Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine continues to devastate the lives of working people there, to fuel anti-war opposition to the regime of President Vladimir Putin in Russia, and to roil world politics as it enters its third year. Workers in Ukraine are at the center of the fighting to defend the country’s sovereignty.
To defend his capitalist government’s expansionist course, Putin repeated his denial that Ukraine is a nation in a Feb. 6 interview with U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson. “Ukraine is an artificial state,” Putin said. He claimed, “Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people,” when in fact they have existed as a nationality for centuries fighting foreign invaders and occupation, including that imposed by the despotic Russian czars.
Czarist rule was overthrown in 1917. Led by V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the working class took power, making the world’s first socialist revolution. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks created Ukraine, Putin claimed. He condemned Bolshevik policies “promoting national languages and national cultures.”
“For some inexplicable reason, Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, insisted they [Ukrainians] be entitled to withdraw from the USSR,” Putin told Carlson.
In fact, Lenin led the new workers state to unconditionally grant the right to self-determination to all nations oppressed under the czars, including Ukraine, leading them to join a voluntary federation of independent Soviet republics and advance the unity of working people.
After a few years, these conquests were overturned in a counterrevolution headed by Joseph Stalin that drove workers from power and ended the proletarian internationalist course fought for by Lenin. The reinstatement of Moscow’s oppressive domination over the Soviet republics ensured the inevitable disintegration of the USSR along national lines as the Stalinist regimes crumbled in the late 1980s. Ukraine declared its independence again in 1991.
In his interview Putin glossed over Moscow’s early defeats in its war, claiming, “We withdrew our troops from Kyiv” in April 2022. The truth is that his invading army was forced to retreat, largely by working-class volunteers who took it on. Moscow’s military planners had failed to take into account the determination of Ukraine’s working people to defend the country and fight to repel the Russian rulers’ attempt to seize the capital.
After earlier Ukrainian gains in the east and south, the front lines have become static for months despite heavy losses on both sides. Moscow continues its bombardment of cities and towns across the country, maximizing civilian casualties to try to demoralize the Ukrainian people. But their resolve has only hardened.
Putin is using waves of untrained and ill-equipped conscripts to try to wear down and push back Ukrainian front lines. But the deadly consequences of these assaults are provoking a sharp conflict at home.
Kremlin faces rifts, opposition
One Russian unit near the Donbas town of Novomykhailivka suffered heavy losses in early February. At least 12 armored vehicles, including three tanks, were destroyed, reported the Kyiv Post. The advancing column was repeatedly hit by Ukrainian light drones.
“What is the point of these attacks? So that [senior commanders] can report they are taking decisive action, and so that they can earn medals by throwing away the lives of their own people?” wrote Maksim Kalashnikov, a Russian commentator and supporter of Putin’s war.
Vladimir Solovyev, the anchorman of a nightly national news program, criticized Kalashnikov and others for reporting the facts. “Those people need to be arrested and put in jail,” he said. “Who are they doing this for?”
Divisions are surfacing among Russian frontline forces. A soldier in the 5th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade complained about “bastards with messed-up fantasies” throwing troops into battle “as meat, as cannon fodder.”
Ukrainian soldiers in the Kherson region are firing shells with surrender leaflets that provide instructions to Russian troops about how to quit and approach Ukrainian positions safely. More than 100 Russian soldiers near Avdiivka, scene of heavy fighting for months, surrendered to Ukrainian forces in December and January. Their low morale had been exacerbated by food and water shortages, as well as frostbite.
Anti-war actions in Russia
The Way Home, an organization of wives and mothers of Russian soldiers, is demanding their loved ones be relieved from frontline duties. It has been gaining support since its founding last September, when the Kremlin reneged on a promise that soldiers mobilized 12 months earlier would be rotated out of the battle zone after a year.
Members of The Way Home go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near Red Square in Moscow to lay flowers regularly on a Saturday. Scores of the women, wearing white headscarves, protested “500 days of hell” at the Kremlin Feb. 3. The group refuses to call for a second troop mobilization as a means to rotate troops and get their relatives back. “We don’t want this fate for anyone,” The Way Home website says, “God forbid anyone has to go through what we go through every day.”
Unlike earlier public anti-war protests, the Kremlin has held off from heavily repressing their actions so far. Police arrested male journalists and protesters Feb. 3, but not the women. When some women tried to block a police van, cops pushed them aside but didn’t detain them. At a similar protest in Yekaterinburg, five were arrested.
In mid-January mass protests erupted in Bashkortostan in Russia’s southern Ural Mountains against the sentencing of Fail Alsynov to four years in a penal colony. He is an opponent of the war and a leader of the Bashkirs’ fight for ethnic rights. The demonstrations were among the largest in Russia since the war began. Bashkirs and other oppressed nationalities shoulder a disproportionate burden of the fighting and dying.
“If you don’t stop acting against our people, against our fathers and mothers, we will abandon our positions and come for you,” a group of Bashkir soldiers said in a video addressed to Russian authorities. “If you want a war, you will get it.”