Defend Russia and the Donbass People!

By Liz Hoskings

Anyone who states that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are defending themselves against a Russsian ‘invasion’ is either misinformed or a racist liar.

Despite the silence of the Western media, the Russian-speaking Donbass region has been subject to a programme of ethnic cleansing by Ukraine since 2014, since they first voted for autonomous status and when that was rejected declared themselves independent republics.

This began with the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014, which overthrew the elected government of Victor Yanokovich and replaced it with a client regime. Having been funded and encouraged by the United States and NATO in its hope of expanding Eastwards and bringing its forces closer to Russia’s borders, neo-Nazi forces, mostly from the Western region of Galicia, whipped the masses into a nationalist frenzy.

The first act of the newly installed government of Petro Poroshenko was to drop the official status of the Russian language, despite the fact it is the mother tongue of a third of Ukraine’s population. Despite his official banning of the Russian language, the current president of Ukraine was born in Russia and struggles to speak some Ukrainian words himself. In fact, considering the interspersed nature of central Ukraine and the fact it grew up there (it appears to be mostly influenced by old Russian, Turkic languages and Polish) it would be more accurate to call it Galician. It was likely adopted as the official language in 1991 to signify independence, as much as it being the mother tongue of a questionable majority, which it would not have if Galicia had broken away.

Alarm bells rang in Crimea, which was historically part of Russia and only gifted to Ukraine in the 1950s by Nikita Khrushchev, without consulting the population. It held a referendum and re-joined the Russian Federation.

Protests then rang out in the eastern Donbass region, who voted for regional autonomy. This result was not respected by Poroshenko, who sent in troops to reassert dominance over the region. This led to declarations of independence by the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

Around the same time, a group of peaceful protesters in the Russian-speaking city of Odessa were burned alive in a Trade Union headquarters by Nazi death squads, and those who managed to escape were clubbed to death.

Contrary to the impression given by the Western media, the war in Donbass did not begin with Russia’s intervention in February 2022 following its recognition of the breakaway republics but had been raging for eight years. Residents had suffered shelling daily on the pretence of ‘rooting out separatists’, when in reality civilian infrastructure was being targeted, along with civilians who were not part of the defence militias. The Nazi Azov Battalion was let loose on the region and allowed to loot stores and attack civilians.

Meanwhile, in Central and Western Ukraine, those speaking Russian in public risked being attacked by menacing groups of Nazi thugs. The Russian language was no longer taught in schools, to the further alienation of Donbass civilians and no doubt fearful residents of Odessa, who had been shown the price of resistance.

Streets were renamed after Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who was responsible for the murders of Jews, Poles, and Russians, despite the recent attempt of the Western media to rehabilitate him. Statues have been built of him, and Poroshenko gave him the title of ‘Hero of Ukraine’, despite the fact he and his thugs had little to no support east of Galicia. He was instrumental in the formation of the Galician Waffen SS Division, the logo of which is used by the aforementioned Azov Battalion.

A Ukrainian nationalism stripped of the history and close lingual and cultural ties with its neighbour (differences indistinguishable by foreigners) is bound to be false. And false it is.  Schoolchildren are taught that Ukrainians existed as long ago as 1000 BC (!) and were responsible for building the Black Sea. From a young age they are given cartoon books glorifying Bandera and demonising the Soviet Union that their not-so-distant ancestors fought and often died to defend from Nazi Invasion. They are also sent to Nazi Summer camps where this malignant nationalism is drilled into them as they learn fighting techniques. The despised Russians are referred to as Orcs, a word which as most people familiar with Lord of the Rings would be familiar with. They were in Tolkien’s world a sub-species, fought against by the good and pure blonde-haired, blue-eyed elves.

Yet this is not Lord of the Rings, with its simplistic world view of good vs evil, a dualism echoed in Christianity as much as it is in racist mythology. Israel views the Palestinians in the same light, an inferior race that must be destroyed by the chosen people (Israel).

The truth of the matter is that as a nation, Ukraine is a young one. Ethnically they are Slavs, and as they are so close together linguistically and culturally as well as geographically they are believed to be one people in pan-Slavic ideology. They were referred to in the West as Great Russians, White Russians (Belarusians) and Little Russians (Ukrainians) Contrary to the claims of the current regime, echoed by the West, that it was a demeaning term, all it truly meant was that it was a smaller country, and especially with cultural and linguistic differences overlapping so as to be indistinguishable to a foreigner, it did appear as a smaller Russia. Prior to the 19^th century there was little in the way of a Ukrainian national consciousness. As remains the case even today, the land was rich in agriculture, and was one of the main sources of grain and livestock for the vast empire. The flag in use today represents the yellow of a cornfield and the blue of the sky.

The name appears to derive from an expression used in Russia around the 18^th century. ‘I’m going to cross the border’ was crossing the Y’Kraine, and Russian troops on the outskirts of the empire were said to be stationed on the Y’Kraine, pronounced ‘Ooh-kraine’. But this term meant borderlands in general. There was little to speak of in the way of a Ukrainian national consciousness. The language spoken in Galicia and by some communities to the east of it, was dismissed by the ruling classes as a ‘peasant’s dialect’ almost until the revolutions of 1917. In the late 18^th century, the term ‘Ukrainian Cossacks’ started to be used.

The emerging Ukrainian nationalism was treated as harshly by the Tsars in the 19^th century as the others emerging, and the language was repressed until the revolutions of the 20^th century. The land that was then commonly known as the Ukraine declared independence in 1917 along with many other nations in the area. It became part of the Soviet Union partly down to the civil war spreading to the region, and the Whites using it to group. Along with most newly declared republics it was encouraged, albeit not forced, to join the Union.

The idea of Ukraine, its name literally stemming from a word meaning Russia’s border, joining NATO is bound to be seen by Russia as a provocation as it breaks the promise made by George Bush Senior that NATO would not expand beyond its then present borders. Since then, it has been swallowing most countries in Eastern Europe, right to the Baltic States right on Russia’s border. This gives them the right to put American bases with military hardware there. The idea that it is a defensive alliance is put to rest by Putin being rebuffed by Bill Clinton when he asked if Russia could join. It is an aggressive tool which is aimed against Russia and should have been dismantled with the Warsaw Pact.

The idea that the war was ‘unprovoked’ is a blatant lie used by the Kiev regime and the US to garner sympathy from the West. One of the main criticisms by the Russian Communist Party of Putin was that he was betraying the people of Donbass by allowing them to be slaughtered by neo Nazis. They were in full support of the operation, especially with the constant provocative assertions that Ukraine would join NATO at a later date. When Russia finally recognised the breakaway republics in February 2020 and declared the operation, Ukraine’s military forces were very close to Russia’s borders in the Donbass in their non ending war against its people.

This is now a full-scale proxy war between the United States and Russia. Despite their own people facing shortages and rising costs, the Biden regime and its allies keep flooding Ukraine with arms and billions of dollars in ‘aid’. Prior to the war Ukraine was named ‘the most corrupt country in Europe’, and its neo-Nazi problem well documented by mainstream media. Likely because they know the war is unwinnable and the corruption problem not having disappeared since the war broke out, a lot of the military hardware sent by the United States and its EU/UK allies is not reaching its target but being sold on the black market, while US dollars end in the hands of oligarchs.

The social media campaign to garnish support for the war, with propaganda pieces and the sudden appearance of blue and yellow flags, was not spontaneous but was carefully orchestrated by a troll farm, which has now been exposed by the alternative US commentator Jackson Hinkle and others as operating from Discord. Along with posting on alleged Russian war crimes , such as the ludicrous idea put out by Kiev that Russia killed its own POWs in a false flag operation, destroying their own evidence. The only evidence they had for Russia doing such a crazy thing was that the attack was not made by a US HIMAR rocket launcher as originally thought. Common sense tells that it was more than likely ordered by Zelensky as he was worried about what the captives would say to incriminate him and the regime during their conduct of the war.

The Western media was silent when Ukrainian forces shelled a maternity hospital in Donetsk and is silent as it strikes civilian targets there daily. Yet any time civilians are killed in strikes on military targets in Ukraine, the West is mendaciously up in arms. Video footage showing Bucha to have been an obviously staged massacre by the Nazi who was stupid enough to film it on his social media is ignored. And we already know about the Kiev regime’s use of civilians as human shields.

If war crimes by Ukraine since the 2014 coup were gathered in a file, it would be enormous. Yet Russia is not supposed to even defend itself.

Russophobia in the West has become a ‘woke’, socially acceptable form of racism. To show solidarity with Zelensky’s book burning crusade and banning of any Russian art or culture in Ukraine, Italian universities have gone as far as banning Dostoyevsky, and other Russian authors and composers have been belittled, while some of the country’s rich contribution to human culture have been attributed to Ukraine. Orchestras ban Russian composers from being played all over Europe, and a top-class conductor was not allowed to conduct a piece he had previously been invited to do. Racist attacks on ethnic Russians have been reported all over Europe, with truckers being forced to transport goods in fear their vehicles will be attacked. Meanwhile, Zelensky calls for Russians to be banned from entering the countries of his allies. Taken to its logical conclusion this would include himself, as he was born in Russia and still struggles to remember some Ukrainian words.

We support Russia’s military operation in Ukraine out of solidarity with the Donbass people, and the knowledge that they cannot defend themselves without the Russian troops there, who they have welcomed as liberators. Often, they raise the Soviet flag used by their forefathers to defeat the Nazi menace. Now it is back in Europe with full support of the West. The coverage by the Western media, which has long ceased to be objective, is totally one dimensional. French reporters live from the not long liberated town of Lisichansk were surprised to find the people they interviewed supporting the Russians, and had it been recorded it most likely wouldn’t have been shown. Why they would support a regime which now bans their language and where Nazis seek to murder Russian speakers who fail to pronounce Ukrainian test words correctly is anyone’s guess.

Support for the military does not mean solidarity with the right-wing populist Putin regime, but we will defend it against US/NATO aggression. It is not an imperialist power but a semi-dependent regional capitalist power, and though it has built itself up from the poverty of the Yeltsin era its military and other technology have been inherited from the Soviet Era.

Any ‘anti-war movement’ that calls for Russian troop withdrawal is useless, as it is merely echoing the demands of imperialism. It would be abandoning the people of the Donbass to genocide, and Ukrainian forces would easily retake the recently liberated Lugansk Republic, as well as Donetsk and other threatened Russophone/Russian centres like Mariupol if this was to happen.