UK Labour government unveils far-right anti-immigration programme

Robert Stevens

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm

UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled a fascistic anti-immigration policy Monday, effacing any remaining differences between the ruling Labour Party, the Conservatives, and the far-right Reform UK.

Mahmood unveiled a 33-page policy paper, “Restoring Order and Control”, before addressing MPs in Parliament. She trailed the document in a Guardian op-Ed on Monday writing, “These reforms bear down on illegal migration… They ensure that we enforce our rules more robustly, returning illegal migrants who have no right to be here.”

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood speaking in Parliament, September 7, 2023 [Photo by House of Commons/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Labour’s plan is lifted from the programme of the Denmark’s Social Democrats Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen who oversees—in coalition with right-wing parties—one of the most vicious anti-immigration regimes in Europe.

Adopting the Danish plan is Labour’s response to months of demonstrations—centred on mobilisations outside hotels accommodating asylum seekers—organised by the far-right demanding mass deportations. These have been backed by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which has thrived in the noxious atmosphere created by years of Conservative and Labour governments competing over which had the most anti-immigrant programme. Labour’s failure to offer any policies addressing the needs of the working class has it polling at record low levels for a ruling party, with Reform taking a 10 point lead.

Restoring Order and Control effectively abolishes the right to asylum in Britain, preparing the ground for mass deportations to be enforced by the ICE-style Immigration Enforcement (IE) teams already in operation.

Refugees will no longer have the right to live permanently in the UK, and will be deported once their home country is no longer deemed dangerous to return to. Under Mahmood’s plan refugee status will be subject to regular review every two and half years and deportations carried out, including of families with young children in school.

Currently, if an asylum seeker is granted refugee status in the UK they receive a five-year protection period of “leave to remain” and can apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years. Under the new plan those deemed to have arrived “illegally”, i.e., after perilously crossing the Channel on a small boat—will be forced to wait 20 years before they can apply for permanent settlement.

Ahead of Mahmod announcing the plans Sky News quoted one of her backers saying, “The moment your home country is safe to return to, you will be removed. While this might seem like a small technical shift, this new settlement marks the most significant shift in the treatment of refugees since the Second World War.”

According to the Refugee Council the plans would require the Home Office to review the status of up to 1.4 million refugees.

Under new legislation, the Home Office will no longer have to provide financial support to asylum seekers, as is presently the case under the Human Right Act 1998 (which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law). This will be changed to a discretionary power, meaning that anyone in government funded accommodation can be removed.

Based on the Danish precedent, UK officials will be able to seize assets, including jewellery, from asylum seekers to cover the costs of their accommodation and processing. Home Office minister Alex Norris told Sky News that the only “heirloom” items would be excluded, such as wedding rings.

Labour will legislate to restrict how courts apply the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 3, protecting people from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, will be reinterpreted to “support the deportation of dangerous criminals”.

The right to family life enshrined in Article 8 of the ECHR will be reinterpreted to “rebalance public interest tests in favour of the British people’s expectations”. Only asylum seekers with immediate family in the UK, such as a parent or child, will be able to cite Article 8 as grounds to stay in Britain.

Asylum seekers whose claim to stay has been rejected will no longer be allowed further appeals. New legislation will restrict them to arguing all grounds against their removal in a single appeal.

Mahmmod’s document complains that “many families of failed asylum seekers continue to live in this country, receiving free accommodation and financial support, for years on end”.

It warns, “The government will offer all families financial support to enable them to return to their home country. Should they refuse that support, we will escalate to an enforced return. We will launch a consultation on the process for enforcing the removal of families, including children.”

A Home Office Immigration Enforcement vehicle in north London [Photo by Philafrenzy / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The plan also proposes that the Modern Slavery Act be modified to prevent asylum seekers from claiming they are fleeing countries where they have been subjected to slavery!

Such fascistic policies in Denmark have slashed the number of asylum applications to the lowest level in 40 years, with the removal of 95 percent of asylum seekers whose applications were rejected.

In 2014, the year prior to Frederiksen taking leadership of the Social Democrats, a total of 14,792 asylum seekers arrived in Denmark. By 2021—two years after she became prime minister—that figure had collapsed to 2,099 and has remained at around that number since. Given that the UK’s population is around 12 times the size of Denmark’s and that 111,084 people claimed asylum in Britain in the year to June, a similar reduction in UK claims would see 100,000 people being deported.

Frederiksen has demonstrated that are no limits as to the savagery that social democratic governments will impose on asylum seekers and refugees. The WSWS noted that Frederiksen’s government “retained a racist policy implemented by her Liberal predecessors that permits authorities to designate low-income neighbourhoods with large immigrant populations as ‘ghettos’.” On this pretext such areas could be demolished and their residents driven out.

Under the Social Democrats own 2021 law establishing “parallel society areas”—which rebranded the Liberal legislation—areas with over 1,000 residents were defined as ghettos if more than 50 percent were “immigrants and their descendants from non-Western countries”.

Labour’s plan will also prevent three African countries, Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo—setting a precedent for others—from accessing UK visas if they fail to take back people deported from Britain. The Times noted that this measure originates with another far-right politician—Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration.

Reform could disagree with almost none of Labour’s policy, with Farage declaring only that he was for repealing the ECHR, not reinterpreting its articles.

So comprehensively have Labour adopted the policies being demanded by the far-right that the Elon Musk-funded Tommy Robinson—who in September staged the largest ever far-right demo in Britain—posted on Musk’s X platform: “The Overton window has been obliterated, well done patriots!”

Trump’s tariff war devastating major Indian export industries

Yuvan Darwin & Kranti Kumara

President Donald Trump meets with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, February 13, 2025, in Washington. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]

Numerous Indian industries—including textiles and garments, gems and jewelry and shrimp-raising hatcheries—have been plunged into crisis by the Trump administration’s imposition of a 50 percent tariff on most Indian exports to the US since August 27.

In September, India’s total exports to the US contracted by 11.9 percent, falling to $5.5 billion, and while they rose to $6.3 billion last month, they were still down 8.6 percent from October 2024.

So serious has been the tariffs’ impact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government have cobbled together a bailout package of Rs. 450.6 billion ($5.2 billion), equivalent to about 1.3 percent of total central government programme spending. Announced on November 12, the bailout package includes collateral-free loans for enterprises with cash flow problems and access to trade finance.

Notably, the bailout includes no funds to assist laid off and furloughed workers, even though the poverty wages that these workers earn when they are employed are generally barely enough to support them and their families.

For months, the Modi government has been desperately trying to persuade the Trump administration to reduce its tariffs on Indian exports, which at 50 percent, are currently higher than those Washington is imposing on any other country’s goods. Brazil is also subject to a 50 percent US tariff, but a much larger portion of its exports are exempt.

Trump recently said that the tariffs on India “may be reduced.” But the would-be dictator US president has also repeatedly chastised India, charging that its barriers to US trade and investment are among the highest in the world.

The Modi government has offered to make steep cuts in India’s tariffs on a raft of US imports, including machinery, aircraft and mineral fuels, but to no avail. In a further attempt to placate Trump, India’s government-owned oil companies announced Monday that they have concluded a one-year deal with US producers to import 2.2 million tonnes of US liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), equal to about 10 percent of India’s total annual LPG imports.  

Whatever reduction the Trump regime is offering to India, the US tariffs on Indian goods will almost certainly remain at 25 percent or higher even if Washington and New Delhi conclude a deal.

Earlier this year, Indian officials had expressed confidence they would not only reach a satisfactory deal on Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs,” but that they would also soon conclude a broader trade and investment deal with Washington.

However, all of this was upended by Washington’s demands for India to open up its agricultural sector to large-scale US agribusiness exports and dramatically curtail its imports of cheap Russian oil. The former would squeeze the incomes of hundreds of millions of small farmers, and the latter would drive up inflation and undercut New Delhi’s long-term strategic partnership with Russia.

When negotiations failed and the US slapped a 25 percent tariff on Indian goods at the end of July, New Delhi took solace in the fact that this was lower than the US tax on Chinese exports.

But only days later Trump slapped an additional 25 percent tariff on India, as punishment for its refusal to buckle to US demands that it curtail its Russian oil imports. The Trump administration is seeking to choke off Russian government oil export revenue as part of its efforts to weaken Moscow and force an end to the US-NATO instigated Ukraine war on terms favourable to US imperialism.

Exports to the US are critical to many Indian industries and the overall Indian economy. The US has been India’s largest export market in recent years, accounting for 20 percent of India’s export income. In the 2024–25 financial year, ending in March 2025, total exports to the US amounted to $86 billion. Of this, an estimated $50 billion worth of goods are now subject to 50 percent tariffs, making them much more expensive for American consumers.

Less than three months into Trump’s economic war on India, the consequences have been severe: factory closures, mass unemployment, reduced working hours and indefinite furloughs, further impoverishing already poverty‑stricken working class families.

India’s textile industry, with its deep historical roots, provides direct employment to at least 45 million workers and supports another 60-100 million people, including small cotton farmers, truck drivers and food vendors near textile mills.

The textile sector is dominated by small- and medium‑sized enterprises (SMEs) producing synthetic and cotton fabrics. SMEs account for at least 60 percent of the industry. They now face acute cash‑flow problems, with many on the brink of bankruptcy due to unsold inventories. Small‑scale industries are defined as enterprises with less than Rs. 10 million ($115,000) in fixed or leased assets, while medium-sized enterprises are those with less than 10 times that amount in investments.

A significant portion of India’s textile production is carried out by home‑based cottage industries, where workers endure long, back‑breaking hours for meagre pay. Many of these enterprises are financed through “micro‑finance,” championed by Bangladesh’s current president, Muhammad Yunus, as a supposed solution to the poverty created by capitalism.

The textile industry is a major contributor to India’s economy, accounting for about 2.3 percent of GDP and 12 percent of total exports. It is also the largest employer after agriculture, which absorbs roughly 46 percent of India’s workforce while contributing only 16 percent of GDP. This imbalance highlights India’s economic backwardness: the proportion of workers employed in agriculture is higher than even in Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries.

Reports indicate that numerous textile factories in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu—known as the “Knitwear Capital of India”—have halted or scaled back production. Similar cutbacks have occurred in other textile hubs such as Surat in Gujarat and Ludhiana in Punjab. Orders have been cancelled, payments delayed, and many small and medium export units have shut down entirely. In Tiruppur, thousands of migrant workers from Bihar and Odisha have been sent home, while women working on piece‑rate contracts have been told there will be “no work for weeks.”

In Surat, Gujarat—the state from which Prime Minister Narendra Modi hails and where he presided over an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002, earning the epithet the “Butcher of Gujarat”—power looms are running at half capacity. Average earnings for loom operators are less than Rs. 21,000 ($100) per month, barely enough to cover food and rent.

In Noida, Uttar Pradesh—one of India’s poorest states—finished garments lie unsold because foreign buyers refuse delivery. Exporters admit they cannot compete with Bangladesh or Vietnam, which face far lower US tariffs of 20 percent. The industry is trapped: unable to repay bank loans, facing delayed orders from the US, and most critically, compelled by the logic of capitalism, throwing hundreds of thousands of textile workers out of work.

Another sector hit hard is gems and jewellery. The US accounts for 37 percent of India’s diamond exports and 28 percent of its jewellery exports. This sector employs 5 million workers directly and contributes 7 percent of India’s GDP. Exports include cut and polished diamonds, coloured gemstones, and gold jewellery. Around 65 percent of production comes from small, home‑based workshops, which are bearing the brunt of the collapse in US demand.

The US is also the largest market for Indian seafood exports, accounting for about a third of all exports. With Indian seafood exports to the US already subject to 5.76 percent countervailing duties and 3.96 percent anti-dumping duties, the effective tax on India’s seafood exports to the US is now almost 60 percent, making seafood exports there unviable.  

Despite the Trump administration’s punishing tariffs, the BJP government, and indeed the entire Indian ruling class, remain committed to the reactionary anti-China Indo-US global strategic partnership that has been the foundation of their foreign policy and geo-economic strategy for the past two decades.

On the sidelines of the recent ASEAN summit, India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, signed a new 10-year Defence Framework Agreement (DFA). The agreement expands on that reached in 2015, and is meant to integrate India ever more fully into US military operations throughout the Indo-Pacific. At the signing, Singh boasted that it pointed to the growing “strategic convergence” between the Indian bourgeoisie and US imperialism, while Hegseth, a notorious anti-China war-hawk, hailed the DFA saying, it “advances our defense partnership, a cornerstone for regional stability and deterrence.”

Prospective students hit by cuts to Australian university courses

Leonard Johns

A far-reaching, pro-business restructuring of universities across the country is having a severe impact on the future of prospective students, with growing numbers of school leavers reporting that the courses they had intended to study are not available.

Rally against cuts at Macquarie University, May 7, 2025

Over the past 11 months, some 3,500 jobs have been destroyed at universities across the country, with more sackings slated at many institutions. The offensive, being spearheaded by the federal Labor government through cuts to international student enrolments and the suppression of government funding, is resulting in the elimination of courses and in some instances entire departments.

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reported high schoolers’ university applications being suspended, as the courses they had enrolled in no longer exist.

Interviewee Natasha Lim was hoping to study international relations, earth and environmental science, but said “literally all of my courses got suspended.

“I was pretty annoyed. These are really important courses I believe people should be allowed to partake in. UTS [University of Technology Sydney] is an affordable university, and now people who want to do international relations have to go to a more expensive university like UNSW [University of New South Wales] or USyd [University of Sydney].”

Another high schooler, 17-year-old Neel Erande told the SMH he had applied for a communications and international studies degree at UTS, only to be told by email both his selections were to be suspended.

The cuts are also hitting existing students. In response to a social media post, one commented: “I complete my post grad marketing cert this week and was looking to go into my masters of marketing—with the new cuts I lose 2 of 4 courses worth of credit towards my masters—that’s another 6 months and many thousands of dollars I lose.”

In September, UTS announced that it was cutting some 1,100 subjects, or about a fifth of the total, and was suspending enrolments into them. It is also seeking to eliminate hundreds of jobs, as part of a multi-year restructuring aimed at saving $100 million.

While the course cuts at UTS are particularly sharp, they are part of a broader onslaught.

Eighteen-year-old high schooler Fabian Closuit told the SMH he deferred his offer to study music at Macquarie to take a gap year, only to be told that the course he was set to start in February was being removed. The university recommended he enrol in “criminology,” “arts,” “security studies” or “social services” instead.

Closuit said “I thought it was a joke. I get they are trying to keep students to make money out of me, but I think they are losing all credibility as a learning institution.”

After Macquarie University offered Erande a bachelor of arts/commerce, he said he “was informed that the politics major had been cut and was forced to switch to a bachelor of commerce single degree.”

Erande observed, “It has really made me think of uni as something that is profit-led. There is not as much care for students. The priority isn’t education. They are businesses; they are trying to make money. ” Erande said he “fears more cuts are on the horizon.”

At Macquarie University, a restructuring will eliminate bachelor’s degrees in archaeology, music, education, and ancient languages, while cutting back sociology, ancient history, politics, gender studies, criminology and psychological studies.

The course cuts are bound up with the wave of sackings of academics and administrative staff at universities across the country, hitting virtually every university.

The overhaul is being pushed by the Labor government. It has imposed draconian caps on international student enrolments, upon whose fees the universities are heavily dependent as a result of decades of cuts to public funding.

At the same time, the Albanese government’s continuation of the “Job-ready graduates” program initiated by the previous Liberal-National government sets fees for three-year humanities degrees at up to $50,000, while cutting the funding to universities for delivering them. 

Those who do attend university, despite the cuts, face leaving with a mountain of debt.

As of 2025, the federal government HELP–HECS scheme lends most students up to $126,839 to pay for tuition fees, $13,811 or 12.2 percent more than last year. Graduates repay the debt gradually through the taxation system once they earn $48,361 per year—just above the minimum wage—taking a decade, on average, to repay the full amount.

While student loans do not technically accrue interest, the outstanding debt is indexed to keep up with inflation.

According to Finder, latest figures show total outstanding student debt hit $81.05 billion for 2023–24, a $2.85 billion increase from the year before. Average individual student debt continues to climb, increasing from $26,494 to $27,640 at the end of 2023 and 2024. Some 63 percent of those with student debt were concerned about repayment and 12 percent thought they would never be able to pay their debt.

That has flow-on implications, under conditions of a social crisis and where the housing market is more inflated than ever before. Graduates seeking to purchase a home, for instance, will have to service their student debt, while trying to save the hundreds of thousands of dollars required for a deposit, under conditions where the median house price across Australian cities is now over $1 million.

The consequence is that higher education will increasingly be confined to wealthier layers of the population.

While the assault on courses is broad, there is a definite targeting. Arts and humanities courses are disproportionately affected, as part of an assault on the conception of a well-rounded education, aimed at producing critically-thinking individuals.

Instead, Labor’s “national priorities” for universities are aimed at subordinating them to the immediate employment demands of big business, and to the requirements of the military, amid the development of a war-related economy.

Labor has particularly emphasised the need for university courses geared towards training those who will work in AUKUS-linked projects. AUKUS is the militarist pact with the US and the UK, including Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, aimed at preparing for war against China.

There is growing opposition to the wave of university restructurings, among university staff as well as students.

The campus trade unions, the National Tertiary Education Union and the Community and Public Sector Union are suppressing any fightback, however. At one university after another, the union officials have presented the cuts as the product of poor decisions by individual managements, covering for Labor’s role in spearheading the nationally coordinated offensive against jobs and courses.

The unions have subordinated staff to their negotiations with the managements, and have forced through a series of deals, facilitating the elimination of jobs. In this, the thoroughly corporatised unions, which are aligned with the Labor government itself, effectively function as adjuncts of management.

Zelensky government embroiled in massive corruption scandal

Jason Melanovski

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky talks during the press conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, Aug. 24, 2025. [AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky]

The dictatorial right-wing government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is reeling following the unveiling of a massive $100 million corruption scandal. So far, two cabinet ministers have been forced to resign and a former business partner of Zelensky was sanctioned.

The scandal was first exposed last Monday when the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) announced that a 15-month-long investigation had revealed that several leading members of the Ukrainian government were involved in an embezzlement scheme around Energoatom, the state nuclear company.

Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk and Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko were forced to resign; they had allegedly received kickback payments worth 10 to 15 percent of contract values from contractors building fortifications on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

Other alleged accomplices in the scheme included former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov and Timur Mindich—a close Zelensky associate who is a co-owner of Zelensky’s own former TV studio Kvartal 95, who was reportedly tipped off about the raid and had already fled the country to Israel.

Mindich and his other close business associate, Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, were instrumental in bringing the former comedian Zelensky to power in the 2019 presidential elections and Zelensky even traveled in Mindich’s personal armored car during the campaign. Zelensky also owned a high-end apartment in the same building as Mindich, where NABU investigators discovered a gold-plated bathroom that Mindich had built for himself. That Zelensky himself was completely unaware of Mindich’s massive embezzlement scheme involving ministers in his own government is highly improbable.

In addition to Mindich, former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov is also a well-known Zelensky friend and ally and was accused of receiving over $1.2 million in cash by NABU.

Following the eruption of public outrage over the sheer audacity of the embezzlement, Zelensky quickly moved to throw his former associates under the bus, demanding the resignations of both Halushchenko and Hrynchuk last Wednesday and removing them from the security council.

Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko had originally announced Halushchenko’s “suspension,” which was immediately criticized by Ukraine’s so-called “civil society” organizations, which are largely funded by Western backers. Soon after, Zelensky moved to dismiss Halushchenko.

Zelensky also sanctioned Mindich in a desperate attempt to distance himself from his former business partner and personal friend.

There is significant anxiety within the Ukrainian state and ruling class that the scandal-plagued Zelensky government might fall or lose face to such an extent that it would be unable to continue the NATO-backed proxy war against Russia.

Ukrainian investment banker and political commentator Serhiy Fursa was quoted in the Financial Times as saying, “We cannot afford for the Ukrainian president, for the Ukrainian government, to lose its remnants of legitimacy during the war. Otherwise, we risk losing the state in the same way as during the first world war, when desertion at the front came on top of mass despair and political discord.”

The current scandal has been exacerbated by the fact that just earlier in July, Zelensky—likely aware of the massive embezzlement and robbery endemic to his government—had moved to limit the power of NABU and SAP, leading to the largest protests across the country since the beginning of the NATO-backed proxy war in February 2022.

According to Zelensky, stripping the agency of its independence was necessary to combat “Russian influence.” At the same time, Ukraine’s security services (SBU), aligned with Zelensky, had carried out raids of NABU to supposedly arrest Russian spies.

As a result of both domestic outrage and intervention from its Western backers—which strongly backs NABU as a means to control Ukraine’s domestic political apparatus—Zelensky ultimately was forced to backtrack and withdraw his attempt to take over NABU. But the very types of scandals Zelensky was seeking to head off through his control of NABU have now exploded to shake his government just as Russian forces continue to advance and domestic support for the war has eroded.

Former President Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky’s main political rival and leader of the opposition European Solidarity party, called for the resignation of Zelensky’s government and for opposition leaders to form a coalition government.

“Ukraine has fallen into a dangerous political storm… This growing crisis requires an immediate response and the unification of all healthy forces of society. Throughout our history, in the most difficult times, it was the parliament that took responsibility and stood up for the Constitution and statehood. Today, deputies from different factions have a chance to take a historic step, to stop the chaos that is destroying the country and return a sense of justice to Ukrainians. That is why European Solidarity initiates the resignation of the Cabinet of Ministers. The compromised government must resign, and the parliament must form a new coalition. Which, in turn, will appoint the government—not according to the criteria of personal loyalty or political affiliation, but on the basis of professionalism, patriotism and responsibility. A government capable of confronting the challenges facing the state. The authorities (both the President’s Office and the mono-majority) must bear political responsibility for their appointments,” Poroshenko wrote on the European Solidarity website.

Poroshenko—who continues to visit regularly with Ukraine’s imperialist backers in the EU—has himself been accused in countless corruption investigations and was caught in a corruption scandal in 2019 similar to the one currently facing Zelensky.

Zelensky used fighting “corruption” as a major part of his campaign as a political outsider to defeat Poroshenko, who, in addition to being plagued by scandals, was widely despised for his promotion of right-wing nationalism and militarism.

“Modern politicians are tied to old grudges, nepotism, and business projects, and are incapable of changing Ukraine,” said Zelensky of Poroshenko in 2019.

Following his election, within just the first two years of his presidency, around 30 people connected either to Zelensky’s family or his former comedy group were appointed to high-ranking positions, according to Bihus.Info.

While the corruption scandal is no doubt part of the intense infighting within the Ukrainian state and ruling class, it also has the potential to bring to the fore immense social opposition which has been seething just beneath the surface.

A poll taken over the summer showed that 70 percent of Ukrainians believe that their leaders use the war, which is estimated to have cost hundreds of thousands of lives already, to enrich themselves. The latest revelations starkly confirm what workers have already understood: While the Ukrainian working class continues to die in droves at the front, the highly interconnected Ukrainian ruling class is enriching itself by robbing the state of hundreds of millions in a country where the average monthly salary is just $660. Meanwhile, since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has received about $152 billion in foreign financial aid from its imperialist backers, according to Reuters. Opponents of the war, such as the Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk, have been imprisoned and silenced.

The fact of the matter is that all factions of the Ukrainian oligarchy, which has historically emerged through the outright theft of state assets during the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism, are steeped in criminality. From their standpoint, the war is above all a means to defend their class interests against the working class and an opportunity for further plunder.

The revelations of unabashed theft and self-enrichment by the Ukrainian ruling class and government, in the midst of a mass slaughter that has been falsely portrayed as a war to defend “democracy” and “freedom,” further undermine the legitimacy not only of the war effort but the entire socio-economic system that Zelensky and Poroshenko defend.