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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

West stokes the flames of War as Ukraine burns

by our Eastern European Affairs correspondent

Russian air-defences downed Ukrainian drones over Moscow and the Crimea whilst fending off wave after wave of attacks along the front from the Donbas to the Black Sea. Russia continues its relentless missile attacks on Kiev and military targets throughout Ukraine whilst tightening its Black Sea blockade that is crippling the puppet regime’s exports. And on the diplomatic front the so-called ‘peace conference’ in the Saudi port of Jeddah last weekend ended without conclusion, which is perhaps not surprising given that Russia wasn’t invited.

In the USA dissident voices say Biden doesn’t have a coherent strategy in Ukraine or a Plan B for a face-saving exit. Robert F Kennedy Jr, a Democratic presidential candidate, says Biden and Boris Johnson derailed the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022.

“Is it worth the cost already being paid – tens of thousands of dead youngsters and families?” Kennedy said. “Billions of American dollars drained from our food banks, our hospitals, our schools, and instead detonated in foreign skies to rip young flesh from bone? Higher gas [petrol] bills, higher grocery prices, higher utility bills, higher housing costs, and too little money in your bank account to pay for them? Tell me, President Biden, how is it worth all this to fight a war that could have ended a month after it began?”

Meanwhile, “Washington’s attempts to put pressure on developing countries in order to ‘convince’ the Russian Federation to return to the ‘grain deal’ are part of an information campaign to distort the real situation,” the Russian ambassador to the USA said last week.

The door for the resumption of the Black Sea Grain Initiative remains open, Anatoly Antonov told the media. “All that is needed from the United States and its allies is to eliminate distortions in the implementation of inter-related agricultural agreements not in word but in deed, as well as eliminate the piled up barriers that impede the access of Russian agricultural exports to world markets.”

Whether that happens is another matter. And nothing is likely to happen in the near future if the Jeddah ‘peace conference’ is anything to go by. Although Brazil, China, India, South Africa and Turkey sent West stokes the flames of War as Ukraine burns delegations, the vast majority of the 40 participants came from the West. There were about 15 from the Global South and four or five others joined by video link. Zelensky proposed his usual 10-point peace plan that called for a complete Russian withdrawal from Crimea and the Donbas together with the establishment of a special tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes – which made the whole exercise meaningless from the start.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: “The Anglo-Saxons and their allies have stood up for the Nazis of Kiev, glossing over, if not justifying, their actions that violate human rights and the rights of national minorities.

“Instead of a serious conversation based on recognising the evolution of the real situation ‘on the ground’ over the past 10 years they convene staged forums with the sole purpose of luring as many countries as possible into any semblance of a discussion of the ‘Zelensky’s formula’, which demands nothing less than that Russia completely capitulate, agree to compromise its security and leave millions of Russians to the mercy of fate.”

The Kremlin dismissed the Zelensky plan as a “meaningless ultimatum” that can only prolong the conflict. Although Russia is open to any serious diplomatic initiative to end the fighting, “none of the 10 points of the above-mentioned formula aimed to find a negotiated and diplomatic solution to the crisis”.

The Saudis were doubtless pleased at the brownie points they won through the smooth running of the international conference they hosted, but it’s difficult to see what the USA hoped to gain by this futile exercise that was presented as a Ukrainian initiative to end the war. Certainly the Americans are projecting their hireling, Zelensky, as an international politician like they did with Ben Gurion in Israel and Syngman Rhee in south Korea in the 1950s. But in much of the Global South Zelensky is seen as just another American puppet and that’s why most of them decided to give Jeddah a miss last week.