As Israel has launched retaliatory attacks against Iran, heightening the possibility of a wider war in the Middle East and beyond, a dangerous new development is taking place in the U.S.-Russia proxy war in Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies allege that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to Russia, for training and deployment in Ukraine to fight alongside Russian forces. According to the New York Times, U.S. and Ukrainian officials say the North Korean troops have arrived in the Kursk region—an area in Russia where Ukraine launched a military offensive in August and occupied some territory—and may be part of a Russian counteroffensive to retake that area.

Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, said that if the North Korean troops “are co-belligerents—if their intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf—that is a very, very serious issue. It will have impacts, not only in Europe. It will also impact things in the Indo-Pacific as well.” John Kirby, spokesman for Biden’s National Security Council, warned, “If these North Korean troops are employed against Ukraine, they will become legitimate military targets.” 

Kirby and Austin did not spell out what exactly the U.S. response would be if the North Korean troops did join with Russian forces in the war in Ukraine. But their threats point to the U.S. possibly getting even more directly involved in the Ukraine war and/or taking retaliatory action against North Korea. 

These developments underscore the urgency of what revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) said in his social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #42, “Imperialism—and Imperialist War: What is, and is not, its fundamental motivation, nature and role, and how it can be finally ended”:

…right now, the danger of war between nuclear armed imperialist powers is once again increasing, with the intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and China, and particularly now the war in Ukraine, which began with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia but quickly turned into a war in which the U.S. and Russia are (so far) indirectly fighting each other, with the U.S. (and its “allies” in NATO) heavily arming and essentially directing the Ukrainian forces, utilizing Ukrainian soldiers as “cannon fodder” in this war with Russia.

All this powerfully illustrates the literally life and death importance of my statement that:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. And it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way.

The new development in the war in Ukraine takes place as the U.S. and its NATO allies have been considering taking a step with potentially catastrophic consequences: officially allowing Ukraine to use NATO-supplied long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia for the first time (go here for more on this). Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin immediately declared that such a step “will mean that NATO countries—the United States and European countries—are at war with Russia,” and if that is the case, “we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.” 

Then Putin turned up the warning another notch by announcing that Russia had updated the doctrine for use of its nuclear arsenal to treat attacks by a non-nuclear state (i.e., Ukraine) backed by a nuclear state (i.e., the U.S.) as a “joint attack” on Russia. These are extremely ominous declarations from Putin, who has repeatedly threatened that Russia would use nuclear weapons if it felt the existence of the Russian state was fundamentally threatened.

For the U.S. to act outraged over Russia allegedly using North Korean troops in Ukraine is staggering hypocrisy. The U.S. imperialists portray the billions of dollars in American weapons sent to Ukraine as support for a just war to defend Ukrainian sovereignty against Russian invaders—a front line in the worldwide clash between western “democracies” and the increasingly allied bloc of “autocracies” that include Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. In reality, as BA points out, the U.S. has been using Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder in a reactionary, bloody proxy war with its imperialist rival, Russia.¹

So far, the U.S. and Russia have avoided a direct clash. But these are the two top nuclear powers in the world, each with thousands of nuclear weapons ready to be fired at all times, and driven by capitalism-imperialism’s expand-or-die logic into vicious contention over domination of strategic parts of the world. This contention, in Ukraine and elsewhere, could suddenly escalate to all-out conflict, including nuclear war.

Think about the utter insane criminality of this: a system—the system of capitalism-imperialism—whose workings could bring about the possible extinction of humanity, or at minimum the deaths of tens of millions or more, along with untold suffering for those who survive, and the perhaps-fatal poisoning of the entire planet.

This bring us back to BA’s all-important point: “…it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way.” Everyone deeply concerned about the state of the world and future of humanity needs to dig into, and spread, BA’s social media messages @BobAvakianOfficial, where he speaks scientifically and passionately to why an actual revolution in the U.S. to overthrow this system and bring in a radically different, much better system is possible in this time—and how such a revolution could actually win.²