Anticapitalist Organisations of Russia, Ukraine, and NATO Countries
April 12, 2022
The criminal war launched by Russian imperialism against Ukraine is the most serious threat to world peace since the end of the Cold War. It brings the world closer to a global conflagration than at any time since Mikhail Gorbachev’s peace initiatives.
The main culprit for this dangerous evolution is US imperialism, which took advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union in order to consolidate its global military network, expand its presence in various parts of the world and launch invasion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Washington fostered in Russia and Eastern Europe the adoption of a brutal neoliberal program that created conditions for a far-right drift in most of these countries, especially Russia where it supported Boris Yeltsin’s antidemocratic coup in 1993.
To stress this historical responsibility of the Cold War’s victor does not in the least exonerate the far-right government of Vladimir Putin of its Great-Russian expansionist ambitions, its own militaristic drive and increased global reactionary interventionism and, above all, its murderous invasion of Ukraine, the most brutal invasion of one country by another since the US invasion of Iraq.
In addition to the terrible devastation and death that it brought to Ukraine, the Russian invasion has boosted the global militaristic drive and reinvigorated NATO after years of obsolescence. It is being seized as an opportunity for a sharp rise in military expenditure benefitting military-industrial complexes. This comes at a time when NATO governments themselves keep stressing that Russia’s force has been very much overrated, as proven by the heroic Ukrainian resistance, and when U.S. military expenditure alone is close to 40% of the global total, three times that of China and more than twelve times that of Russia.
As anticapitalist forces, we are as much in solidarity with the Ukrainian people’s resistance as we are radically opposed to this global militaristic drive. We therefore stand indivisibly for the following demands:
· Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine
· Support for the Ukrainian resistance and its right to get the weapons it needs for its defence from whatever source available
· Support for the Russian antiwar movement
· Russia should be forced to pay reparations for what it has inflicted on Ukraine
· No to any increases in military expenditure—we pledge to launch, as soon as this war ends, a new campaign for global disarmament, the dissolution of all imperialist military alliances and an alternative architecture of international security based on the rule of law.
· Open doors in all countries to all refugees fleeing wars in any part of the world
Signatories (by 11 April 2022):
Social Movement (Sotsialny Rukh) – Ukraine
Black Flag – Ukraine
Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) – Russia
Liberation Road – USA
Solidarity – USA
The Tempest Collective – USA
International Marxist-Humanist Organization – USA
Green Party of Onondaga County (New York) – USA
SAP – Antikapitalisten / Gauche anticapitaliste – Belgium
Midnight Sun – Canadian State
Anti-Capitalist Resistance – England & Wales
Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) – France
Fondation Frantz Fanon – France, Martinique
Elaliberta – Greece
Rproject-anticapitalista – Italy
SAP – Grenzeloos – Netherlands
International Marxist-Humanist Organization – UK
