The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

Collusion, Corruption, and Extortion:

In that same pamphlet, I argued that the Ukrainian government is a semi-colonial, comprador state, which is to say that its government sells out its own people to foreign imperialists for the personal gain of state officials. To justify this, I pointed to several reforms that were made to facilitate the dispossession of Ukraine’s farmers at the behest of the IMF and against the wishes of the majority of the country. But again — this was prior to the war. How does war itself create opportunity for profit? One way is “disaster capitalism,” where a crisis in a locale causes the price of its resources to drop. Normally, an unstable environment is unattractive to investors, but when a crisis is acute, when there is an expectation that the price will rise after reconstruction, then foreign vultures are apt to jump to the “rescue.” Predatory investors dispossess the locals only to turn around and flip their assets.

And this is precisely what happened earlier this May, when American and British firms leveraged their connections in the Ukrainian government to steal the assets of several Ukrainian firms. According to Julia Kiryanova, the CEO of Smart Holding, one of Ukraine’s largest investment firms, her and other’s businesses have been hit with “dubious criminal charges” and were added to “Ukraine’s list of sanctioned companies by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on highly vague national security grounds.” Ostensibly, the firms were sanctioned for having ties to Russia, and yet they had not done any business with Russia since 2014. “Coincidentally,” these same firms had been approached by Western businesses who had promised that they could have their sanctions lifted… If they agreed to sell their companies for a pittance of what they were really worth:

“This was followed by a series of police raids at our head office and our subsidiaries,” Kiryanova explained. Ukraine’s security services seized $96 million in assets, and the deeds to 40 companies and 30 natural gas wells… Yet, hours before the raids, the company [Smart Holding] was approached with a fire-sale buyout offer for its natural gas interests from foreign investors — British and American — who have no history in the energy sector. They said they’d face no problems, as “they would be able to resolve any issues with the office of Ukraine’s President.” The offer — a third of what the businesses are worth — was declined.

Sanctions cause rising business fears in Ukraine, May 2023.

Various other companies and investigators have attempted to get an explanation from Ukrainian authorities, and yet no formal communications have been received, suggesting that the government agents responsible are acting with the tacit consent of the state even while it is supposedly waging a struggle against corruption. Even without a formal explanation, the situation is clear: Western imperialists used their connections with Ukrainian compradors to extort the country’s businesses and to plunder their resources. 

Without the ongoing war or some other crisis, this kind of brazen collusion likely could not have happened. In a period of conflict, however, calling attention to corruption can leave one open to retaliation and accusations of “endangering the war effort.” The media and international community have essentially given the Ukrainian state a blank check to repress anyone who gets in their way, whether rival political parties, churches of the wrong denomination, or capitalists who refuse to fall in line with the comprador’s cannibalistic agenda. Even here in America, criticizing the Ukrainian government can get you accused of supporting Russia’s invasion, as if the collusion between Western and Ukrainian oligarchs are not also threatening the lives and wellbeing of Ukrainian citizens!

US Aid: Who Is Benefiting?

Of course, this collusion doesn’t just end with the private sector: Western governments got in on the action directly. For example, where exactly is American tax money going in Ukraine? Weapons of course, but not only weapons: some of it is straight money that goes into Ukraine’s treasury — nearly half of the government’s budget is coming from Western aid — and some of it is investment in “economic recovery.” There is a portion of that money which Ukraine pays back out again to Western firms to help “rebuild.” That amount is a direct transfer from the tax-paying population of the U.S. to the private U.S. firms reaping the benefits. 

According to Holly Williams’s report on 60 Minutes: 

Russia’s invasion shrank Ukraine’s economy by about a third. We were surprised to find that to keep it afloat the U.S. government is subsidizing small businesses… In total, America’s pumped nearly $25 billion of non-military aid into Ukraine’s economy since the invasion began — and you can see it working at the bustling farmers market on John McCain Street in central Kyiv.

What U.S. taxpayers are getting for their money in Ukraine, September 2023

The purpose of this aid is alleged to be supporting Ukraine’s economic self-sufficiency, yet, in truth, it’s only pushing Ukraine further into dependence on Western capital. The agency responsible, USAID, is, after all, run by the Department of Defense and the State Department. It’s not a charity, it is an instrument of the empire.

USAID claims that it is concerned with unemployment and hunger and the ability of the Ukrainian government to become self-sustaining. If we were to take them at their word, they would be one of the most inept international organizations ever to step on the world stage, unless becoming self-sufficient really means continuing to provide cheap commodities to the world market. That is, while the U.S. government arms Ukraine to keep fighting their battles with Russia, the NATO alliance still expects its private firms to profit from Ukraine’s agriculture. This much is said about as explicitly as can be expected in a press release conspicuously titled “The United States Provides Additional $250 Million to Help Ukraine Continue Feeding the World”:

Ukraine’s agricultural products and grain are critical for the world’s food supply and key to the country’s economic recovery and future prosperity. USAID, through AGRI-Ukraine, will continue to help Ukraine’s farmers produce, store, and export agricultural products and grain to the world. To date, USAID has leveraged $250 million in private sector contributions in support of AGRI-Ukraine… USAID is supporting infrastructure investments that will increase the rate of loading and unloading in Danube ports, and enhancing western border checkpoints and rail lines to expedite and facilitate trade, decreasing export costs for farmers (emphasis added).

The United States Provides Additional $250 Million to Help Ukraine Continue Feeding the World. July, 2023

All this is buried in language about “economic recovery” and “prosperity,” but the emphasis on exports makes it quite clear whose prosperity is really under consideration: Western consumers and imperialist profiteers. And these “infrastructure” investments are not even a public service, but the private property of monolithic agribusiness firms. Three in particular have received USAID funding to increase their export capacity: Kernel (363,000 ha), Grain Alliance (57,000 ha), and Nibulon (76,500 ha). If you read the previous pamphlet, Kernel should jump out because it’s the largest holder of Ukrainian land based in Luxembourg, and because it is also indebted to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which functions like the IMF but confined to the former Eastern Bloc. It’s also owned by Andriy Verevskyi, an infamous Ukrainian oligarch who is a former member of parliament and current fellow of the Agrarian Policy and Land Relations Committee. These three companies are ranked among the top 100 largest “latifundists” in Ukraine — hardly a “charitable” contribution!

Indebted to Europe

By far, the United States has contributed the largest single share of “aid” to Ukraine, but what about the rest of the Western powers? For one, most of the aid delivered by the European powers has been financial, rather than arms. And unlike the American financial aid, which was delivered in the form of grants, the majority of European capital, about 55 billion Euro in total, are loans.

As stated earlier, the American grants were given to giant agribusiness firms in order to increase their capacity to export their commodities to the world market. The loans provided by the European powers, however, are more straightforwardly about collecting on the debt.

The debt racked up by Ukraine has been a tremendous issue, because, as you’d expect, they’re unable to repay it in the middle of a war — yet they can’t afford to reject the predatory imperialist loans. A year ago, Ukraine, while hoping for their debt to be forgiven, was forced to beg for their debt repayment to be restructured; “magnanimously,” they were given a two-year freeze on paying back $20 billion of their debt. According to Reuters, “BlackRock Inc (BLK.N), Fidelity International, Amia Capital and Gemsstock Ltd are among the biggest holders of Ukraine’s debt… Kyiv had appointed JPMorgan as sole solicitation agent.” Worse still, additional conditions on the debt will make it more difficult — not less — if and when the Ukrainian economy begins to recover. According to Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans, a professor of political-economy:

Most of Ukraine’s debt is denominated in US dollars (60%) or euros (24%), [so] spiralling Ukrainian inflation ensures that debts are harder to repay. Second, in addition to approximately $25bn (£21bn) in bond commitments, Ukraine has outstanding ‘GDP-linked’ obligations to creditors of $3.2bn (£2.7bn). These instruments ensure that Ukraine will pay investors an increasing amount as post-conflict reconstruction increases GDP, as repayments on these obligations are tied to GDP growth (emphasis added).

Ukraine’s debts to Western banks are destroying its social safety net, November 2022.

Forced into debt servitude to neoliberal creditors, Ukraine has been strong-armed into destroying its social safety net and demolishing labor protections while workers need strong benefits more than ever. Dr. Dolan-Evans continues:

“[The Ukrainian] parliament recently passed legislation that curtails trade union representation, [which] makes it possible to remove Ukrainian workers from national labour law protections, and allows firms to suspend employees arbitrarily. This new law — which… the UK government secretly supported — was originally submitted by the Zelenskyi government in 2021, but only passed under wartime conditions. This is despite about 40% of Ukrainians losing their jobs since the invasion began, and Ukrainian businesses slashing nominal wages.

The government is also planning to merge its social insurance fund with its state pension fund, firing personnel, cutting state expenditure and reducing benefits in the process — even though millions of Ukrainians asked for social assistance when Russia invaded, and the pension fund provides a lifeline for the country’s elderly. Even the government itself estimates that 60% to 80% of Ukrainians may end up below the poverty line.”

Once again, the supposed aid provided to Ukraine is not charity, nor is it building up their self-sustainability. It’s hollowing out their institutions and restructuring their economy to serve the needs of Western consumers while imperialists rake in the profit. With Ukraine understandably preoccupied with their Eastern front, one can’t help but wonder whether  more damage is being done by their Western front.

Military “Circle Exchange” Schemes

Though most of the European aid is financial, some of it is also arms, albeit through peculiar “Ringtausch” (circle exchange) agreements. In essence, one country provides arms to Ukraine while receiving replacement weapons from a different country. In one exchange, for example, Slovakia provided Ukraine with 30 BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, while Germany reimbursed Slovakia with 15 Leopard 2A4 tanks. If, like me, you’re not familiar with military hardware, you should know that the BMP-1 is a piece of Soviet-era hardware. And that’s not unusual for these deals: each participating country is pawning off their outdated, Soviet-era hardware on Ukraine, and then receiving some shiny, new military tech from other Western governments. According to a report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, “We estimate that the total value of weapons sent to Ukraine as part of German ‘Ringtausch’ is between €82 and €127 million… while the total value of German replacements is estimated at €90 million.”

The exchanges accomplish two things. First, each country is able to dispose of unusable, excess capital that had accumulated in the form of weapons. By wasting resources, they’re able to forestall a crisis of overproduction. Second, the NATO bloc is thereby able to strengthen its peripheral militaries in preparation for a future conflict. From the surface, it appears like they’re donating weapons to Ukraine, when, in reality, they’re foisting their junk on Ukraine.

In some cases, the military hardware probably does do its job, outdated or not. But in at least one high profile case, it likely caused disaster. At the beginning of the year, a “Super Puma” helicopter infamously crashed into a kindergarten in Brovary, Ukraine, killing 14 and injuring 25. Horrifying footage released on social media showed fires spreading from the crash site. Investigations into the incident never confirmed the cause, though this particular model of helicopter, the EC225/H255, had previously been grounded after a design flaw was found to cause the rotor to completely detach from the craft. According to Airbus Group chief executive Tom Enders, the problem was so extensive that around 80% of the entire fleet had been grounded. So why, then, did France sell 55 of these helicopters to Ukraine in 2018? By then, the helicopter’s design flaws had been common knowledge for two years, so they must’ve known the risk, yet they chose to sell them to Ukraine all the same.

Conclusion

The ruling class of Ukraine and the United States have colluded to squeeze out all the blood, sweat, and tears that they can from Ukraine’s working class. Lives lost to war, livelihoods lost to neoliberal austerity, corporate espionage, unpayable debts — none of these things matter to those who claim to be acting in the defense of Ukraine. And perhaps this would be obvious if we stopped to consider the staggering difference in scale between American aid to Ukraine compared to other war-torn countries: what sets Ukraine apart is not that this war is especially heinous, or that Russia is a uniquely violent or dangerous power.

What set’s this war apart is the jackals in blue suits prowling Wall Street and executive suites of corporate towers throughout the U.S. looking greedily at the ruined Ukrainian economy for a time when they can swoop in and restore profitability. But that’s not all: Ukraine also occupies a particular strategic position in the world amidst the West’s pivot to the East. The American Empire is increasingly preoccupied with the People’s Republic of China and its growing bloc of oppositionists. This horrific war, NATO war planners have admitted, is a “cheap” way to ensure Russia ceases to grow on the world scale to prevent it from threatening U.S.-NATO interests.

Perhaps most importantly, from the eyes of the U.S. capitalist class, Europe is forced to align more and more closely with the U.S. at a time when the NATO alliance had begun to drift away from Washington’s orbit. As a result of the war, NATO countries have turned to U.S. liquid natural gas to meet demands that were previously met with Russian gas; the U.S. sabotage of pipelines and the sanctions on GAZPROM and other Russian state agencies have placed the Eurozone in a new position of subservience to their old masters in the White House.

This confluence of overlapping interests — from geopolitical strategy, to corporate profits, to tightening the reins on Washington’s satellites — is what really sets this war apart.

The mass media, slaves to the ruling class, are nevertheless beating the drums of war. The Washington Post (“Democracy dies in darkness”) openly trumpets that the war in Ukraine is good for the U.S. Empire in all of the expected ways: It will “break up” the Sino-Russian alliance, it will defeat “our” enemies (who are “we” here? The editorial doesn’t say, but merely assumes that anyone reading the rag is bourgeois, upper petit-bourgeois, or otherwise aligned with the political class of the Empire), Ukraine is a good place to test experimental weapons and gear up to go to war with the People’s Republic of China, and the perennial favorite, U.S. manufacturing will return if we go to war. Of course, the author Marc Thiessen, speechwriter for some of the most evil people on the planet, doesn’t mean general domestic manufacturing — he means high-tech jobs in the murder sector like Raytheon and Northrop.

There’s more money to be made in Ukraine, though: The U.S., which pushed Ukraine into war with the R.F., can turn around and “rebuild” its infrastructure. The empire and its junior NATO partners have already committed $66 billion to do just that. This would, of course, result in significant concessions within Ukraine to these foreign investors. In June of this year, the U.S. Empire announced its intentions to own the Ukrainian energy grid with a $1 billion investment. Criminal financial monopolists like BlackRock have taken time from their busy schedule of buying all the housing stock in the U.S. to help the clown Zelenskyy raise private capital so U.S. investors can buy his entire country. The war has turned out to be a fire sale for the West. Yes, we are all aware that “[p]rivate investors see a ‘tremendous opportunity,’” as the JPMorgan ghoul Stefan Weifer cooed in an interview with CNN, in the destruction and privation of the Ukrainian people, but we thank JPMorgan for pointing out that the investment firms intend to capitalize on human misery! Of course, the mass media has called out the feeding frenzy and publicized it so no investor need miss out on this opportunity to financially colonize a country.

Reuters released the results of a poll on Wednesday June 28, 2023, showing that this media saturation has had its intended effect. The poll “charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with 65% of the respondents approving of the [weapons] shipments compared with 46% in a May poll.”

In foreign policy, the U.S. government represents the most rapacious elements of U.S. Capital. Anyone who bucks this trend on the all-empire scale, including those within the ranks of the reactionary far-right GOP block, is rapidly silenced. The capitalists cannot afford skepticism about Ukraine, the war, and their part in it. Left-liberal politicians, for so long pointing to the Wagner Group within the R.F. as proof that the R.F. had its fair share of Nazis, rejoiced this month when the same Russian fascist private military contractor turned on Putin and the R.F.’s government. Whichever side they fight for, the U.S. ruling class and their pet politicians seem to keep eagerly lining up with various fascists. Global fascism, in fact, traces its funding and support directly to the post-World-War-II United States intelligence agencies.

We cannot afford to be duped by the mass media, by the politicians, or by the ruling class. We must agree that we will not support the imperialist Ukraine war. We say NO to all U.S. dollars and resources being spent to see bigger piles of bodies in Eastern Europe, to see blood spread across an ever-widening arc in Ukraine. The support of the U.S. is the kiss of death, and benefits no one except the far-right elements within Ukraine. We demand an end to U.S. support for this war!

On Tuesday, November 15, a wayward Ukrainian missile hit the village of Przewodowe in eastern Poland, just a few miles from the Poland–Ukraine border, killing two civilians.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the Associated Press, citing an anonymous (and, in all likelihood, nonexistent) U.S. official, falsely reported that the missile was fired by Russian Federation forces into Poland. This false claim was disseminated throughout the Western capitalist press.

Naturally, the Russian Federation government immediately and repeatedly denied responsibility for the strike. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on Wednesday, November 16, which read:

[T]he Russian Federation immediately provided comprehensive clarification on Russia’s armed forces not being involved in this incident.

Despite this … the media [in NATO countries], without looking into the situation, scrambled as one to spread absolutely fake and unfounded allegations about Russia potentially being responsible… We see this mayhem as a deliberate effort made as part of a systematic anti-Russia campaign conducted by the West around Ukraine. At the same time, the speed with which accusations against Russia were made by the Kiev regime is notable. Kiev [takes] every opportunity to … consolidate Western support as the Zelensky regime appears to have tired its patrons.

We are confident that an impartial investigation and publication of the results will expose the facts of this provocation.

Remarkably, despite the ongoing inter-imperialist conflict between the Russian Federation and NATO, the two sides actually seem to be in unanimous agreement on this fact: The missile that struck Poland was decidedly not fired by the RF military, and was, in fact, most likely launched by the Ukrainian Air Force. This agreement on the facts is perhaps a first in the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict’s eight-year history.

Already by the night of November 15, President Biden stated to reporters, “It is unlikely [given] the trajectory that [the missile] was fired from Russia.” Biden’s statement followed an “emergency” meeting of the G-7 imperialists (the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Britain, plus the European Union) and NATO.NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, of Norway, in an address on Wednesday, November 16, following an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NATO’s top executive body) stated the following:

We have no indication that this was the result of a deliberate attack. And we have no indication that Russia is preparing offensive military actions against NATO [i.e., Poland and other NATO member-states]. Our preliminary analysis suggests that the incident was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile, fired to defend Ukrainian territory against Russian cruise missile attacks.

Stoltenberg, in customary NATO fashion, then proceeded to lay “ultimate blame” for the Ukrainian misfire on the Russian Federation.

For its part, the Polish government immediately forgave Ukraine.

On Wednesday, November 16, President Andrzej Duda of Poland stated in an address, “It is unfortunately highly probable that one of the missiles fired by the Ukrainian air defenses fell in our territory.” He added that the missile appeared to be an old Soviet-era model, and acknowledged that “There is no evidence, at the moment, that it was launched by the Russian side. It is highly probable that it was fired by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense.”

Later, speaking to reporters, Duda, whose government has been focused on “calming down” the Polish public, emphatically insisted, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, indicates that this was an intentional attack on Poland.” 

Meanwhile, the United States, which leads NATO and the whole Western imperialist axis, both politically and economically, immediately acknowledged the findings of NATO’s “preliminary analysis.” Multiple U.S. military officials have conceded that the missile was almost certainly Ukrainian, not Russian, in origin.

Following President Duda’s remarks, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that the U.S. government concurs that “this explosion was most likely the result of a Ukrainian air defense missile that unfortunately landed in Poland.” Austin also echoed, however, that the Russian Federation bears “ultimate responsibility” for Ukraine’s misfire.

Citing “Western diplomats,” Reuters reported, that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has been coaching foreign diplomats from NATO member-states and other U.S.-aligned countries, “asking them to adopt a cautious approach and to be ‘measured’ while the United States worked out how it would respond.” On Wednesday, November 16, the day after the incident, the Associated Press, along with the numerous outlets that had repeated its false report as fact, were forced by NATO’s consensus to issue a correction to its initial report:

In … a story published November 15, 2022, [the AP] reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made [in fact, the missiles were manufactured in the Soviet Union, and were thus not simply “Russian-made” — a common misconception that has been repeated by many Western media outlets] and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.

By the time this correction was issued, however, the damage had been done. The AP’s false report reignited the fervorous jingoism that the Western pro-imperialist press has worked so tirelessly to instill in the North American and European public, with yet another tale of Russian war crimes. Every time public support for NATO’s proxy-war with the Russian Federation wanes, or gives way to the fear of a potential escalation to world war, even by an inch, the Western pro-imperialist press applies another dose of — typically false — pro-war agitation. This formula hasn’t changed in decades; it’s been reapplied to each subsequent American imperialist war of aggression, whether against Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam and Cambodia, Korea, Yugoslavia, Haiti, or the greater part of Latin America. The Associated Press wasn’t concerned about their report’s truth. The point, after all, was its effect. 

Despite this remarkable international consensus, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the CIA-installed, NATO-backed, puppet-dictator of Ukraine, has continued to insist that the missile was fired by Russian, not Ukrainian, forces.

In a video uploaded on November 16, Zelenskyy stated, “Today happened what we warned of a long time ago… Terror is not limited to our national borders… [T]oday, Russian missiles hit Poland… How many times has Ukraine said that the terrorist state will not be limited to our country?”

Zelenskyy went on to say that “This is a Russian missile attack on [NATO’s] collective security. This is a significant escalation. We must act.”

Zeleneskyy implored the Polish government to invoke Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows a NATO member to invoke the principle that “an attack against one is an attack against all,” and thus compel NATO to consider collective military action. Poland, alongside fellow NATO member-states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, already invoked Article Four of the treaty in February, shortly after the Russian Federation launched its invasion of Ukraine; the fourth article may be invoked when a member-state perceives a military threat, but has not been directly attacked, in order to procure military reinforcements from its NATO allies. This has resulted in a build-up of several thousands of NATO troops along NATO’s “eastern flank.” Now, in no uncertain terms, Zeleneskyy was imploring Poland, as a NATO member-state, to initiate a world war between NATO and Russia — a world war between nuclear-armed powers.

Zelenskyy’s blustering has been repeated by other Ukrainian government officials.

On November 15, Ukraine’s Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov tweeted an especially bizarre statement: “Poland. This is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the reality we’ve been warning about. We were asking to close the sky, because [the] sky has no borders. Not for [Russia’s] uncontrolled missiles. Not for the threat they carry for our [EU and NATO] neighbors. Gloves are off. Time to win.”

Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba similarly tweeted on November 15, “Russia now promotes a conspiracy theory that it was allegedly a [Ukrainian missile] that fell on [Poland]. Which is not true. No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages.” Kuleba’s claim of a “Russian conspiracy theory” was made despite the fact that, by that point, NATO, including Poland itself, had already acknowledged that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces.

In response to the Ukrainian government’s continued false assertions, the Russian Ministry of Defense reiterated in a statement its assertion that “The statements of various Ukrainian sources and foreign officials on the fall of alleged ‘Russian rockets’ in Przewodów are a deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation.” The statement also claimed that “All [destruction] in the residential quarters of [Kiev]” were caused not by Russian missiles, but by “self-destruction of the air defense missiles launched by Ukrainian forces from the foreign-manufactured air defense systems deployed within the [Kiev] city limits.”

At a November 16 meeting of the United Nations Security Council on the “maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine,” the Russian Federation’s Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya spoke of “the attempts by Ukraine and Poland to provoke a clash between Russia and NATO. The completely irresponsible statements made by the leaders of these two countries cannot be interpreted any other way,” he said.

Citing Zelenskyy’s false statements (the same statements we quoted above), Nebenzya said, “This is not just an intentional attempt at disinformation, but a conscious attempt to involve NATO, which is conducting a proxy-war with Russia in Ukraine — to [draw NATO] into a direct conflict with our country.”

Nebenzya proceeded to say that, “The Russophobic authorities of Poland … unequivocally stated that they were the target of Russian attacks… And this is in spite of the fact that photos published … leave no doubt that Ukrainian air-defense missiles had crossed into Poland. And now this has been confirmed even by NATO.”

Nebenzya added, “If not for that [evidence], all these facts would be concealed from the [Western] public, in order to promote the [narrative] of Russian guilt.” He cited other instances in which Ukrainian missile misfires have been blamed on the RF military, and reminded the Security Council that the Ukrainian government has imposed laws banning civilians from publishing photo and video evidence of Ukrainian war crimes on social media.

Finally, responding to the claim that the RF bears “ultimate responsibility” for the Ukrainian misfire, Nebenzya said that “We would not find ourselves in this situation if not for the fact that, in 2014 … with the direct participation of a number of Western states, a bloody anti-constitutional coup had not taken place.”

The RF permanent representative referred to the CIA-manufactured Euromaidan coup, which overthrew the previous Ukrainian government. The coup ousted an internationally neutral president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installed a pro-NATO, pro-European Union regime, led by the Zelenskyy government since 2019.

While the leaders of the Western imperialist axis will, of course, not subscribe to the overarching narrative of the Russian Federation government, and while NATO continues to cast “ultimate blame” on the RF for the Ukrainian misfire on Poland, the facts of the incident are now established beyond dispute.

In fact, President Biden has now directly countered Zelenskyy’s claim that the missile was fired by Russian forces.

On Thursday, November 17, when asked by a reporter for his “reaction to President Zelenskyy saying that the missiles that landed in Poland were not Ukrainian,” Biden simply replied, “That’s not the evidence,” before waving and walking away.

Why have NATO and the Russian Federation agreed on the facts?

Why has even the President of the United States, the central, foremost, unrivaled leader and figurehead of the Western imperialist axis, acknowledged the fact that NATO’s great rival, the Russian Federation, did not strike Poland?

For all their imperialist machinations and ambitions, neither the Western imperialist axis nor the Russian Federation stand to benefit from nuclear war. The only possible outcome of such a world war is, as it always has been, mutually assured destruction. Even the most bloodthirsty imperialist is forced to the table of diplomacy by this fact. Both “sides” of the proxy-war in Ukraine have thus taken great pains to ensure that, whatever happens — no matter which “side” gains and loses more, and no matter how much destruction Ukraine suffers in the process — the inter-imperialist conflict remains a proxy-war, that it remains within its prescribed bounds, and that it does not escalate to a world war. 

Only President Zelenskyy and the deranged leaders of his military-dictatorship regime have departed from this international consensus. As the war in Ukraine rages on, the Zelenskyy regime grows increasingly desperate for a direct war between NATO and the Russian Federation — no matter the toll. If the war does not end soon, we may well see the Zelenskyy regime resort to even more drastic measures to provoke a world war, and we may well live to see the unimaginably violent collapse of the existing world order.

The Western imperialist axis created and unleashed this monster. Now, the common people of Ukraine, of Russia, and of Europe, especially the working classes and the poor, are suffering for it. If this monster cannot be contained or destroyed, then the rest of the world, the rest of humanity, may lose everything.

On Monday, October 24, thirty of the most “progressive” Democrats in the U.S. Congress, comprising one-third of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), sent a letter addressed to President Biden concerning the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian conflict. Despite lavishing the Biden administration’s militarization of Ukraine, on which the U.S. has spent more than $50 billion dollars since February, with praise, the CPC Democrats also implored President Biden to “pair military and economic support … with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.” The CPC Democrats claimed that the U.S. has a responsibility to “reduce harm” and urged the president to “seriously explore all possible avenues,” to a “peaceful settlement,” including “direct [talks] with Russia.”

“If there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue,” argue the CPC Democrats in their letter.

That the CPC Democrats did not rule out direct negotiations is particularly noteworthy. The political climate in the U.S. over the last several years has become dominated by Cold War-style jingoism and Russophobia. The Democrats and their mouthpieces in the capitalist media have made, and are making, a concerted effort to demonize Russia and whip the American public into a state of frenzy — to psychologically prepare the American public for a full-scale war with the Russian Federation. It was thus remarkably clear-headed for the CPC Democrats to continue advocating diplomacy.

It has become worryingly normalized for liberal political commentators to make absurd comparisons between the ongoing Russian invasion and the Holocaust, and betweeen Putin and Hitler — a glaring instance of the new wave of Holocaust revisionism that’s become mainstream in liberal political discourse.

Adding irony to absurdity is the Western liberal whitewashing of a phenomenon that has been euphemistically termed Ukraine’s “Nazi problem.” Since the 2014 CIA-manufactured Euromaidan coup, in which the current regime seized power, the Ukrainian government has armed and mobilized thousands of Ukrainian fascists, most notably the infamous neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and carried out numerous war crimes againt ethnic minorities in Ukraine. The Russian government’s stated goals for the 2022 invasion, to “denazify and demilitarize” Ukraine, are obviously cynical, but have nonetheless drawn attention to the unavoidable fact that the CIA-installed, NATO-backed Ukrainian regime is thoroughly fascistic.

The CPC Democrats soberly noted that, in addition to its thousands of deaths, combatant and civilian, and millions of refugees, the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian conflict has also heightened the threat of nuclear war between the two military powers with the greatest stockpiles of nuclear arms — the U.S., with over 5,000 warheads, and Russia, with over 6,000. The consequences of such a war are nearly unthinkable. In their letter, the CPC Democrats rightly caution against “the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation” and a potential “World War III,” going on to state that “it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict.” 

The CPC Democrats made room in their letter to praise the U.S. puppet president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for making a statement to the effect that a diplomatic solution with Russia would be necessary. This is rather hypocritical, as President Zelenskyy has repeatedly demanded, as recently as this month, that NATO carry out “preemptive” nuclear first strikes on Russia.

Still, for all their hypocrisy and American exceptionalism, we must acknowledge that the CPC Democrats were remarkably principled to advocate diplomacy and a “peaceful settlement,” not least because, despite being the “right” thing, the anti-war position is highly unpopular in today’s frenzied political climate, and out of step with the aggressive imperialist policies advanced by the Democratic Party’s established leadership. A letter signed by only thirty representatives, and lacking any definite demands, wouldn’t have really affected the Biden administration, but it at least broke from the Democratic Party’s apparent consensus on perpetuating U.S. imperialist aggression.

But this small act of political “courage” — if we could be generous enough to call it that — didn’t last long.

The Democratic Party’s majority center-right wing, principally led by President Biden and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, took the letter as an opportunity to castigate their political opponents on the CPC and to consolidate Democrat support for the Biden administration’s policy of continuing to militarize Ukraine. Within 24 hours, bending under political pressure from the Democratic Party leadership, as well as from the Ukrainian government, the thirty Congressional “progressives” rescinded their letter to the president, abandoned and disavowed their calls for diplomacy, and obediently fell in line behind the Biden administration’s warmongering.

On Tuesday, October 25, House Representative Pramila Jayapal (Washington), chairperson of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (and the first signature on the CPC’s letter), released a statement apologizing for the letter, claiming that it had been “drafted several months ago” and “released by staff without vetting.” Needless to say, this “excuse” sounds unconvincing, and in fact, an anonymous source cited by Politico stated that Rep. Jayapal had personally approved the letter for release on Monday. Pinning the “mistake” on staff was an attempt to save face.

Rep. Jayapal characterized the call for a diplomatic resolution as a “distraction at this time,” adding that the CPC Democrats have “strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance” to Ukraine, and would not “seek to pull the plug on American support for President Zelensky [sic.] and the Ukrainian forces.”

Rep. Jayapal’s “excuse” was reiterated by other CPC Democrats, including in tweets posted by House Representatives Sara Jacobs (California) and Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), who each backtracked on the letter’s call for diplomacy in a similar fashion.

Among the thirty Congressional Progressive Caucus Democrats who signed and subsequently backtracked on the CPC’s letter to President Biden are four self-avowed “socialists” who hold membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The Marxist Unity Group, a significant faction of Communists struggling within the DSA, posted a statement concerning this betrayal on Twitter:

Every DSA member in Congress has voted, against DSA’s official position, for tens of billions of dollars in arms for an imperialist proxy war. Now the Congressional Progressive Caucus retracts its weak criticism of U.S. policy in Ukraine after only a day. DSA members must speak with one voice against militarism and war. We need a socialist caucus in Congress separate from the pro-imperialist “Progressives.”

What the Marxist Unity Group, as with many U.S. Communists, failed to say, is that the Democratic Party is fundamentally an imperialist party. Both it and the Republican Party exist to serve the interests of differing factions of the U.S. imperialists — the most powerful stratum of the capitalists who, through military and economic power, have conquered, carved up, and divided among themselves the majority of land and water on Earth. When the prevailing faction of the imperialists demand war, as they do now, even the most “progressive” Democrats in Congress will, before long, bend under pressure and abandon even the most threadbare commitments to diplomacy, to peace, and against militarization.

The 2022 midterm elections are just around the corner, and as election day nears, the duty of Communists is to speak with absolute clarity: A vote for either major party, for either the Republicans or the Democrats, for either the “right-wing” or the “left-wing” of American imperialism — even a vote for a “progressive” or “socialist” Democrat — is inevitably a vote for endless wars of aggression. World peace will never be on the ballot in the U.S. Empire. Only by smashing this whole rotten political system can we once and for all end America’s imperialist wars.