Ukraine

Stop the attack on the labour rights of Ukrainian workers! (articles and statements)

We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, fighting a brutal invasion by Putin’s Russia. We wish their people’s resistance victory over this criminal aggression.

I’m a Ukrainian socialist. Here’s why I resist the Russian invasion.

I’m writing from Ukraine, where I serve in the Territorial Defense Forces. A year ago, I couldn’t have expected to be in this situation. Like millions of Ukrainians my life has been upturned by the chaos of war.

Strategic ambivalence or disguised conflict? China’s reactions to Russia’s war on Ukraine and to Covid

Why does China’s response so far to the Russian invasion of Ukraine "not add up"? On one hand, China has refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has pushed its own state-controlled media to promote only pro-Russian propaganda, and even republished false reports by the Russian state media. China abstained from a UN Security Council resolution in March 2022 that condemned the Russian invasion. Meanwhile, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently announced that China and Russia "will always maintain strategic focus and steadily advance our comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era," especially in the energy trade (Quoted in Torigian 2022).

The tragedy of the Ukrainian working class

At the end of 1965, the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Ukraine received an outrageous samizdat – in Ukrainian: samvydav – entitled “Internationalism or Russification?”. It argued that behind the facade of fraternal coexistence of peoples in the USSR, there lurked a Great Russian chauvinism that prevented the real development of national culture, suppressed the history of non-Russian peoples, promoted Russification and encouraged Ukrainophobia.