When the crisis between Ukraine and Russia last February entered its current phase, marked by the start of the “special operation” of Russian troops on Ukrainian territory ordered by Vladimir Putin, Fronte Popolare published its own statement. Our views were summarized in the following points:
- The root cause of the precipitation of this latest phase of the crisis consisted of the Kiev government’s choice to focus on a new involvement of the United States of America in negotiations regarding the conflict that opened in Donbass following the ultranationalist, Western-maneuvered coup of May 2014. This choice, dictated by the search of Ukrainian nationalist forces influencing the moves of their puppet-president Zelensky, for ways and means to evade the settlement of interests mediated by Germany and France through the Minsk Accords, has been the premise for an inevitable and to date seemingly unstoppable increase in tension.
- The Biden administration has from the outset aimed to exacerbate contradictions and has actively worked to corner the Russian government by advocating Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which would pose a clear threat to the security of the Russian Federation.
- At a deeper level, the aims of the Biden administration’s action are to revive its own and NATO’s role on the European chessboard, to strike at the objective concatenation of material interests that binds the active players in the region, to undermine the European Union’s autonomous energy supply policy, and to favor the dollar over the euro in the currency markets, so as to rake in resources with which to buffer the current inflationary spiral underway in the US. We are thus facing a piece of Washington’s strategy to preserve and strengthen its declining hegemony: this strategy must be understood, studied and countered.
- The Ukrainian government, now for eight years engaged in a war against the peoples of Donbass marked by constant bombings and systematic violation of the Minsk agreements, armed to the teeth by its Western instigators, has in turn maliciously stoked tensions with Moscow in order to secure the consent and strengthen the grip on society of the reactionary, nationalist and far-right sectors at the origin of the 2014 coup.
- The attempts at mediation exercised by the German and French governments have failed due to the inability of Western European imperialism to deploy an adequate autonomous military deterrence capacity in the region and its persistent inability to fully emancipate itself from U.S. initiatives and influence, which has in the deployment of troops on European soil a fundamental lever. From this objective observation two tasks arise for those fighting for peace on our continent: on the one hand, to revive the struggle against NATO, to denounce its role as a detonator of the current crisis, to prevent its strengthening and to intensify the struggle for the withdrawal from the alliance of the countries that make it up, with a view to its final dissolution; on the other hand, to mobilize against the hypothesis of the arms race within the framework of the EU and the so-called “European army”. The future of peace on our continent lies in the strengthening of multilateral political and security instruments, excluding the U.S. from them and in a strategic framework of divestment of weapons of mass extermination, not in the substitution of a European power to Washington or even in Russian nuclear deterrence.
- Russia’s choice to initiate military intervention in Ukraine, while followed by repeatedly making explicit demands to avoid the developments that later occurred, unquestionably undermines the principle of the legitimacy of borders and the right of nations and states. These key principles of international politics, five hundred years old, of which Europe was the cradle as a consequence of centuries of bloodshed, are the only ones capable of guaranteeing the rights of weaker nations in a world hostage to imperialism and violence. They certainly do not represent our ideal horizon, but under the given conditions they are an indispensable brake, albeit a stunted one, mutilated in scope and repeatedly trampled by the U.S. and its allies (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.), on the arbitrariness of the strongest. The impossibility of equating U.S. imperialism’s ambitions to perpetuate its planetary dominance-despite its repeated reversals, most recently last summer’s Afghan catastrophe-with Russia’s frantic scramble to secure itself against unquestionably hostile forces, does not justify the violation of this principle. As painful as this may be, particularly thinking of the violence exercised by Kiev troops against the populations of Donbass, turning the armed intervention of major military powers, whatever the formal motivation, within the internationally recognized borders of other states into normalized practice is objectively dangerous for world peace. From this perspective, Russian military intervention in Ukraine, with the dramatic bloodshed that ensued, can in no way be approved, since it sacrifices the general interest of nations and peoples and the value of peace and stability in Europe in the name of special interests that, in the medium term, it cannot even guarantee.
- The Russian Federation is a capitalist power whose deeply backward economy is based on commodity trade rents and dominated by a brutal and corrupt oligarchic caste. Putin’s government is an expression of this structural configuration and interprets its interests in the forms of a nationalism that celebrates the myth of the imperial past and is nourished, in a state-continent populated by dozens of non-Slavic nationalities, by pan-Slavic rhetorical suggestions, the exaltation of Great-Russian identity, and fierce anti-communism. Putin’s statements against Leninist policy on nationalities were only the latest manifestation of this. However, these considerations cannot affect the ability to objectively read the power relations on an international scale and correctly frame Russia as a target of aggressive initiatives by actors-primarily the U.S.-significantly more powerful and for that reason frighteningly more aggressive. Understanding such a concrete situation and distinguishing between those who attack and those who are attacked is something else and different from so-called “campism”: it means adopting the only useful perspective for reconstructing a fully independent political subjectivity of the working classes, capable of reading international phenomena in their complexity while refraining from any aventinian or moralistic temptation. It means standing in the heart of the contradictions of this historical moment, as revolutionaries.
- At this serious and danger-laden moment, the peace movement in our country must strive to demand that the acts of the Italian government be consistent with the needs imposed by the urgency of returning to dialogue. It is therefore necessary, once again, to reject the practice of economic sanctions, to reject the sending of Italian armaments and troops to the theater of crisis, and instead to pursue the path of diplomatic settlement, in accordance with our constitutional principles.
- At its current stage, the Ukrainian crisis represents a serious defeat for the international popular anti-war movement. Those in the West who feel the frightening dangers of our age and seek ways to respond to them cannot be allowed to find themselves split between advocates of peace at the price of being objectively conniving with Western imperialism and advocates of Russia’s reasons at the price of voting for justificationism of the policies of a reactionary government in the service of a clique of bloodthirsty oligarchs. If we want to safeguard peace, we must connect its defense with a general idea of human progress and with a consequent internationalist practice capable of making the peoples, the public opinion that hates bloodshed and war, no longer passive and dazed victims of the decisions of the “world’s leaders” and their instigators, but a subject, an active and independent power in historical dynamics. The experiences of the second half of the 20th century have taught us that this is possible, but also that, in the new conditions of this era with unprecedented characters in human experience, we can and must know how to go further, create new forms, do better than in the past.
Against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving situation in Ukraine, now in the midst of military escalation and exposed to the increasingly tangible danger of the use of nuclear weapons, it is more necessary than ever for communist, socialist, leftist and anti-imperialist forces to equip themselves with the necessary tools to exercise an effective vanguard role. Broadening the analytical framework, we need to be able to identify the nature of the contradictions that are dragging humanity to the abyss. To have a critical posture toward the development model and policies of a huge country such as China, for example, is not to fail to realize how its position in the international chessboard is quite different, and its postures are quite antithetical to the practices of Western imperialism and the United States in particular.
Based on this general inspiration, and in a spirit of dialogue and inclusiveness towards all sectors of the popular and democratic movement, we need to be able to foster an interchange of analysis and information at the international level. We need the tools to be able to develop coordinated mobilizations around the world. We urgently need to gather and systematize our views on the various hotbeds of crisis burning around the world, from the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East: those hotbeds correspond to the friction points generated by the policy of containment and suffocation that the United States and its allies implement against those they consider a threat to their planetary hegemony. A planetary hegemony whose focal point is the role of arbiter that the U.S. has violently arrogated to itself on the Eurasian continent. Peoples’ struggles must break this hegemony.
For decades now, the hegemony of Atlantic forces, and within them the dominance of the U.S., have plunged the world into an agonizing spiral of permanent war. Our duty is to revive a broad movement of solidarity with the peoples suffering in their flesh from the consequences of the present situation. Together we must stand resolutely alongside martyred peoples such as the Syrian, Palestinian and Libyan peoples. It is our duty to relaunch the struggle to break the chains of neocolonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We must fight resolutely for a united Korea, at peace, freed from foreign military presence and finally free to determine its own destiny, without the permanent threats of war that overhang the DPRK and all the Korean people. From Cuba to Vietnam and the new Latin American experiences, we must be more than ever able to support with a solidarity effort the struggle of the peoples who have paved their way to a socialist future and who are daily attacked and threatened by imperialist forces because of this.
All this implies an enormous responsibility for us communists, socialists and anti-imperialists fighting within the imperialist countries. We have a moral duty not to leave the attacked peoples to fight our battles alone. There is an urgent need to find ways to return to impact in our societies, to be truly decisive in politicizing the class struggle taking place at home. Western imperialism will be defeated if we all do our part. For this reason, from Europe or the U.S. we cannot afford any ambiguity, any rhetoric of equating the forces on the international stage, any confusion between aggressor and aggressed. We cannot afford, in short, to objectively give our ruling classes a free hand in the international-scale exercise of their violence. We must be clear that there is a fine line between superficiality of analysis, obliviousness, and open complicity. This line must be clearly drawn to determine who is fighting for peace today and who is not.
For this reason, on behalf of the FP militant collective I would like to thank the PDP for this important meeting. We will also hold a similar one in Milan next November 20th.
May our common commitment help shape that global anti-imperialist movement without which we will not be able to avert the dangers that loom over us.
