Three days of talks in early January on the Ukrainian crisis during three different Summits – the US and Russia, NATO and Russia and a full meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – failed to reach agreement on the future relationship of Ukraine to NATO. At first glance the issue appears simply to be whether Ukraine should or shouldn’t become a member of NATO. The underlying issue though is the growing pressure from imperialism on the borders of Russia and what Russia will, or can, do to defend its own capitalist interests in the region. As Vladimir Putin put it in his annual end of year press conference in December: ‘Further movement of NATO eastward is unacceptable. They are on the threshold of our house. Is it an excessive demand, no more attack weapons systems near our home, is there something unusual about this?’ In other words, Russia sees the attempts to make Ukraine a member of NATO as a strategic threat that it cannot agree to. BOB SHEPHERD reports.
For months the governments and media in the US, Britain, Germany and across Europe have been beating the drums of war, declaring that Russia is about to invade Ukraine and preparing the ground for a possible imperialist military intervention. Their main argument is based on the fact that Russia has thousands of troops deployed near the eastern borders of Ukraine. These troops, however, have not crossed any borders; they are based on Russian territory. It was mid-January before Russian troops began military exercises in Belarus, an ally which borders both Russia and Ukraine. This is in contrast to the 30,000 troops deployed by NATO last summer in military exercises across eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea, or the British troops sent over a thousand miles to train Ukrainian troops to operate the 2,000 anti-tank missile launchers recently sold by Britain to Ukraine.
Russia’s justification for the build-up of troops was the Ukrainian government threatening in April 2021 to launch a military offensive against the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which broke away from Ukraine in May 2014 after the right-wing coup. The civil war which has carried on since then has claimed over 14,000 lives and created hundreds of thousands of refugees, the majority of whom have fled to Russia. As well as regular troops, the Ukrainian government has used fascist militia to attack the separatist regions. The conflict has carried on primarily because the Ukrainian government refuses to implement the Minsk 2 Protocol drawn up in February 2015 by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France, overseen by the OSCE. The main political point in the Protocol was the call for autonomy for the Donbas region within a unified Ukrainian state, which is clearly unacceptable for the right-wing nationalist Ukrainian regime. In response to reports of further arms deliveries to Ukraine, on 9 December the Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov declared:
‘The deliveries of helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles and aircraft to Ukraine are pushing the Ukrainian authorities towards abrupt and dangerous steps. Kiev is not fulfilling the Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian armed forces are touting that they have started to employ US supplied Javelin anti-tank missile systems in Donbas and are also using Turkish reconnaissance/strike drones. As a result, the already tense situation in the east of that country is further deteriorating.’
NATO expansion
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist states in eastern Europe in the early 1990s, NATO has brought into membership almost all the former socialist states, including the three ex-Soviet Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. This is despite US Secretaries of State agreeing in both 1990 and 1993 that NATO would not advance its membership into central and eastern Europe. Russia now has NATO members and imperialist troops and weaponry up against its western borders and it is unsurprising that it wishes to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
The imperialist-backed right-wing coup in March 2014 in Ukraine has led to rising NATO military activity across the region. The NATO summit in Wales in September 2014 agreed to set up a ‘Readiness Action Plan’ for eastern Europe. This became known as the ‘Enhanced Forward Presence’ and was reported as fully operational in 2017. According to a NATO website, ‘NATO has enhanced its presence in the eastern part of the Alliance, with four multinational battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. These battlegroups, led by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and the United States respectively, are multinational, and combat-ready.’ The ‘battlegroup’ led by Britain based in Estonia comprises of over 800 British troops with tanks and armoured fighting vehicles. The Latvia ‘battlegroup’ led by Canada has over 1,500 troops with tanks and armoured fighting vehicles. The Lithuania ‘battlegroup’ led by Germany has around 1,250 troops along with armoured fighting vehicles and the Polish ‘battlegroup’ led by the US has over 1,000 troops including some 150 British troops. It is no coincidence that these ‘battlegroups’ are stationed in the four NATO countries which directly border Russia.
Since the Ukrainian military threat in April against the separatists in the Donbas region, NATO has been building up military pressure on Russia. After NATO’s summer military manoeuvres across eastern Europe the US then staged simulation bombing raids within 12 miles of Russian airspace. According to NATO itself, its warplanes confronted Russian aircraft 290 times in 2021, most of the time along Russia’s western borders. It means nearly 80% of NATO’s 370 flight missions in 2021 involved confrontations with the Russian air force.
NATO naval exercises also regularly take place in the Black Sea probing Russia’s defences around Crimea. In June 2021 a British destroyer, HMS Defender, was fired on by Russian forces as it sailed close to the coast of Crimea in a deliberate act of provocation. After the 2014 coup it was reported that the overwhelming majority of the Russian-speaking population of Crimea had voted in a referendum to secede from Ukraine and unify with Russia. This guaranteed Russia control of its main Black Sea military port, Sevastopol in Crimea.
Since 2014 the US has given over $2.4bn to the Ukrainian government in ‘security aid’ including $450m in 2021 alone. In addition to this it was reported that the Biden administration had given it a further $200m in late December 2021. Apart from the US, Britain, France, Turkey and other European countries have been supplying Ukraine with arms. Turkey has provided the same type of drones that it supplied to Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia.
In 2010 Britain signed an agreement worth $1.6bn to equip the Ukrainian navy with modern missile boats and to upgrade port facilities to service them. A new agreement in June 2021 includes the building of two new naval bases for Ukraine in the Black Sea with the sale of boats and missiles.
Inter-imperialist rivalries
Imperialism, led by the US, has been prodding and pressurising Russia since the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. This latest escalation of rivalries is a reflection of the economic problems faced by all capitalist and imperialist states which the Covid pandemic has brought to the fore. Russia, as a weak imperialist power, has been put in a position where it has been forced to attempt to stop the continuing weakening of its influence in areas of eastern Europe, where once it was dominant.
The written demands Russia made going into negotiations with the US and NATO included that neither Ukraine nor Moldova should become members and that there should be legal guarantees of a non-expansion of NATO. They also called for a return of NATO to its borders of 1997 with the withdrawal of NATO troops and missiles from countries that have joined since then.
These demands were immediately rejected outright by Julianne Smith, the US ambassador to NATO, who stated: ‘I cannot imagine any scenario where that is up for discussion.’ NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that Russia had ‘no right of veto on the question of whether Ukraine can become a NATO member.’ Then on 27 January it was reported that the US and NATO, in a written response, had rejected Russia’s demands. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the core issue of Ukraine’s ‘independence’ was not up for negotiation but that the US would be willing to discuss other issues. The response of Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was that although the US document does not address Russia’s ‘main concern’ about NATO’s expansion it ‘gives hope for the start of a serious conversation’ on secondary questions. At the same time as talking about diplomacy the US is sending more arms to Ukraine and calling on its NATO allies to increase their troop deployment in eastern Europe.
This strategy is supported by Britain with Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Defence Minister Ben Wallace all calling on other European countries to commit more troops, be prepared to impose strict sanctions on Russia and provide more arms to Ukraine. It is important for British imperialist interests to be seen as standing by the side of the US in any confrontation with Russia. Not to be left out of the sabre rattling, Labour’s Shadow Defence Minister John Healey, along with Shadow Foreign Minister David Lammy, ‘bravely’ visited Ukraine to condemn ‘Russian aggression’ and support the selling of more arms to Ukraine. Healey declared that all threats must be met with ‘strength and resolve’. Lammy tweeted, ‘Putin’s aggression threatens peace in Europe and runs counter to Labour’s core values of internationalism and the rule of law.’ In a nauseous joint article which flies in the face of reality they proudly make clear the Labour Party’s criminal role in the formation of NATO and its continuing aggressive path,
‘We must not believe Russia’s assertions that NATO is responsible for escalation. It is a defensive alliance based on security and progressive values. Its founding treaty enshrines the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law, alongside collective security. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government was instrumental in the foundation of NATO, and our commitment to it remains unshakeable.’
The present situation has also exposed both the political and military weakness of the EU. It has no military force of its own and as a consequence as a political entity it had no independent involvement in the main round of talks on Ukraine with Russia in early January.
Divisions between the US and the main EU states of Germany and France on what to do if Russia does send troops into Ukraine have also appeared. Apart from arming the Ukrainian military to the hilt, at present the most likely outcome to any Russian incursion would be massive economic sanctions, but on this there is no unanimous agreement. Germany refuses to sell any arms to Ukraine at present and blocked Estonia from sending German-supplied weapons there.
Germany gets over 30% of its gas supplies from Russia. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which runs from Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany to provide cheap gas has not been allowed to operate due to pressure from the US. Sections of the ruling class in Germany are opposed to any new sanctions on Russia which will affect the flow of cheap Russian gas. Ben Wallace, on a trip around Europe to bolster support for action against Russia declared, ‘what we want from Germany, as the biggest economy in Europe, is a stronger signal on sanctions.’ Meanwhile, on 26 January a meeting of the ‘Normandy Format’ countries – France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine – took place in Paris. They confirmed their support for Minsk 2 and an unconditional ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. They also agreed a follow-up meeting in Berlin in mid-February.
At the moment though, it is still the US, through NATO, which is calling the shots on the future of Ukraine and any possible military confrontation in Europe with Russia.
Oppose the drive to war!
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 286, February/March 2022
