Wayne Madsen

The Los Angeles-class submarine USS Annapolis breaks
through three feet of ice while participating in Ice Exercise
(ICEX 2009) in the Arctic Ocean (Photo credit: WMC)

Although President Obama's «pivot to Asia» is receiving media attention, his little-known push to establish American hegemony over the rapidly melting Arctic polar zone has gone largely unnoticed. Using three NATO allies, all of them monarchies, Obama is trying to establish a U.S.-led condominium of the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark over the Arctic, conspicuously leaving Russia out of the equation. Obama’s military and intelligence push into the Arctic could be taken from the pages of the 1960s Cold War thriller by Alistair MacLean, «Ice Station Zebra», With the depletion of the Arctic ice pack opening up formerly non-navigable Arctic maritime zones to shipping, Obama and his Wall Street handlers are eyeing the Arctic as America’s new region for natural resource exploitation. And, as always, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence Community are ready to act as the centurions for the investment bankers and hedge fund tycoons.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s Arctic Strategy was unveiled in Halifax in November 2013. Hagel said the Pentagon’s «Arctic Strategy» is centered upon the U.S. bolstering its military capabilities in the Arctic region with the opening of new sea lanes for natural resource «exploration».

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Konrad Kreft & Clara Weiss

Skoropadskyi with officers of the Hetman

Part one - The roots of Ukrainian nationalism

The Western media is seeking to downplay the prominent role of fascists in the new Ukrainian government. Several of the regime’s ministries are headed by members of the far-right Svoboda party, and the militias of the neo-fascist Right Sector are active in violently repressing resistance in the east of the country.

Both Svoboda and Right Sector played a crucial role in the February 22 coup in Kiev, which was strongly backed by Berlin and Washington. This is no coincidence. The close collaboration of Germany and the US with Ukrainian fascists has a long history, reaching back over the last hundred years.

In contrast to many other European countries, there has never been a strong bourgeois national movement in Ukraine. Ukraine has been divided between Poland and Russia since the late Middle Ages. After the carve-up of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire. Only a section of what is now western Ukraine was integrated into the Hapsburg Empire.

The weakness of the Ukrainian national movement was due on the one hand to the country’s economic backwardness and lack of a strong middle class. Significant industrialisation occurred only in the era of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, a large proportion of the urban population consisted of Russians, Germans and Jews, while the rural population was mainly Ukrainian.

When bourgeois forces finally erected a Ukrainian nation-state, following the 1917 February Revolution’s overthrow of the tsar in Russia, they were immediately confronted with a revolutionary working class. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia in October, received powerful support from the workers of Ukraine. Ever since then, bourgeois nationalism in Ukraine has been characterised by virulent anti-communism, pogroms against revolutionary workers and Jews, and attempts to win the support of imperialist powers.

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Mike Head

(L-R) Angela Merkel, Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin

With US Vice President Joseph Biden in the audience, Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire confectioner, was formally sworn in Saturday as president of Ukraine. Delivering a bellicose speech, he pledged to confront Russia, suppress the separatists in Ukraine’s east and fully militarise the country. At the same time, he alluded to his plans to impose brutal austerity measures on the Ukrainian working class.

Poroshenko began by paying homage to the fascistic forces that spearheaded his installation, via a US- and European Union-backed putsch in February followed by an election held May 25 amid a reign of terror and military violence in eastern Ukraine. He enthused over the “victorious revolution” by “Ukrainian patriots” and “warriors.”

While the Western media portrayed it as a powerful performance, the speech only underscored the fact that Poroshenko is nothing but a front man for German and particularly American imperialism, and is entirely dependent on them. Adopting a provocative stance toward Russia, he declared he would never accept Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and vowed to repudiate the Budapest Agreement that restricts the deployment of Western military forces within former Soviet states.

“Russia occupied Crimea, which was, is and will be Ukrainian soil,” Poroshenko insisted. Referring to a brief meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the D-Day commemoration in France, he said: “Yesterday, in the course of the meeting in Normandy, I told this to President Putin: Crimea is Ukraine soil. Period. There can be no compromise on the issues of Crimea, European choice and state structure.”

Fresh from talks in France with US President Barack Obama, Poroshenko rejected any negotiations with pro-Russian separatist forces in Ukraine’s east. He vowed instead to swiftly put an end to the resistance to February’s pro-Western, fascist-led coup in Kiev.

He depicted those holding control in dozens of eastern cities and towns as “bandits,” “criminals,” “terrorists” and “Russian mercenaries,” foreshadowing a renewed offensive by the Ukrainian military and allied right-wing militias.

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