End the sanctions on Russia now!

The Putin government has noted that the sanctions imposed by America, Britain and the European Union on Russia have backfired and resulted in a sweeping energy crisis as well as record inflation across the West.
    The Turkish leader says Western European leaders only have themselves to blame for the tough winter they’re going to face this year. Recep Tayyip Erdogan says “Europe is reaping what it sows” when it comes to the natural gas shortages plaguing the region and that the countries’ attitude towards Russian President Vladimir Putin and the sweeping sanctions imposed on Moscow are to blame for the current crisis.
    Even Boris Johnson is saying it. In his last official visit to Kiev last month he told the world that high energy prices are a pain that UK households must endure as part of the effort to resist Vladimir Putin.
    It’s all very well for Johnson and his cronies to talk about “pain”. They won’t feel it. Their vast fortunes will protect them. But for workers the colossal hike in gas and electricity will push millions back into poverty no seen since the Victorian era.
    Back in March the TUC warned that the conflict in Ukraine would hike up energy costs further in a call on the Government to urgently come forward with new measures to support struggling families.
    But that “support” or even the price freeze that Liz Truss is contemplating will be financed by further cuts in services and imposing a higher tax burden on working people for many, many years to come.
    This isn’t the answer. It’s only part of the problem. The real solution is to end the sanctions regime against Russia.
    That, however, is something that Labour leaders and the union bureaucrats will not do. When the chips are down both sides of social-democracy – left and right – close ranks around the imperialists.
    Some like Sir Keir Starmer and the Blairites openly embrace NATO and US imperialism while the fake lefters who pose as socialists essentially argue that peace is only attainable on imperialist terms. They are the sinister forces within the labour and peace movement that have long acted as cheer-leaders for NATO and neo-colonialism.
    They did it in 1914. They waved the flag and cheered on the slaughter. Only Lenin’s Bolsheviks, the Serbian Socialists and pacifists like Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald opposed the madness of imperialist war.
    Now they wave the yellow and blue banner of the fascist regime in Kiev. They serve the war lobby within the United States – the so-called “deep state” that represents the most venal and aggressive sections of the American ruling class that seek to dominate the entire world in the name of “globalisation” and the “new world order”.
    It’s no good bleating about the cost-of-living crisis and soaring inflation without raising the obvious solution which is to end the conflict in Ukraine and restore Western access to the vast gas reserves in the Russian Federation.
    Communists must lead the call for an end to the fighting and a just and lasting peace in eastern Europe. This can only come with a neutral and de-Nazified Ukraine that recognises the independence of the Donbas republics, Crimea’s decision to join the Russian Federation and equal rights for all the people of the regions of the Ukraine.