by New Worker
correspondent
 |
| British Posadist Marie Lynam and Andy Brooks on the line |
Anti-fascist
campaigners were out last weekend calling for solidarity with all the victims
of the fascist gangs and the regime police in Ukraine. NCP leader Andy Brooks
and London District organiser, Theo Russell, joined the protest picket opposite
Downing Street on Saturday to call for an immediate end to British military aid
to the Kiev regime and an end to the conflict with the Donbas republics that
seceded after the fascist takeover in 2014.
Many passers-by stopped to show their
support for the Whitehall picket called by the New Communist Party, Socialist
Fight and the British Posadist movement, and supported by the Solidarity with
the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU) campaign.
The February 2014 coup was backed by the
US to the tune of $5 billion. Mass anti-fascist uprisings followed in eastern
Ukraine and Crimea. Anti-fascists seized local government institutions to
prevent the fascist gangs, police and security service taking local control.
The new regime in Kiev responded with
extreme violence, including terrorism and assassinations, and the brutal
massacre of over 50 Anti-Maidan activists at the Odessa House of Trade Unions
on 2nd May 2014.
Three weeks after the Ukraine coup CIA
Director John Brennan paid a secret visit Kiev, and barely a week later a
so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” responded to these mass civilian uprisings
by launching an all-out war with artillery, tanks, aircraft and missiles.
It was only then that Russia stepped in to
support the rebels in the eastern Donbas region by allowing volunteers with
military experience to join the anti-fascist struggle in the intense battles of
2014-15.
Since then Russia has provided
humanitarian and political support including regular convoys with medical and
other supplies, given refuge to over a million Ukrainian exiles, and provided
holidays for children from the Donbas.
In 2015 dozens of openly Nazi militias
were incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard. They now conduct joint
patrols with the police to maintain “Ukrainian order”. They have smashed up
Roma camps, trade union, socialist and communist offices, destroyed holocaust
memorials, arrested, beaten and imprisoned opponents of the war, and abducted
or assassinated many journalists and activists.
While the western media generally ignore
the Ukrainian fascists their governments are well aware of what is happening.
In March a letter from the ambassadors of the leading G7 countries asked
Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov “to act against violent political extremist
groups” which "intimidate Ukrainian citizens”. According to the US-financed
Radio Free Europe, this was “a thinly veiled reference to the National Corps
and National Militia, the far-right Azov group's political and vigilante wings.
Members of the National Corps and National Militia (parts of the Azov
Battalion) have been blamed for multiple violent attacks on minorities in
Ukraine, particularly Roma and LGBTI persons, in the past year”.
` The Azov Battalion’s emblem is based
on that used by Ukrainian collaborators who fought for the Nazis in the Second
World War. This openly neo-Nazi militia has been part of Ukraine’s National
Guard since 2016, and it is controlled by Arsen Avakov who was the only
minister to be reappointed in Oleksiy Honcharuk’s new government in August.
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