Independent journalist Dean O’Brien talks to Nina Kosta about the situation in the Donbass, the eastern, ethnically Russian, and culturally Soviet workers’ region of Ukraine, formally recognized as the independent people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk after the Nato-backed fascist coup of 2014.

Dean explains that certain key facts are not being reported in western mainstream media coverage and that without this vital context, workers are unable to make sense of what they hear about the conflict there (especially as most of them are only hearing about it now after eight years of silence).

1. Nato has been continually expanding eastwards since its formation, but especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is encroaching upon Russia, violating its previous agreements, and the mass transport of war materials is a direct assault upon and threat to Russia’s sovereignty.

2. In 2014, a Nato and European Union-backed coup led to the takeover of the Ukrainian government by ultra-nationalists, many of them open fascist descended from those who sided with Hitler during WW2.

3. That Ukrainian fascist junta, having taken over Kyiv and the government illegally with EU and US backing, declared war on ethnic Poles, Russians, and Jews, among others, outlawed the Russian language (spoken as a mother tongue by 40 percent of Ukraine’s population), rehabilitated Nazi war criminals while tearing down antifascist and Soviet monuments, and started a war in the east against the predominantly Russian-speaking and socialist-minded people.

4. That is why the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly in a sovereign referendum to quit Ukraine and rejoin Russia.

5. The escalation of this eight-year conflict now is entirely the work of Nato and the Ukrainian far-right.

6. The USA’s goal is to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from opening up, as this would bring Germany and Russia closer together economically. It will fail.

What is needed at this time is an anti-war moment. The leaders of the world who monger war and are threatening to drag us into a war that could cost millions of lives, bring a full-blown refugee crisis within Europe, which threatens to degenerate into a world war – nuclear world war.

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