Ukraine: Kramatorsk, Bucha and Mariupol, the barbarism of the Russian imperialist invasion

By Oleg Vernyk – Ukrainian Socialist League

The city of Kramatorsk is located in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass region. The train station is an evacuation point for people fleeing the war. On Friday 8, in the morning, about 4,000 were waiting to board trains, mostly elderly people, women and children. It was precisely there that the Russian army shelled. Two missiles killed more than 50 people and wounded about a hundred. There are previous reports showing the use of the same missiles in an attack on the town of Vuhledar. 

The massacre of Bucha

Bucha is a town of 37,000 inhabitants. The Russians took it on February 27 and withdrew on March 31.  When they left, the horror was exposed in the streets. Dozens of civilian corpses were found, executed, handcuffed, buried in mass graves, with signs of torture. The images of the Bucha massacre circled the globe. They will remain engraved in the memory of millions of people as a horror of the Russian invasion.

As in Guernica or Srebrenica

People crying because of the trauma experienced in Bucha gave testimony of what happened. And a video taken from a drone surfaced showing the moment when two armored vehicles shot at a person riding a bicycle. Satellite images had already captured the corpses in the streets. It is no coincidence that the massacre in Bucha is reminiscent of Guernica (Viscaya 1937) and Srebrenica (Bosnia 1995).

Targeting Mariupol

In Mariupol, only 35,000 people managed to leave and approximately 2,500 people have been killed. Some 400,000 people remain in the port city. They no longer have enough food and water. The shelling destroyed almost the entire infrastructure. Despite this, there was no surrender, so Putin’s troops are preparing an offensive to defeat and occupy it.

Crimes against humanity

In all cases Russian separatists and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said that the killings are Ukrainian “provocations” and “stagings”. However, the images and subsequent events ratify the savage Russian military action. What the imperialist forces are doing on Putin’s orders are massacres of civilians. Crimes against humanity are being committed against our brothers.

Cynicism in tears

Faced with the horrors of war, the sincere sensitivity of the peoples to the massacres is growing. At the same time, the cynicism of the Western imperialists and bourgeois governments is multiplying. They cry in front of the cameras, but do not give all the support the refugees need. And they have a long record of looking the other way when massacres take place in Syria, Palestine and other regions of the world; executed by NATO and U.S. missiles.  

We continue to resist

We condemn the massacres and crimes against humanity all over the world, today in Kramatorsk, Bucha and Mariupol. Russian imperialist troops out of our territory. From the Ukrainian Socialist League we are part of the resistance against the invasion, we do not trust NATO and Western imperialism. We call on our Russian class brothers to mobilize against Putin’s regime and, to the workers and peoples of the world, to form a great movement for the No to War as the International Socialist League proposes.