By JOÃO QUARTIM DE MORAES*
The destabilizing effects of the spasmodic unrest of the ill-fated “Arab (Blood) Spring” offered the vultures of liberal-imperialism the opportunity to settle accounts with the governments of the region that refused to pay them allegiance.
1.
The June 2024 elections to renew the European Parliament literally brought more of the same: a large majority for the right, with a strong presence of the fascist extreme right. The “European People's Party” led by the fierce Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, emerged stronger. As far as it and its partners depend, NATO's warmongering escalation in support of the sinister Zelensky will continue. He has spent most of his time collecting billions of dollars and euros from his protectors to keep his country in its miserable role as a bridgehead for the American war machine and its European satellites on the border of the Russian Federation.
It is always important to remember that “casus belli” of the ongoing war in Ukraine dates back to February 22, 2014, when a coup d'état, encouraged and supported by the American government, deposed President Victor Yanukovych because he was opposed to breaking his country's neutrality status to do so joining the European Union (EU) and consequently the war machine commanded by the Pentagon.
The crypto-fascist junta that took power soon launched a wave of persecutions against Russians in general and communists in particular, repealing the law that recognized Russian as the official language in regions where it predominated. From Barack Obama, the leaders of the European Union and the right in general, applause came for the coup plotters. From the Russian-speaking populations of the Lugansk and Donetsk regions, the response was different: they proclaimed independence, willing to defend it with weapons in hand.
Minimally objective sources (very rare in the “West”) recognize that Vladimir Putin strove to avoid an escalation in the confrontation, publicly asking the leaders of the two already proclaimed people's republics to postpone the referendum to ratify independence, in order to allow negotiations with the government installed in Kiev. In September 2014, a trilateral discussion with the participation of Ukraine and the European Union in Minsk (Belarus) established a ceasefire protocol in the Donbas region (Lugansk and Donetsk).
The success was small; a new meeting, in February 2015, called Minsk II, reduced the intensity of the military confrontation (withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, exchange of prisoners, etc.), but without reaching a lasting agreement. The negotiations were constantly trampled on by the Azov battalion (later regiment), a Ukrainian military formation with Nazi ideology, which kept the autonomous populations of Donbas under terror.
This was the situation when Volodymyr Zelensky assumed the presidency of Ukraine in May 2019. A bold adventurer, a persistent provocateur, encouraged by NATO's intelligence services, he maneuvered to further poison relations with Russia, which had well-founded reasons to consider his integrity threatened by NATO missile siege.
Did he underestimate Vladimir Putin's determination to defend the Russians in the Donbas, or did he have instructions and authorization from Washington to provoke him to the limit? The fact is that, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin went from warnings to actions, launching the offensive that he called “special military operation”.
2.
At that time, a strong Russophobia was already thriving in “Western” common sense, artificially inseminated by the “owners of the news” (big newspapers, TVs and other media trusts, etc.). They accused Vladimir Putin of being an “authoritarian” ruler, “forgetting” that the current political regime in Russia was established by Boris Yeltsin, the head of the 1991 capitalist counter-revolution, that the ruling circles of the “West”, euphoric with the which they supposed to be the victorious “end of History” and the consecration of the neoliberal “single thought”, they supported.
They also showed themselves to be extremely understanding when Boris Yeltsin, on September 21, 1993, violated the Constitution to close the Legislature, which opposed the rampant plundering of the Soviet economy by gangs of “oligarchs” with whom he was in league.
The Supreme Soviet reacted to Boris Yeltsin's coup by declaring him barred from holding the presidency and summoning vice-president Alexander Rutskoi, a soldier who had received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in the war in Afghanistan, to assume the position. Alexander Rutskoi was determined to put an end to “privatization” and the other neoliberal reforms of Yeltsin and his gang.
In the serious political crisis that emerged, a large popular mobilization, in which communists participated, took to the streets of Moscow in support of the Soviet. For ten days, protesters faced Yeltsin's supporters and police forces. The Army, after some hesitation, surrounded the Soviet headquarters, which was bombed and burned. Alexander Rutskoi and the resistance leaders who survived were arrested. According to the liberal newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, around 1.500 resisters died in the Soviet building, whose bodies were removed through secret passages. The Western bourgeoisie breathed a sigh of relief.
Victorious, Boris Yeltsin abrogated the Russian Constitution of 1978, which he had already violated, and had another approved by the referendum of December 12, 1993, which expanded, at his convenience, the powers of the Executive. The plundering of the Soviet State's immense industrial heritage continued apace, acquired at negligible prices by the regime's “oligarchs”, headed by the president's family and relatives.
By calling him a “thief among thieves”, Domenico Losurdo only mentioned a public and notorious fact. A considerable part of the fortunes arising from this immense looting was devoted to the purchase of sumptuous mansions on the Côte d'Azur, castles in Germany, yachts in Spain, alongside millionaire deals in Switzerland.
The well-thinking circles of the “West” treated these new “globalized” millionaires with mellifluous condescension. All the more so as the economic and social decadence of Russia subjected to Yeltsin's mafia was reflected in the impotence of its foreign policy. The Kremlin's protests were timid against the great fraud of Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., who waited for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact military alliance to announce that, contrary to what they had promised the failed Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO would not be dissolved.
On the contrary, more active and deadly than ever, throughout the 1990s it promoted successive military attacks that, as Losurdo clearly showed, heralded others that would follow at the beginning of the new millennium.[1]
Passively watching, in March 1999, the storm of missiles unleashed by NATO against Serbia, the last bastion of socialist Yugoslavia, was an additional humiliation for a demoralized Russia. Two common cultural heritages, dating back to the High Middle Ages, bring the two peoples together: the Cyrillic script and the Orthodox religion. Most likely, this humiliation aroused a patriotic reflex in the military commands and circles close to power, which pressured Boris Yeltsin to prepare his succession.
In August 1999, he invited Vladimir Putin, who had built a solid reputation for firmness and skill in his career in the state apparatus, to assume the presidency of the government (a position equivalent to prime minister in a presidential regime). The facts soon showed that Vladimir Putin was here to stay. Worn out and drowning in alcoholism, Boris Yeltsin agreed to leave his position as long as impunity was guaranteed for the immense robbery he had sponsored.
On December 31, 1999, he resigned in favor of Vladimir Putin as President of the Russian Federation. In his first decree, the new president guaranteed his predecessor and members of his family full judicial immunity.
3.
Have you read it or not? The prince, Vladimir Putin masterfully applied the rules of the logic of power to uplift the Russian State. He exercised a Machiavellianism of great style, snatching Russia from the material and moral degradation to which the neoliberal counter-revolution had dragged it.
Convinced that the successive ballistic massacres carried out by the US empire and its smaller European partners in Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to smaller bombings in other points on the periphery, were part of a strategy to recolonize the planet, he carried out the diplomatic initiative, outlined during Yeltsin's presidency, to build a strategic alliance with China and three large Central Asian states. Implicit in the logic of this alliance was the decision to set a limit to NATO's aggression.
The destabilizing effects of the spasmodic unrest of the ill-fated “Arab (Blood) Spring” offered the vultures of liberal-imperialism the opportunity to settle accounts with the governments of the region that refused to pay them allegiance. From March to October 2011, they attacked Libya through massive bombings that only ended with the overthrow of the anti-imperialist government and the assassination, with an atrocious method, of its historical leader, Mouammar Gaddafi.
In the same month of March 2011, protests by the liberal and religious opposition took place in Syria against the secular regime of President Bachar Al Assad, whose foreign policy, articulated in the alliance with Russia, Iran and the Hezbollah movement, the vanguard of the fight against Zionism clashed with the interests of Western neocolonialism and the oil states of Arabia, its partners. These conflicting interests supported and financed successive waves of rebels, many of them mercenaries, and fanatics, who sowed terror in the country, in an endless sequence of destruction.
Attacked on several fronts, government forces lost control of a large part of the country during the first four years of a bitter civil war, in which multiple military formations intervened with objectives that were not always convergent. The “Free Syrian Army” received weapons and support from NATO, Turkey and the oil sheikhs.
Radical fundamentalist movements, in conflict with the US forces occupying Iraq, notably the so-called “Islamic State”, as well as the Nusra Front, linked to al-Qaeda, intended to establish a Sunni caliphate, covering a large part of Syrian territory. The Turkish government reinforced this terrible pandemonium by invading northern Syria to attack the Kurdish populations fighting for autonomy.
The situation only began to reverse in September 2015, when the Russian government, responding to President Bachar Al Assad's call, intervened directly in the confrontation, with massive air support and participation in ground fighting. Three more years of war were necessary to recover the essence of the territories occupied by the “rebels” of the “Free Syrian Army” and the various factions of terrorist fanatics. The retaking of Aleppo in December 2016 confirmed the advance of the government's counteroffensive.
In eastern Syria, operations against “Islamic State” fighters continued until the end of 2017. But the victory of the regime presided over by Bachar Al Assad was assured. For the first time, a major recolonization operation promoted or supported by NATO failed. Since then, Vladimir Putin has become the preferred target of the hatred of the liberal-imperialist “West”, which rushed to complete the siege of Russia through Ukraine. Beyond the national interests of the Russian State, the historical perspective of a multipolar world is at stake in this siege.
*João Quartim de Moraes He is a retired full professor at the Department of Philosophy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The military left in Brazil (Popular Expression). [https://amzn.to/3snSrKg].
Note
[1] see the articles “Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia: the United States and the colonial wars of the 1999st century”, published in XNUMX in Marxist Criticism no. 9 and “Belgrade as Stalingrad: US imperialism and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia”, in New directions, no. 31, 1999.
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