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04-03-22-
To hear the U.S. corporate media tell it, the entire world has joined Washington in condemning Russia’s recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in Donbass and their joint anti-fascist military operation in Ukraine. But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s a fact that NATO allies and dependents have repeated the lies of an “unjustified Russian invasion” verbatim from U.S. State Department news releases. U.S.-owned social media platforms are flooded with “Pray for Ukraine” propaganda, much of it spiced up with photos of alleged Russian war horrors – often from attacks actually carried out by the U.S. and its proxies (in Yugoslavia, Palestine and even Donbass itself).
What’s being carefully hidden from workers and oppressed people here is the opposition of many countries and movements to NATO expansion. They are aware of Washington’s true role: making an armed conflict inevitable by stoking the flames of war in the region for months and years.
This is especially true in the case of the many countries that are themselves targets of U.S. war, sanctions and slander campaigns.
Bolivarian Venezuela
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has faced down many U.S.-instigated coups and assassination attempts. On Venezolana de Televisión Feb. 22, Maduro announced his government’s support for Russia’s decision to recognize the Donbass republics.
“We have been attentive to the events in Russia and in Ukraine, and we have been observing, not just now, but the whole evolution of the process where the North American empire and NATO intend by military means to end Russia, and to end this multipolar world that is already a reality.
“The Lugansk territory and the Donetsk territory assumed the functions of People’s Republics to defend themselves from a massacre that the fascist sectors, which had seized power in Ukraine, began to carry out. Hunting men, hunting women, assaulting families, bombing with heavy weapons.”
Maduro noted that during “all the stages” of this “extremely harsh conflict” in the region, “the diplomatic proposal, calling for dialogue, of President Putin has always been present.” This resulted in the Minsk agreements that were established to guarantee peace. However, these were “ripped to shreds by the neo-fascist ruling elite of Ukraine.”
He added: “The old colonialisms of Europe and the United States attack Russia, China and Iran, they threaten Turkey and Latin America, they also attack Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela. The old colonialisms, the old superiority complexes of Europe and the old complexes of rapacious colonialism represented by NATO and the neo-colonialism of the U.S. empire.”
Maduro called Putin on March 1. “Putin shared his assessments of developments around Ukraine, noting that the goals of the special military operation are to protect civilians in Donbass, Kiev’s recognizing the DPR and LPR and Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, as well as the demilitarization and denazification of the Ukrainian state, and ensuring its neutral and nuclear-free status,” the Kremlin press service reported.
“Nicolas Maduro expressed strong support for Russia’s decisive actions, condemned the destabilizing activity of the United States and NATO, and stressed the importance of countering the campaign of lies and disinformation launched by Western countries.”
Socialist Cuba
On Feb. 23, on the eve of the anti-fascist military operation, President Miguel Diaz-Canel and a large, high-level Cuban delegation met with visiting chair of the Russian Federation’s State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin.
Granma reports, “The Cuban president expressed his solidarity with the Russian Federation also facing escalating U.S. aggression and the expansion of NATO toward its borders.” Volodin emphasized Russia’s “condemnation of U.S. hostility toward [Cuba] and reiterated the will to continue strengthening exchanges at all levels.”
An official Declaration of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba on Feb. 26 stated: “The American determination to continue the progressive expansion of NATO towards the borders of the Russian Federation has led to a scenario, with implications of unpredictable scope, that could have been avoided. …
“History will hold the U.S. government accountable for the consequences of an increasingly offensive military doctrine outside NATO’s borders, which threatens international peace, security and stability.
“Our concerns are reinforced by the decision recently adopted by NATO to activate, for the first time, the Response Force of that military alliance.
“It was a mistake to ignore for decades the well-founded demands for security guarantees by the Russian Federation and to assume that the country would remain defenseless in the face of a direct threat to its national security. Russia has the right to defend itself. It is not possible to achieve peace by encircling or cornering states.”
Nicaragua and Bolivia
Speaking Feb. 21, on the anniversary of the assassination of the great revolutionary Augusto Sandino, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said: “President Putin has taken a step today whereby he recognized … republics bordering Russia that did not recognize the coup government [in Ukraine] and created their own governments there.
“They set up their governments, they took on that fight, they have engaged in that struggle for independence. They have written to us, sending us messages explaining why they are waging this struggle. And meanwhile Ukrainian troops are looking for ways to overcome them, to liquidate them, to murder them; there have been thousands of deaths there over all these years.
“Despite the aggression by the Ukrainian army, they have not been able to defeat them. So [Putin] has recognized these governments, and of course this also implies military support so that these governments have security.”
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales was the victim of a U.S.-backed coup in 2019, after an election marred by Washington’s interference. Fortunately, the militant people’s movement, led by Indigenous workers and peasants, returned the Movement Toward Socialism to power and Morales was able to come home in 2020.
Morales said: “NATO is a serious threat to international peace and security; it’s record of invasions and aggression proves it. Now, its expansionist attempt is one of the main reasons for the situation in Ukraine.”
Socialist Korea
A declaration by the Foreign Ministry of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Feb. 26 said in part: “The U.S. unilateral and unfair cold war mentality and its bloc-forming external policy transformed the structure of international relations into one of a new cold war, and they strain politico-military situations with each passing day and continue to spawn new knotty problems in different parts of the world. …
“In particular, the air raid conducted by NATO against Yugoslavia at the end of the last century served as an occasion of bringing to light the extent of U.S. and Western hypocrisy in their much-touted global peace and stability, territorial integrity and safeguarding of sovereignty, as well as of exposing in all its nakedness who is the real destroyer of international peace and stability.
“The Iraq war, the Afghan War and other ‘color revolutions’ which brought tragedy to the 21st century clearly substantiate the fact that the U.S. and the West would seek their policies of hegemony by fair means or foul.
“The present international order is that it has become an immutable law that seeds of discord are sown in every region and country where the U.S. intervenes, and that the relations between the states deteriorate.
“The root cause of the Ukrainian crisis also lies in the high-handedness and arbitrariness of the U.S. which has held on solely to the unilateral sanctions and pressure while pursuing only global hegemony and military supremacy in disregard of the legitimate demand of Russia for its security.”
People’s Republic of China
In numerous official statements, articles and social media posts, the government and people of China – the world’s most populous country and another target of the U.S. New Cold War – have made it crystal clear that Washington and NATO are responsible for the unfolding crisis in Eastern Europe.
On Feb. 27, the diplomatic legation of the Chinese Embassy in Moscow reminded the world that “Of the 248 armed conflicts that occurred between the years 1945 and 2001 in 153 regions of the world, 201 were initiated by the U.S., accounting for 81 percent of the total number.
“Never forget who is the real threat to the world,” the Chinese embassy said.
It added that the administration of President Joe Biden is to “blame for the current tensions around Ukraine” as it poured fuel on the fire “while accusing others of not doing their best to put out the fire.”
At a Feb. 23 news conference in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying stated: “When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?”
“The next day, as Ms. Hua was peppered with questions about whether China considered Russia’s ‘special military operation’ an invasion, she turned the briefing into a critique of the United States,” reported the New York Times. “‘You may go ask the U.S.: they started the fire and fanned the flames,’ she said. “How are they going to put out the fire now?’
“She bristled at the U.S. State Department’s comment that China should respect state sovereignty and territorial integrity, a longstanding tenet of Chinese foreign policy.
“‘The U.S. is in no position to tell China off,’ she said. Then she mentioned the three journalists who were killed in NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, a tragic incident that prompted widespread anti-U.S. protests in China.
“‘NATO still owes the Chinese people a debt of blood,’ she said.
“That sentence became the top Weibo hashtag as Russia was bombing Ukraine. The hashtag, created by the state-run People’s Daily newspaper, has been viewed more than a billion times. In posts below it, users called the United States a ‘warmonger’ and a ‘paper tiger.’”
Lebanon’s Hezbollah
The Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah rejected a statement by the country’s Foreign Ministry that condemned Russia’s actions. During a Feb. 25 cabinet session in Beirut, Minister of Labor Mustafa Bayram, a member of Hezbollah, said the statement violated the principles of neutrality espoused by the Lebanese government.
Ibraham Al-Moussawi, a member of parliament from the Loyalty and Resistance bloc, criticized government officials who “distance themselves and pretend to be neutral where they want, and … interfere and condemn where they want.”
In a March 1 televised speech, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah slammed the West’s “double standards” and stressed that the U.S. is not trustworthy.
“The U.S. is to blame over the crisis in Ukraine,” Nasrallah said. “Washington has been inciting and working on this scenario for weeks.
“How did the international community react to wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Syria and Yemen? And how did it react to Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine? Such stances prove that the strongest is respected in this world while the weak are oppressed.”
Syria
Hezbollah, along with the governments of Syria and Iran, form the Axis of Resistance against U.S. imperialism in Western Asia. Together with Russia, they have fought to free Syria from the ultra-right Daesh movement and other Western allied “rebels,” and from U.S. occupation troops, in a war that has gone on for more than a decade.
Syria was among the first countries to welcome the news of Russia’s decision to recognize the Donbass republics. On Feb. 22, SANA reported, Deputy Foreign Minister Dr. Bashar al-Jaafari affirmed that Syria “supports Russia’s recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, indicating that it had expressed its willingness two months ago to work on building relations with the two republics in the context of common interests.”
In an interview, al-Jaafari said: “The question is whether or not the United States will succeed in imposing a unipolar regime on all countries of the world, including Russia and China. That is, the issue is related to geopolitics and not to politics in the simple sense of the word. Therefore, Syria is part of the scene, and China, Venezuela and Iran are part of this scene in the geopolitical sense.”
On Feb. 25, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad spoke with Russian President Putin to express his solidarity with the anti-fascist military operation and condemn the imperialists’ “dirty methods to support terrorists in Syria and Nazis in Ukraine.”
“President Assad stressed that what is happening today is a correction of history and a restoration of balance in the global order after the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Syrian government announced.
Assad also said that “Syria stands with the Russian Federation based on its conviction that its position is correct and because confronting NATO expansionism is Russia’s right.”
Iran
On March 1, Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei blamed the U.S. for the crisis in Ukraine, saying the Islamic Republic of Iran has always opposed war and destruction anywhere in the world.
“The U.S. disrupted the stability of the country by interfering in its affairs and organizing rallies and creating a color coup,” Khamenei explained. “We oppose the killing of people and the destruction of the infrastructure of nations.
“If the people of Ukraine had been involved, the Ukrainian government wouldn’t be in this situation. The people didn’t get involved because they didn’t approve of the government,” he said.
“The American regime is a perfect example of modern ignorance. This regime is a crisis-producing and crisis-consuming regime, and it feeds off creating crises in the world.”
According to Press TV, “As an example, the leader pointed to the U.S. formation of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group, denouncing Washington for plundering oil resources in eastern Syria, stealing Afghanistan’s assets, and supporting Israeli crimes against Palestinians.
“The leader then pointed to the West’s double standards in dealing with the crisis in Ukraine, stating that Western countries support the killing of Yemeni people in the Saudi war, but they call for an end to the Ukraine crisis.”
“If the United States fails to create a crisis, the arms factories will not be able to make the most of it,” Khamenei said. “They have to create crises in order to maximize the interests of these mafias.”
Turkish movements
Turkey’s repressive government, a NATO member, has been waging war on Syria. It is also arming Ukraine with deadly drones and threatens to block Russian access to the Black Sea by closing the Dardanelles Strait.
The revolutionary music group Grup Yorum has suffered greatly from repression by Turkey’s government. Not only is it banned from giving concerts, but several members are imprisoned, and some have died after torture and hunger strikes.
At a news conference in Moscow Feb. 21, visiting members of Grup Yorum declared their support for the people of Donbass in their fight against NATO imperialism and the far-right Ukrainian regime. Members said they would like to perform a solidarity concert there again, as they did in 2015.
The group opened its concert in Moscow Feb. 24 with these words: “We support the struggle of the people of Donbass against U.S. imperialism, against NATO, and against the fascist Ukrainian government. … Even a rock thrown against imperialism is a forward action for the people.”
The Communist Labor Party of Turkey/Leninist announced Feb. 24: “Our party, TKEP/Leninist, calls on all revolutionary, communist and progressive forces and the working class and oppressed peoples of the world to support both of these People’s Republics [Donetsk and Lugansk.] …
“The fact that the bourgeois government of Russia has been forced to support the People’s Republics because of its national interests should not be cause for hesitation. Imperialist apologists in Turkey and around the world have, either using Russia as an excuse or with empty words, abandoned this internationalist duty and argued for remaining neutral.
“In fact, as a necessary outcome of its own national interests, Russia has supported socialist, popular governments in countries like Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Nicaragua against U.S. imperialism, acting as a shield, so to speak.
“If this operation … against Ukrainian fascism and which boldly challenges U.S., British, and German imperialism is victorious, it will be an enormous source of morale and embolden the working class and the oppressed and exploited working peoples of the world.”
Actions in support of Russia’s recognition of the Donbass republics and the joint military operation have been held by movements in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy and Serbia.
