What is called for, and urgently now, is to oppose all imperialist marauders and mass murderers, and all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation, while giving particular emphasis to opposing “our own” imperialist oppressors who commit their monstrous crimes “in our name” and seek to rally us to support them on the basis of a grotesque American chauvinism, which we must firmly reject and fiercely struggle against. 

—Bob Avakian, from his article “A Basic Principle on the War in Ukraine,” written shortly after that war began

The war in Ukraine began after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Almost as soon as the war began the U.S., along with the European imperialists that it overall leads in the NATO military alliance, began arming, financing, training, and giving strategic direction to Ukraine. The war became a proxy war between the U.S./NATO and Russia. This means the U.S. has been advancing its imperialist interests in its conflict with a rival imperialist power, Russia, through the Ukrainian military and people. It is a war between rival imperialist gangsters, the U.S./NATO on one side, Russia on the other.

There is nothing “just” about this war. It has turned the country of Ukraine into a slaughterhouse. In the 16 months since it started, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives, countless more have been maimed, raped, and crippled. Entire cities have been destroyed, and over 13 million people have been “displaced from their homes.”

Dangerous New Levels of Violence and Uncertainty

Events over the past few weeks have pushed the hellish situation in Ukraine into ever more dangerous levels of violence. They underscore how quickly this could all spin out of anyone’s control, and possibly lead to a nuclear holocaust. Among these events:

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of a Russian mercenary formation that has been instrumental in Russia’s brutal, illegal war, and who had repeatedly denounced much of Russia’s formal military leadership, led a revolt that included thousands of the mercenaries marching towards Moscow, Russia’s capital, and shooting down several Russian army helicopters. Prigozhin denied that his actions constituted an attempted coup, and his whereabouts are currently unknown.
• Russia and Ukraine accused each other of planning to sabotage the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. If any of this is true, and if the plant is damaged, the results could be catastrophic.
• A long-anticipated Ukrainian spring “counter-offensive” along a 600-mile front has become a “slow and bloody slog,” with neither side making breakthroughs. Meanwhile, the body count mounts. Last week, U.S. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that Ukraine’s offensive is "going to be very difficult, it's going to be very long and it's going to be very, very bloody.”
• On July 7, the Biden administration announced that it is sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. Each cluster bomb contains up to hundreds of  “bomblets” that explode upon contact, and if they don't explode immediately they can lay dormant and lethal for decades. They are especially dangerous to children, who can mistake a bomblet for a toy. One hundred twenty nations have banned the use of cluster bombs—the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine, have not. (See “Biden Announces U.S. Will Supply Ukraine with Cluster Bombs: A Rain of Death That Kills for Decades” for further exposure on cluster bombs.) The question must be asked: What other armaments that have up to now been seen as “too atrocious to use” might suddenly become not only acceptable but “necessary” according to the logic of winning the war and—as the U.S. Secretary Defense put it—administering a “strategic defeat” to Russia?
• The cluster bombs were a portion of $800 million in new shipments of weaponry the U.S. is sending to Ukraine. The new arms feature “‘dozens’ of Bradley and Stryker fighting vehicles, air defense missiles and anti-mine equipment.”

These events illustrate how, after 16 months of massive bloodshed, both the U.S. and Russia are “digging in” for what they would consider “victory” in this war. They are escalating to dangerous new levels of combat, using deadlier weaponry. Neither one of these nuclear-armed powers has given any indication it is willing to back down.

Confusion, and Clarity

A few weeks after this war began, Bob Avakian wrote:

The “fog of war” refers to the fact that, in a situation of warfare, many things become obscured. To put it simply, it is often difficult to tell exactly what is happening.

Related to this is the fact that war, once begun, has its own dynamics: things often do not go the way that the people who started a war, or became involved in it, expected them to go. This has very heavy meaning in the current war in Ukraine, which involves not just Russia and Ukraine but also the imperialist alliance (NATO), headed by the U.S., in a “war by proxy” with Russia—providing massive amounts of arms to Ukraine and waging economic warfare (in the form of “sanctions”) against Russia, while heightening the military “readiness” of NATO countries, in particular those bordering or close to Russia.

These words are as true, and even more urgent, now than they were when they were written 15 months ago. News media in the U.S. are filled with speculation about what the “Prigozhin affair” was all about, and what its impact will be on the war in Ukraine. Countless articles and editorials have expressed countless opinions on why the Ukrainian offensive has not advanced the way the U.S. and Ukraine had wanted.

How long this war will last, what could constitute a “victory” by either side—none of this is clear. Instability permeates everything, the entire situation in Ukraine could dramatically change in a moment. This in turn could reverberate across the world. It would greatly impact the terrain on which people in the U.S. are working to make revolution.

In the confusion, lies and deceptions, disinformation and false accusations, of the “fog of war” and, most of all, against attempts by the imperialist powers to line people up on their side, some truths are vital for masses of people to understand, and to act on.

1. The war in Ukraine is not a struggle between “‘autocracy’ and democracy,” it is a conflict zone of imperialist rivalry between U.S. and Western imperialism and Russian imperialism. The Ukrainian people and Ukrainian army are cannon fodder in this war—being used cold-bloodedly to advance U.S. imperialist interests in contention with their Russian rivals.

2. The U.S. and the NATO alliance it leads are right now massively escalating this war, as they continue to send in more, and deadlier, armaments to Ukraine. Russia is digging in, and also escalating its preparations for a more extensive and decisive war.

3. Both the U.S./NATO side and the equally imperialist Russian side are deeply committed to “winning” this war—a logic that can lead to the unspeakable horrors of nuclear war. Their mounting aggression has already included threats to use nuclear weapons; their nukes remain “locked and loaded.”

4. These recent developments—the revolt by Prigozhin, the highly risky Ukraine counter-offensive, the escalation of weaponry with the shipping of cluster bombs—have made things potentially even more explosive and dangerous to the masses of people far beyond the “theater of war” (Ukraine and Russia).

5. The entire dynamic of this war must be radically changed in the interests of humanity, not rival and contending imperialists.