RUSSIA’S military chief of staff General Baluyevsky has said Russia is ready to use force, pre-emptively if necessary and with nuclear weapons, to defend itself against the threats coming from countries that are seeking ‘global hegemony’.
His words were: ‘We do not intend to attack anyone, but we consider it necessary for all our partners in the world community to clearly understand. . . that to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and its allies, military forces will be used, including preventively, including with the use of nuclear weapons.’
The Russian military have an understanding of the fact that the Russian Federation is now the number one target of the imperialist war drive.
This understanding has arisen after the imperialist powers have driven NATO right up to Russia’s western borders and have taken the decision to build radar and missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Russia responded to this by suspending the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, under which Russia greatly reduced its tank and infantry forces.
This situation is now being further aggravated by the US-UK drive to declare the independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo, detaching it from Serbia.
The Serbian government has declared that it will not accept any such declaration of independence which will encourage Albania to think that the time has come for it to expand and establish a Greater Albania, plunging the Balkans into a new round of wars.
The Western powers see the declaration of Kosovan independence as the last nail in the coffin of the Yugoslav workers’ state, which they determined to destroy when the Red Army retreated from eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Russia was promised by Thatcher and Reagan that if it withdrew from Eastern Europe those countries would not become part of NATO, but would become a series of buffer states between NATO and Russia.
Once the Red Army was withdrawn, this promise was binned and NATO advanced eastwards bringing the European Union with it.
The Russian Stalinist leader Yeltsin refused to intervene to assist the Yugoslavs against NATO, while the NATO leaders supported all those Stalinist bureaucrats who emerged in the wake of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, to seize a section of the Russian state-owned economy, turning themselves into overnight billionaires.
This was the ‘new world order’ that encouraged Blair and Bush to make their big push to reorder the world.
This has come to grief with their defeat in Iraq, and the massive inflation of gas and oil prices that this has brought about. Their plans have also suffered a major defeat in Russia when the working class made it clear to Putin that if he did not purge the Oligarchs there would be a new revolution.
A major section of the oligarchs now live in Britain, led by Boris Berezovskiy, who, under the protection of the British government, vows that he will overthrow the Putin regime from the right.
Oil- and gas-hungry imperialism is desperate to get its hands on the oil and gas of the Russian Federation, and is mobilising to do so.
This is the reason for the warning by the Russian general staff.
We support their military defence of Russia and other soviet states.
However, we stress that this issue will only be resolved with the victory of the world socialist revolution and the overthrow of US and UK capitalism and imperialism.
The current capitalist crisis is creating the conditions for the building of the Fourth International all over the world to organise the workers and the youth to see that this is done, and the conditions created to advance to world socialism and the world socialist republic.