‘‘Politics has no relation to morals’’
— Niccolo Machiavelli
War is an egregious task. No modern country in world history knows this fact more profoundly than Russia. With all throughout its history fighting against invaders which include Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century , the 9th to 13th century, when the boyars of what is now present-day Ukraine wielded considerable power through their military support of the Rus's princes, not to mention the Swedes, the Poles, and eventually the Napoleonic invasion and fascist German incursion on June 22, 1941. War, the Russian people have had to endure with rarely periods of a long peace. The Soviet peoples and now Russian citizens have to take up the struggle again and again against those across their borders including those across oceans, like for instance its most formidable opponent, the United States, who covet the natural resources and minerals, not including Russian oil fields and its great quantity of natural gas. What is ironic is that perhaps there would be no United States of America, had the Soviet Army had not sacrificed millions of men and women along the Eastern Front in World War II. The War was known as the Great Patriotic to Russians, destroying millions of hordes of fascist German troops and airmen.
We should be forever grateful to the great Soviet Army which preserved the overall freedoms that Europeans and Americans which they still enjoy. The Americans hate to admit that they could not have been able to resist German and Japanese fascist on the battlefield alone, and that it required alliance with the Soviet Union to keep its capitalist economy and its bourgeois freedom. It is the opinion or observation of this military historian that it is out jealousy and a pathological sickness that American regimes, regardless of the party affiliation, that have brought about their primitive and even barbaric hatred towards Russia and her peoples. It is with this brief historical reference that I would like to present my commentary on the Ukrainian Question and its present crises, when in late February 2022, Russian armies, Russian air groups and naval ships, including Russian nuclear submarines were forced to enter the territory of the Ukraine, because of the actions of the present Ukrainian regime was pointing a gun, metaphorically speaking, at the temple of the Russian State.
However, let me proceed first to make some acute observations of President Putin’s speech on February 21, 2022, when he chastised both Lenin and Stalin in the way they handled the Ukrainian Question during their historical period. According to one section or part of the Putin speech text, the Russian President sarcastically commented the following:
"Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia. This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917...
"As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called 'Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's Ukraine'. He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archive documents ... And now grateful descendants have demolished monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. This is what they call decommunisation. Do you want decommunisation? Well, that suits us just fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunisation means for Ukraine.”[1]
Putin is in great error, when he gives an erroneous account of the way Lenin proceeded to handle the situation of the various reactionary political elements that resonated from Kyiv Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. The Russian President seems to be limited in his knowledge of Soviet history to know and understand that Lenin was pragmatic and lucid when he understood emphatically that he was in the process of consolidating a revolutionary state, while the Red Army was still in its infancy, and that he was also waging a war against the White army forces, not to mention the Ally military units that would eventually come into Soviet territory including American military forces. Lenin always saw Ukraine as part of Russian history, but he also was deeply aware that by granting the Ukrainian peoples Self-determination and autonomy so that he could keep them within the Soviet fold. As Lenin himself stated about the Ukrainian Question:
The new, coalition Provisional Government’s policy failure is becoming more and more obvious. The Universal Act on the organisation of the Ukraine, issued by the Ukrainian Central Rada[1] and adopted on June 11, 1917, by the All-Ukraine Army Congress, plainly exposes that policy and furnishes documentary proof of its failure.
“Without seceding from Russia, without breaking away from the Russian State," reads the Act, “let the Ukrainian people have the right to shape their own life on their own soil.... All laws by which order is to be established here in the Ukraine shall be passed solely by this Ukrainian Assembly. And laws establishing order throughout the Russian State must be passed by the All-Russia Parliament.”[2]
Lenin would then proceed to give his affirmation of a Ukrainian identity without harming the socialist democracy aspirations of the young Soviet State when he wrote:
These are perfectly clear words. They state very specifically that the Ukrainian people do not wish to secede from Russia at present. They demand autonomy without denying the need for the supreme authority of the “All-Russia Parliament”. No democrat, let alone a socialist, will venture to deny the complete legitimacy of the Ukraine’s demands. And no democrat can deny the Ukraine’s right to freely secede from Russia. Only unqualified recognition of this right makes it possible to advocate a free union of the Ukrainians and the Great Russians, a voluntary association of the two peoples in one state.
The crucial term or word to define Lenin’s understanding of Ukrainian Self-determination is voluntary meaning that the Ukrainian leadership and its people understand that they have the right to their own language and culture customs without being a threat to the Russian peoples and the Soviet State. Lenin was not naïve about the national character of Ukraine; he knew emphatically that they could be even more backwards and primitive in their world view, but he also needed them to be discipline in their raw political urges, and therefore, he gave them a sense of self-responsibility within the auspices of the Soviet Union. If they did not comply, Lenin would have eradicated them as a republic, even as Stalin was forced to do with the tragic but not unforeseen death of the Ukrainian Kulak class. The Kulak class where those Ukrainian farmers, were a class of people who owned 24 or more acres, or had employed farm workers. Stalin, as leader of the Soviet Union rightly believed any future insurrection would be led by the Kulaks, thus his harsh policy aimed at "liquidating the Kulaks as a class." was necessary for the preservation of the Soviet Union in terms of agriculture economy. What the Western World and in particular American academies, along with liberal intellectuals never desire to admit is that: War is class war, and class war is total war.
It would be more prudent and diplomatic if the President of Russia, without the shadow of the Russian oligarchs in his midst, but with the help of the more Russian military leadership continuing to administer the conflict against the Ukrainian regime, but not its civilian population nor the Ukrainian military men and women who have no quarrel with the Russian State nor The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation or commonly known as the Russian Armed Forces. Here I will lay the kernel of my essay before the readers. The Ukrainian regime, along with the veiled encouragement of outside forces, with the main protagonist being the Untied State, with its history of various past and present regimes, not excluding the bellicose and illiterate Donald Trump, who panders to Putin out of his own childish imagination of illusions of greatness— it is these forces with their pretext for peace in the Ukraine territory but who in essence desire nothing more but to use the Ukrainian peoples and their armies to fight for them against the Russian peoples and her various armies. This is the deep root of the matter. The Ukraine regime with help of its ‘allies’ in Europe and abroad have placed a gun against the temple of the Russian State, and the Russian leadership had no choice but to remove that gun from its head and take full military aim at its enemies within Ukraine. Thus with the lustful political and military desires of the Ukrainian regime and its distant ally across the Atlantic, the United States, they made a grave mistake, as they brought to bear a world at war.
The world is in a state of war not seen in such a horrific state since 1914. What we, the citizens of the world witnessed in the early days of February was this: Intense diplomatic exchanges were a precursor to war and secret diplomacy between the various belligerent states will ultimately be a precursor to a certain peace.
There was one profound statement in the otherwise very personal speech on February 21st by President Vladimir Putin that was coherent and from this historian’s perspective, historically objective, and that was when he stated:
"We clearly understand that under such a scenario, the level of military threats to Russia will dramatically increase many times over. I pay special attention to the fact that the danger of a sudden strike against our country will increase many times over. Let me explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It's Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike. If our ancestors had heard about it, they probably would simply not have believed it. And today we don't want to believe it, but it's true."[3]
Putin’s assessment is objectively correct regarding Russia’s adversaries and their quest to destroy the very core of the Russian State Federation, while colliding with fascistic regimes including military forces like those of the Azov Ukrainian military personnel which are a far-right volunteers' battalion embedded with the Ukrainian Army. As Dmitri Kovalevich, a Ukrainian journalist and activist of the banned communist organization 'Borotba' stated in an interview for International Magazine, “ The main thing hidden from the public is that there are numbers of outright Nazis integrated into Ukraine's army, police and National Guard. The Ukrainian education system brainwashes children glorifying WW2 Nazis and blaming Soviets. West media preferred to ignore the daily shelling of Donbass cities and the resistance of Donetsk coal-miners, but are outraged when only when pro-US side is being bombed”.[4] As much Mr. Kovalevich is also correct in his first-hand observation of the Ukrainian nationalists and their neo-Nazi goals, there is also the very unpredictability and manipulations of threats by the Ukrainian President who recently said on February 19th at the Munich Security Conference , "I have instructed the Foreign Ministry to convene a summit of the countries - signatories to the Budapest Memorandum. If it fails to take place or refuses to give Ukraine security guarantees, Kiev will recognize it as well as the clauses signed in 1994 as null and void,[5]" The Budapest Memorandum which was signed which was signed on December 5, 1994, by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Britain and the United States was an international agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons on the territory of the Ukraine State, but which would also guarantee Kiev’s security. By the President of the Ukraine, Zelensky, denouncing the Budapest Memorandum, he placed a bullet into the chamber of the gun at the temple of Russia and her people. Zelensky’s impulsive and irrational refutation or threat of a refutation of the Budapest Memorandum only played into provoking Russia’s genuine fears of not only NATO expansionism on its various borders but also as a weapon of nuclear weapon blackmail which could not be ignored. Thus, the right to wage war against a nation-state that threatens its neighbors with a bellicose behavior and ‘diplomatic’ language manipulate no less by such allies as the European Union including the United States only has led to war, an unforgivable war of malaise intent on the part of not only the Ukrainian Government by also certain Western allies, Germany and France not being included within the abovementioned nation-state provocateurs. Tragically, it is the Ukrainian and Russian people, along with their men and women in the armed forces that will the price for what seemingly could become a war of attrition, ghastly death not seen since the murderous images in the trenches of France and along the Eastern Front of World War I.
As a student of the German military theorist, Karl Von Clausewitz, I am of the disposition that once one enters into the friction of war it should be as “The aim of war according to its conception is always to be the overthrow of the enemy; that is the fundamental idea from which we set out”. In the latter days of February, when the Russian Armed Forces began their incursion into the territory of the Ukraine it was with the intent destroying the political infrastructure that from the Russian Government’s position was riddled with private corruption among the Ukrainian leadership as well as their continuous pleading with NATO authorities to become a NATO member knowing full well that it would only bring more animosity and ill will from the Russian Government and its diplomatic signals concerning the need to protect its border sovereignty. Therefore, the Russian Armed Forces has no other choice but to attack in almost a wide arc, including an attack at Ukraine's major port cities of Odesa on the Black Sea and Mariupol on the internal Sea of Azov. It was not a Blitzkrieg attack on the territory of the Ukraine as the hysterical Western media, particularly in the United States delivered to its less than intelligent viewers watching the military events unfold on American television media. It was a methodical, at times even a plodding attack taking place across the Ukraine territory in ground attacks in fits and starts. There was no element of “Surprise” as Clausewitz advocates about any serious incursion, invasion or special military operation that should take place against an enemy. There was almost a theatrical pose between Russia, Western Europe and the United States on when, where and why such a military attack might take place.
However, what should not be lost upon the political strategic outlook which is wedded to the military strategy is as one political scholar wrote:
“The point about this history is that the existing crisis with Russia has origins that go far beyond Putin. Russia has a foreign and security blob, just as does the United States, with a set of semi-permanent beliefs about Russian vital interests rooted in national history and culture, which are shared by large parts of the population. These include the exclusion of hostile military alliances from Russia’s neighborhood and the protection of the political position and cultural rights of Russian minorities”.[6]
And finally what should be clearly understood that the two legitimate republics in the Donbass region, those being the Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics are socialistic or socialist democracy republics with all their political verve, great audacity and courage that is a part of the peoples’ lives there in Eastern Ukraine. They have displayed to the world they are willing to fight for their rights as people who desire to live in a socialist democratic society, even at the cost of fighting and dying for that political freedom. As Lenin once said about the core value of war stripping away liberal moralism that dies in the battle trenches “If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just” “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory “great” powers”[7] The kindle wood has been lit, a fire of political war which is now upon us, and it will be waged over Europe and beyond. This will also ignite the oppressive classes to free themselves with the realistic opportunities that will exist, and this will become total war, total class war without the veil moral hierocracy. The war in the Ukraine is a war creating a new world order, a new paradigm of brutality and confrontation not seen since the Peloponnesian War.
