Above photo: September, 2014. Crowds at a rally in Donetsk to mark the liberation of the Donbass region from the Nazis in the second world war. Francisco Leong/AFP.
The Troika Kollective stands in solidarity with the people of Donetsk and Luhansk. We stand firmly against all wars of plunder, against NATO’s repeated military interventions, and against U.S. intervention. We recognize that the working-class of these two republics want peace and self-determination. We are in solidarity with the anti-war faction in Ukraine. The U.S. ruling class is only interested in maintaining post-2014 Ukraine as an economic and geopolitical pawn in it’s outdated attempt to hang on to a unipolar world (U.S. hegemony). Russia is one of many nations of the world today who, through their refusal to bend to U.S. imperialism, represent the deterioration of U.S. hegemony.
If you were to be asked when was the last time that the U.S. began a new war for moral reasons you would be left speechless. The U.S. government cares as much about the people of Ukraine as they cared about the people of their past wars. Did the U.S care about; the Korean people, the Vietnamese people, the Cuban people, the Nicaraguan people, the Libyan people, the Iraqi people, or the Afghan people when they invaded and/or funded proxy wars? Even here at home did they care about Afro-Americans during segregation or at the peak of the War on Drugs, did they care about Muslims at the peak of the War on Terror.
In 2020 at the first peak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the nation rose against the brutal police lynching of George Floyd with hundreds of everyday people being imprisoned, beaten, and murdered by the police of the U.S. government. The rulers of the U.S. have never responded to a call for human life, they are only interested in maintaining global hegemony. This is why they have invested billions of american taxpayers money into providing lethal “aid”, weapons, to the Ukraine. The U.S. government has enough money for war but refuses to feed its poor. The U.S ruling class will send the working-class child to fight for foreign interests, but refuses to invest in improving the quality of life of working-class americans.
We must as workers and oppressed people in the U.S empire build-up a stronger anti-war movement. It is our duty to ourselves and our fellow humans that the working-class in every nation must stand up against its own ruling class. That being said, we have a duty to stand against the U.S. ruling class, which is occupying this homeland and other lands of origins, occupying our matrias and patrias.
There are two general trends in the anti-war movement: i) one that supports resistance to the empire and ii) those who will engage in lecturing and hand wringing the forces fighting back in Ukraine against imperialism and their proxies. We have no illusions about Russia, Putin, and the United Russia Party. It is important to thoroughly evaluate Russia as a social formation today. Russia is indeed capitalist with its own oligarchy, but one that is objectively in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism. We support the resistance that takes myriad forms challenging the class interests of the Russian bourgeoisie.
History does not develop along a straight line. We cannot glorify the loss of life anywhere, but we know that a people’s right to sovereignty is an inalienable right to be defended at all costs. We put the blame squarely on the shoulders of NATO and their local henchmen in Kyiv who in their attacks on the people of Donetsk and Luhansk brought this war into motion.
This has been building up since 2014. In February, Russia announced before the world that it had had enough of NATO/U.S. war-mongering and expansion. In a speech full of half-truths and mischaracterizations, Putin signaled to the world that when poked and provoked enough, the Russian bear will defend itself and its own interests. The Troika Kollective is not afraid to say that Russia – as a country on a collision course with U.S. imperialism – has the right to defend itself. If it were not for the Russian intervention in the Donbas region, the 14,000 death toll since 2014 would surely have been higher and would continue to rise today. The corporate media only started caring about casualties twelve days ago when their underlings were on the run and it was clear a new government would assume power in Kyiv.
As people who have been forced into becoming part of a diaspora, we know all too well the devastating consequences of U.S. imperialism and NATO expansion. The ruling class has ravaged and exploited far too much already for us to be fooled. For this, we find ourselves in solidarity with the working and oppressed people of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic, as well as the working class Ukrainians who have been held hostage by the Neo-Nazi regime installed by a U.S.-funded coup. And just like in Latin America, U.S. injerenecia, or illegal hybrid involvement in Ukraine, has had disastrous effects for the people of Ukraine, causing a civil war to break out. Young Ukrainian men, women, and people have fled their country as refugees to escape war.
In becoming a U.S. puppet state, Ukraine’s economy is plummeting, becoming the second poorest country in the region. The workers are always the ones who suffer at the expense of wars that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Ukraine is the largest country in Europe with rivers, bordering two seas, rich soil, coal, and gas. But in the hands of a fascist puppet government, Ukrainians find themselves seeking refuge out of a country so rich in history and resources.
In the 1920s, Ukrainians and Russians joined together in camaraderie to create the first state made by and for working people, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), overthrowing the brutal dictatorship of the Tsar that oppressed them both. In 1941, Russians and Ukrainians fought in arms against the German Nazi occupiers, freeing their homeland and the world from fascism, but if only momentarily. Now the grandchildren of the Communist liberators find themselves in an ethnic conflict against the nation who they once called a brother and under a new boot of a regime that created eugenics, the US ruling class and NATO who support Ukrainian Neo-Nazis.
In response to the installed puppet regime the people of Donbass, which includes Donetsk and Luhansk, who fervently remember and hold dear to their Soviet past took arms and declared independence from Kyiv up until the regime resigns. Instead, their own former compatriots rushed to their border to slaughter them for eight long years. The people of Donbass faced a deafening international silence, only finding solidarity and refuge in Russia.
This ethnic conflicts created by the NATO terrorist group is reminiscient of the violence created between another two ancestral siblings: Colombians and Venezuelans. Colombia, a member of NATO, continues to wage economic and political warfare against their socialist neighbor Venezuela at the beck and call of their U.S.-E.U. overseers. Venezuelans, like Russians, have been attacked by the Colombian regime and subjected to extreme forms of violence. For example, illegal U.S. sanctions that killed 40,000 Venezuelans in 2014 alone, 6,000,000 forced to flee. The empire directs that war on Venezuelan sovereignty . The working people of Colombia, like in Ukraine, find no justice and dignity under the boot of NATO as we seen with last years #SOSColombia uprisings. Both are merely used as proxies in the West’s agenda of financial profits and global hegemony.
For this, we stand firmly with the people of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the working and oppressed of Russia and Ukraine against fascism, capitalism, and US-EU-NATO imperialism however much this situation escalates
Смерть фашизму, свобода людям! *
*Смерть фашизму, свобода людям! Translated means Death to fascism, freedom to the people. It is a Yugoslavian anti-fascist slogan.