The propaganda instruments of the imperialist system—be they the blatantly fascist FOX News or the oh-so-objective New York Times/CNN bunch—report on the war as if it were a combination of some kind of video game/sports event (“yay, the Russian are losing”) or hot new drama series, in which the Ukrainian TV performer-turned-president Zelensky stars in a compelling new series and “hardened” newsmen are suddenly reduced to tears at seeing the suffering that war brings (tears they somehow never found when reporting on the far greater suffering brought on by U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan or right now today in Yemen—and if you don’t know about Yemen, you should look at our article this issue and find out how you’ve been lied to and manipulated).

Yet the war is in fact extremely important, and the world is entering into an extremely dangerous situation. Especially given this, as Bob Avakian wrote in “Shameless American Chauvinism: ‘Anti-Authoritarianism’ as a ‘Cover’ For Supporting U.S. Imperialism,” “…we can and must confront and analyze reality as it actually is, and draw the necessary conclusions.” 

Mainly, this means having a grasp of the fundamental class interests of all sides and not becoming what Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader and great communist theoretician, once called a “foolish victim of deceit and self-deceit.” But it also means applying that to events as they unfold.

Here are the actual key developments:

1. Increased suffering among the people of Ukraine

Less than two weeks into Russia’s totally unjust invasion of Ukraine, well over a million refugees have been driven to abandon their homes in a desperate search for shelter in neighboring countries. The death toll is difficult to quantify but between Russian troops, Ukrainian troops and civilians, it is already over a thousand.¹

In the face of what appear to be military and logistical setbacks in its invasion, Russia is escalating attacks on civilians. Verifiable photos show bridges, schools and residential areas damaged or destroyed by Russian missiles. Fierce battles have raged at nuclear power plants including the one at Chernobyl that experienced a terrifying meltdown in 1986 that sent airborne radiation across Ukraine, Russia, and Europe.

Russia understood when they entered the war that this might not be an easy victory and that they would pay a price.  They evidently thought that the alternative—the steady and escalating encroachment by the U.S. on what Russia considers its sphere of influence—was worse. Now having staked everything on this, there is a real necessity for them to win in some form.

2. The U.S. is pouring in aid to prolong the war and bleed its rival Russia

Seeing the possibility of making the invasion more militarily, economically, and politically costly for Russia—and the necessity to not back down and appear weak—the U.S. is ramping up shipments of hundreds of millions of dollars of arms into Ukraine.

Right now, the U.S. and its allies have considerable freedom to transport those weapons into western Ukraine while Russian forces are focused on the south and east of the country, and the U.S. is rushing in arms while that corridor remains open. Those state-of-the-art weapons are being put in the hands of Ukraine’s 170,000 active duty troops, many of whom have been trained by U.S. Special Operations forces and battle hardened using U.S. military technology in the war against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

This infusion of U.S. weapons in turn ups the ante for Russia to achieve a quick victory by escalating its destruction of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and abandoning pretenses of not targeting the civilian population.

In short, the U.S. seems to have decided on—at least for now—a strategy of not directly entering into the war, but marshaling its allies to aid Ukraine in such a way as to prolong the war and weaken Russia as much as possible. They do this not out of any concern for the Ukrainian people, but as a way to further advance their imperialist interests in Europe.

3. The imperialist powers on all sides are playing an increasingly dangerous and very serious game with the planet

As horrific as all this is, as the war drags on and escalates, there is the real potential that events will spiral out of control of even the intent of either side, including to the point where one side or the other or both sees a need to use nuclear weapons.

The driving compulsion on the part of both sides—the U.S. bloc and Russia—to dominate Ukraine and the unpredictability of war have already led to pitched battles over control of fragile nuclear power plants (that depend on external energy to keep them from overheating), and to a more horrible toll of death and destruction than it seems either side expected.

But there is a danger that the fast-developing situation in Ukraine could explode in even much more terrible ways.² As Andy Zee posed in the recent Emergency Forum on the War in Ukraine at Revolution Books in New York City, “All wars are full of uncertainty, calculation and miscalculation. And with Russia and the U.S. possessing 8,000 nuclear weapons, with a possibility of destroying the earth and much of life on it, the danger is truly profound.” And as Raymond Lotta pointed out in that same program, these weapons are configured in such a way that they could be deployed by either side in the war in (or expanding beyond) Ukraine.

In another escalating dynamic, Ukraine’s leader Zelensky has been demanding the U.S. and NATO impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine. On March 5, Zelensky had a Zoom meeting with 300 members of the U.S. Congress. After the meeting, Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said, “Let’s be cleareyed about our options: A no-fly zone means sending American pilots into combat against Russian jets and air defenses—in a battle between nuclear powers that could spiral out of control quickly.”

While at this point, the U.S. is saying no to a direct air war over Ukraine, the U.S. and Ukraine are exploring ways to provide Ukraine with drones and other technology to challenge Russia in the air but branded as “Ukrainian” and not American forces. Such a move would not fool anyone, and Putin warned early in the invasion that any attempt to interfere by other countries would lead to “consequences they have never seen,” with the implication this could mean a nuclear response from Russia.

In short, the conflict is escalating, and scenarios are developing where a move by the U.S. and its allies or by Russia might be perceived by the other side as existential threat to their interests that demanded a “first strike” nuclear attack. With unimaginable consequences for humanity.

4. Biden is using the war to advance U.S. imperial interests

As the war escalates, the intentions of both sides are becoming more nakedly clear. Russia’s insistence it is carrying out a limited operation aimed only at military targets to “de-Nazify” Ukraine is being more and more exposed as an all-out invasion with the potential to become a massacre of civilians, all for the purpose of reinstituting and tightening its grip over a country it has long viewed as strategically important.

For his part, Biden, in his State of the Union speech, gave a clue as to the motives of the U.S. He took credit for a new level of “unity among leaders of nations and a more unified Europe a more unified West … [i]n the battle between democracy and autocracy.”³

The “unified West” that Biden is celebrating is a collection of capitalist countries who emerged and thrived on the enslavement and most horrific exploitation of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Middle East and Latin America. The leader of that “free world,” the USA, has genocide and slavery at its foundation. Its legacy of wars to enforce its position at the top of a global system of exploitation and oppression in every corner of the world is unmatched. The prosperity and very relative “freedom” of that world rests on the bitter and grinding exploitation of billions of human beings around the planet, including 150 million children who labor in the imperialist “supply chain” every day.

In the face of challenges to that “free world,” from Russia and China, the U.S. has used the clash over Ukraine to reforge NATO and more closely align their European allies (some of whom have important economic ties with Russia) more firmly under the political domination of the U.S. and the “umbrella” of the U.S. military. This is what Biden celebrates as a “more unified West.”

The New York Times summed up this “bright side” (from the perspective of the U.S. empire) of the carnage in Ukraine: “Europeans were initially divided over how to respond to various forms of Russian aggression, and the conflict laid bare the fractures within the European Union [E.U.] and NATO. But outrage over Mr. Putin’s aggression has helped foster a unified front, and the E.U. unveiled penalties that they described as unprecedented for the bloc in terms of scale and reach.”

5. With many progressive people swept up in a delirium of pro-U.S. madness, the importance of revolutionaries bringing truth to the situation has grown

In this situation, many people who have taken more or less progressive stands in the past have allowed themselves to be played like violins by the U.S. media. All the more necessity for revolutionaries to go against the tide and tell the truth, insisting that people NOT get swept up by these masters of manipulation and look at things scientifically. In other words, to dig into the underlying dynamics, the real history of development, and the actual material interests that are driving the actions of people who do NOT act on the basis of anything else but what will further those interests.

The heart of this means bringing home, through all events, the fundamental point made by Bob Avakian in “Shameless American Chauvinism: ‘Anti-Authoritarianism’ as a ‘Cover’ For Supporting U.S. Imperialism”:

Certainly, the big power bullying and aggression by Russia, with its invasion of Ukraine a clear example, is something that all decent people should oppose. But no decent person should be joining in with the U.S. imperialists in their rivalry with Russian imperialism. For reasons I will get into here, it is utter, disgusting hypocrisy for the U.S. imperialists, and their media mouthpieces and other representatives, to be self-righteously condemning this Russian invasion, when the U.S. is the country which has, by far, carried out the most invasions and other acts of violent interference in other countries....

For those of us who are not willing to be blinded by this [GTF⁴], we can and must confront and analyze reality as it actually is, and draw the necessary conclusions. Besides the fact that the U.S. is today, and has historically been, allied with many “authoritarian” governments throughout the world (and, in fact, has forcibly installed such governments in many countries), the even more fundamental fact is that the essence of the conflict between the U.S. and countries like Russia and China is not one between “democracy” and “authoritarianism,” but is a matter of rivalry among imperialist powers, all of which are monstrous oppressors of masses of people, and none of which represent or act in the interests of humanity. 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.