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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Russian communists call for victory!

by our Eastern European Affairs correspondent

Fierce fighting continues on all fronts in Ukraine as the Russians beat back waves of Ukrainian attacks in the south and the Donbas. The Ukrainians launched further pin-prick drone attacks on Moscow that have no military value but have only served to provoke the Russians into further strategic bombing of the Ukrainian capital. And the Russian naval blockade tightens as their missiles pound Ukraine’s Black Sea ports to cut off all Ukrainian sea-borne exports, including the grain so crucial to the Western market.

The blockade was first imposed at the start of the Russian intervention to save the Donbas in February 2022. It had a crippling effect on Ukrainian grain exports and sent global food prices soaring. The grain deal brokered by the UN and Turkey was meant to help cover the grain needs of the Global South and exempt some Russian agricultural products from the imperialist sanctions regime – but the imperialists never kept their promises.

Russia will return to the grain deal when the West actually fulfils all the deal’s obligations towards Russia. And Russia is working to meet the needs of the countries most in need of food. Reliable options for the supply of Russian grain, including on a free-of-charge basis, are being worked out in talks with Turkey and the countries of the Global South.

Meanwhile Yuri Afonin, the deputy leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), mocked Ukrainian talk about “liberating” Crimea. Taking part in a discussion on Russia One TV, the Russian communist said the Zelensky regime had said Crimea would be taken in their “spring offensive”. But “spring is long over, summer has passed the middle. It seems that as everyone has already forgotten past promises new ones can be made… however, it will not be possible to deceive the people forever and drive them to the slaughterhouse, sooner or later this vile regime will be swept away”.

At the same time Russia must build up its armed forces. This must continue even after the Ukrainians are beaten, he said, because “we have entered into an irreconcilable battle with the collective West, and this struggle will not be easy”.

Afonin called for the restoration of Russian naval power. At the moment the Russian fleet is inferior to the Soviet Navy of 1990 in terms of the number of large combat surface ships seven times, in terms of the number of submarines six times. But he pointed out that since 2000 Russian oligarchs have spent twice as much money on building their yachts as the state has spent on building ships for the navy: $18 billion for yachts versus $8 billion for ships. Of course, this should not be the case, the state needs completely different priorities: revenues from Russian mineral resources should not go to the over-consumption of a handful of rich people.

“Today, a considerable part of humanity is looking at Russia with hope,” he said. “More and more countries of the world perceive Russia as the vanguard of the anti-colonial struggle. It is no coincidence that the Russian flag appears on the streets of the rebellious capital of Niger – for Africa it is the same symbol of struggle as the Soviet flag once was. After the destruction of the USSR, the West began again to impose a neo-colonial model on Africa, and the disastrous consequences of this model for Africans are expressed in numbers: if in the 1980s the gap between the average per capita GDP in Africa and in the countries of the ‘golden billion’ was eight times, now it is almost 14 times!

“For more than 10 years, the number of hungry people has been on the rise in Africa. Now 22.5 per cent of the population of this continent is systematically malnourished – this is more than 300 million people! And this is by no means a consequence of our special military operation and problems with the export of Ukrainian grain, as they invent in the West.

“African hunger and poverty are the fruits of the neo-colonial model of relations. Russia challenged Western colonialism, and hundreds of millions of people sympathise with our struggle – they believe that our victory will make the world more just. And in order to fulfil this great mission, we must build up our military potential, rebuild our economy and strengthen the morale of our people!”