The following declaration was issued by communists in Donetsk on 9 October 2023 and was signed by our party a few days later. Steve Sweeney gives more information about the declaration in the special report above.
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Today the world is in grave danger. The financial capital of the United States and Nato countries, acting together with the Ukrainian oligarchy, brought the Ukrainian bourgeois nation to the state of Nazism, provoked the war in Ukraine, using its people as a battering ram directed against Russia.
The imperialist goal of the United States is the weakening and dismemberment of Russia into a number of warring entities. All this was supposed to make it possible to seize the economic territory and natural resources of Russia, as well as to establish control over political processes with the help of a puppet government.
At the same time, the imperialist efforts of the United States are aimed at maintaining its hegemony by unleashing bloody conflicts in different parts of the world, and this can lead to nuclear war.
At this historic moment, we, the undersigned parties, state:
- Economic claims and political practice show that the United States of America is the main imperialist and the most aggressive state, with the highest expenditure on armaments, with the largest number of foreign military bases, which took part in unleashing the greatest number of wars and conflicts with the aim of enslaving countries and peoples.
- Today, the government of Ukraine pursues an open Nazi policy, openly defines itself as “Banderite”, ie, Nazis who exterminate people on the basis of ethnicity. We consider it necessary to recognise that the current government of Ukraine is fascist and Nazi.
- On the part of the governments of the United States and Nato countries, the war unleashed in Ukraine is predatory, unjust, and purely imperialistic. On the part of the Russian bourgeoisie, the war has a defensive character, therefore it is defensive. On the part of the working people of the main territory of Ukraine, the most conscious and best strata of society, the form still has an underground antifascist form. On the part of the workers of Donbass, since 2014, the war has taken the form of national liberation from the Ukrainian nazis, antifascist, and is clearly people’s liberation. Defending its right to sovereignty, ie, to the independent exploitation of labour resources and the sale of natural resources, the Russian bourgeoisie objectively contributes to the just people’s liberation struggle of the working people of Donbass.
- The actions of the armed forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine have a progressive component to the extent that they fulfil the goals of the SMO declared by the Russian authorities (demilitarisation, denazification, neutral status), in contrast to the actions of the armed forces of Ukraine, which are reactionary, bringing death and enslavement to the rebellious people of Donbass.
- While recognising the right of people to self-determination, we call on the international community to recognise the choices made by the people of the Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Lugansk regions, and to force the nazi government of Ukraine to remove all its pro-Nato armed forces and punitive death squads from these territories.
- Taking into account the current circumstances, we consider it necessary to help the organisation of the antifascist underground movement in Ukraine, including such organisations as the political party ‘Derzhava’ and those indicated in the closed list.
- We consider it necessary to emphasise that it is possible to rid the world of fascism and war only by following the path of the progressive revolutionary transformation of society.
Signatories:
- Russian Communist Workers’ Party (РКРП)
- Russian United Labour Front
- Donetsk Republican Branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (ДРО-КПРФ)
- Communist Party of Lithuania (КПЛ)
- United Communist Party, Russia (ОКП)
- Communist Youth League, Russia (СКМ)
- ‘Derzhava’, Ukraine
- Communists of Russia
- Khlebnikov’s Workers University, Russia
- Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) CPGB-ML
- New Communist Party of Britain
