U.S. and Russian imperialists are engaged in an all-out struggle for control over the territories of the former Soviet Union. U.S. rulers have gained a foothold in Eastern Europe, up to the border of Ukraine. But Russia’s vital oil and gas pipelines run through Ukraine to European Union (EU) countries, netting Russian bosses huge profits and a stranglehold on EU energy supplies.
In the short run, Russian bosses appear to be winning. But this is just one battle in a long war, and U.S. bosses will not willingly surrender to the emerging Russian power grab. Given the stakes, the conflict between these imperialist rivals could easily escalate into a broader, open conflict.
Russian-Backed Rebellion in Ukraine
Putin has massed 40,000 Russian potential invaders on Ukraine’s border. According to U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, supreme NATO commander, the Russian force includes “support for planes and helicopters as well as military hospitals and electronic warfare equipment.” These troops, the general said, “could accomplish a major incursion into eastern or southern Ukraine ... in between three and five days” (Wall Street Journal, 4/2/14).  
Putin’s nationalist strategy is to oppress the Russian working class while rebuilding the Russian empire for the profits of Russian capitalists. Having overrun Crimea, Putin and his oligarch cronies now aim to grab other strategic parts of Ukraine. In addition to threatening a future invasion, they are fostering an armed rebellion among pro-Russians inside the country. The imperialists’ ultimate goal is to absorb all the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Mikheil Saakashvili, the anti-Putin politician who became president of Georgia with the backing of U.S. billionaire George Soros and the CIA in the 2003 Rose Revolution, has first-hand experience with resurgent Russian militarism. In 2008, Russia overran Georgia and carved out “independent” states in Russia-leaning South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In an April 5 opinion piece in Foreign Policy headlined “War is Coming,” Saakashvili wrote:
Russian strategists are talking about a ‘weekend of rage’ that could involve some kind of armed siege of government buildings in southern and eastern Ukraine. If these local provocateurs and ‘self-defense forces’ manage to hold these buildings as they did in Crimea, it might serve as a basis for further military intervention.
Events on the following day, April 6, lent further credence to Saakashvili’s scenario:
Crowds of pro-Russian demonstrators stormed government buildings Sunday in two major cities in eastern Ukraine. In Luhansk, 20 miles west of the Russian border, hundreds of people surrounded the local headquarters of the security service and later scaled the facade to plant a Russian flag on the roof. In Donetsk, to the southwest, a large group of people surged into the provincial government building and smashed windows. A gathering of several hundred, many of them waving Russian flags, then listened to speeches delivered from a balcony emblazoned with a banner reading “Donetsk Republic.”
U.S. Bosses’ Weak Counterpunch
NATO’s response to Kremlin aggression has been muted and rear-guard: a couple of U.S. warships dispatched to the Black Sea, increased air policing over the Baltics, Romania and Poland.
But while Russian boots cross Crimean soil, NATO, by its own admission, stands unprepared to deploy its foot soldiers beyond their barracks:
The trickiest question may be whether NATO should move troops into Eastern Europe, where the alliance currently has few installations. Countries like Poland are pushing hard for such a shift, but it would almost certainly be seen as highly provocative by Moscow. While NATO’s air and sea options are fairly clear, Gen. Breedlove said, “Frankly…we have work to do on what the ground options would be” (Wall Street Journal).
U.S. capitalists, and especially Big Oil, recognize the political advantage they gain from controlling the flow of gas and oil to maintain their top dog status among the world’s imperialists. For them this is an absolute necessity, not some breakable addiction to profits. Their long-term strategy is to counter the Kremlin by flooding world markets with newly found shale gas and free Europe from its dependence on Russian energy.  
But for the foreseeable future, the U.S. bosses have neither the infrastructure nor the unity in Congress they need to export gas. Resources expert Michael Klare warned that “increased U.S. oil and gas output have provided White House officials with no particular advantage in their efforts to counter Putin’s aggressive moves.... the prospect of future U.S. gas exports to Europe is unlikely to alter his strategic calculations” (OilPrice.com, 4/5/14).
The bosses also understand they need to ramp up militarism within the U.S. to protect those interests. One step in that direction is the ENLIST Act, now being debated in Washington. A more nightmarish version of the DREAM Act, it aims to draw undocumented youth into the Pentagon’s war machine with the promise of citizenship.
But like the DREAM Act, ENLIST is likely to fail. It lacks bipartisan backing in Congress, and — most important — has failed to win mass working-class support, a problem for the capitalists since the Vietnam War.
Workers’ Power Can Triumph
From Ukraine and Russia to Western Europe and the U.S., workers have nothing to gain from a war between the rival imperialist camps. Meanwhile, we suffer from the cyclical capitalist crises that cause mass unemployment, wage cuts, widespread poverty, reductions in healthcare, and increasing racist attacks on black, Latino, Asian, Muslim and Arab workers. The rulers use this racism to reap super-profits from super-exploited workers and also to divide the working class, weakening its ability to fight back.
The answer for our class is to destroy the capitalist system, the source of all our problems, and create a communist society free of bosses and profits, run by and for the working class. This can only be achieved through the leadership of a communist party, the Progressive Labor Party. Our goal is a communist revolution to smash the capitalists’ state power and replace it with worldwide workers’ power. A revolution means the overthrow of one ruling class and its replacement by the rule of the formerly oppressed class, the working class, which produces everything of value in society. This was never the aim of the bosses’ phony “color revolutions,” which merely replaced one set of bosses with another.
Capitalist society oppresses us today and will drive us into broader wars tomorrow, to kill our class sisters and brothers for the rulers’ greater profit. But a united, communist-inspired working class, led by the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party, has the power to combat the bosses and ultimately to destroy their parasitic system. Join us!