including half a million children.

Will the U.S./NATO military funds bring peace to Ukraine — and improve our lives as well? NO! It is dragging the Ukrainians into catastrophe and threatening the well-being of the entire world.

Fight racism, not war!

During rush hour on March 25, anti-war protesters in Baltimore held a banner drop and street meeting to demand “No U.S.-NATO War on Russia & Donbass.” 

Activists handed out fact sheets and Struggle-La Lucha newspapers to drivers at red lights. They reported many honks of support for the slogan on the banner. 

La sustitución y el desplazamiento del pueblo boricua ha tomado un ritmo sumamente acelerado, particularmente luego de la destrucción que causaron los huracanes Irma y luego María, en el año 2017. Para entonces, ya hacía 5 años – en el 2012 – que se habían implantado las nefastas Leyes de incentivos fiscales 20 y 22. Las que yo llamaría Leyes de Paraíso Fiscal que han atraído cientos de millonarios extranjeros. Pero lo que supuestamente iba a ser una inversión para la economía en Puerto Rico, ha demostrado que su verdadero propósito era el de terminar – más bien exterminar – la población isleña y hacer de Puerto Rico un centro de vacaciones y residencias para millonarios.

Han estado comprando las mejores tierras en las costas y montañas, sacando residentes de viviendas de interés social para convertirlas en habitaciones de arrendamiento corto. Han destruido los mangles y los corales en las costas, rellenando con cemento y poniendo en riesgo las comunidades aledañas al ser más susceptibles de ser arrasadas por marejadas y tsunamis.

Y todo con el aval del gobierno y sus agencias. 

Pero ante este gobierno fallido, hay un pueblo que no cesa de luchar en defensa de nuestra tierra, exponiendo estos crímenes constantemente por las redes sociales y en manifestaciones. Y esto quedó demostrado esta semana cuando por fin, después de que expusieran públicamente los crímenes contra la costa sur en una Reserva Natural en Salinas, el Tribunal de Justicia ha hecho acusaciones de crimen ambiental contra agencias del gobierno, lo que ha hecho renunciar al titular del Departamento de Recursos Naturales.

Ante un gobierno criminal y fallido, un pueblo se levanta y lidera. Y así seguimos hasta que logremos la independencia y nuestra soberanía.

Desde Puerto Rico, Para Radio Clarín de Colombia, les habló Berta Joubert-Ceci.

Presentation by Struggle-La Lucha co-editor Greg Butterfield on behalf of the Socialist Unity Party at the international online forum “Marxists Speak Out on the Conflict Between Russia and Imperialism” on March 26. The event featured representatives of communist and socialist organizations based in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Greece, South Korea, Turkey, the U.S. and more.

I want to thank the organizers for inviting us to participate in this important event. 

There are turning points in history where the principles of organizations and individuals are tested and clarified. This is one of those moments. In the past month we have seen so many anti-war and left formations bow to the intense pressure of imperialist propaganda at the expense of anti-imperialism and the interests of the workers and oppressed.

The other side is that the war crisis is separating the wheat from the chaff. Leaders and organizations that have coasted through recent years on past accomplishments are now forced to show where they really stand. At the same time, groups separated by historical differences and secondary issues may now find a new basis to work together and learn from each other.

The Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha newspaper call for the victory of the Donbass republics and Russia in their defensive joint military operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine. What this really means is: to end the eight-year genocidal war against the people of Donbass; to remove the neo-Nazi bootheel from the neck of the Ukrainian people; to reverse Ukraine’s transformation into a NATO war base that poses a threat to Russia; and return it to the formally neutral status before the U.S.-backed coup of 2014.

We call for the defeat of U.S. imperialism, which instigated this war and is a combatant as surely as it is in Yemen or anywhere else Washington’s proxy wars are carried out. After this week’s NATO summit, the imperialists are moving closer to direct intervention, which could precipitate an unprecedented global war.

We believe it is very important to elevate the struggle of the people of the Donbass region, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Too often their struggle is ignored by the left or, following the lead of the corporate media, written off merely as “Russian separatists” or “Putin’s proxies.” Such a view can only be argued by people who are completely ignorant of the Donbass and the anti-fascist struggle of the people there for the last eight years, or by those who know better but are adapting their views to the needs of imperialism. 

The people of Donbass have resisted through eight years of constant terror by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and neo-Nazi battalions, and a blockade that has deprived the people of food, medicine and the essentials needed for the maintenance of basic industry. This resistance draws upon the deep traditions of internationalism and anti-fascism of the Soviet people and it found an echo among people in Russia. 

Marxist view of Russia’s contradictions

Revolutionary Marxists look below the surface to understand the class forces and contradictions at work. Those who focus on President Vladimir Putin’s and Russian capitalists’ reactionary ideology ignore the dialectical relationship between Russia’s struggle to maintain its sovereignty against the U.S. and NATO, and the anti-fascist struggle in Donbass and Ukraine. 

The same dynamic exists on a global scale. Looking at it purely on the surface level of Putin’s domestic pronouncements, you could come to the conclusion that there’s little difference from Bolsanro in Brazil or Modi in India, whose ruling classes are fundamentally subservient to the U.S. But the life-and-death struggle of Russia to not be dissected and swallowed by Western imperialism has pushed it into the camp of countries and movements resisting U.S. imperialism, including Venezuela, Cuba, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

With our modest forces and resources, we are doing what we can to clarify the issues and bring a genuine anti-war position to the working class. We have launched a campaign called “Stop the War Lies,” aimed at exposing the U.S.-NATO role in Ukraine and imperialism’s cozy relationship with Ukrainian fascists, educating about the cause of Donbass, and explaining how Wall Street, Big Oil and the military industry profit from the war at the expense of people here.

We and allied groups have been getting out into communities with fact sheets, holding picket lines and speak-outs. Last night, our comrades in Baltimore held a rush hour banner drop and leafleting action. Today folks in New Orleans and San Diego are doing community outreach. Next weekend, on April 2, we are building protests in New York and Los Angeles. 

On March 27, we will hold a webinar featuring speakers from the Donbass republics, to help inform the anti-war movement and the left about the reality of the U.S.-Ukraine war. 

We invite the organizations here to join this effort. We are open to collaborating with groups here in the U.S. and internationally. This is the moment to overcome secondary differences and build a united front against imperialism and war that can lay the foundation for future revolutionary struggles.

Victory to the Donbass republics and their allies! U.S.-NATO out of Ukraine!

Struggle-La Lucha and the Socialist Unity Party based in the United States will join this weekend’s media marathon called by the Europe for Cuba and Europe for Cuba-Russia against the U.S. blockade on Cuba.

For 24 hours from April 2 to 3, media from around the world will broadcast a special uninterrupted program aimed at opposing the U.S. blockade of Cuba. People from around the world, those representing organizations large and small, will be saying: “Cuba, you are not alone! End the blockade!”

The U.S. blockade is now over six decades long. The tightening of the blockade during the COVID-19 pandemic is nothing short of criminal. The intention of these policies is to strangle the Cuban economy, create unbearable hardships for the Cuban people in an attempt to intervene, and overturn the right of the Cuban people to determine their own government.

Larger networks including teleSUR, Al Mayadeen, Cubavision International, HispanTV, Prensa Latina, Sputnik news agencies, along with radio stations Radio Rebelde, Radio del Sur, Radio Habana and others, will be participating.

The World Federation of Trade Unions and Latin American Network of Solidarity with Cuba are also supporting.

Struggle-La Lucha is proud to participate. You will see links on our website, Facebook page, Twitter and Telegram where you can access the program on April 2-3. The marathon begins on April 2 at 8 p.m. Eastern / 5 p.m. Pacific, and runs for 24 hours.

Watch here on YouTube: Europa X Cuba – Maratón Mediático contra el Bloqueo.

On March 31, dock workers of the Italian port of Genoa observed a 24-hour strike protesting the usage of the port for the transit of arms which are likely to be used in deadly imperialist wars going across the world. The call of the strike was given by USB Italia trade union. Activists from various left, anti-war groups including Potere al Popolo participated in the blockade held at the Ethiopia crossing at the Genoa port and an assembly of workers at Cap in via Albertazzi.

During the protest, workers raised a banner which read “Not a penny, a rifle or a soldier for war“ and also stated that Italian ports and airstrips must not be used to make arms deliveries for imperialist war. The protesting workers also resolved for a greater participation in national mobilization of Italian workers on April 22 in Rome against the anti-worker policies of the Mario Draghi government.

Dock workers in Genoa have a legacy of anti-war interventions as the port has become a major transit point for cargo ships carrying weapons allegedly destined for use in the ongoing wars in Yemen and Ukraine. Earlier, in the first week of March, dock workers of Genoa protested the disembarking of camouflage tanks at the port from a ferry coming from Palermo, allegedly destined for Ukraine. On March 14, cargo workers at the Pisa airport refused to load cartons of arms and ammunition in planes destined to deliver humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Workers and trade unions in Italy have already denounced the transfer of arms and ammunition to Ukraine from Italian seaports and airports disguised as humanitarian aid.

The USB Italia union has stated that “on behalf of the interest of the US and NATO, the Mario Draghi government in the country is dragging Italy into more imperialist conflicts with the sending of our resources and the adoption of sanctions. The price of such conflict will be paid by workers with austerity and layoffs. As port workers have no intention of staying indifferent in the face of the new war winds that are blowing in Europe again”

“Not a penny, a rifle, or a soldier for war. Let’s block our gates to gun traffic. It’s time for the labor variant,” added the USB.

Potere al Popolo has demanded that there should not be any increase in military spending and that public money should be used for urgent social measures. “It is the workers more than anything else paying very dearly the price increase, the crisis of raw materials and energy etc. Italian workers are the ones with the lowest salaries in Europe. We want the government to stop the military escalation. This is why we stand by the workers who oppose the war.”

Source: Peoples Dispatch