US backs Kiev Nazis

by our European Affairs correspondent

FIERCE fighting continues in eastern Ukraine as anti-fascist forces battle to cut off the Debaltsevo salient and take the strategic town, which has been surrounded by the partisans. Novorossiyan air defence units have downed two Ukrainian war-planes and one helicopter gunship and Nato-backed puppet regime forces are continuing to pound Donetsk and Novorossiyan positions along the front.

The Novorossiyan freedom fighters have prevented puppet regime reinforcements reaching Debaltsevo through their artillery “fire control” over the only road into the town. But they have allowed rear support units and civilians to leave the town, which is held by some 7,000 Ukrainian soldiers and fascist militiamen that the Novorossiyans call the “Naziguard”.

besieged

Donetsk People’s Republic premier Alexander Zakharchenko has called on the besieged Ukrainians to surrender. “Guys, my proposal is to lay down arms and surrender. You’re fighting the wrong people.

You have the only chance to save your lives. Surrender and you will live. I promise that all of you will return home afterwards,” Zakharchenko said.

But the Ukrainians are holding out, hoping no doubt, that a new ceasefire will leave them still in control of the town, which is the road and railway hub to the flow of coal from the Donbas.

That’s not likely to happen at the moment. Though Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeated his call for all sides to end the incessant fighting, peace talks in the Belarusian capital of Minsk broke up last weekend without agreement.

The leaders of the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics are ready to accept a standstill ceasefire that would enable them to retain the territory they’ve liberated over the past few weeks.

But the Kiev regime wants them to return to the lines held when the original Minsk agreement was signed last year, even though it was their own punitive offensive in January that sparked off the new upsurge of violence.

In the Kremlin there’s growing concern that the Americans are going to rearm the Ukrainian armed forces. Konstantin Kosachev, the head of Russia’s Foreign Affairs Committee, warned that possible weapon supplies from the US to Ukraine would only aggravate the situation. “If this decision is taken,” he said, “it might trigger further escalation of the conflict and show that the US is choosing, like Kiev, the path of military solution.”

jumped on

Meanwhile the Russian media have jumped on remarks by US President Barack Obama about an internationally brokered deal to resolve last year’s Ukrainian crisis, claiming they prove that the Americans were involved in a coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected president.

In a CNN interview broadcast on 1st February, Obama said he thought Russia had been interfering in Ukraine partly because President Vladimir Putin was “caught off- balance” by embattled Ukrainian President Viktor Yanuk- ovych “fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine”.

This was backed up by former Ukrainian premier Nikolai Azarov who told reporters in Moscow that he had been threatened with regime change if he didn’t sign up to the association agreement with the European Union. Azarov, who resigned in January 2014 during the height of the “Maidan” protests in Kiev, said he was repeatedly told by European Commissioner Štefan Fòle that “if we did not sign the accord then it would be signed by another government”.

“I never once heard Putin or (Russian premier) Medvedev telling me that if I did sign off on the agreement, we would have a different Cabinet and a different president, but this is exactly what I heard from Mr Fòle,” Azarov added.