Thirteenth Convention of the Left Bloc of Portugal, May 26-28, 2023

Motions and pre-convention discussion on the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Motions

1. Motion A (majority)—Excerpts on Ukraine

14. NATO has carried out aggressions in the service of American interests, in Syria, Yugoslavia and Libya and, having been defeated in Afghanistan by its former Taliban allies, has managed to regain the initiative by extending its scope far beyond its member states, especially in Eastern Europe

15. The existence of US global hegemony does not alter the imperialist nature of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, which the Left Bloc has condemned with the same clarity with which, over the years, it has denounced Putin's regime. The left can expect nothing but oligarchic dictatorship and militaristic adventure from him. The Kremlin has contributed to the strengthening of NATO, the US strategy of confrontation with China and subordination of Europe, and the projection of the authoritarian government of Turkey as a mediating go-between in conflicts between imperialisms.

16. Misunderstanding of the imperialist nature of oligarchic Russia has biased the politics of many sectors of the left. It is important today not to make the same mistake regarding the imperialist nature of the People's Republic of China, even if the second capitalist economy on the planet claims to be socialist. The fact that the US regards China as the main enemy of its economic and military power does not make defensible this militarised one-party regime that projects its economic ambition over several continents. As in the time of the Cold War, the cause of the peoples’ freedom cannot combat one superpower by supporting another. US imperialism remains the most dangerous, because of its efforts to maintain its world supremacy.

17. Cooperation among European states is an important part of a strategy to contain the radicalised right wing, but on condition of a democratic turn that accepts the sovereignty of the peoples, the development of social rights and ecological planning. Only such a project will be up to the challenge of a peace strategy for the continent, independent of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States and NATO. The EU must establish non-aggression treaties between European states, creating a policy of security and cooperation that respects and supports the realisation of the right of all peoples to self-determination.

18. The Bloc reiterates its call for the holding of a peace conference for Ukraine, under the impetus of the UN and the European Union, accompanied by a full-scale halt to the current arms race, in particular of threats to go nuclear.

2. Motion E (minority)—Excerpts on Ukraine

8. A world without exploitation of humanity, of workers and of ecological systems, must be won in the struggles to change the policies determined by capital, by its productivist and extractivist model, which is the cause of enormous international instability. The US is a major factor in this instability, frequently resorting to aggression, as in Iraq, to bellicose blackmail and to trade conflict, evident in its confrontation with China, which is also seeking to establish itself as a global power. We reject alignment with either side. Our struggle is anti-hegemonic and ecosocialist.

9. European states in general do not play an autonomous role in international relations, subordinate as they are to NATO and the dictates of the USA. They do not define a policy of their own on fairer international trade, on solidarity with the Global South, with peoples who migrate to flee from hunger and death, on support for Palestinian, Kurdish and Saharawi peoples, vanguard in the struggle for peace and the fight against climate change. Instead of choosing the path of negotiation to resolve conflicts, they opt for militarisation and an arms race, producing a dramatic procession of death and destruction on the battlefield.

10. The Left Bloc stands against war, a product of the crisis of global capitalism itself, in which the peoples always lose. We vehemently reject Russia's aggression against Ukraine and demand of all the powers involved that, instead of fuelling the war, they immediately cease fighting and move towards peace negotiations. We condemn and are aware of the direct responsibility of the Russian Federation in the invasion of Ukraine. We have no doubt about the aggressive role of the USA and NATO and the submission of most European governments to their expansionist designs for global domination in the dispute with emerging powers. We want Putin out of Ukraine and NATO out of Europe. The Bloc cannot be bound by any decision that whitewashes this submission (as in the case of the vote on resolutions in the European Parliament). Generic references to “imperialisms” cover up the hegemonic role of the USA and of NATO.

3. Local Platform of Amarante – Clarify the Left Bloc, Strengthen Motion A

Invasion of Ukraine—Unconditional Withdrawal of Russian Troops as Watchword!

The war in Ukraine is a direct consequence of the invasion of a country that has been sovereign and independent since 1991, and internationally recognised as such—including by its current aggressor, the Russian Federation—as regards the full integrity of its territory, including Crimea and the Donbas. It is a UN member state, victim of the plundering of its territorial, raw material, and productive forces, along with the destruction of its cities and its people. Before the invasion of Ukraine, NATO was facing growing criticism and hostility from broad popular sectors, specifically in Europe. The Russian invasion and the recognition by European “public opinion” of the obvious need to support the Ukrainian resistance at all levels (including military aid), changed that state of affairs. The European countries, in an isolated manner at first, provided aid without preventing their political capture by NATO, which was not directly involved in the war. The fact of not directly intervening in Ukraine did not prevent this military organisation from gaining public prominence, assuming a role as “protector” of all Europeans, including countries that were not part of it and now want to join it. It is elementary to recognise this in order to make a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation”, that is the invasion of one country by another.

Militarisation consumes huge public resources, which are diverted from other state functions which should strengthen social welfare in housing, health, social security and culture.

War first of all means the plundering of the people being attacked, but also of the people attacking. No other system of commodity production is financed on such a large scale by public taxes as the military one. The Left Bloc must call for the formation of anti-militarist movements in Europe and throughout the world to oppose the perpetuation of war(s). In particular, the Left Bloc, as a current within the internationalist Party of the European Left, will give all necessary support to the formation of anti-war movements within Russia while not opposing all forms of support, including military support, to invaded Ukraine.

The political position of Motion E, which advocates the simultaneous withdrawal of Russia and of NATO from the theatre of “European war”, conceals, hides or “washes over” the concrete situation which was (and is) the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

The Left Bloc must support the unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, as a sine qua non condition for the implementation of a peace conference under the aegis of the UN.

Contributions to pre-convention discussion

1.          Only a broad peace movement can stop imperialism from playing nuclear ‘Russian roulette’ in Europe!

Carlos Vieira e Castro, Célia Cláudia L. Rodrigues

Hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, eight million refugees in the European Union and three million in Russia, destruction of homes and cities... But NATO, the US and the European Commission tell us that we must continue sending arms to Ukraine until Russia's total defeat. NATO's secretary general said that “the victory of Russia would be the defeat of NATO”, thus assuming that this alliance is not only concerned with the liberation of Ukraine, but above all with its expansionist geo-strategic objectives. Even Mário Soares, in 2008, in Visão, warned: “NATO, surrounding Russia and installing missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, starts to become a threat to Russia, which could become aggressive. NATO, created as a defensive organisation, (...) is becoming, under pressure from American neo-conservatives, a threat to peace.”

“At the root of the Ukrainian crisis is the Association Agreement with the European Union” ... which “the Ukrainian authorities want to have ... and at the same time belong to the Eurasian Union, but the European Commission, and the WTO thinks this is not possible.” ... Mr Barroso confirms this position, which Merkel rejects “ “Ukraine's President won't sign the European agreement and the opposition occupies Maidan Square”. (Carlos Gaspar, The World of Tomorrow, 2020). The Empire and its lackeys prevent a country from being neutral and having free relations with its neighbours!

A year ago, there were negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and Zelensky even accepted Ukraine's neutrality vis-à-vis NATO in exchange for guarantees of respect for the integrity of Ukraine’s territory. But Boris Johnson ran to Kiev to urge Zelensky not to give in, promising all the necessary weaponry until Russia's defeat. Then the US Secretary of Defence arrived, and the negotiations were over.

Ukraine has every right to defend itself against the savage aggression of an autocratic supporter of the international extreme right, nostalgic for the tsarist empire, the “prison house of the peoples”, as Lenin called it, whom Putin blamed for the autonomous existence of the Republic of Ukraine within the USSR. Putin's justification for the invasion, “denazifying Ukraine”, makes no sense; he should first have denazified Russia, since if the Ukraine was a training camp for neo-fascists from all over the world following the “Maidan Revolution” (according to reports in Público of 21.06.2020, The Times and the French Canal+), also in Russia the Wagner Group, with links to Putin, and the Russian Imperial League were training foreign neo-Nazis and other Russian groups, such as the “Born” (killers of journalist Buborova and human rights lawyer Markelov), with the indulgence of the Kremlin. If the extreme right took advantage of the legitimate aspiration of the Ukrainians to join the EU at EuroMaidan, to the point that the Right Sector had “outside its headquarters, in the building of the Kiev City Hall, a gigantic swastika” (Paulo Moura, Journey to the Heart of a Future War), the truth is that both these militias and the Azov Battalion fought the Donbas separatists and were eventually incorporated into the regular armed forces. Also, the neo-fascists of Svoboda, after EuroMaidan, also had up to five members in the new government, including a deputy prime minister, but ended up losing parliamentary weight and being absorbed by other parties, which would have normalised them. Neither this nor the fact that Ukraine has had corrupt governments and a doubtful democracy serves to reduce our solidarity with the Ukrainian people.

We have condemned the crimes committed by the US and the UK in Iraq (bombing of cities with weapons of mass destruction like white phosphorus), despite Saddam's crimes. The context does not condone the crime, but you cannot obliterate history. View in colour and not just in black and white!

The parallel reports of the Antenna 1 correspondents, Nuno Amaral in Kiev and Irpin and Luis Peixoto, in Donbas (a rare exception in the unilateral and Manichean coverage), show that on both sides there is immense suffering, destruction, loss of innocent lives, deep war-weariness and an enormous yearning for peace.

The Russian-speaking people of the Donbass also suffer from the civil war that in nine years caused about 14,000 dead and they cannot be treated as “children of a lesser god”. They too must be guaranteed the right to self-determination, a right initially proclaimed by President Wilson (USA) and by Lenin to be incorporated into the Charter of the League of Nations, but which the European colonialist countries vetoed until 1966, when it was adopted by the UN (resolution 1514).

The European Conference for Peace that the Left Bloc defends can achieve a peace agreement, but we must not forget that imperialism and its colonialist countries are not the only ones who have a right to peace.

But we cannot wait for imperialism and its European henchmen, nostalgic for colonialism, to decide. Once again, “PEACE IS IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLES”

2.          The Internationalist Left, War and Peace

José Manuel Pureza

With its occupation and aggression against Ukraine, Russian imperialism has generated a war of national liberation in that territory. If the aim was to come to the rescue of the populations of the Donbass region, the occupation and the war have deprived this war of any legitimacy and have made the resistance of the Ukrainian people worthy of all solidarity.

Does this mean that the peoples of the Donbass are mere pawns in the dispute between Russian and US imperialism? No. The peoples of these republics, like all peoples of the world, have the right to self-determination. The occupation of the Ukraine was the worst service rendered to the exercise of this right. But it cannot be excluded from a political solution, which must be opposed to the destruction of the peoples of Ukraine in the name of the narrative of the inevitability of a military solution.

The internationalist left does not sit on the fence, and it chooses the only side that can be asked of it: that of solidarity with the peoples of Ukraine and their self-determination, rejecting all imperialist strategies, whoever their interpreters may be and whatever justification they may use to win over public opinion.

In this spirit, the internationalist left has the duty to dispute the hegemony of the discourse of support for the military solution, an obvious irresponsibility that calls for destruction, which produces destruction, and which makes us believe in a fantasy, denying the nightmare of the apocalypse that it covers over.

The internationalist left does not fight for peace out of pure innocence or tactical cleverness, but because it does not accept the simplistic polarisation that war generates, with its accompanying elimination of divergences, contradictions, the class struggle and all emancipatory struggles. At this moment the internationalist left adopts as its own the priority the recovery of the radical critique of the narrowing of political space by a schema that views reality as antagonism between countries—as if countries were not internally heterogeneous and did not contain social protagonists with their own interests. Only the internationalist left can bring to the centre of debate and political action those diversities and socio-economic hierarchies, aa well as all the violence that geopolitics hides behind its miserable ontology (in an opacity that hides everything only states matter, and not even when they are great powers).

The left fights for peace for the sake of emancipation and not because of a moral imperative that any peace is always superior to any war. Wars of national liberation, wars of resistance to oppression and occupation, and wars against tyranny do not deserve the left's principled disapproval, but rather its solidarity, precisely because they are tools that have become necessary for essential emancipation. This is now the case in Ukraine, as it was before in the former Portuguese colonies and in so many other countries.

In February 2003, the gigantic demonstrations for peace against the war in Iraq were demonstrations against imperialism and against the world political economy that led the international political process to that war. The current challenge is to rescue this emancipatory sense and radical critique in a great internationalist movement for peace. This challenge unfolds in three concrete demands.

The first is to show that a political solution is possible and, to this end, to join voices and forces to demand urgent political investment by governments in exploiting the channels that remain despite the war: the cereal export channel and the prisoner exchange channel The strengthening of these channels and the opening of others is what will make it practically possible to put the convening of a peace summit, sponsored by the United Nations, on the horizon. Opposition to the slaughter of the Ukrainian people and the Russians sent to the front, opposition to the danger of a nuclear holocaust, support and solidarity for the Ukrainian resistance must go hand in hand with all possible pressure for a political solution to the conflict.

The second requirement is to make the political solution an instrument of the self-determination of peoples. The world needs a political solution to the war in Ukraine so that the self-determination of that people and of all the peoples of that territory is fulfilled. A peace summit must be a summit of affirmation of the primacy of self-determination.

The third requirement is to combine the strength of the internationalist peace movement with the strength of other internationalist movements, articulating agendas and struggles with them. This will be the case with the feminist movement and its denunciation of the patriarchal nature of the international system that fuels war. It will be the same with the movement for climate justice and its battle against fossil fuel dependence, because renewable energy alternatives are a key ingredient in all conflict prevention strategies in our time.

3.          Critical notes on Motion A: EU/US/NATO, Russia and China: the war in Ukraine

Manuel Carlos Silva

Under sub-head III (“For a Turning Point in Europe”), Motion A rightly argues that the EU, being the product of the project of the transnational and elites of the northern European countries, is confronted with the limits imposed by its treaties, which are, moreover, roughly defined by the transnationals themselves within the framework of neoliberalism. However, Motion A does not draw the proper conclusions from this neo-colonialism in relation to the countries of the South on various continents, including Europe, particularly in relation to Portugal and Greece: they were blackmailed and their sovereignty violated by austerity policies at the time of the Troika and now, again, with the new crisis. The lesson to be learned should be that, if the assumptions described in paragraph 17 are not fulfilled, and in particular renegotiation of the debt, Portugal and other countries of the South should set out an exit path and not maintain dependence on the financial capital of the countries of North-Central Europe, particularly France and Germany.

Motion A in point 17 is based on the assumption that “cooperation between European states is an important element in containing the radicalised right, on condition that there is a democratic turn that accepts the sovereignty of peoples, the development of social rights and ecological planning. Only such a project will be up to a strategy for peace on the continent, autonomous from the hegemonic pretensions of the USA and NATO hegemonic pretensions”. However, such an assumption and such a formulation, besides erasing the historical role of the European states in the enslavement and over-exploitation of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the exploitation of the European working classes, is patently naïve. Rather, it is profoundly idealistic and forgetful of the secular and still current, role of (neo)colonial Europe, now subservient to the US in the war in Ukraine. In addition to the fact that the leadership of the Left Bloc has aligned with and voted in favour of the bulk of the resolution of the European Parliament resolution supporting the EU's climbing onto the war chariot and its armament policy, it is even more pathetic to call in paragraph 18 for a Peace Conference under the impulse not only of the UN but also of the EU, aligned with US imperialism—instead of supporting a broad grass-roots movement for peace.

As regards the nuclear risk (point 8), attributable to Russian expansionism aimed at “re-establishing the borders of the Tsarist empire”, Motion A ignores the role of the United States in the escalation of warmongering and the militarised enlargement of NATO to 18 countries to the East, in spite of a verbal agreement in 1990 between Bush and Gorbachev not to expand NATO because of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Even when it recognises this enlargement, it does not draw out the consequences. Moreover, it reverses the argument, stating that the expansion of NATO is due to Russian expansionism and that even the subordination of Europe to the USA is the work of Putin, which borders on the absurd. If the invasion of Russia deserves unequivocal condemnation, it is necessary to go back in time and consider the remote and proximate causes of this political-military conflict: in the geostrategic framework, in which what has stood out are the intelligence services (CIA, Pentagon) and think tanks such as the Rand Corporation and the Atlantic Council and the provocations of US imperialism, especially since the coup against elected President Yakukovich in Ukraine in 2014, the incorporation of neo-Nazi militias into the army and the National Guard, and the US nod to Ukraine's entry into NATO, constituting a threat to Russia when US diplomats like Kissinger and Kennan were advocating a neutral Ukraine.

If China can be the object of criticism in terms of non-democracy and failure to build socialism, defining the Chinese economic system as imperialist similar to that of the US is to operate a blind, superficial analysis. China, having expanded economically and/or commercially, does not have a history of aggressive interventions, provocations and support for coups d'état in various countries on various continents as the US does (as Motion A recognises in paragraph 14). Moreover, it constitutes, in today's geopolitics towards a multipolar world an important counterweight to US hegemony, as was the USSR in the past, regardless of whether it was socialist or not.

To say that everyone is imperialist without making a concrete analysis of which is the main enemy of the peoples, is to objectively support in practice the predominance of US hegemony.

This hegemony, which, due to a growing decline, has become more and more aggressive, disrespectful of international law, and today is not so much interested in a ceasefire in Ukraine and the peace negotiations, but rather in driving Russia away from Germany and the EU itself (cf. US operation Defender Europe 1921 and sabotage of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline), subjugating it in the name of “democracy”, “freedom”, and “Western values”, in short, “civilisation” against “barbarism”, making use of Ukraine and its people in a war by proxy.

4.          ‘The last days of humanity’ *

Mário Tomé

“To say we will continue the war is to say we will destroy the world because we will pretend that we have principles.’ –Noam Chomsky

The developments in the war in Ukraine have put the Marxian left in general and the Left Bloc in particular to the test. Its analytical criteria have been corrupted by common sense approach subordinated to the pressure of the social neoliberalism of the PS.

To argue that it was the invasion of Ukraine that “led the peoples of Europe to believe in the protection of the greatest imperialist power in the history of humanity” (“The Putin Tragedy”, Luis.Fazenda, esquerda.net) ignores that with the Marshall Plan and NATO, Europe had become part of the great complex of US imperialism.

And it is no use lamenting that Europe is not a mediator when it is part of the imperialist strategy of “weakening Russia”. And this strategy has been explicitly supported by the Left Bloc in the major resolutions of the European Parliament: accelerated rearmament of Europe, supplying arms to Ukraine and the cherry on the cake, the introduction of censorship!

By refusing to see that in Ukraine a proxy war is being waged by the USA against Russia, with eyes fixed on the rise of China and not harshly confronting António Costa for recommending the continuation of the war until “the defeat of Russia”, one cannot play a serious role in the mobilisation of workers for peace against war.

This collaborative passivity leaves the Bloc powerless to intervene seriously with the workers, especially when, for the first time since 1961, the nuclear threat was put on the table which negotiations! Apocalypse now?

The diversion of financial means to the war economy, together with energy prices and also the inflation driven by the profits of the powerful, falls on the workers, dismantling what remains of the Welfare State and worsening their living conditions with a growing poverty that already afflicts about 20% of the Portuguese population.

And we still have sabotage of the fight against climate change, both in the recovery of the business of fossil fuels and atomic energy and in the spreading of soil and air pollution resulting from the fighting.

The workers can only fight this cynical and criminal war policy, like all those imposed by the interests of the Empire. And this struggle begins with the struggle against capitalist exploitation, which is becoming more and more refined, but also more brutal.

It is no use talking against all wars (P. Filipe Soares, Portuguese parliament) when we cannot be clear and firm about the one we are facing.

When the Members of the Left Bloc gave a standing ovation in the Portuguese parliament to NATO’s factotum in Ukraine, it was a stance that was a blow to the prestige of our party. It was a stance which revealed submission to imperialist pressure with the loss of the points of references which defined, but will have to continue to define, our internationalist and anti-imperialist position.

The support of imperialism does not in itself delegitimise the struggle against the invader, but one cannot ignore the fact that imperialism is only interested in the “defence of the Ukraine” as a means to “weaken Russia”, as Biden made clear from the start. The human and environmental catastrophe are collateral damage.

We must get to the real causes and conditions of the confrontation and thus also be armed for future developments. And thus find the legitimate bases for supporting a great movement for peace (J M Pureza, left.net) one year, millions of displaced persons and refugees and thousands of deaths and catastrophic destruction later.

We must demand an immediate ceasefire and negotiations based on the concrete situation on the ground, as has been urged from Henry Kissinger, the hawkish US war crimes strategist, to Edgar Morin, the reference point for European integration.

This demand should have been made from the start of the war with the call for a broad peace movement, had the Left Bloc maintained its robust criteria of analysis and not capitulated to the pressure of neoliberalism from Costa at the orders of Ursula [von der Leyen] at the orders of Biden.

 As Chomsky, with his radical and sensible intelligence, states: “Diplomacy by definition means that both sides have something they can accept” ... to stop the killing.

Of course, it is never too late to take up the full fight for the interests of the workers. But a party like the Left Bloc was not born to trail behind established interests, in the last resort serving them, but to serve as an enlightened compass for the workers' struggle.

* Title of the satire on the Austro-Hungarian empire in the First World War of Austrian writer Karl Krauss

5. A Platform Against War

Mário Tomé, Adriano Zilhão, José Casimiro, Acácio Pinheiro, Ana Sofia Cortes, Bento Correia José Santana Henriques, Higino Maroto

The solidarity of the workers of the world is due to the Ukrainian people, subject to war and to the regime of Zelensky's oligarchy, and to the Russian soldiers and mothers who face down Putin's oligarchic regime and refuse to be called up. The people want peace.

In 2022, Putin cursed the “Ukraine of Lenin”. We can understand why: after centuries of subjugation of the Ukraine to the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and to Poland, the Russian revolution in 1917 allowed Ukraine to become self-determined.

Then, in the 1920s, the bureaucratic counter-revolution expropriated the soviets, consolidated the political power and privileges of the emerging nomenklatura in the party and state, imposed a fierce dictatorship, cooperation with imperialism and the return of the “Great-Russian” ideology. However, it could not abolish social ownership of the means of production or the constitutional rights of nationalities and republics.

In the final years of the USSR, mafias from the bureaucratic apparatus systematically plundered social property in all republics, restoring capitalist social relations. At the end of 1991, Yeltsin, Putin's predecessor, proposed to the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine that the three countries should split, dissolving the USSR.

The brutal expropriation of social property by the IMF/World Bank led to general impoverishment, factory closures and emigration, while foreign capital and goods flooded in. Between 2000 and 2010 the heads of the mafias that plundered the USSR accumulated in their economic concerns fortunes equal to 30% to 40% of the national income.

But it should be noted: the Western imperialists keep the bulk of the capital they accumulate in the plundering the world in their own countries. The Americans have around 4% of their assets in tax havens (which re dependent on them), the Europeans 10% (dependent on them), the comprador bourgeoisies of neo-colonial countries, insecure “at home”, would have 22% (Latin American) and 30% (African).

The financial assets held by Russian nationals (Ukrainians, etc.) in western tax havens was to reach 50% of the total (capital flight between 1993 and 2018 was equivalent to at least 10% of Russia's GDP)! Comparable only to the semi-feudal oil monarchies of the Gulf (57%), in power only by the grace of the American army (cf. Piketty).

The world capital markets, Wall Street, London... took the booty of the USSR. Some oligarchs--many for convenience with alternative nationalities—became minor capitalist figures themselves. In the catastrophic 2008 crisis, many lost up to 90% of their fortunes, disappearing from Forbes. The booty from the looting entered the circuit of American and European big capital, the real oligarchy of the world. Russian rentier capital has learned who's boss. The restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe has not given birth to “rival” imperialisms.

On the contrary: another effect of the 2008 crisis was that the huge masses of surplus capital needed to find new fields for generating super profits. Hence the US agreement with the Chinese CP in exchange for diplomatic and military tolerance - an agreement which opened the door to the exploitation of Chinese labour (“factory of the world”) by large Western companies. But now it was necessary to remove all restrictions: Obama, then Trump, turned their military axis towards Asia, the new main stage of the world situation.

But the Russian oligarchs, too, with a lot of oil, gas and nuclear weapons, were bdly used by American imperialism (although they came in handy for German capital). The US, with the thirty or so European dwarfs on a leash, tightened the military siege on Russia. The victory of the pro-EU faction of the Ukrainian oligarchs in the civil war (“Maidan”, Donbass) sealed Ukraine's assimilation into NATO. Merkel dixit: the Minsk agreements only served to buy Ukraine time to arm itself.

To save himself, Putin was left with the great leap forward. But the brutal Russian invasion and the war of one oligarchic regime against another against another contracted as a direct agent of imperialism does not make either of them an “imperialist power”. The destruction of Yugoslavia by the IMF/EU had already triggered a war between the smaller oligarchies, loyal to the USA/EU and clinging to the slogan “nation”, and Serbia. In the Ukraine, the game is being played to complete the incorporation of Eastern Europe into the imperialist world market.

Confronting Putin's army, an army armed, equipped, financed, trained and led by NATO. Only Russian and Ukrainian cannon fodder. An imperialist war, then: fought by sub-contracted parasitic mafias, whose regimes persecute and ban parties, trade unions and collective agreements.

By voting for several pro-NATO and pro-war resolutions in the European Parliament, the Left Bloc leadership has betrayed its program and the interests of Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian workers.

Neither Putin nor NATO
Immediate ceasefire
Russian troops out of Ukraine
NATO out of Europe
Not a weapon for war
Repatriation of the Portuguese soldiers
Peace among the Peoples