Moscow launched its largest missile and drone strikes on Ukraine in almost a year April 24, killing 12 people in their homes in Kyiv and injuring 87. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime is focusing on daily attacks on civilians, ignoring calls by Washington and the Ukrainian government for a ceasefire.
President Donald Trump condemned Moscow’s latest assault and threatened he might tighten U.S. sanctions against Russia. But these fall hardest on working people and are an obstacle to forging unity between workers in Russia and fellow working people in Ukraine and around the world.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press April 27 the White House was considering whether to abandon attempts to broker a settlement.
The U.S. rulers’ aim is to impose stability in the region to advance their own predatory interests, irrespective of the Ukrainian people’s courageous fight for their country’s sovereignty. Trump’s goal is to bring Moscow closer to Washington and into common opposition to Beijing, which the U.S. rulers consider a more dangerous threat to their declining domination of the world imperialist order.
Putin is pursuing his war of attrition, hoping to take advantage of Trump’s desire for a realignment in the region to make advances against Ukraine’s smaller forces. On April 28 he cynically called for a three-day ceasefire May 8-10 to coincide with celebrations in Russia to mark victory in World War II by the Soviet Union and its allies.
“Why wait until May 8?” Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, responded. The Ukrainian government supports an immediate ceasefire, he said, that is “real, not just for a parade.” The White House said it wanted “a permanent ceasefire first to stop the killing.”
The same day, for the first time, the Russian and North Korean governments admitted North Korean troops were involved in Moscow’s efforts to crush Ukraine. In coordinated statements, Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hailed their role aiding Moscow’s forces in pushing Ukrainian troops out of the Kursk border region of Russia.
Some 14,000 North Korean soldiers sustained heavy losses in the battle for Kursk, a product of Moscow’s combat strategy of sacrificing hundreds of workers in uniform at a time while achieving only small advances.
The North Korean government is also providing millions of artillery shells as the Russian military faces shortages, as well as ballistic missiles, which Moscow uses in its strikes on Ukrainian cities.
Trump tries Crimea lure for Putin
As an enticement to Putin to agree to end the fighting, Trump raised the possibility that Washington could recognize Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, claiming Ukraine had lost Crimea “years ago.” He urged the Ukrainian government to concede the peninsula to Moscow, claiming otherwise Ukraine would “fight for another three years before losing the whole country.”
This was immediately rejected by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said altering Ukraine’s borders was against the country’s constitution that was adopted when it declared independence from Russia in 1991.
In 2014 Putin used Russian troops based in Crimea to spearhead the seizure of the peninsula after working people across Ukraine, including in Crimea, had joined the popular Maidan uprising, toppling the pro-Moscow Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Crimean Tatars joined in protests against the Kremlin’s takeover. Ever since, Moscow has subjected Tatars there to brutal repression and tightened political persecution to suppress opposition to its rule.
Crimean Tatars were the majority on the peninsula before czarist Russia’s conquest in 1783. They faced centuries of persecution under Moscow’s boot. The exception was the years immediately after the 1917 Russian Revolution when V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks led working people to conquer political power. The new revolutionary government championed self-determination for all the nationalities oppressed by czarism, including Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars.
A decade later, Lenin’s course was reversed in a bloody counterrevolution headed by Joseph Stalin that re-imposed Moscow’s domination over Crimea, Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. During World War II Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar population into Russia’s interior, slandering them as Nazi agents. Tatars were only permitted to begin returning home decades later.
“Crimea is the homeland of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people and an integral part of Ukraine,” Refat Chubarov, head of the Mejlis, the council of the Crimean Tatars, wrote April 22. “No one — under any circumstances — can decide the fate of Crimea except the Ukrainian state and the Crimean Tatar people.”
At the forefront of the defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty are the working people and oppressed Crimean Tatar people who have mobilized in huge numbers to resist Moscow’s invasion for the past three years and continue doing so.