The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 9th June 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 9th June 2023
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Fierce fighting rages across Ukraine as the puppet regime launches its much-vaunted spring offensive along the southern front and into the Donbas to try to recapture the recently liberated town of Artyomovsk.
Western tanks that were supposed to be ‘game-changers’ on the battlefield have not helped the advancing Ukrainians who were beaten back by Russian forces holding the line in the Kherson area. But Ukrainian commandos blew up the flood-gates of the front-line Kakhovka dam on Dnieper river sending water surging across the Russian lines and threatening a nearby nuclear power plant and the homes of hundreds of thousands of people in the Kherson region.
The Ukrainians and their imperialist masters naturally blame the Russians as the flooding spreads over into Ukrainian territory, including the provincial capital of Kherson that the Russians pulled out of in November. Although this is what the imperialists routinely call ‘collateral damage’, the Zelensky regime naturally doesn’t want to take the blame for something clearly detrimental to the people whom it claims to protect.
In New York, Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, told the Security Council that the attack on the dam was an “unthinkable crime”. “Feeling its total impunity and being encouraged by Western sponsors, the Kiev regime decided to carry out this terrorist plot this time.”
Nebenzia said that the Ukrainians had significantly increased the discharge of water from the Dnepropetrovsk power station, leading to even greater flooding downstream “which indicates that this sabotage was planned in advance”. He said that the “terrorist act” was intended to free up Ukrainian forces for the “counter-offensive” currently bogged down in Zaporozhye.
The flood has left a dozen towns along the Dnieper River uninhabitable and also reduced water levels in the North Crimea canal, which supplies water to the peninsula. The Kiev regime has “once again decided to take revenge on the Crimeans for their choice in favour of Russia and leave the population of Crimea without water”, the Russian diplomat said.
Nebenzia condemned the UN Secretariat for its 'politicised' statements and for not condemning Kiev over the attack. He said claims by Ukrainian, US and EU officials that Russia was responsible for the dam’s destruction were part of a “well-co-ordinated disinformation campaign” – just like previous allegations that Russia was behind the shelling of its own people at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant or the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic sea.
Former UN weapons inspector and US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter says there’s also another compelling reason: a bid to attract fresh sympathy for Kiev from the West and cure the USA and its allies of growing “Ukraine fatigue” against the backdrop of Kiev’s failing spring offensive and the forthcoming NATO summit in Vilnius next month.
“The objective here is to create a source of international controversy,” Ritter said. “The United States and Europe – the collective West, have shown a propensity to accept at face value anything the Ukrainian government says regarding allegations against Russia even though there’s no evidence to back it up. We saw this back in April of 2022 when Ukraine created the Bucha Massacre controversy, accusing Russian forces of slaughtering unarmed Ukrainian civilians in the Bucha suburb of Kiev. This was done in order to get the West to move away from the potential of a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia that was about to be consummated in Istanbul” last year.
Ritter says that if all that Kiev “can deliver [at the NATO] summit is yet another Ukrainian defeat with little hope of NATO being able to reverse this defeat”, the situation would threaten to become “dire” for the Zelensky regime as far as Western support is concerned.
“So what Ukraine is seeking to do through the destruction of the Kahkovka dam is to create a new controversy, a new outrage, around which they hope to rally international support for their cause, allowing the conflict to continue by rekindling a desire upon the West to continue to fund Ukraine both fiscally and to provide the tens of billions of dollars that would be necessary to rebuild the Ukrainian army after this current counteroffensive fails.”