We publish below the statement of the Left Opposition collective in Ukraine on the war in the east and the steps it believes are needed to bring it to a halt. [1]
Ukraine’s Fractures: New Left Review’s interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko
23 April 2015Since the start of the Maidan protests six months ago, Ukraine has been at the centre of a crisis which has exposed and deepened the fault-lines—geopolitical, historical, linguistic, cultural—that traverse the country. These divisions have grown through the entwinement of opposed political camps with the strategic ambitions of Russia and the West, the former bidding to maintain its grip over its ex-Soviet bailiwick even as the latter relentlessly expands its sphere of influence. The fall of Yanukovych at the hands of a pro-Western protest movement in February brought a surge of opposition in the east of the country, spilling into separatist agitation after Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in March. At present, the Ukrainian army is engaged in what it calls an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against an array of militias in Donetsk and Luhansk, composed of a blend of local residents and Russian nationalist fighters. The spectre of a dismemberment of the country, previously raised as a distant nightmare, has given way to a de facto partition, as Ukraine enters what may be the larval stages of a civil war. The combination of escalating local tensions and great-power rivalries poses significant challenges for analysis and political judgement. Here, Kiev-based sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko discusses the unfolding of the Ukrainian crisis and its outcomes to date, against the backdrop of the political and economic order that emerged after 1991.
Between fascism and imperialist intervention
23 April 2015, byStatement of the Organization of Communists Internationalists of Greece – “Spartakos”, Greek section of the Fourth International, Athens, 04.03.2014
Footnotes
[1] Posted originally in Ukrainian by gaslo-info on 15 June 2014. Translated by Marko Bojcun