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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Lead story

Russians makes goodwill gesture

by our European Affairs correspondent

RUSSIAN TROOPS are battling to drive the last fascist bands out of Mariupol whilst other units are pulling out of positions around Kiev as a goodwill gesture following face-to-face talks with the Ukrainians in Istanbul this week. But a cease-fire is still a long way off as the Zelensky regime still refuses the meet the minimum demands of the Russian Federation.

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Action over P&O

by New Worker correspondent

THIS WEEK’S reports from the front-line of trade union struggles are dominated, but not exclusively so, by fire-and-rehire disputes. The most dramatic of those is the continuing struggle at shipping company P&O, which saw many protests take place up and down the country last weekend.

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Kitchen sink spies

Reviewed by Ben Soton

HARRY PALMER, the creation of Cold War espionage fiction writer Len Deighton, was an alternative to James Bond. Back in the 1960s Deighton’s novels exist as a half-way house between the pure action adventure of Bond and the rather dry psychological thrillers of John Le Carré.

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Editorial

The first step…

THE ISTANBUL peace talks may not be the beginning of the end of the war in Ukraine – but it may perhaps, as Churchill put it, be “the end of the beginning”. The Zelensky regime has at last accepted the key Russian demand for permanent neutrality, but they are still refusing to recognise the independence of the Donbas republics, Crimea’s decision to join the Russian Federation, or equal rights for all the people of the regions of the Ukraine.

While the Western propaganda machine conjures up phantom victories for the Ukrainian army the reality on the field tells another story. The Ukrainians have lost control of the skies and their own coastline. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the country to escape the fighting. Their cities are besieged and their army and their fascist legions that they say do not exist have been unable to prevent the Russians from extending their control over vast amounts of Ukrainian territory.

Dreams of direct NATO intervention and imperialist ‘no-fly’ zones have faded along with hopes that the Western sanctions regime would provoke the Russian oligarchs into launching an anti-Putin coup. Sooner or later the Ukrainian oligarchs who put Zelensky into office will realise the hopelessness of their position. Then their only way out will be to accept what’s on the table.

Read the full story here >> The first step…