By Joseph Rosen
Instead of charging Trump with sexual assault or incitement of hate crimes or crimes against humanity, the Democrats have centered their impeachment inquiry around the allegation that Trump withheld nearly $400 million worth of military aid to Ukraine in order to press the current government for dirt on his potential rival, Joe Biden. Practically no voice among the capitalist owned media has been raised to point out the fact that this aid is destined for a military with openly fascist Neo-Nazis militias in its ranks.
The recent history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine incriminates both Biden and Trump
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc, the U.S. ruling class has been determined to gain unfettered access to the human and natural resources of the former socialist republics. But Ukraine’s longstanding commercial and cultural ties to a sovereign Russia have been a barrier to U.S. domination.
Eager to replace a relatively Russian-aligned government with one that would more readily yield to U.S. colonial desires, the U.S. State Dept. and CIA leapt at the chance to lend their support to an insurrection against the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in 2013/2014. That the 2014 coup was carried out by violent Neo-Nazi gangs did not bother Obama, Clinton, or Biden in the least. All they wanted was a Ukraine “open for U.S. business.”
Since the coup, state companies have been sold off at fire-sale liquidations and the country’s rich farmland has been raided by transnational agribusiness firms like Monsanto. Mass layoffs have caused a surge in unemployment. The government has deployed fascist street gangs to repress any resistance to these widespread attacks on workers.
Per the demands of the U.S., the post-coup government has pledged to phase out much of its business with Russia. More alarmingly, they have taken steps towards entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which is carrying out war games closer and closer to Russia’s borders.
End all U.S. military aid to the fascist Ukrainian government
At least $1.5 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has been used to supply the fascist Ukrainian government with arms and military equipment since 2014. This “aid” supports Neo-Nazi militias such as the Azov battalion who have welcomed American white supremacist terrorists into their training grounds. The government of Ukraine’s capital Kiev officially sanctions patrols by the Neo-Nazi militia C14, who have carried out pogroms against Roma communities and violent attacks on LGBT people.
Since 2014 more than 13,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands more have been displaced in a war on the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Luhansk, both formed in the Donbass region after seceding from Ukraine in the wake of the right-wing coup.
Because the Donbass remains a bulwark against the building up of offensive U.S./NATO forces, they receive limited support from the Russian government. But the main reason that the people of the Donbass continue their armed struggle against the fascists is that they reject the privatizations, pension cuts, and plant closures that Kiev is carrying out on behalf of the U.S. and E.U. capitalists in charge of the International Monetary Fund.
Workers in the U.S. don’t have any interest in common with gangsters like Biden or Trump, much less with the war profiteers or bankers that they work for. The capitalists’ recent record in Ukraine shows that they regard fascism as just another means to exploit and steal from working and oppressed people. If the U.S. ruling class doesn’t shrink from arming swastika-wearing soldiers in the Ukraine, they’re not likely to withhold arms from the fascists at home. We workers must organize to root out and smash the fascists wherever they exist; we can’t leave it up to any capitalist government to do that for us.