Happy birthday, Kirill Butylin

Kirill Butylin, one of the first Russians to protest against the war on Ukraine by firebombing a military recruitment centre, today marks his 22nd birthday in pre-trial detention.

Kirill Butylin. Photo from Solidarity Zone

Butylin made the protest at the centre in Lukhovitsy, near Moscow, on 28 February last year – three days after the all-out invasion, and one day after he turned 21. The building was empty and there were no casualties.

On 8 March last year, a short film of the blaze was posted anonymously on telegram, with this message:

A couple of days ago, I set fire to the military recruitment centre at Lukhovitsy, Moscow region, and recorded it on GoPro. I painted the entrance with the colours of the Ukrainian flag, and wrote, “I will not go to kill my brothers!” After that I crawled under the fence, poured petrol on the front of the building, broke some windows, and threw Molotov cocktails through them. The aim was to destroy the archive containing details of those eligible for conscription that is held there. This will obstruct mobilisation in the area. I hope that I will not see my old classmates taken prisoner, or in the lists of those killed at the front.

I believe that we should do this everywhere. Ukrainians will know, that people in Russia are fighting for them – that not everyone is scared and not everyone is indifferent. Those who are protesting here need to take courage and act more decisively. And this will surely help to break the spirit of the Russian army and the government. Let those fuckers know that their own people hate them and will snuff them out. The land will soon be burning under their feet, and hell awaits them at home, too.

Update: On 15 March 2023, Kirill Butylin was sentenced to 13 years in a maximum security prison, on charges of terrorism, public advocacy of terrorism, and vandalism. Solidarity Zone said: “We recall, that only the exterior of the military recruitment centre was on fire. The fire service estimated the damage at 12,000 rubles [130 pounds sterling].”

Butylin was detained on the day the on-line manifesto was published. After the arson attack, he had got rid of his phone and travelled to the Lithuanian-Belarusian border, according to press reports. But he was detained there and extradited to Russia. 

Russian socialists say: ‘War on war!’

A statement by the Russian Socialist Movement group in emigration, on the nature of the war in Ukraine and the delusions of Western “pacifists”

For a year now, Vladimir Putin’s regime has been killing Ukrainians, sending hundreds of thousands of Russians to their deaths, and threatening the world with nuclear weapons in the name of the insane goal of restoring its empire.

For us Russians who oppose Putin’s aggression and dictatorship, it has been a year of horror and shame over the war crimes committed daily in our name.

A lone anti-war protester in Kazan last week. See “About the photo”, below

On the one-year anniversary of this war, we call all those who yearn for peace to turn out for demonstrations and rallies against Putin’s invasion.

Unfortunately, not all the “peace” rallies taking place next weekend will be actions of solidarity with Ukraine. A large part of the left in the West does not understand the nature of this war and advocates compromise with Putinism.

We have written this statement to help our comrades abroad understand the situation and take the right stand.

A counterrevolutionary war

Some Western writers attribute the war to causes like the collapse of the USSR, the “contradictory history of the Ukrainian nation’s creation,” and geopolitical confrontation between nuclear powers.

Without denying the importance of these factors, we are surprised that these lists overlook the most important and obvious reason for what is happening: the Putin regime’s desire to suppress democratic protest movements throughout the former Soviet Union and in Russia itself.

The 2014 seizure of Crimea and hostilities in the Donbas were a response by the Kremlin to the “revolution of dignity” in Ukraine, which overthrew the corrupt pro-Russian administration of Viktor Yanukovych, as well as to Russians’ mass demonstrations for fair elections in 2011–12 (known as the Bolotnaya Square protests).

Annexing the Crimean Peninsula was a domestic policy win for Putin. He successfully used revanchist, anti-Western, and traditionalist rhetoric (as well as political persecution) to expand his social base, isolate the opposition, and turn the Maidan into a bogeyman with which to frighten the population.

But the popularity boost that followed the annexation was short-lived. The late 2010s saw economic stagnation, an unpopular pension reform, and high-profile anti-corruption revelations by Alexei Navalny’s team that dragged Putin’s ratings back down, especially among young people. Protests swept the country, and the ruling United Russia party suffered a series of painful defeats in regional elections.

This context has driven the Kremlin to place all its bets on conserving the regime. The 2020 constitutional referendum (which required rigging unprecedented even by Russian standards) effectively made Putin a ruler for life. Under the pretext of containing the COVID-19 pandemic, protest gatherings were finally banned. An attempt was made to poison extra-parliamentary opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which he miraculously survived.

The popular uprising of summer 2020 in Belarus confirmed the Russian elite’s belief that the “collective West” is waging a “hybrid war” against Russia, attacking it and its satellites with “colour revolutions.”

Of course, such claims are nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Social and political discontent in Russia has been growing due to record social inequality, poverty, corruption, rollbacks of civil liberties, and the obvious futility of the Russian model of capitalism, which is based on a parasitic fossil-fuel oligarchy appropriating natural resource rents.

Ukraine: ‘We are surviving, but not living’ under Russian occupation

Women in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine demonstrated last month against the forced conscription of men into the armed forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”.

A banner, stating “We are surviving, but not living” was pictured by the Eastern Human Rights Group – which has supported workers’ movements and civil society organisations in the “republics” since they were founded in 2014 – on its facebook page.

“We are surviving, but not living”. From the Eastern Human Rights Group facebook page

The chaotic situation in the Russian-controlled areas, including a reshuffle of the puppet government of the “Donetsk people’s republic”, is described by Ukrainian activists in this series of facebook posts, reproduced with permission.

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Forcible conscription provokes protests

By Vera Yastrebova, 18 May

On Monday and Tuesday, 16-17 May, women protested near local military recruitment offices in Debaltseve (Donetsk), Krasnoe Luch and Perevalsk (Luhansk). Women demanded to be given information about the whereabouts of their men who had been forcibly mobilized by the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR). In Anthracite and Rovenky (Luhansk), women organised a collective march to address the heads of the occupation administrations of these cities and to demand information.

Women also wrote numerous letters of protest to the authorities of the Russian Federation, demanding an end to the forced mobilisation of men and students in the DPR and LPR. However, in almost all cases, their grievances were dismissed, or they were recommended to approach the Luhansk and Donetsk administrations.

‘No war but the class war’. Not a very useful slogan

A guest post by BOB MYERS

In a discussion I took part in last week, a comrade ended a piece he wrote about Ukraine with the following:

The left slips into the two opposing camps quickly (pro-Putin/ pro-independence), and the tiny voices that call for working class unity and system change are hardly heard. What kind of actions – of self-defence, support etc – facilitate that this voice is heard and what kind of actions drown it out or contradict it?

The devil is in the detail. As he says, what kind of actions? But your actions will flow from your understanding of the situation. I want to go back over our experience in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to show that many of the people who started  with “no war but the class war” ended up either totally irrelevant to the working class or even worse, on the side of reaction, because of their  inability to understand the working class kernel wrapped up in a “national flag” shell.

An anti-war demonstrator being detained in Moscow

The problem is that all inter-imperialist wars always contain within them the war between classes.  In each situation, militants have to try to understand how these two different wars are overlaid – and this can be very difficult in situations where the working class has no clear voice of its own.

And trying to unravel these two wars is necessary, not just to write nice “analysis”,  but to know what to do as a working class militant. 

I read  many pieces at present which ask the question, what should workers in Ukraine do, and then proceed to give them advice. I’m not saying thinking about this is forbidden, but it seems back to front.  The Ukrainian worker has made his or her decision, maybe to get out, maybe to stay and fight. Our question, first and foremost, is, what are we going to do in response to their decisions?  But the answer to this is inevitably dependent on the first question – where is the class war within the inter-imperialist war? 

No war but the class war, without real investigation, is meaningless.

I want to stress that the situation in Bosnia in the 1990s was different from Ukraine, and you can not simply transfer our experience of the one on the other.

Putin’s war is the face of 21st century capitalism. A podcast

David Camfield and I spoke about how post-Soviet Russian capitalism folded into the world system, what Vladimir Putin’s drive to establish the strong state has done – from his wars in Chechnya and Syria, to his conflict with Russian business and the invasion of Ukraine – and what it tells us about capitalism in the 21st century. All here on the Victor’s Children podcast. Simon Pirani.

Ukrainians demonstrating in Melitopol this week against the Russian occupation

Why Ukraine is a Syrian cause

By YASSIN AL-HAJ SALEH, a Syrian writer and political dissident. Republished, with permission, from the DAWN website

In the week since Russia’s invasion began, Syrians opposed to President Bashar al-Assad might come second only to Ukrainians themselves in following every horror of the war that Vladimir Putin’s regime is waging in Ukraine. The reason behind this curious situation, of course, should be quite apparent. Russia has been occupying part of Syria since late September 2015, brutally supporting Assad’s regime, whose highest priority is to stay in power forever, even if he has to submit the country to expansionist outside forces like Iran and Russia itself.

A member of the Russian military police stands guard, before posters of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. Damascus, Syria, 2018

For six and a half years, Russia has held a major military base in northwestern Syria, called Hmeimim, to which Assad is usually summoned when Putin or his defence minister visit their troops there. In 2019, Russia secured a 49-year lease for the port of Tartous, where it can now base warships in the Mediterranean. Russia’s defence minister has boasted of successfully testing more than 320 different weapons from its military arsenal in Syria. Putin himself praised the combat experience that more than 85 percent of the Russian army’s commanders gained in Syria.

Syria was a testing ground for Russia’s military. It used phosphorus munitions, thermobaric bombs and cluster bombs—banned by international treaty—against civilian facilities, targeting hospitals, schools and markets. It labelled all those who opposed the Assad regime as terrorists (just like Assad did too). This simply means that their lives are ungrievable; that killing them is not a crime. It is even a good thing that should be rewarded, at least with praise. Indeed, Putin was praised by Islamophobic right-wing organizations in the West, and supporters of authoritarianism everywhere, for his imperialist war in Syria, responsible so far for killing some 23,000 civilians.

Solidarity with Russia’s anti-war schoolteachers

An open letter against Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine had yesterday been signed by more than 5000 Russian teachers – and some signatories are facing pressure and threats from their managers.

“Violence goes against the very essence of our profession”, the letter states, implicitly supporting teachers who are resisting the propagation of the Kremlin’s military aims and ideology in classrooms.  

Moscow, 24 February. “Peace to Ukraine, freedom to Russia”

The open letter, and the names and regions of each signatory, were published on line by the Teachers Against War group. But with the introduction last week of heavy penalties – up to 15 years in prison – for public statements of opposition to the war, the letter itself was removed. The group’s campaign continues.

Trades unionists in Russia are appealing to teachers’ unions and professional associations in other countries to voice their solidarity with Teachers Against War.

■ Teachers’ unions and associations, at national, local or branch level: please contact Teachers Against War and indicate your support. The best way is to email directly to teachershelpnow[at]gmail.com (in English is fine). Or go via their website, telegram channel or facebook) and indicate your support.

■ Individual teachers: please join the Teachers Against War facebook group and send your own messages.

Here is the text of the teachers’ open letter, in English and then the Russian original. Below that is a letter posted on the Teachers Against War page from Igor Tsyvgintsev, a Ukrainian teacher, who this week evacuated most of his pupils to Poland.

Open letter by Russian schoolteachers against the war on Ukrainian territory

All wars have human victims, all wars cause destruction. War inevitably brings in its wake a mass of breaches of human rights. War is catastrophe.

Russian feminists launch anti-war action

Here are two texts from the Feminist Anti-War Resistance telegram channel, addressed to opponents of the Russian war on Ukraine internationally

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March 8: laying flowers, all-Russian campaign

Note to readers outside Russia about the context. First, legislation signed by president Putin yesterday has made all open opposition to the war in Ukraine illegal, potentially punishable with long jail sentences. This is the context for the call to lay flowers at war memorials. Second, men presenting flowers to women on International Women’s Day was a universal practice in late Soviet times, in a patriarchal society in which women bore the “double burden” of paid work and household work. Especially among older Russians, this tradition persists to this day.

We, the women of Russia, refuse to celebrate the Eighth of March this year:

Don’t give us flowers, better to go out and lay them in memory of the dead civilians of Ukraine (about 300 people lost, there are children among them), against whom our country has unleashed aggressive military actions. Or lay the flowers already gifted at the monuments to the fallen: flowers are better than bullets.

From 12:00 to 16:00 o’clock, we invite everyone to lay the flowers at any monument to the Great Patriotic War [i.e. the second world war] in your city. Victims of that war are shamelessly used by the Putin government as a cover while it commits war crimes against civilians of another country.

Feminist Anti-War Resistance: “8 March: laying flowers”

Show the people of Ukraine, women, and children of Ukraine that you are grieving with them, show them that mothers and wives of Russia are not ready to receive their sons and husbands in zinc coffins. No, do not only show solidarity, fight to stop bloodshed!

March 8 is the day of struggle for women’s rights. Today we are fighting for peace for Ukrainian women and men, we are fighting for freedom for Russian political prisoners, among whom there are more and more women every year.

This year, March 8 is a day of rage and mourning for us: we ask you to come without posters and organize minutes of silence while at the monuments. The concept of today’s campaign is standing in solidarity.

For many years, the state propaganda machine has used May 9 [Victory Day, a public holiday that marks the Soviet victory over Germany in 1945] to its advantage. A thirst for war was hiding behind the ostentatious words of peace. We live in the reality of “we can repeat” instead of “never again”. This year March 8 is the new May 9: the day of struggle against militarism, imperial wars, and terrible losses on both sides.

We cannot guarantee that you will not be detained. We believe that if detentions happened at a mourning site, they will only demonstrate the lack of honor and any principles of this police state and an authoritarian regime.

Liverpool: Stop the electronic war fair

RITCHIE HUNTER writes about Liverpool City Council and the electronic arms fair due to take place at the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool in October

Slave-branding in England, 1853. Photo from wikimedia commons / New York Public Library

During the slave trade, Liverpool Council spent thousands of pounds fighting the abolition movement and conferred the freedom of the borough on those who were the ‘spin doctors’ of the day. 

This was in a city where thumbscrews, branding irons, and fetters for use on slaves, with devices for opening their mouths when they refused to eat, could all be seen for sale in ships chandlers’ windows.

Fast forward to today and Liverpool City Council have decided not to cancel the arms fair planned for October, even though they own the venue.

This is the resolution passed by the Council on 21 July 2021: