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UKRAINE

AGAINST RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM AND THE UKRAINIAN OLIGARCHS



Interview with Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski
originally published in French in the Swiss socialist, feminist and ecologist fortnightly
SolidaritS, no. 253, September 4, 2014.

Our editorial board talked with our comrade Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski, adjoint
editor-in-chief of the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique, specialist of Ukraine
and author of several works on the history of the Ukrainian national question.

In your last article published in French you highlighted the role of the Donbass
oligarch Rinat Akhmetov in the pro-Russian separatist movement. You especially
emphasized the weakness of the social base of the "Donetsk People's Republic."
Can you remind us of some elements of this analysis?

Donbass is the central base and the hard core of oligarchic power in Ukraine. The
separatist rebellion in the Donbass early was from the beginning instigated by two
allied forces: the apparatuses of the Party of Regions, linked directly to the most
powerful oligarchic interests, and the state apparatuses of Russia.
For the first force, the rebellion was a reaction of panic to the fall of the regime of
Yanukovych and his party, toppled by the Maidan popular uprising. It was a question
of saving oligarchic power in its central base, relying on Russian imperialism.
For the second force, Russian imperialism itself, it was a question of destabilizing
and disintegrating Ukraine, which, with the victory of the Maidan uprising, and turning
towards the European Union, was likely, this time definitively, to break the centuries-
long colonial relationship tying it historically to Russia.
That is why they created the two puppet republics and moved on quickly from some
very minority "mass" actions (rallies of about two thousand people each time) to
military action. The Party of Regions in the Donbass has a mass base, representing
approximately 30 per cent of the population, but it is a very passive mass, only
mobilizing, in the best of cases, to vote.
Thus, for the separatist "referendum" vote, only half of this base mobilized: about
15% per cent of the population. A mass separatist movement has never existed in
Ukraine.

The leaders of the movement, like Colonel Igor Strelkov and Aleksandr Borodai have
an activist past and an ideology that does not fit in completely with a simple function
of "puppets of the Kremlin." When talking about them you used the term "Russian
White Guards". Can you clarify this?

Having come from Russia, Strelkov and Borodai represented a current of the Russian
far right - ultranationalist, monarchist, Orthodox fundamentalist whose aim is the
restoration of the old Tsarist Empire in its 1913 borders and its expansion throughout
the Slavic and Orthodox world.
They were never the leaders of the whole of the separatist movement. They held very
important formal positions in the Donetsk "republic", and they really did lead sectors
of the separatist movement in this republic and also in the Luhansk one. They were
forced to share power with the "Akhmetovites", that is to say with those who had the
trust of Rinat Akhmetov, the biggest oligarch of the Donbass, and other oligarchs and
barons of the Party of Regions. The "Akhmetovites" had their own armed forces,
including the "Vostok (East) battalion which, in fact, did not obey Strelkov, despite
the fact that he was, formally, "minister of defence" in Donetsk.
Strelkov and Borodai were not "puppets", but far-right activists pursuing their own
political agenda. It is for this reason that, despite all the efforts of Borodai to seek the
support of Putin, they lost out in the factional struggles in the top leadership of the
rebellion.
They were eliminated in favour of trusted supporters of Putin who had been sent
there. The formation of this new alliance of the "Putinists" with the "Akhmetovites"
was cemented by a strong increase of Russian military aggression.

Do the present events in Ukraine invalidate the position of the internationalist left,
which took a position for an antiwar front?

This war is, on one side, the armed rebellion of part of the Ukrainian oligarchy,
combined with the war of aggression, increasingly direct and massive, of Russian
imperialism. On the other side, it is a war of national defence, that is to say,
conducted in defence of the national independence - won just 23 years ago - and
national unity of a people desperately seeking a way out of centuries-long national
oppression.
It is not possible to find this way out in the framework of a bourgeois regime subject
to Western imperialism. Ukraine has an urgent need of a socialist programme of
national defence. The international left has done nothing to contribute to the working
out of such a programme. Quite the opposite: we are witnessing a neo-Stalinist and
neo-campist degeneration of a large part of this left, which has gone over to the side
of Russian imperialism.
If it is a question of a front against the imperialist war of Putin, then let us go for it. On
the other hand, a front against the war of national defence of the Ukrainian people
would be a front of support to Russian imperialism and the oligarchic separatist
rebellion.

This interview was conducted by Daniel Sri

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