Four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine

 

Crush Putin’s atrocities with the internationally united power of the working class!

 

Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction)

February 17th, 2026

 

(1)

 

Four years after the start of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, workers and toiling people of Ukraine are now in the face of a very difficult situation. Trump and Putin are forcing them to accept a ‘peace plan’ which was framed in August 2025 by the two power holders, acquitting Russia of aggression and swallowing almost the whole of its demands.

Donald Trump, who poses as the ‘king’ of the militarist empire of America, is now thrusting arrogant unreasonable demands on the Ukrainian government, saying ‘Accept the peace plan by June. Otherwise, no guarantee of your security after the ceasefire.’ All that preoccupies Trump, who is being reduced to a ‘lame duck’ just one year after his inauguration, is to leave behind a legacy as a ‘great president who stopped war’ by the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

So now Vladimir Putin, the Russian ‘Emperor’, unashamedly says, ‘Ukraine should surrender unconditionally, or else will fight until support runs out’, and is insanely firing missiles and drones across the whole land of Ukraine. He did it at Christmas last year, early in the New Year, and is doing at this very moment.

Ukraine is now experiencing its severest cold in 20 years, with the record-breaking temperature dropping to 25 degrees below zero. In the midst of this cold, Russian forces are destroying the infrastructure, including electricity, gas, and water supply, and striking schools, hospitals, passenger trains, and other public facilities. In an attempt to cut off the fuel supply for thermal power generation, they went so far as to assault and killed miners and other workers on a bus. Now in Kyiv, the capital of approximately 3.5 million population, half of the homes are without power, and hundreds of thousands are forced to leave Kyiv. Putin and his troops are frantically engaging in this state terror, forcing cold, hunger and darkness onto Ukrainian people with the aim of crushing their will to resist.

But we know Ukrainians are not discouraged. They are encouraging each other and supporting and helping each other to somehow overcome even this extreme situation. Many trade unions, as well as various communities that have been formed amid the war, are repairing those destroyed infrastructure, rescuing the injured and helping the elderly who live alone.

 

  (2)

 

We believe that Ukrainian working people will not succumb to those invaders because they do not wish to and cannot abandon their compatriots in the four eastern and southern oblasts, whose ‘annexation to Russia’ was arbitrarily declared by Putin in September 2022.

Working people all over the world must look straight at the horrible realities of the Russian-occupied territories and thereby renew their working-class anger against Putin’s outrageous atrocities.

Russia has deprived Ukraine of not only the lands in the four occupied oblasts. Six million Ukrainians are living there, but Russia is planting a whole lot of Russian settlers in these ‘new territories’ and allotting to them houses confiscated from Ukrainians.

And in schools, boys and girls are forced to sing the Russian national anthem, to speak Russian, and to learn Russian history textbooks. Russia is forcing them to undergo training to fight, in the near future, against Ukrainians as Russian soldiers.

Without a Russian passport, residents cannot walk the streets; without Russian citizenship, they cannot go to hospitals, nor can they buy medicine. If they make remarks without caution, they will be arrested and sentenced to ten-odd years in prison. People have no choice but to live quietly, holding their breath, so that they attract little attention from anybody. Anybody who shows even the slightest bit of defiance to Russia is arrested for treason; the number of such cases has already reached 16,000. In concentration camps, torture is an everyday affair while rapes are rampant.

The occupied territories are completely cut off from the outside world and are turned into a black box. One young female freelance journalist was arrested when she was secretly investigating the realities of these territories. Her body was returned in a prisoner exchange, with her eyes gouged out and part of her brain removed. Those incomparable brutes returned her body as a warning to others that it is best to ‘see nothing and think nothing’.

In the four occupied oblasts, more than 46,000 Ukrainians were conscripted into the Russian army as Russians and sent to the front to fight against Ukrainians. 16% of the prisoners of war currently detained in Ukrainian prison camps are Ukrainians who were captured as Russian soldiers.

Vladimir Putin! Bring back home all the children kidnapped and deported! Return all the prisoners of war to Ukraine!

 

(3)

 

Today in Russia, those who want the war to end amount to 67%, which shows a tendency to far exceed the 25% who support its continuation. What is the reason for it?

The number of the Russian war dead has today surpassed 350,000. It rose rapidly in the latter half of last year. Pressed by the fact that conscription from ethnic minorities in border areas is reaching its limits, Putin has now started to hire foreign soldiers from countries such as Kenya and Somalia in Africa and India and Sri Lanka in Asia. What is used as a modus operandi is a sort of help-wanted ads on social media like ‘well-paid jobs’ , which allures job-seekers into battlefields. On the battlefield, there are no tanks nor armored vehicles for them; the Russian Army is forcing soldiers to make a dash like human bullets by only using horses, bikes or used cars. Such being the case, its occupied areas have not been expanded, while the death toll alone is swelling. We emphatically condemn Putin for using foreign workers as his bullets!

Moreover, inflation is beginning to rage in Russia, as Trump has tightened sanctions against Russia for circumventing exports of oil, natural gas and others via third countries while scaling back military and financial aid to Ukraine. Furthermore, unemployment of tens of thousands of repatriated soldiers, together with crimes committed by them, is accelerating the devastation of society.

But Putin has no choice left but to ‘escape forward’. He has instilled a sense of national greatness and aggrieved feelings into Russian people, who were cast down by the ‘misery of a ruined country’ they underwent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By so doing, this man has built up an FSB-helmed authoritarian state, while attempting to revive the territory of the former Soviet Union. Therefore, Putin sees no other way but to use his war, under the banner of the ‘restoration of Great Russia’, to quell people’s dissatisfaction quietly growing in Russia. Now Putin -- while pretending to agree to Trump’s mediation for peace -- is frantically launching indiscriminate attacks on Ukraine with the aim of forcing it into surrender by shouting arrogantly that ‘wherever Russian soldiers set foot, it belongs to Russia’. And at home, he is perpetrating brutal repressions against his own people, which can only be described as insane, an example being the case of a 14-year-old boy who was put before a military tribunal and sentenced to five years in prison just because he raised an objection to ‘Putin’s war’.

Workers and people of Russia!

Around 110 years ago, by following the ideal and perspective of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Russian workers, peasants and soldiers -- your antecedents -- realized a proletarian revolution in Czarist Russia, which was called the ‘weakest link of capitalism’, thus opening the door to world socialism.

Notwithstanding that, after Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin declared ‘We will build socialism in one country alone’. He subordinated proletarian class struggle in each country to the defence of the Soviet Union called the ‘fortress of socialism’, thereby betraying the historic project of liberating the proletariat of the world. At home, he obliterated the economic principle in socialist society and the transitional period to it, which Marx clarified in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. He thus justified the bureaucracy in exclusively expropriating vast amounts of additional labour by the ‘Stalin-style law of distribution’, while making working people labour under a severe norma-based piecework system. In this way, the Stalinist bureaucrats fabricated a new system of expropriation, which is different from the capitalist exploitation based on the commoditization of labour-power. The so-called ‘socialist’ Soviet Union provided Stalinist bureaucrats with palaces, imposed poverty on toiling people and, in order to maintain this, purged dissident elements as ‘enemies of the people’. It has nothing to do with Marxism. As such, it must be called an anti-workers state.

And it is for this reason that the Stalinist Soviet Union collapsed from within, with an external cause which was its defeat in the rivalry with imperialist powers after the Second World War.

However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stalinist state-party bureaucrats shamelessly used their privileged status and usurped state properties by various means, thus transforming themselves into economic bureaucrat mafia. They did not pay any attention to their people who were plunged into the depth of poverty. Then, in the beginning of the 21st century, they established an FSB-helmed authoritarian ruling system with Vladimir Putin, a petty KGB official, installed as president. They converted the economy into state capitalism (i.e. quasi-capitalist economy) in which the FSB controls everything, from the energy industry to the munitions industry. Thus today’s ‘Russian Empire’, which is akin to the ‘Stalin-led Soviet Union’, came into being.

The Russian rulers’ attempt to incorporate Ukraine into the Russian Federation ’ is only for satisfying the bureaucratic interests as privileged bureaucracy by means of holding aloft great Russian chauvinism and claiming that ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union is the greatest geographical catastrophe in the 20th century.

Russian working people!

Conscientious people who have been quietly resisting Putin’s tyrannical rule according to your conscience!

Go forward for the overthrow of the FSB-helmed authoritarian ruling system!

 

(4)

 

The world has now entered an age where those nuclear big powers -- the United States, China and Russia -- struggle against each other to exclusively expand by force their respective spheres of influence.

At the beginning of this year, the Trump-led US administration launched a military attack on and violently overturned the government of Venezuela, an ‘anti-American, pro-China and pro-Russian’ state. By so doing, it has forcibly established a government that would follow its intention and seized oil resources. This outrage committed by Trump with unreserved neo-Monroeism has turned the darkening tide of the world into one ever more serious at a stroke.

Trump’s new strategy to ‘Make America Great Again’ is meant to eliminate totally China’s and Russia’s political, military and economic influence from the Western Hemisphere, consisting of North and South America. It is also meant, on the other hand, to recognize the eastern half of Eurasia as Russia’s sphere of influence and Southeast Asia as China’s, namely to bring about habitat segregation, so to speak. Trump says, ‘The internal and diplomatic affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.’ It is from this point of view that Trump is pressuring Ukraine to accept that ‘peace plan’ collaboratively fabricated by the US and Russia.

However, in the face of this new national strategy of declining American imperialism, China and Russia are intensifying their challenge to America more and more by strengthening their alliance-like ties, and also by reinforcing their own nuclear capabilities. For this very reason, the crisis of the world today is deepening from day to day, which should be called the eve of a Third World War.

And what marked the turning point at which the world plunged into this age of ‘the right of the strongest’ is, needless to say, the military aggression against Ukraine commanded by Putin four years ago.

Ukrainian workers and toiling people are unbendingly continuing to put up resistance against the invading army. We believe that they have a strong desire not to return to that Soviet Union, a dark and gloomy world. Ukrainians established a power based on councils (in 1922) and joined the proletarian revolution in Russia. In spite of that, Stalin enforced great purges to ‘Russianize Ukraine’. Stalin also imposed harsh quota-based requisition for grains on Ukrainian peasants who opposed the ‘collectivization of agriculture’, thus deliberately starving as many as six million people to death (Holodomor). The Soviet bureaucracy covered up the Chernobyl nuclear disaster for as many as ten days, resulting in the contamination of Ukrainian soil with nuclear fallout. Undoubtedly, they have been told through generations about these crimes of Soviet bueaucrats..

Incidentally, some leftists have never given thought to the sufferings of Ukrainians. They have been saying things like ‘The war in Ukraine is a proxy war between the US and Russia’, ‘NATO is to blame for cornering Russia’, ‘There is no resistance to support in Ukraine’, and ‘We’re opposed to support for Ukraine because it brings poverty to our people.’ Such fake leftists -- especially European pseudo-internationalists who have degraded themselves to be ‘campists’ and pseudo-pacifists who are aloof from the reality of Ukraine -- have now fallen into total silence.

We here again loudly appeal to workers and people all over the world. Be aware that those who do not oppose Putin’s war and who remain a passive onlooker before the great struggle of the Ukrainian workers and people are to increase the daily mounting danger of a Third World War, the threat of the annihilation of humanity by thermonuclear warfare.

Now, four years after the start of Russia’s aggression, trade unions are standing up all over the world to take actions in solidarity with Ukraine. Arm in arm with those people fighting across the world, we the revolutionary left in Japan, too, are going to stage united actions across Japan on February 22nd and 23rd.

The darkness of the 21st century is deep and thick. But the end of capitalism has already begun. For its evil is being exposed in every respect due to war, poverty, tyranny and devastation of the planet. Turning this ‘beginning of the end’ into the ‘actual end’, and making this century the starting point for creating a new society is the historical mission of the proletariat, the alienated, oppressed and despised wage slaves who ‘have nothing to lose but their iron chains’.

Workers of all countries, unite!

Ukraine for the world! The world for our brothers and sisters in Ukraine!