Moscow is stepping up its murderous assault on Ukrainian workers’ lives and on the mines and factories of the country’s eastern Donetsk region, as well as on crucial infrastructure across the country. Yet the Ukrainian people’s courageous determination to defend their independence remains unbroken.
The Kremlin is throwing waves of troops against outgunned Ukrainian forces on the eastern front, making some small gains, as Ukraine’s supply of armaments dwindles. Although President Vladimir Putin’s police have largely suppressed larger public protests at home for now, the heavy toll on Russian conscripts, especially from regions with substantial populations of oppressed nationalities, continues to stoke anger and smoldering opposition among working people.
Putin denies that Ukraine — as a nation and as a people — exists. He promises a long bloody war at the expense of working people in both Russia and Ukraine. Moscow billboards quote him, “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.” This signals the expansionist ambitions of his Great Russian chauvinist regime modeled on the czarist empire and on Joseph Stalin’s rule after he crushed the revolutionary working-class movement built by V.I. Lenin.
“The Socialist Workers Party supports the courageous Ukrainian working people defending their country’s sovereignty and calls for the defeat of Moscow’s invasion forces,” Alyson Kennedy, the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas, told the Militant April 23. “Communists oppose the U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, which hit working people the hardest. These economic measures are a barrier to the solidarity that is possible and needed between Ukrainian and Russian working people, and by workers in the U.S.
“The SWP also opposes the deployment of U.S. forces in Europe, who are there to advance Washington’s imperialist interests, and calls for their withdrawal, including their nuclear weapons,” she said.
Moscow’s ‘missile terrorism’
Moscow’s “missile terrorism” has destroyed “almost all of Ukraine’s thermal energy generation,” the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) and the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU) said April 19 in an appeal for solidarity to the European trade union movement. Power cuts mean coal miners “find themselves in constant danger underground during blackouts and attacks in Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions.”
Cynical double rocket strikes are used to target “rescuers and ambulance workers who are members of the KVPU and FPU.” The union statement noted that “Russian forces also torture, illegally imprison and kill civilians, including workers and trade unionists, in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.”
Over 80 missiles and drones targeted energy facilities across the country April 11 with the Trypillia thermal power plant, the country’s largest, just south of Kyiv, being destroyed. Days later, scores of people were killed or injured as missiles struck apartment buildings in the northern city of Chernihiv and then in Dnipro and elsewhere in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
While Putin claims he is the champion of the people of eastern Ukraine, the fact is he has systematically destroyed the infrastructure, industrial base and fields across the region. An April 21 New York Times article titled, “Russian Attacks Crush Factories and Way of Life in Ukrainian Villages” graphically describes this reality.
Plants like the massive Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol, the giant ammonia plant in Sievierodonetsk and the Avdiivka coking coal plant have been obliterated, with workers driven out, arrested or killed. The Kurakhove Heating and Power Plant, 6 miles from the front, has been targeted 48 times by artillery and rockets this year.
The Ukrainian parliament passed a new mobilization law April 19, seeking to boost the size of the country’s armed forces by 300,000 to 1.2 million. Since the popular Maidan mass mobilizations overthrew the pro-Moscow government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, tens of thousands of working-class volunteers have flocked into the territorial militias and army.
This greatly expanded after Moscow invaded in 2022 as Ukraine pushed Russian forces back. But now with increasing assaults by Moscow, the capitalist government in Kyiv has had to turn to conscription to augment its forces.
The Putin regime is gambling that Russia’s greater population and resources will enable it to win a protracted war of destruction, as backing for Kyiv from Washington and European powers weakens.
But Putin faces opposition to his brutal war bubbling on the home front, fueled by the heavy casualties resulting from his “human wave” offensive, despite deepening repression.
A video appeal was made to Russian authorities in early April by families of soldiers mobilized for the 1454th Regiment from the Yugra region in central Russia. It complained that the men were used by their commanders as cannon fodder in “meat grinder assaults” on Ukrainian lines near Avdiivka. Units at their back were ordered to shoot soldiers trying to avoid fire or retreat. Within five days, the relatives said, their men’s unit was effectively destroyed.
The Way Home, a group of wives and mothers of mobilized reservists, is demanding the return of their loved ones from extended service at the front. After police harassment of their weekly flower-laying protests, they are now organizing actions by women banging pots and pans from their balconies.
Russian working people are the greatest potential allies for Ukrainian toilers’ fight to defend their national sovereignty.