None of us knows whether Putin is going to invade Ukraine.
His demands upon NATO and the west prior to the talks with the US and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were almost certainly drafted to be rejected, creating a pretext for a further invasion (following the 2014 “annexation” of Crimea). Or it may be that Putin will stop short of a full-scale invasion and seize enclaves or establish a land-bridge to Crimea.
What can be predicted with certainty is that the Morning Star will support Putin. We know this because ever since a mass uprising ousted the pro-Russian government in February 2014, the paper’s coverage on Ukraine has been nothing more than Kremlin propaganda.
International editor Steve Sweeney was at it again on 14 January, claiming that the CIA is training Ukrainian special forces “at an undisclosed location in the Southern United States” as “part of preparations for a potential armed insurgency.” This claim may well be true, but what is noticeable is that while Sweeney says “Washington has ratcheted up tensions in the region”, he ignores the more than 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders, and the fact that the US and NATO have explicitly ruled out a military response to any Russian attack.
The US military support for Ukraine so far amounts to Javelin anti-tank missile systems, small arms, and a group of training officers. It is dwarfed by the Russian mobilisation.
The most blatant declaration of advance support for a Russian attack, came in an article on 8 December last year, by John Wojcik (republished from the US Stalinist People’s World, of which Wojcik is editor). This piece is chemically-pure Putinesque propaganda, slavishly repeating every single trope, stock-phrase, half-truth and outright lie that the Kremlin has circulated about Ukraine since 2014:
• That the 2014 uprising (the “Maidan” protests), actively involving more than half a million people, was a “fascist coup”. (In fact the politics of the “Maidan” protest were complex. Participants ranged from fascists, who played a key part in the violent confrontations with the old regime’s armed forces, to socialists and anarchists. But to use the word “coup” is simply ridiculous. It also ignores the fact that it is the security forces in Russia, not Ukraine, that have recently tortured and jailed a group of young anti-fascists).
• That the Ukrainian government murdered “hundreds of trade union activists”. No such murders have been recorded on the web sites of Ukraine’s two trade union federations. None have been mentioned in the detailed reports of the United Nations.
• The government “banned opposition political parties”, including the Communist Party. It didn’t. The electoral commission banned the Communist Party from participation in the 2019 presidential elections — something that we would obviously oppose, but not the same as banning the party, which continues to operate legally.
• The government “banned the use of the Russian language”. It didn’t. A law making Ukrainian the state language was adopted in 2019 — after three decades of argument, shaped by aspirations to revive Ukrainian culture after centuries of Russian repression. Again, something that we would oppose, but it is not a “ban”. Russian is still widely used, and there is no legal obstacle to it in private or religious life.
• That Ukraine is naturally part of Russia and “millions of Ukrainians and Russians ... are part of the same families.” Although he doesn’t acknowledge it, Wojik is referring to Putin’s article On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians published in July 2021 and seen in Ukraine as preparing the ground for an invasion. Putin argues that Ukrainian nationhood was invented by the Poles and/or Austro-Hungarians and describes the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, by which Poland and the Baltic states were divided between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, with the words “the USSR regained the lands earlier seized by Poland”.
So although we don’t know what Putin’s next move will be, we do know for sure that whatever it is, the Morning Star will support it.
• In preparing this piece, JD has made extensive use of Simon Pirani’s post “Putin’s little helpers undermine solidarity” on the blog People and Nature.
