Out of NATO now, US/NATO military bases out of Italy now!
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Rete dei Comunisti
With the start of the bombings in Ukraine, the Russian Federation has intervened heavily in the political impasse produced over the last eight years on the Ukrainian question and the expansion of NATO to the east.
That of Putin’s Russia appears to be a calculated risk, but a gamble nonetheless.
The ongoing escalation of the war in Ukraine – and therefore in Europe – bears the responsibility of Western governments and Ukrainian political elites following the 2014 golpe, which brought to power a museum of horrors of gangsters, oligarchs and pro-Western neo-Nazis.
That event is the basis for the secession of the Donbass Republics that were created to protect the Russian and Russian-speaking communities in Ukraine from the aggression of the nationalists and fascists who came to power in Kiev.
That event was the last violent attempt to expand NATO in Eastern Europe up to the borders with Russia. On this there can be no ambiguity and equidistance between the US and NATO, the real trigger of the Ukrainian crisis, and the Russian Federation, thus cornered but unable (itself) to find a solution other than the adoption of the military instrument.
We must be clear on one point: the power bloc that Putin represents is the expression of that part of Russian society created by the collapse of the USSR and which, thanks to its collapse, has benefited from thinking it can carve out a “place in the sun” in neo-liberal globalisation and even find a place in NATO.
The geo-political aspirations of Putin’s Russia have nothing to do with the USSR’s foreign policy of internationalism and anti-nationalism.
The fact that Putin “recognised” the Donbass People’s Republics only after eight years of their difficult existence and resistance speaks volumes about the degree of political courage he has shown.
The field has shifted from the “war of nerves” to the actual war, with Moscow striking the Ukrainian armed forces and infrastructures with a blitzkrieg on the very first day, despite the fact that the invasion had been feared for weeks by the Western media, which reproduced the Anglo-American intelligence point of view.
What appeared to be just Western war propaganda eventually turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Putin, by recognising the two self-proclaimed Donbass People’s Republics, had “raised the negotiating bar”, and with this Thursday’s military action put an end to the strategy of attrition pursued by the West, which to date has never wanted to seriously respond to Russia’s legitimate security aspirations threatened by NATO’s eastward enlargement after the collapse of the USSR.
By triggering military intervention in Ukraine, NATO’s eastward enlargement was interrupted, but at the price of “opening Pandora’s box” in a context of deteriorating diplomatic relations with uncertain outcomes. Faced with the inability of Western diplomacy to establish a minimal negotiating path leading to the resolution of the “Ukrainian question” and opening up to Russian demands on Ukraine’s neutrality, Moscow played the fait accompli card, upsetting the cards but fuelling an extremely dangerous escalation.
Its advantage lies not only in the military aspect, but also in the materialisation of the trend towards a multipolar world that has grown out of the crisis of Western hegemony from all points of view: economic, political, financial, ideological and finally military, as shown by the defeat in Afghanistan and the ruinous flight of NATO military contingents from that country.
The Russian forcing can only be conceived within this new configuration of international power relations, where the “super-competition between “blocs” now prevents the creation of a shared framework of relations and common governance of international relations in the 21st century.
This is causing at the same time “growing instability” and the inability to find shared and common solutions to problems as this system has shown, one for all the failed management of the pandemic or the environmental emergency.
Only the political obtuseness and intellectual dishonesty of Western intellectuals can omit the fact that the disappearance of the USSR put an end to the balance achieved after the Second World War and to a peace capable of withstanding the tensions and conflicts that occurred in those decades.
All the Western leaderships declared that the Cold War was over, that progressive and peaceful fates were opening up for the world while they unleashed war in Europe in 1999 in Yugoslavia, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
As Rete dei Comunisti (Italy), we will unhesitatingly engage in the anti-war movement. To stop the bombings and escalation, but also to reaffirm our country’s exit from NATO and the dismantling of the US/NATO military bases in Italy, starting with the atomic bombs stored at the Ghedi and Aviano bases.
We will fight by any means necessary so that Italy is not involved in a possible NATO war or in war sanctions that will hit the working classes in our country and in other countries more than Russia, which is now part of systems of economic relations other than those with Europe, which have long since been downsized.
24 February 2022