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print versionRadical Socialist
[September 22, 2022]
The latest public statements coming out of Moscow are very worrying and must be forthrightly condemned. Putin is talking of a referendum in the Russian held parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, on whether the populace in their majority want to be a part of Russia. The voting is likely to be held between September 23 to 27. The reason behind this shift in strategy is that, given the strong and unexpected resistance of the Ukrainian people, Putin is no longer confident that he can swallow the whole of Ukraine. So he wants to try and ’legitimise’ in some way the part that he now controls. Area wise it is a substantial part of the country, has much of the industry, oil and gas reserves, quite considerable deposits of different valuable minerals as well as the larger proportion of the country’s coal deposits. Of course, any such referendum must be deemed illegitimate and unacceptable because it would---like in Crimea---be carried out under military occupation. Crimea is the only part of Ukraine that has a majority ethnic-Russian population. Although Donetsk and Luhansk are majority Russian speaking regions (most everybody in Ukraine understand both Russian, the main market language, and Ukrainian, the language of governance) the majority in these two regions are ethnic-Ukrainian with a very large portion of ethnic-Russians being opposed to the Russian invasion. Any such referendum will obviously be rigged to show results favouring absorption by Russia. After such a referendum whereby Russia ’officially’ has extended its territorial boundaries, Moscow can then claim that continued Ukrainian military efforts to retrieve lost territories, is a violation of the integrity and sovereignty of Russia and allows it to use whatever means necessary to defend itself.
This is where the latest veiled nuclear threats by Putin and Sergey Lavrov, his Foreign Affairs Minister, come in. These hints at possible escalation to the nuclear level is really a political message directed at the West, especially the US. Washington, Putin is indicating, should understand what is at stake. If not before, then certainly after the Russian absorption of these new territories, the West and the US must stop arming Ukraine and put decisive pressure on it to accept the new political-territorial status quo, i.e., a final settlement that means a Ukraine accepting its own truncation while Russia gets a victory more partially than it earlier hoped for but none the less a victory! Ukraine has only conventional military might. Would this deter Russia from using nuclear weapons if this war carries on and on? Putin knows that any such first use against a nuclearly unarmed Ukraine would alienate most, if not all of Russia’s current supporters home and abroad, and simply shock and horrify the world comity of nations.
The most rational evaluation of what Moscow is up to is that it is, in a deeply immoral and obscene way, creating the fearful spectre of what it might do---a kind of bluff if you like---so as to achieve more immediate and lower level politico-territorial gains. The danger, however, is that an escalation dynamic can set in. The West continues to provide arms; Ukraine keeps fighting and even gains further ground over time. It is then that a Russian leadership, which did not initially intend to use nuclear weapons, begins to more and more seriously consider their actual use, albeit at a smaller scale on Ukraine only---a repeat of 1945 in Japan—which will have to be accepted by outside nuclear powers for fear of a wider holocaust breaking out.
In spite of these manoeuvres and nuclear threats the Indian government and the bourgeois opposition parties continue to take the immoral and reactionary line of claiming ’neutrality’ and refusing to condemn the invasion. This is only to be expected. But the mainstream Indian left, namely the CPM and CPI, instead of holding high the banner of international solidarity and justice---which has historically been the proud legacy of the left worldwide---has continued to rationalise and in effect justify the invasion and Russian behaviour thereafter. Will they now at least condemn forthrightly this farce of a referendum under military occupation as well as the shameful and deeply disturbing nuclear threats? We call on every party claiming to be communist, internationalist to take a forthright stance condemning this behaviour.
