On Thursday, US President Joe Biden warned that the conflict in Ukraine might set off “Armageddon,” i.e., a nuclear conflict between the USA and Russia.
However inside 24 hours of Biden’s warning, the Ukrainian Special Forces, after beforehand getting a public inexperienced gentle from US officers, staged an assault on the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia, a provocation aimed toward intensifying the conflict and making such an “Armageddon” extra possible.
In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a collection of airstrikes on civilian infrastructure all through Ukraine Monday. Roughly 14 individuals have been killed and 97 injured, in response to Ukrainian officers, and energy was disrupted in additional than half the nation’s areas.
The World Socialist Net Website condemns the actions of all events concerned within the battle. The Putin regime is just not engaged in a conflict to defend the Russian inhabitants however to defend the pursuits of the capitalist oligarchy that got here to energy after the dissolution of the USSR.
However final accountability for the escalation of the conflict lies with the USA and its imperialist allies. By encouraging Ukrainian plans to forcibly retake Crimea and be part of NATO, the US sought to instigate a conflict on Russia’s borders, first to “bleed Russia white” and in the end to hold out a regime change operation and break up the nation.
Now, with Russian forces retreating within the face of the higher armed and higher provided Ukrainian army—backed by the would possibly of the world’s imperialist powers—the US and NATO are in search of to additional escalate the conflict. At no time has the US or every other NATO energy referred to as for a ceasefire or negotiated settlement of the battle.
On Tuesday, NATO Secretary-Normal Jens Stoltenberg introduced that he would maintain a summit of NATO’s nuclear planning group and that NATO could be holding a coaching train utilizing nuclear bombers.
Within the wake of Friday’s assault on the Kerch Bridge, the New York Instances hailed the blast as a “blow to the Russian conflict effort in Ukraine.” Main US officers couldn’t comprise their glee on the terror assault, with Colonel Alexander Vindman, the previous director for European Affairs for the USA Nationwide Safety Council, tweeting above a photograph of the burning bridge, “I’ve been dreaming of this second.”
However the cheers at Ukraine’s assault on the Kerch Bridge turned to solemn condemnation of Russia’s assault on civilian infrastructure, with out skipping a beat.
Responding to the assaults, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken mentioned, “The Kremlin’s strikes towards Ukraine immediately once more place the stakes of Russia’s brutal conflict into stark aid. … Russia’s assaults are one more reminder that its conflict towards Ukraine presents a profound ethical problem,” including, “There may be one aggressor on this conflict: Russia.”
As all the time, the place of American imperialism is characterised by staggering hypocrisy. No nation has killed as many civilians in air raids as the USA.
Throughout World Battle II, the USA killed as many as 25,000 civilians within the firebombing of Dresden and as many as 37,000 civilians within the bombing of Hamburg. This was adopted by the firebombing of Tokyo, the only most damaging bombing assault in human historical past, which killed 130,000 males, ladies and youngsters. After this got here the dropping of the world’s first and solely atomic bombs ever utilized in fight on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing as much as 226,000 individuals.
Throughout the Korean Battle, the American army fully destroyed each main metropolis in North Korea, killing as many as 1.5 million individuals, or 15 % of the nation’s inhabitants. The years-long strategic bombing operation through the Vietnam Battle, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” killed between 30,000 and 182,000 civilians. Greater than 1 million Vietnamese have been killed through the entirety of the conflict.
The dissolution of the USSR promoted a brand new outpouring of imperialist barbarism by the USA, main to a few a long time of never-ending wars:
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In 1991, the USA launched the Gulf Battle, fully obliterating the Iraqi armed forces and massacring troops as they tried to retreat. Among the many quite a few conflict crimes carried out by the US throughout that conflict was the Amiriyah shelter bombing on February 13, 1991, during which the US intentionally focused a crowded civilian bomb shelter with two precision-guided bombs, killing over 400 individuals.
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In 1998, the USA bombed the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical manufacturing unit in Khartoum North, Sudan, resulting in “a number of tens of hundreds of deaths” of Sudanese civilians as a result of drugs shortages, within the phrases of Germany’s ambassador to Sudan.
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On March 25, 1999, the USA and NATO initiated the conflict towards Yugoslavia, bombing Serbia and its capital Belgrade for 78 straight days. Factories, colleges and hospitals have been destroyed, together with bridges, roads and {the electrical} grid. The airstrikes killed round 2,500 individuals and wounded one other 12,500, in response to Serbian estimates.
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The second Iraq Battle, launched in 2003, led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million individuals, in response to the ORB survey of Iraq Battle casualties. A whole bunch of hundreds of individuals have been killed within the decades-long occupation of Afghanistan, which started in 2001.
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In 2011, the USA and its NATO allies carried out a bombing marketing campaign in Libya, which left the nation in ruins and factional warfare, adopted by the CIA-instigated civil conflict in Syria.
The US media proceeds with a type of collective amnesia concerning the wars of American imperialism over the previous 30 years, declaring that, regardless of the crimes dedicated by the US army up to now, its motives within the present battle are purely altruistic. However the conflict is a continuation of earlier conflicts, solely now involving nuclear-armed powers.
The identical ruthless indifference to the deaths of the peoples of the Center East is driving the US efforts to escalate the conflict towards Russia, utilizing the Ukrainian inhabitants as cannon fodder and reworking all the nation right into a proving floor. The US and its lackeys in NATO imagine that they’ll obtain a army defeat of Russia which is simply a prelude to the battle with China.
The historical past of US imperialism reveals that it locations no worth on the lives of the individuals it needs to subjugate and dominate by way of conflict. However the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that it additionally doesn’t put any worth on the lives of the American inhabitants. The American ruling class fought tooth and nail towards any measures to cease the pandemic, resulting in the deaths of greater than 1 million individuals within the US alone.
The relentless escalation of the conflict have to be stopped! On Sunday, the Worldwide Committee of the Fourth Worldwide (ICFI) and Worldwide Youth and College students for Social Equality (IYSSE) held a gathering to provoke a world mass motion of staff and youth towards imperialist conflict. We urge all of those that agree with this angle to contact us immediately.
