We had a chat recently with Russell “Texas” Bentley who is an American communist who has been living and fighting in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine/Novirossia since 2014.
Russell gave us a update on the situation in the region: the spirit of the people, the Ukrainian army and their fascist mercenaries, some international links as well as Russell’s take on what is happening in the US and Ireland.
He also detailed how as the Ukrainian state began collapsing into fascism in 2014, people in the east of the country mobilized and took over police and army stations before this could happen to them.This is a very important model and lesson for people living in many countries in danger of fascist takeover.
In 1991 Ukraine was the wealthiest of the former Soviet republics, with 80% of the people there wanting the USSR to stay together.
Today it is one of the poorest countries in the world and it’s population has collapsed. The reason for this is that Ukrainian fascists have been running the country since 2014 coup, ironically based revenge to a national myth of a ‘holodomor’ population reduction in 1932.
Historically, it was the grandparents of the fascists currently running Ukraine that were hired by the Nazis to commit the bloodiest atrocities of the Holocaust during WWII.
Ukrainian volunteer police battalions were used by Nazi einzatzgruppen death squads to murder communists, Jews, Roma, Poles and any resistors to Nazi rule.
The mass executions carried out against defenseless civilians – mostly by Ukrainian volunteers with German Nazi overseers – was so gruesome that the Nazis had to develop poison gas chambers in their concentration camps to save the mental health of their soldiers.
Ukraine today is being positioned as the leading open Nazi state in Europe, fulfilling in similar role to ISIS 2013-2018.
Nazis and fascists from across the world come to Ukraine to get military training and weapons (supplied by European and American governments) and bring these skills back to form terror cells in their own countries.
The fight against Fascism in Ukraine has been vicious, with an estimated 100,000 people killed since 2014 (the EU has lobbied to keep the official casualty figure capped at 10,000 out of embarrassment of what their fascist “freedom fighters” have done).
Since fascism is the last line of defense for Capitalism, the existence of fascist entities like banderite Ukraine, ISIS “Free Syria” and other contra outposts across the world is evidence of the crisis of capitalism. ISIS in Syria and Azov in Ukraine have been clear disasters for the people there, but there has also been clear lessons learned in combating them.
Work to organise the world’s working class and build the instruments of revolution – we can defeat these reactionaries within our lifetimes.