Ukrainian left wing

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Mikhail Kononovich, leader of the youth wing of the outlawed Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), and his brother, Aleksander Kononovich, were arrested by Ukrainian authorities in Kiev and could reportedly be facing execution.

The press office of the Security Service of Ukraine charged the two with being “propagandists” aiming to “destabilize” the internal situation in Ukraine. Essentially, the state accused them of acting as agents for Russia and Belarus, according to information received from the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), a global organization of progressive youth groups.
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The government that took power in Ukraine in the wake of the U.S.-backed “Euro-Maidan” coup of 2014 outlawed the Communist Party and banned it from running candidates in elections. The party’s youth group was also made illegal and its members subjected to political persecution by the police and in the courts.

Across the country, the government enforced a so-called “de-communization” law that not only outlawed the CPU, but also forbid the use of any Communist names or symbols in public, mandated the destruction of Soviet war memorials, and prevented any teaching about the positive aspects of Soviet history in schools.
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In an interview featured in People’s World in November 2019, Mikhail Kononovich—one of the two activists currently being held by the state—discussed Communist Youth Union mobilizations against the privatization of public farmlands by the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990-91, the Ukrainian government abandoned the collective farm system that had defined socialist agriculture in the USSR. The former collectively-owned land was distributed among the members of the farms, however, and bans on further sales were put in place to protect small farmers from being swallowed up by corporate industrial giants.

The Zelensky government reversed that longstanding policy in 2019, leading to fears that Ukrainian farmland—which takes up as much space as France and Germany combined—would be gobbled up by foreign agribusiness giants.

Ukraine is a top wheat producer; together with Russia it accounts for about 30% of the world’s traded wheat. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war have disrupted exports from both countries and sent global wheat prices soaring. International inflation of food prices, already on a steady rise before the war, will certainly be accelerated—leading to higher profits for producers outside the conflict zone.

Mikhail Kononovich situated the government’s persecution of Communists within the context of the neoliberal economic policies of marketization and privatization, such as the land sales, that have been pursued since the coup of 2014.

All through the 1990s and most of the 2000s, the CPU was the largest party in the Ukrainian parliament, and in the last election before it was banned, it received nearly three million votes. It often stood as a roadblock to multiple governments’ attempts to sell off more of the public property and resources inherited from Soviet socialism.

Kononovich said the outlawing of the CPU was intended “to clear the political field of left parties so they would not interfere with lowering social standards and selling land.” Comparing the fight to the resistance against Nazi invaders during World War II, Kononovich said, “The sale of [public] land is our Stalingrad—not one step back! No sale of land!”

The Kononovich family has been repeatedly targeted by both state authorities and fascist militia forces. According to a filing on record with the European Parliament, while leaving flowers in 2016 at a monument to Red Army soldiers who fought against Hitler, Mikhail Kononovich and other members of the Komsomol were victims of an assault by right-wing militants. Kononovich suffered serious blows to the head and another member nearly lost his sight.

Fascist gangs attempted to pressure hospital staff not to treat the injured Communists and also regularly intimidated Kononovich’s wife and daughter at their home afterward.

As of press time, the status of the two brothers, Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich, and the conditions under which they are being held are not known.

Information from the CPU remains difficult to obtain due to the fighting in and around Kiev and because the party’s website and electronic communications channels have been blocked by the government since just after the war began.

Some 1,000 Ukrainian rightists, led by the notorious Right Sector, surrounded, stormed, and burned the House of Trade Unions in Odessa last Friday, killing 39 pro-Russia demonstrators in the building.

On their way to attacking the union hall, which was occupied by anti-Kiev government demonstrators fearing for their lives, the rightists recruited members of a Ukrainian football club, the Chernomorets, according to numerous reports in the European press and on line.

Many of those who attacked and burned the building wore swastikas and other fascist insignias, according to observers. Eye witnesses said that the fascists were armed with bats, shields, and metal chains and that the people inside the union hall had run there for protection from them. After the attack by the rightists streets around the trade union headquarters were reportedly stained with the blood of those who had jumped from windows to escape the flames.

Women and children were reported to be among those burned alive after initial rounds of shots and Molotov cocktails were thrown into the building by the right wingers.

The right wingers who burned the union headquarters had already set another pro-Russian encampment in Odessa afire. That encampment consisted of rows of tents in Odessa’s Kulikova Field Square.

Police said that many of the victims at the House of Trade Unions had choked to death before burning up. The majority of the victims were found lying dead on the floors but some had jumped from windows, according to police.

As the union hall was engulfed in flames, photos posted on Twitter showed people hanging out of windows and sitting on windowsills where they appeared to be preparing to jump.

According to numerous reports those who jumped and survived were surrounded and beaten by right-wingers, including members of the football team.

The videos and photos showed Ukrainian riot police standing there doing nothing to stop or prevent the violence. The Ukrainian police said they could do nothing because they were “unarmed.”

Right Sector has bragged about its role in the killings on line and on YouTube:

“At first we broke through the side, and then we came through the main entrance,” said one pro-Kiev rightist who identified as a member of the group.

As the building burned some of the pro-Kiev activists said on Twitter that “Colorado beetles are being roasted up in Odessa,” using a derogatory term for the St. George’s ribbons worn by many of the anti-Kiev government demonstrators.

There were few official media outlets present, thus the heavy reliance on live streamed social media.

“The aim is to completely clear Odessa of pro-Russians,” said Dmitry Rogovsky, another Right Sector activist whose hand was injured during the fighting.

Increasing violence by the rightists is a growing embarrassment to the U.S. and the European Union, which have backed the right wing coup in Kiev and have tried to pin the blame for Ukraine’s troubles on Russia. Leading circles in those countries had hoped to use the coup government to force an IMF-designed austerity program on the Ukraine. If the right wingers continue to embarrass the West, however, U.S., EU and IMF plans for the Ukraine could go awry.

Although Putin's Russia is tantamount to a dictatorship at this point, it's not a Communist one and the Soviet Union is no more. The attack on Ukraine is not justifiable by any means.

Ukraine's government, like so many governments, is very far from perfect. But Ukraine should have been able to resolve its own problems with right wingers, neo-Nazis and others working against democracy.

Not a popular time to be pro Russia , in Ukraine …… apparently , just like freedom of speech in the USA .
When poorly timed seem to result in death .

I blame the North American organised Ukrainian community for imposing the idea that what they think in the former Austrian Empire territories is what they think everywhere else in the borders of that former Soviet republic.

Asia Times’ roving correspondent Pepe Escobar just returned from a reporting trip to the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the pro-Russian enclave in the Donetsk Oblast province of eastern Ukraine. The area’s been the scene of heavy fighting between pro-Russian rebels and the Ukrainian military. Escobar traveled to Donetsk at the invitation of Europa Objektiv, a German-based non-governmental media project. He traveled at his own expense.

I’ve just been to the struggling Donetsk People’s Republic. Now I’m back in the splendid arrogance and insolence of NATOstan.

Quite a few people – in Donbass, in Moscow, and now in Europe – have asked me what struck me most about this visit.

I could start by paraphrasing Allen Ginsberg in Howl – “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

But these were the Cold War mid-1950s. Now we’re in early 21st century Cold War 2.0 .

Thus what I saw were the ghastly side effects of the worst minds of my – and a subsequent – generation corroded by (war) madness.

I saw refugees on the Russian side of the border, mostly your average middle-class European family whose kids, when they first came to the shelter, would duck under tables when they heard a plane in the sky.

I saw the Dylan of Donetsk holed up in his lonely room in a veterans’ home turned refugee shelter fighting the blues and the hopelessness by singing songs of love and heroism.

I saw whole families holed up in fully decorated Soviet-era bomb shelters too afraid to go out even by daylight, traumatized by the bombings orchestrated by Kiev’s “anti-terrorist operations”.

I saw a modern, hard-working industrial city at least half-empty and partially destroyed but not bent, able to survive by their guts and guile with a little help from Russian humanitarian convoys.

I saw beautiful girls hangin’ out by Lenin’s statue in a central square lamenting their only shot at fun was family parties in each other’s houses because nightlife was dead and “we’re at war”.

I saw virtually the whole neighborhood of Oktyabrski near the airport bombed out like Grozny and practically deserted except for a few lonely babushkas with nowhere to go and too proud to relinquish their family photos of World War II heroes.

I saw checkpoints like I was back in Baghdad during the Petraeus surge.

I saw the main trauma doctor at the key Donetsk hospital confirm there has been no Red Cross and no international humanitarian help to the people of Donetsk.

Oktyabrski neighborhood, bombed hospital

I saw Stanislava, one of DPR’s finest and an expert sniper, in charge of our security, cry when she laid a flower on the ground of a fierce battle in which her squad was under heavy fire, with twenty seriously wounded and one dead, and she was hit by shrapnel and survived.

I saw orthodox churches fully destroyed by Kiev’s bombing.

I saw the Russian flag still on top of the anti-Maidan building which is now the House of Government of the DPR.

I saw the gleaming Donbass arena, the home of Shaktar Donetsk and a UFO in a war-torn city, deserted and without a single soul in the fan area.

I saw Donetsk’s railway station bombed by Kiev’s goons.

I saw a homeless man screaming “Robert Plant!” and “Jimmy Page!” as I found out he was still in love with Led Zeppelin and kept his vinyl copies.

I saw a row of books which never surrendered behind the cracked windows of bombed out Oktyabrski.

I saw the fresh graves where the DPR buries their resistance heroes.

I saw the top of the hill at Saur-mogila which the DPR resistance lost and then reconquered, with a lone red-white-blue flag now waving in the wind.

Top of the hill at Saur-moglia

I saw the Superman rising from the destruction at Saur-mogila – the fallen statue in a monument to World War II heroes, which seventy years ago was fighting fascism and now has been hit, but not destroyed, by fascists.

I saw the Debaltsevo cauldron in the distance and then I could fully appreciate, geographically, how DPR tactics surrounded and squeezed the demoralized Kiev fighters.

I saw the DPR’s military practicing their drills by the roadside from Donetsk to Lugansk.

I saw the DPR’s Foreign Minister hopeful there would be a political solution instead of war while admitting personally he dreams of a DPR as an independent nation.

I saw two badass Cossack commanders tell me in a horse-breeding farm in holy Cossack land that the real war has not even started.

I did not see the totally destroyed Donetsk airport because the DPR’s military were too concerned about our safety and would not grant us a permit while the airport was being hit – in defiance of Minsk 2; but I saw the destruction and the pile of Ukrainian army bodies on the mobile phone of a Serbian DPR resistance fighter.

I did not see, as Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe international observers also didn’t, the rows and rows of Russian tanks and soldiers that the current Dr. Strangelove in charge of NATO, General Breedhate, sees everyday in his exalted dreams invading Ukraine over and over again.

And I did not see the arrogance, the ignorance, the shamelessness and the lies distorting those manicured faces in Kiev, Washington and Brussels while they insist, over and over again, that the entire population of Donbass, traumatized babushkas and children of all ages included, are nothing but “terra-rists”.

After all, they are Western “civilization”-enabled cowards who would never dare to show their manicured faces to the people of Donbass.

So this is my gift to them.

Just a howl of anger and unbounded contempt.

I heard an unconfirmed statement.
Russia carried out compulsory conscription in the occupied pro-Russian areas.
These people are not Russian citizens, so they don't get guarantee like Russian soldiers.

But another statement is that they were sent to the newly occupied areas to exercise control. So this is an attractive job.