M. Tarakanov
What is needed to be demonstrated
The Ukrainian attacks on Moscow, which caused a large fire at an oil refinery, rains of oil products, fires in the largest market in the Russian capital and damage to numerous buildings, and which, added to the attacks in recent months against Russia’s entire oil infrastructure, have contributed to a growing fuel crisis in the middle of the agricultural and holiday season, confirm once again the correctness of our analysis: Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered a new stage. The Armed Forces of Ukraine began to carry out systematic attacks against strategic companies and vital centers of the enemy: Putin’s Russia.
It was practically impossible to imagine something like this in 2022. At that time, Russian elite units invaded Ukraine, tried to surround Kiev, a city of four million inhabitants, surrounded Kharkiv, a city of two million inhabitants, with tanks, carried out airstrikes throughout Ukrainian territory and carried out a genocide in Mariupol, a city of half a million inhabitants. At the same time, NATO and the so-called “democratic leaders” were panicked discussing the contours of a new world order in which Ukraine simply should not exist.
The contrast is striking. Russia, under the leadership of an incompetent from the FSB, is not only not winning, but is increasingly heading towards its own catastrophe. In response to these bold and determined actions by Ukraine, which become more widespread every month — if not every week — and in the face of the evident stalemate on the front, where Russian occupation troops practically do not advance, Putin resorts to desperate measures of terror against the civilian population. It launches ballistic missiles against Ukrainian cities, residential neighborhoods and some of the most important historical centers of European civilization. But all this barbarism does not demonstrate strength, but the growing desperation of a Kremlin insignificance that has failed so shamefully and continues to openly lie to the world and its own population about offensives and supposed conquests of cities.
This whole situation also reveals another important aspect: the profound failure of the positions of the majority of the so-called “lefts” and activists who expected a completely different development of events and continue to expect to this day a world war and the triumphal march of right-wing dictatorships. Among them is the current leadership of the LIT, which after Trump’s return to power in 2025 allowed itself to be intimidated by the far-right populist rhetoric of this character and began to expect, nothing less, than the capitulation of Ukraine (!). Especially after the meeting between Trump and Putin in Anchorage last summer. They did not see in Trump an expression of the internal crisis of US imperialism, the growth of social discontent, the protest struggles and the deep crisis of the traditional apparatuses of the left and the populists.
But that would be only half the problem. All revolutionaries make mistakes and correct their mistakes. The problem is that within the LIT there were comrades who clearly saw what was happening. They understood the current crisis of the world order not as a dispute between imperialisms, but as a profound confrontation between the world revolution and the counterrevolution. They understood the crisis of the imperialist order above all as a manifestation of the growing contradiction between revolution and counterrevolution. Unfortunately, instead of continuing the internal debate and correcting the mistakes – something absolutely normal in any revolutionary organization – the leadership of the LIT imposed on the rank-and-file militants, workers and activists the so-called “separation”, simply to exclude those who could help correct the political line.
Therefore, as we observe today the defeats of Putin’s counterrevolutionary Russia and the attacks against Moscow, the uprising in Bolivia, the defeat of Trump in Iran and the defeat of Orbán in Hungary, we can see how the conceptions of reformism and centrism, of populism and Stalinism, of the bureaucratic apparatuses of the left and of degenerate movements, dissipate like smoke.
That is why the policy of “separation” of revolutionaries at a time of the rise of the world revolution was so wrong. This policy is in open contradiction with Lenin’s policy, which has always sought the unity of the revolutionary forces and a break with the so-called “left” bureaucracies that hinder the development of the revolutionary movement.
It remains to be hoped that the rank-and-file comrades of the LIT will soon understand the error of the resolutions of the last world congress, imposed from above by a leadership that, in the last two decades, has failed to present significant political achievements and that, therefore, avoids any criticism and self-criticism.
