New Worker Banner

The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

France and China talks on peace – but no lull in Ukraine fighting

by our Eastern European Affairs correspondent

French President Emmanuel Macron is in Beijing for top level talks with the leaders of People’s China – and Ukraine is top of the agenda. “I know I can count on you in bringing all sides to the negotiating table,” Macron said during his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Macron is clearly hoping for Chinese mediation to end the war in Ukraine. The immense amounts of money and arms being pumped into Ukraine and the financial losses that inevitably followed the imperialist sanctions on Russia now threaten to bring down the economies of Western Europe and only serve the interest of the ruling circles in the USA.

China is clearly willing to help end the fighting. The Chinese 12-point peace plan has been welcomed in Russia, Belarus and all over the Global South. But the Americans have turned their back on it and so the war goes on.

Russian troops are claiming victory in the battle for Bakhmut whilst maintaining the pressure on the Ukrainian fascists all along the western front. This week Russian frontier guards intercepted Ukrainian commandos as they crossed over into the Bryansk region on a sabotage mission. But a prominent Russian journalist was murdered in St Petersburg and an official in liberated south Ukraine was seriously wounded by a car bomb – terrorist attacks that the Russians say were carried out by Ukrainian agents.

Vladimir Tatarsky, a well known war-correspondent who had previously served in the Donbas militia, was assassinated last Sunday when a radio-controlled bomb planted in a statuette exploded whilst he was meeting supporters in a St Petersburg cafe. Thirty-two people were injured in the blast; six of them are in a seri- ous condition. Daria Trepova, the woman who presented the figurine to Tatarsky, has now been arrested. The next day a leading local politician was gravely injured when a car bomb exploded in the centre of Melitopol, the capital of the liberated Zaporzhye region in southern Ukraine.

Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee called the killing of the military correspondent a terrorist act planned by Ukrainian special services. They say supporters of Alexei Navalny’s banned ‘Anti-Corruption Foundation’ (FBK) were involved in the bomb plot. Navalny, the man the Western media call the leader of the “Russian opposition”, was jailed in 2021 – founded guilty of fraud and contempt of court. Daria Trepova was an FBK activist.

Within hours of Tatarsky’s death his name was emblazoned on a Russian flag hoisted over the city administration building in Bakhmut by members of Russia’s ‘foreign legion’, the Wagner private military company. The banner was handed over to the Wagner fighters by Wagner’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He recorded a video message against the background of the administration building, which confirmed that the Russians were now in complete control of the city centre. The Ukrainians are still holding out in parts of western Bakhmut, but the Russians are continuing mop- ping up operations despite the sharply deteriorating weather conditions.

In the Donbas communists have been in the forefront of the struggle. Twenty-seven have been killed in action fighting the fascists on the front-line. At the same time the drive to build the communist movement in the Donbas people’s republics – now members of the Russian Federation – proceeds apace. The Donbas communist parties are now part of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), which consistently supports the anti-fascist resistance and the Russian intervention whilst continuing to expose the vices generated by the capitalist system in Russia. The Central Committee of the CPRF provides them with all the necessary assistance and support. In these extremely difficult conditions, the Donbas communists together with those in the liberated Zaporozhye and Kherson regions are working to build the CPRF network.