A-Infos (en) Italy, UCAD'I #184 - Putin and Zelensky are equal to us (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

For Charles Michel, president of the European Council, the citizens of 
the European Union must be prepared for war and therefore this 
bureaucrat, criminal and irresponsible, has dusted off the Roman brocade 
"If you want peace, prepare for war" . The first step in this direction 
is to convince the European populations that they must mobilize to 
defend themselves from the aggressor, a bloody dictator who attacked a 
sincerely democratic country: Ukraine. The aggressor country, Russia, is 
animated by imperial aspirations, is governed by a dictatorial 
government, which wages war on a democratic and liberal country, which 
guarantees its citizens the civil liberties typical of Western democracies.
This narrative is false, because if it is true that Russia is governed 
by an autocrat who has just been re-elected by plebiscite by a vote 
without opponents, it is rigidly controlled and oriented by regime 
propaganda and by the fear of reprisals towards dissenting citizens; if 
it is true that the troops of this country, during a conflict already 
underway since 2014, invaded the territory of Ukraine on 24 February 
2021, it is also true that Ukraine is a country that is anything but 
democratic, very similar to Russia, in which linguistic, ethnic and 
religious minorities are repressed, where liberal democratic freedoms 
are denied, where 11 political parties were outlawed before the start of 
the war, where militias and right-wing groups are rampant which fuel 
religious, ethnic and political hatred; where martial law is in force, 
where the President of the Republic operates under a prorogatio regime, 
having postponed the elections, despite the fact that his mandate has 
expired. In both these countries a profound social inequality divides 
the citizens, while the economy of the two countries is completely 
controlled by oligarchs who feast on the remains of what was the 
socialist state, dividing its spoils; economic and social inequality is 
accompanied by the denial of individual rights and civil liberties.
Faced with these facts, there are those who claim that the degeneration 
of the liberal state taking place in Ukraine is the result of the war; 
that the country was forced to adopt martial law to deal with the 
conflict, to postpone elections indefinitely due to the difficulties in 
holding them; that in times of war civil liberties, including religious 
freedom, are suspended as are the rights of minorities; that in short, 
there is an emergency situation that requires special rules. But this is 
not the case because Ukraine, already before February 24, 2021, was 
governed by an illiberal regime, characterized by the same violations of 
rights that we have reported, as it repressed linguistic and ethnic 
minorities; a war between no holds barred religious confessions; 
right-wing paramilitary formations proliferated and stood out for their 
reprisal actions against minorities within the country, proof of which 
is that the civil war in Donbass was already underway.
In the name of defending this regime, which is anything but democratic 
and liberal, the political leadership of the European Union is bleeding 
the resources of the peoples of the Union, engaging them in a proxy war 
against Russia which has the sole result of causing massacres the 
Ukrainian and Russian populations on the battlefields and to send 
thousands of young men and women to their deaths, with the aggravating 
circumstance that on the battlefield the peoples of two once brotherly 
countries, which have common traditions and origins and that populations 
are targeted by bombing without holds barred.
We should also have the honesty to say that while Ukraine has a 
population four times smaller than Russia's, with the result that an 
entire generation of Ukrainians aged between 19 and 27 (the age of 
conscription) is erased from history or dispersed in what remains of the 
country, mutilated by horrible wounds as a result of war on the 
battlefields and bombings; Russia, on the other hand, which has 144 
million inhabitants, can fuel the massacre with an infinitely greater 
number of victims recruited largely from the poorest and most 
dispossessed sections of the country.
Taking note of this radical imbalance of forces, we are not so cynical 
as to wish for the death by proxy of the people of Ukraine or of the 
Russian people and faced with the request to take sides in defense of 
the interests of the oligarchs of one or the other party, of one state 
or the other, we say no to war and we refuse the game of choosing 
between "attacked and aggressors". We are convinced that the only truth 
regarding Ukraine is that there are two victims of the war: the people 
of both countries.

The people defend themselves as best they can

Dragged into war, both the Ukrainian and Russian people defend 
themselves as best they can. The Ukrainians, oppressed by the invader 
and the bombings, left the country as many as 8 million. Of course, this 
first reaction was the result of the need to save themselves, but for 
many of them this choice has become consolidated and it is estimated 
that as many as 300,000 Ukrainians, potential enlisted soldiers, today 
refuse to return to the country, proof of this is that the Ukrainian 
government, short of men and women to send to the front, asked the host 
countries to forcefully send them back to their homeland, to no avail. 
Nor is things better at home, because the Ukrainian government is unable 
to pass a law that extends recruitment beyond the age of 27. In an 
attempt to recruit troops to send to the front, the Rada restricted 
recruitment to twenty-five-year-olds; while in Parliament we are 
discussing the army patrols forcibly recruit men and women, to send them 
to the front and there are many who, to escape the forced mobilization, 
actually live clandestinely in the country, taking advantage of the 
difficulties in controlling the territory by the state authorities , 
hampered by the state of war.
Many are those who, for the same reason, resort to corruption and pay 
doctors and recruiters to be exempt from being called to arms. Even if 
it is little known, the same thing happens in Russia where those who 
were able emigrated before the borders were blocked: Russian draft 
dodgers are present in Serbia as in the former Soviet Republics of Asia, 
in Georgia as in Armenia or they have refugees in the former Soviet 
Turkic Republics of Asia.
The incidence of the phenomenon is certainly numerically lower in Russia 
than it is in Ukraine due to the fact that there is a huge disproportion 
between the mobilizable population in the two countries, but this does 
not mean that the populations are so inclined to war.

Attacked and aggressors

In the West, support for Ukraine is usually justified by claiming that 
it is the victim of aggression, the result of a clear violation of 
international law. This narrative is misleading and only works if you 
start narrating the facts starting from the start date of the so-called 
"special operation", implemented by Russia, ignoring the fact that the 
conflict between the two countries had already started in 2014, with the 
secession of the eastern Ukrainian provinces, affected by the shift of 
the country's economy to the West and by the crisis of the industrial 
and mining sector located in those areas of Ukraine which lived and 
prospered thanks to raw materials supplied at political cost by Russia 
and had as outlet the market of that country. The sacrifice of the 
economy of those territories has therefore fueled the secessionist 
tendencies of the populations, increased by attacks by militias and 
right-wing political groups, formed mainly in the western areas of the 
country. (see neo-Nazi paramilitary formation Azof and similar). In 
fact, an important role in the explosion of the conflict was played by 
Ukrainian nationalism, strongly supported by that part of the Orthodox 
clergy linked to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the 
use that the State Department made of this ecclesiastical structure for 
the purpose of assuming the control of the countries with an Orthodox 
majority in Eastern Europe, removing them from the hegemony exercised by 
the Patriarchate of Moscow.[1]
But the Ukrainian crisis exploded above all when Ukrainian nationalism 
and its strategies aimed at bringing the country into the European Union 
and NATO combined with the efforts to destabilize the European Union 
policy undertaken by Great Britain at the time of planning the Brexit 
and accentuated after its implementation. The role of English diplomacy 
on the one hand in derailing the Minsk agreements and on the other in 
the secret and disguised effort to arm Ukraine, training its secret 
services and special troops,
especially after 2014 and consequently of the events following the 
clashes in Maidan Square, in the US interest in putting the European 
economy into crisis, severing its economic and commercial relations with 
Russia.

Britain's goals of destabilizing the Russian Euro axis

The implementation of Brexit definitively separated the destinies of 
Great Britain from those of continental Europe. From that moment on, 
English foreign policy summarized its historical objective as a 
priority: to divide continental Europe, to weaken it, so that it could 
never and in any case constitute a danger to England, once
from a military point of view, today on the economic and financial plan. 
It therefore became a priority to undermine the continental economy, 
based at the time on a low cost of energy - gas and oil - the result of 
a partnership with Russia which obtained investments in exchange and 
effectively became the area's favorite commercial and political partner 
continental Europe. Hence the English (and American) aversion to the 
entry into operation of Nord Stream 2 which would have allowed supplies 
of oil and gas from Russia at low prices, giving high competitiveness to 
the goods produced in Europe. It would have been possible to minimize 
production costs and reduce energy import costs by avoiding paying 
rights of way for oil and gas pipelines in cross-border countries, 
giving the North Atlantic gas pipeline operational autonomy at lower 
costs. The opportunity to influence this structure is offered by the end 
of the political mandate of Angela Merkel, the great protector and 
guarantor of these relationships, proof of which is that the Nord Stream 
2 terminal on German soil was located not by chance in the lander of 
origin of the former prime minister.
Failure to comply with the Minsk agreements, after the second attempt to 
implement them, leads Putin to play the card of a punitive invasion, 
relying on insufficient knowledge of the political situation which has 
evolved in Ukraine in the meantime, underestimating the deep ties 
established by both the United and by Great Britain, in concert with the 
Ecumenical Patriarchate to strengthen the social and political stability 
of Ukrainian nationalism.[2]
The invasion, which resulted in the attempt to take Kiev, implementing a 
sort of coup d'état on the model of those of the USSR towards the 
satellite countries, the reprisals, the massacres following the failure 
of the operation, such as that of Buca, perpetrated in March 2022. did 
nothing but strengthen Ukrainian nationalism in the first phase of the 
war and fuel the call to arms in defense of the attacked nation.
The unexpected resistance of the Zelensky government led both NATO and 
the United States and Great Britain to try the proxy war card. Hence the 
growing support in arms and financing for the Ukrainian war and the 
commitment of NATO countries in fueling the conflict, always supplying 
new weapons to the Ukrainian army, while a careful war propaganda fueled 
the idea that Russia could be defeated by the heroic resistance of a 
people and fueled the narrative that the defense of Ukraine was 
essential to defend the attacked West.
The retreat of the invasion force that had penetrated the country, 
headed towards Kiev, was replaced by Russia by a remodulation of the 
intervention, calibrated on the defense of Crimea and the annexation of 
the secessionist oblasts, moving on a front more than 1000 km long which 
starts from Kharkiv and goes all the way to Odessa, while the continuous 
bombings hit the country's infrastructure, reducing it to a pile of 
rubble, polluting its soil and waters, undermining its territory and 
transforming the war into a clash of positions which in two years it 
literally destroyed the connective tissue and highlighted the existing 
disproportion between the potential of the two contenders.
From a strategic point of view, Russia managed to occupy the coasts of 
the Sea of Azov almost reaching the port of Odessa and the Dnieper 
estuary and to acquire almost complete control of 4 eastern oblasts. 
(Donnes'k, Lugans 'k, Zaporizzja, Kerson) even if the front line is 
uncertain and mobile. Ukrainian troops are experiencing great 
difficulties due to the shortage of ammunition, the inferiority of the 
troops to be deployed, the lack of air cover.
On the Western side, the only ones to have achieved their objectives are 
the British and their allies who, using the Ukrainian secret services, 
their own teams of trained saboteurs, managed to blow up Nord Stream 2 
and order its abandonment. The sanctions launched against Russia as acts 
of retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine have almost eliminated 
imports of oil and gas from Russia, redirecting European supplies to 
other areas of the world and making US-produced liquefied gas 
competitive towards which many European countries have been forced to 
orient themselves towards, having to accept the higher cost of the product.
The European economy has had to bear the effects of this restructuring 
of production costs and that of support for the Ukrainian war, caused by 
the flow of migrants due to the war, the cost of the weapons needed for 
the conflict, the maintenance of the Ukrainian state, in fact failed, 
with the result of having to give up a large part of the green projects 
for its economy, the entry into technical recession of the most 
economically advanced country, Germany, the adoption of a general policy 
of rearmament and the increase of military spending, a very violent 
crisis of the
common agricultural policy which constitutes the sector destined to pay 
the price of Ukraine's accession to the European Union.

The internal front

After 26 months of war the situation on the ground now seems to have 
reached a turning point. The war cost more than a million dead and 
wounded; the civilian victims on both sides are difficult to calculate; 
it transformed from a war of movement into trench warfare. However, 
while Russia continues to mobilize new troops and pour them onto the 
battlefield, Ukraine is now short of human resources and the call to 
arms of the population aged 19 to 25 sees a strong resistance to the 
draft and a growing refusal to accept the compulsory conscription, the 
growth of deserters, the refusal of those who are expatriates to return 
to the country to fight.
The state of war, the imposition of martial law, the growth of hatred 
and resentment, the intersection with the mobilization against Russia of 
the war between the different religious confessions of the country, the 
phenomena of corruption, of hoarding of war profits , the growing hatred 
between different ethnic groups and linguistic groups which now involves 
both Hungarian-speaking and Romanian-speaking and Romanian-speaking 
populations, not to mention the persistent presence of Russian-speaking 
populations, undermines the Ukrainian resistance from within.[3]
The only results that the Zelensky government can boast of having 
achieved concern the promise of accelerated membership, without 
conditions and without any respect for the parameters established by the 
Treaties of entry into the European community and NATO, the prospect of 
being able to burden the costs of rebuilding the country on 
international investors and on Europe, considering the fact that it is 
unthinkable that Russia would shoulder the war damages; the advantage of 
having continuous financing available to support an economy which is 
having increasing difficulty in recovery and development, also in 
consideration of the destruction of the country's agricultural and 
industrial fabric, its pollution, the huge presence of war ordnance 
throughout the its territory, also in the face of a growing decrease in 
the country's population. One of the sure effects of this war is in fact 
a disastrous and unbridgeable demographic crisis of the Ukrainian 
population which has seen the fertile classes of its population perish 
on the battlefields.
All this happens while the Russian aggressor is strengthening itself, 
mobilizing a further 150,000 men, even if partly destined to deal with 
the expansion of the borders with NATO countries, while the Russian arms 
industry has now come fully into operation, working on three 8-hour 
shifts for 24 hours and producing new armaments, to the point that the 
arsenal that the country possessed before the start of operations in 
Ukraine has been completely or almost completely replaced by new weapons 
produced in these two years, the use of which, tested on the 
battlefield, has seen its destructive effectiveness grow, as for example 
it happened with flying bombs.
Despite the West's decisions to proceed with rearmament and the 
conversion of its industries into armaments production, the time 
required to implement this reconversion requires prolonging the conflict 
for another two years. In Western circles - where there is every 
intention of continuing the slaughter - it is thought to achieve this 
objective through the supply of a substantial number of F 16 fighter 
planes to Ukraine which should enter the line to coincide with the 
offensive Russian spring.
The results of a possible air battle, however, will not be able to 
change the final outcome of the war and this is not because Russia 
ultimately retains the option of being able to use tactical nuclear 
weapons, but because the mobilization times and the forces that two 
sides are able to put on the battlefield are so proportionate that they 
cannot bear comparison in the long run. If nothing else, this is the 
main reason that requires the search for peace and the need for 
discussion on the basis of a credible negotiation that takes into 
account mutual interests in the field and
above all that does not sacrifice the two peoples induced to go to war.

Our position on the Ukrainian war

Our aversion to war does not arise only from the profound conviction 
that it serves the dominant classes to push the subordinate classes to 
massacre each other in the name of the interests of all those who profit 
from the war. Therefore, in analyzing the reasons and causes of 
conflicts we are inclined to investigate their economic and social 
causes, regardless of an abstract respect for the rules of international 
law which should regulate relations between peoples. It is for this 
reason that we consider the Ukrainian one one of the 60 conflicts 
currently underway in the world, as part of that ongoing war between the 
great powers to reach a new structure of economic relations between the 
different areas of the planet, and therefore we avoid falling into the 
trap of ethical and moral evaluations, before looking at the facts and 
interests that this clash implies. We are far from belonging to the 
supporters of the West and of the so-called democratic-liberal system as 
well as those belonging to autocratic systems, and we have as our 
guiding star the interest of the people, their well-being, the 
aspiration for freedom and peace and to mutual coexistence, without 
destroying the environment and the planet.
For this reason we affirm that the ongoing war between Ukraine and 
Russia has deep and complex economic reasons which concern both the 
autocrats and oligarchs of the two countries engaged in competing for 
control of the economy and raw materials of Ukraine and Russia and 
reasons and interests of an international strategic nature concerning 
the balance between the different economic areas of the planet. It is 
therefore that, moving from the point of view of citizens who live in 
the European area, we believe that it is in the interest of the peoples 
of the whole of Europe to decide whether to organize their economy
having as a reference development axis a relationship between the 
European area and the Russia, as happened before the Ukraine crisis, or 
look at a relationship along the north-south axis and maintain an 
economic and social partnership with Africa.
We therefore consider the defense of liberal democracy even less than a 
fig leaf behind which the West hides to defend economic and power 
interests and at the same time we give a severe judgment and we strongly 
oppose the ethical and moral reasons of which Both Putin and his state 
chaplain Kjrill are the bearers, who - incidentally - are not unlike 
those supported by the self-styled Patriarch Epiphanius of the Ukrainian 
schismatic Church and by the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew 
himself, allies of the West. We have no no preference and no sympathy 
for this or that priest whose rapacity and interests aimed at possessing 
spiritual and material power we do not want to defend, as the 
expropriations, by the State, of ecclesiastical assets currently 
underway in Ukraine, demonstrate. A profound contempt pushes us to 
forcefully reject the plots of these jackals who feast on the dead of 
both sides, cloaking themselves in values that in reality mask material 
interests and the exercise of power.
We have no interest in justifying the role and function of the foolish 
Stoltenberg, eternal secretary of a criminal military organization which 
has studded its inglorious history with repeated interventions in the 
most varied countries (Afganistan, Iraq, etc.), having the sole ability 
to lose wars and to massacre their own and enemy soldiers, committing 
atrocious war crimes, following logic and using methods that are nothing 
different from those of Russian mercenary companies such as Wagner.
No moral judgment therefore on the reasons for this war, no surrender 
disguised behind the defense of ideal values, be they of the West or of 
liberal democracy, but a comparison on the basis of considerations of 
mere strategic and economic interest which must be evaluated taking into 
account when they are compatible with the maintenance of peace and 
respect for other peoples, called to a common struggle for liberation 
from the exploitation of man by man and for the construction of a 
society of free and equal people that abolishes exploitation and allows 
everyone has equal access to the good things in life.
We are firmly convinced that the only war that is right to fight is the 
class war against the capitalists and exploiting bosses, whether they 
disguise themselves as rich and liberal entrepreneurs or as oligarchs 
serving this or that dictator, who claim to act in the name of the 
people or of freedom of enterprise, whether they are agents of a state 
or of an autocratic regime. We know that a clear understanding of what 
is happening in the international political framework is one of the 
starting points for a coherent and rational vision of the relationships 
between classes and the necessary prerequisite from which to move to 
guide our political action.

[1]G. Cimbalo, The evolution of relations between State and Churches in 
New Ukraine . In search of Autocephaly in "Law and Religions" 2-2020, 
pp. 252-304, https://www.giovannicimbalo.it
[2]G. Cimbalo, ID., The unspoken role of the Churches in the 
Russian-Ukrainian conflict , in "Law and religions" n. 2 of 2021, pp. 
487-512.
[3]The collapse of the internal front in Ukraine , Newsletter Crescita 
Politica, n. 180, 2023; Two considerations on Ukraine , Political Growth 
Newsletter, n. 176, 2023; The failures of the Ukrainian war , Newsletter 
Crescita Politica, n. 170, 2023; The economic causes of the Ukrainian 
war , Newsletter Crescita Politica, n. 160, 2023; War in Ukraine: the 
British trail , Newsletter Crescita Politica, n. 158, 2022; Zelesky's 
Ukraine before Putin , Political Growth Newsletter, n. 158, 2022; The 
beggar and the dictator , Newsletter Crescita Politica, n. 183, 2024.

GL

https://www.ucadi.org/2024/04/25/putin-e-zelensky-per-noi-pari-sono/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en