Tag: history

[Mauvais Sang] Gen Z storms Marineford!

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Reproduced via Tridni Valka – Source in French: https://mauvaissang.noblogs.org/post/2025/10/28/la-gen-z-a-lassaut-de-marineford/

Nepal, Morocco, Madagascar, Indonesia, Peru… In recent months and weeks, massive demonstrations, riots, and even regime changes have taken place in various countries around the world, breathing new life into our most fervent hopes!

In Indonesia, growing outrage over the privileges enjoyed by the elite against a backdrop of austerity reached a tipping point when, on August 28, police killed a young man during a protest in Jakarta and then, on August 31, when videos showing parliamentarians dancing after receiving an indecent housing allowance were made public. In the weeks that followed, riots swept across the country, led by the slogan “Indonesia Gelap, Revolusi Dimulai” (“Indonesia is dark, we are starting the revolution”). Regional parliaments were set on fire and ministers’ residences were looted. The terrible repression, which mobilized the police and army, and led to dozens of deaths and disappearances, has achieved its goal of intimidation since… The movement was also unique in that its symbol was the flag of One Piece, a manga about pirates and their thirst for freedom, a symbol that was later taken up in Nepal, Madagascar, and Peru.

In Nepal, the movement, which initially denounced nepotism and the privileges of the ruling caste, was destructive. On September 9, after weeks of clashes in Kathmandu that left more than 70 people dead, protesters stormed the Parliament and the residences of several members of the government, including the Prime Minister’s one, and burned them to the ground! Because you never stop when you’re on a roll, the headquarters of the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist, the ruling party), the CPN (the Maoist opposition, which called on protesters to remain peaceful), and the Nepali Congress were vandalized by rioters, and the Kailali district prison was attacked and set on fire, allowing all prisoners to regain their freedom!

In Morocco, it was the death of eight women after giving birth by Caesarean section in Agadir due to the lack of resources in the Moroccan health sector that sparked the unrest. From the very first days of the protests, the authorities cracked down by arresting or beating up massively the protesters, but the rebels continued to pour into the streets.

Recently, the GenZ 212 collective, one of the movement’s faces, announced that the protests did not challenge the foundations of the royal authority, that they must remain peaceful, and that calls for action would be temporarily suspended following King Mohammed VI’s promises of reform (even though, at the same time, the justice system was handing down sentences of several years in prison to many protesters).

We won’t fall into that trap! The young Moroccans who took to the streets, set them ablaze, destroyed police stations, were shot while trying to storm police stations to seize weapons and ammunition, and injured more than 300 police officers were anything but peaceful and certainly did not have improving public services in mind!

In Madagascar, the demonstrations and calls for strikes began as a result of exasperation caused by water and electricity cuts imposed on the population and they spread to a widespread challenge to the ruling power, while the island is experiencing massive poverty. The authorities reacted as they know so well how to do: tear gas, beatings up, live ammunition… In the days that followed, despite the deaths and the curfew, the movement intensified and massive looting broke out: supermarkets, shops, banks, hotels… everything was targeted, despite calls for calm from democrats!

In Peru, it is also a widespread system of corruption among those in power and new pension reforms that are being denounced, mainly by students. In Lima, demonstrations punctuated by violent clashes with the police, Molotov cocktails, and attempts to storm the Congress have been repeated in recent weeks. On October 10, President Dina Boluarte was removed from office, which is “only one step” according to many of the rebels.

While the explicit demands of these movements refer to social justice, the fight against corruption, or against the mismanagement of public services, we can only see in all these protests a widespread challenging of the living conditions imposed on the exploited of this world. Everywhere, what is being attacked is the State and its bureaucracy, as well as the political class (even those who historically claim to be “revolutionary”, such as the Stalinist substitutes of the various Communist Parties, as in Nepal). What is being attacked is the bourgeoisie that is getting rich on the backs of the exploited. What is being attacked is the misery caused by pitiful wages or forced unemployment, the restrictions and lack of resources, the cops who protect the exploiters with batons and guns, the lack of future prospects in this shitty world.

We can also detect an anti-political force that partly underlies these demonstrations. In several of these movements, as in Nepal, it was the world of politicians in general, of all political persuasions, that was attacked for a time. It was the widespread enrichment of all the bourgeois and leaders that was called into question, as evidenced by the attacks on Parliament and the homes of parliamentarians. However, we can see that the siren calls of democracy and their endless promises of reform, appeasement, and judicial repression of former decision-makers are, unfortunately, still working just as well as ever. In Nepal, a new Prime Minister was chosen on Discord (which had been a decisive tool in the movement) after the fall of the government; in Morocco, the reforms promised by the king put the movement on hold; in Indonesia, the movement has ended while waiting for the promised changes; in Madagascar, a technocrat has been appointed Prime Minister; and in Peru, the opposition has taken advantage of the situation to remove the president from office, surely waiting to take her place and rule in turn…

Capitalism and the State, like snakes that shed their skin but never die, know how to constantly reinvent themselves in order to recuperate the most fervent hopes and integrate them. We must at all costs ask ourselves why and how democracy so easily co-opt revolts that are so offensive in material terms and can restore another authority that will change nothing.

Incidentally, it is surprising that in France, there is more interest in careerist deputies on show in the media than in people who attack their own deputies.

From Indonesia and Nepal to everywhere else, long live the revolt against the old world!

English translation: The Friends of the Class War

Indonesia, for the Maximal Program!

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From our comrades at Tridni Valka – Original text https://seenothing.noblogs.org/2025/09/15/indonesia-for-the-maximal-program

Statement of Solidarity

Marxist Forum — Metro Manila
7 September 2025

Although part of a long wave of mass urban mobilizations spanning years, the wild series of uprisings in Indonesia today began on the 25th of August, when students and workers led demonstrations against proposed additional housing allowances for parliament members, raising their salaries 10 times higher than the national minimum wage of the Indonesian working class. Parliamentary allowances are only the latest in Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s ferocious attacks on the working class, aided by creeping militarization and guided by the diktat of neoliberal austerity: cutting spending worth trillions of rupiah on education, welfare, and public health. Since Thursday of August 28th, with the murder of Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old rideshare motorbike driver—run over by an armored military vehicle commandeered by Jakarta police to crush the uprising—we have only seen the acceleration of spreading protests throughout the islands, and the escalation of violence and anger amid the protesters, with a number of politicians’ assets looted and burned to the ground—including, according to Perhimpunan Merdeka (Freedom Association), about half-a-dozen regional offices of the House of Representatives.

On the ground, several of the groups and individuals involved have been among the anarchists and communists, insurrectionaries notwithstanding, organized and otherwise. Demands have been made by various groups, featuring in particular two: Perhimpunan Merderka’s (PM; Freedom Association) demand to abolish the unitary government in favor of direct democracy through “People’s Councils”, and Perhimpunan Sosialis Revolusioner’s (PSR; Revolutionary Socialist Association) call for the workers to take the fight to the factories and workplaces to form and coordinate strike committees and worker’s councils.

In light of recent reports of discouragement, deescalation, and a generalizing urge to retreat, Marxist Forum calls on our anarchist and communist Indonesian comrades to push for a maximalist program within the assemblies and coordinating councils. This entails the organization of self-defense militias—for every worker, a rifle; rearrangement of production away from the capitalists and towards social appropriation, sustaining the rebellions and keeping the workers from going back to work; coordinating with workers of key industries to halt production and operations such as in ports and airfreight, shutting down the national economy; seizing the telecommunication and data centers to facilitate continuous in-flow of information within and with-out of the country, and;

Above all, to RESIST ANY AND ALL ATTEMPTS AT NEGOTIATION. Hijack the union leaderships, expel the middlemen and negotiators of labor, stand against the peace-makers who wish to restore the reproduction of the status quo, resist by any means necessary the cooptation of the rebellions for vested political interests by groups who wish to delimit the Indonesian proletariat’s class anger and make a turn towards liberal pacifism and passivity. The responsibility of the most conscious and organized elements of the rebellions, without taking ownership of the movement and fighting the tendency to lag behind the proletariat in rebellion, is to push the class to advance wherever it lags. The anarchists and communists should not be afraid to go past the proletariat, wherever it is reluctant to advance, and make the class conscious of where it is going and what needs to be done to get there!

The class, while still acting as a class, is now in the political arena. To generalize the rebellions into a full insurrection, it is ever-necessary to imbue the sites of struggle with a clear communising direction and go past the economic and political, to directly and immediately appropriate the social. Comrades, the Indonesian proletariat is on the brink of something potentially bigger than all of us. To take the next step, the class must be compelled to intervene into history directly and begin the conscious communisation of Indonesian society.

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY; THERE CAN BE NO COMPROMISE.

Panjang umur Revolusi!

CAMPAIGN OF SOLIDARITY WITH UKRAINIAN CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS AND DESERTERS

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We are not criminals. We are people. Men and women who refused to become casualties of the war of two regimes. We refuse to be held hostage by political contracts and military plans. The Ukrainian government is currently preparing Law No. 13673, which criminalises everyone who has escaped the mobilisation. Anyone who refuses to return to the trenches faces a risk of imprisonment, deportation, and a forceful conscription into the army.

This law entails: 

• mass criminalisation of deserters and conscientious objectors,

• automatic placement into registers,

• collaboration of secret services and courts,

• threat of extradition back to Ukraine.

• This is not a defence of freedom – it is its end.

Ukrainian deserters and conscientious objectors of military service need our solidarity. Their struggle is also our fight for:

• a right to live,  

• a right to not be sent to a battlefront,

• a right to refuse the state and its war.

Therefore, we urge you:

📢 Let’s flood Ukrainian embassies and consulates with protest letters, petitions, emails, phone calls, and faxes. (See the sample of protest letter at the bottom of the article)

📢 Sign an online petition (the link will be posted here: https://www.petice.com/…ku)

📢 Let’s organise public solidarity events in front of Ukrainian embassies and during the visits of Ukrainian politicians in your country.

📢 Download the posters and flyers and hand them out to your Ukrainian colleagues and neighbours – let them know that they should not return to Ukraine and that we approve of their decision not to fight. (The PDF poster is available to download at the bottom of the article, or you can get it by contacting us)

📢 Express your support to Ukrainian men and their families who have left their country so that they would avoid mobilisation and recruitment into war (In Czechia, the estimate is about 150 000 men, in Slovakia it is about 50 000. In the entire EU it concerns approximately 750-800 000 people!)

📢 Translate the appeal into other languages and organise a similar campaign in your country. Keep us informed!

📢 Let’s stand on the side of those who say NO to militarism and war.

Each day of silence is a step further to deserters being deprived of their future. But together we can be the voice that cannot be silenced.

Glory to the deserters! Glory to conscientious objectors!

No to war – never, nowhere.

Anti-militarist journal DEZERTÉR

contact: dezerter@riseup.net

LETTER OF PROTEST SAMPLE

Send a letter and/or email to Ukrainian embassies and consulates in your country. Use both options to increase the pressure.

Subject: A protest against criminalisation of Ukrainian conscientious objectors and deserters

Dear Ambassador,

We are addressing you on behalf of the citizens of [your country] who disapprove of the war and who stand on the side of human dignity. It is with great concern that we observe the Ukrainian government preparing and promoting repressive measures in the form of Law No. 13673, directed against those who refused to be drawn into war. The draft of such laws criminalising conscientious objectors of military service and deserters is an attack on basic human rights.

We reject the idea of sacrificing human lives in an endless war conflict. The people who decided to leave Ukraine in order not to kill or die are not criminals. They are the people who had the courage to say NO to the war.

We ask you to convey our concerns and dissent to the Government of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Parliament, with a demand for:

1. An immediate halt to the preparation of the laws that threaten conscientious objectors and deserters, specifically Law No. 13673.

2. Respecting the right to refuse military service as guaranteed by the International human rights treaties.

3. Ensuring the protection of those who refused the war – whether in Ukraine or abroad. 

We perceive the solidarity with Ukraine as solidarity with its ordinary working people who want to live in peace – not as a support of militarism and repression.

Sincerely,

[Your signature]

Original article/post: https://dezerter.noblogs.org/post/2025/10/02/campaign-of-solidarity-with-ukrainian-conscientious-objectors-and-deserters

Farce followed by Vicious Oppression and Further Exploitation?  Or Class Wide Liberation?

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Report from Newcastle upon Tyne and Hull, 27th Oct

A mass of flag waving was threatened to descend upon the people of Newcastle last Saturday, as thousands upon thousands were promised to be led / manipulated by xenophobic nativists.

This claim, through the convergence of UKIP, Advance UK and the so-called ‘Great British National Protest’, didn’t seem as quite as ridiculous as past such threats.  For the far right has been buoyed up nationally by a number of recent governments, hell bent determined to be an enabling force at every turn.  While the likes of the very wealthy, journalists and social media, endlessly platform their claimed grievances and “othering” of members of our class.

The recent result, a very large and concerning turnout in London, beamed into our homes for all to see and to be nauseatingly endured by that city’s residents. 

Concurrently, there still is the flying of seemingly endless daft bits of material on a variety of streets up and down the country but mostly around roundabouts going nowhere.  Then there’s the spraying of graffiti, mostly on bins for dog waste, if local experience is anything to go by.  All this together provides a further intimidating feel for working class communities, both locally and wider afield.  Dog shit politics, anyone?

However, in Newcastle, as midday arrived, rumours / excuses(?) spread of “coaches breaking down”, one wannabe leader living it up, lounging about on the continent – yet again, another failed one / “actor” turning up desperately trying to appear relevant, and a march planned ironically in the middle of a boat race; maybe all was not as could have been or as feared?

In the end, on the day, the far right mustered a paltry 300 in the Toon, compared to the counter demonstration’s number of around 12 to 15X that.  Only stopped from being run out of the city by numerous lines of uniformed agents of the state, the far right was reduced to trying to claim “victory” by carrying out a mini march in undercover of near darkness as their main planned one was stopped, countered, re-routed and countered again, several times over.

Meanwhile, a number of those on the counter in Newcastle, shouted about the rightists, “Not being even able to stop a boat race!”   This too embarrassed smiles and nervous laughter from some of the less hardcore, probably more confused younger ones with national flags?  Whilst others on the counter demonstration asked the nationalists where they thought their flags were made and didn’t that show the whole thing to be at best, ridiculous?

Then, on the day, there were a handful of Kippers with religious crosses seemingly knocked off from some crap car boot sale around the MAGA movement in the US.  More nationalists, with endless flags, engaged in strangely dull monotone speeches, lacking both wit and intonation, polluting the aural experience for those just out an about in town.  One of these Tannoy based characters is known for being detained recently, for, “nutting their own side”.  To top it all, spectators of the boat race had joined in the opposition, telling the wannabe marchers to “piss off”, for disrupting their viewing pleasure of the Tyne. 

Much to the relief of many on Tyneside, the whole thing appeared at times to be pure farce!

Yet not only were several people arrested on the counter demonstration in Newcastle, some for apparently not telepathically understanding orders to disperse but the underlying pressures, locally and beyond, remain intensely difficult.

This is shown by those endless vitriolic attacks upon refugees by both government and national commentators throughout the country.  It was also shown locally by the fact that those owning the venue that eventually hosted the Advance UK launch near the Quayside by the Tyne, also own the refugee hotel near the city centre that has been subject to demonstrations by the far right and naive, week after week after week.  Where there’s muck and dirty dealings, there’s brass alright for those with capital, in this system.

Locally through to internationally, years of attacks upon our class, crises in capitalism, atomisation, quietism on the class struggle front, immiseration / flatlining or even falling living standards, have enabled a vacuum and space to appear for the hard and far right to exploit.

Having no scruples about empowering a divide and rule agenda to deflect from not offering an optimistic future, state and capital have opened up a chasm to be occupied by those who even appeared to want a 21st century style nation-wide pogrom against refugees last year, as decaying occupied hotels were set alight.

This all then further fuelled by social media, their billionaire owners and ever tweaked algorithms, so the forces of intense reaction have hit new heights – both electorally and also now as a (re)emerged street force, based on nativism, nationalism and bitter xenophobia.  Throughout the UK, continental Europe and beyond, this appears the case. On the day however, the situation in Newcastle offered some very welcome optimism and the opportunity to catch up with and stand with comrades and our wider community.  It provided at least, that collective sigh of relief.

This situation though will likely be only temporary.  As comrades on the same day in Hull reported, the reality, countrywide, is variable at best.

For in Hull, the counter gathering was unfortunately outnumbered as a far-right rally hit the city.   Around 100 far right gathered although accurate figures were difficult to assess, as the area also had a large number of the public around, wondering what all the fuss was about?

The static counter demo by Stand Up To Racism had around 30 people.  Despite this, 6 comrades who refused to join the static counter demo stood firm whilst also mingling with the far right and public, chatting to some people nominally on “the other side”, to try to get them to peel away.  This then, those who were on the edges of the right rally and who were perhaps still able to question what is happening and see through how they are being used and manipulated?!  The far-right stewards (feeling important in the high-vis waistcoats) were not happy with this and kept rushing over to try and bully both our comrades and those they were talking too.

It is one thing to stand there with confidence as you vastly outnumber the opposition, it is quite another to try and positively confront the situation in your local area, when you are clearly outnumbered yourselves.

As both last weekend and recent events throughout the country and beyond have clearly shown, as a class we cannot rely on those in power, nor on our current socio-economic system, to offer us any solution.  In fact, they and this current system fuel the attacks we face.

Let’s face it, the far right internationally are fake rebels and represent literally a defence mechanism for capital and state in times of crises.  Fantasies about liberal democracy being any kind of answer to this, are clearly that, fantasies!

To effectively confront and resist, we must unify as a class, locally and internationally.  We must stand with our communities, especially those on the sharp end of being attacked and “othered”.  We need to meet, discuss and stand with comrades and potential comrades, and help enable where we can, others in our class to resist a disastrous agenda.

It is a massive task but still not an impossible one.  Whilst we may appear small and relatively weak at the present time, the struggle can take twists and turns, and our class can still show impressive determination in the face of those who dream of further oppressing us. 

Wherever we find ourselves, we must collectively turn the tables now by organising, discussing, meeting, and standing firm on a definite anti-capitalist, internationalist basis.  It is only with the ending of capitalism and state internationally, that the threat of the far right will be ended and our prosperity and even existence ensured.

Locally, nationally and internationally, we must engage with offering a far more optimistic future, where we are able class wide, to challenge exploitation, resist manipulation and confidently stand together in solidarity; stand for a world of liberty and equality. 

A failure to do so hardly bears thinking about!

Article by Bloque-Ade

The Downfall of a Right Charlie

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Hyperbole around the assassination of the right wing Christian fundamentalist agitator Charlie James Kirk has made the removal of a footnote to the current populist chaos seem bigger than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps in an embryonic form, this demonstrates the endemic unease about the ripples across our current social fabric.

As if waiting for the brink of some fascist apocalypse, this has been widely described as a “Reichstag” moment – a reference to the murky ignition of the German parliament building in 1933 that acted as the pretext for the Nazis rolling out the seizure of power via democratic Parliamentary instruments.

The rest, as they say being history.  In this case, there is no replay.  This is now and the lessons are not the product of cosplay voyeurism but a pulsing Zeitgeist cautionary tale.  Whatever the motivation turns out to be, it inevitably feeds into the right’s strategy of tension to divide and rule.

The myth about Kirk at the moment is that he was speaking his beliefs and martyred on the crucible of free speech for doing so.  This fascist fantasy / liberal apologia is not the case, though it uncomfortably demonstrates the uneasy alliance between these two capitalist expressions.

He’s been speaking his beliefs for 13 years.  A juvenile debating school tirade of misogyny, racism, xenophobia and toxic masculinity masquerading as speaking truth to power.  His targets, as those of the ideological populist Right he represents, are the most marginalised, excluded and vulnerable in US society.  The diasporas of an atomised working class. 

His hate speech has moved beyond the expression of his belief.  Recently he’s been articulating, validating and fuelling the policy of social violence against minorities currently being enacted in the United States.

This makes Kirk not a dystopian visionary to disagree with, but a fascist street fighter.  Trump’s Horst Wessel, an extinguished nazi thug lionised to inspire others. 

His death’s utility to the reactionary project has been used with immediate effect – despite the lack of clarity re. motivation.  His image used as a central rallying theme to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s “Unite  the Kingdom” mobilisation of the right, the ignorant and the inarticulately frustrated on the streets of London.

Alarmingly attracting in excess of 100,000 people, most feeling understandably a great sense of disenfranchisement in the current era, they were addressed and incited by the world’s richest man, multi billionaire Elon Musk.

Channeling a chilling message through the convicted violent thug convening the rally, Musk said:  “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you…you either fight back or you die.”  A warning perhaps to the meagre 5,000 to 10,000 counter demonstrators from ‘Stand Up to Racism’.

And where is the Labour government’s real anxiety about this demonstration? Where do they stand on the assault on minorities and the dispossessed? Why is it that they felt it necessary to deploy new dystopian facial recognition technology for the Notting Hill Carnival yet not for the largest far right demonstration in British history?

The liberals and their Trotskyoid-Leninite allies in Stand up to Racism want you to think this is a choice between totalitarianism and democracy.  Your rights versus ‘their’ dictatorship.  This is a lie.  Liberal democracy took us to war and both want to crush us for power and profit.  Two cheeks of the same arse!

Liberalism like Fascism wants and needs capitalism, having throughout history betrayed the working class if capitalism was under threat, (from Spain 1936 to the other 9/11 – the anniversary of Pinochet’s US sponsored militarised junta/fascist coup in Chile 1973, for example).

It is not the fascists (yet) locking us up for protesting genocide and their warfare state but a Labour government.  This, the party of partition, strike breaking, numerous regressive immigration acts and the atom bomb.  Our enemy and our focus is capital and state in all their forms and their relentless drive to war, be the general’s democrats or fascists.

The rise of the right at the moment measures the scale of the challenge to a weakened and as yet, fragmented working class.  A weakness used for exploiting and manipulating fear and insecurity to preserve the agenda of the warfare state and its lust for profit. 

Ultimately, only class unity through class struggle can put an end to the abuse of the far right and our inevitable annihilation at the hands of the warfare state – whatever its political hue.

While we may at times have nostalgia for the days gone by when generals, presidents, Kings and Parliaments would genuinely fear the retribution of ardent members of our class, the actions of one cannot replace the action of us all.

As revolutionists we know that demonstrative acts of propaganda by deed are no substitute for the mass action of a revolutionary working class.   Changing the faces of the tyranny in power changes nothing and can easily reduce us to mere onlookers and passivity.  Yet that does not mean that we hypocritically condemn. 

We don’t slate our class; those exploited, repressed and now sometimes seriously living in fear of being targeted by violent nativist xenophobes, if they raise a smile when they see it as one of the bastards getting it.  For whatever reason transpires.

Article by Dreyfus

Health poverty is the challenge; Labour is the disability!

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‘Two-Tier Kier’ is no longer a smear following the compromise made with his back benchers to only do over one section of disabled people in the UK.

Like some inverse promo for loan deals or Internet packages, the government will lay off existing disability claims in exchange for duffing up people with the new ones.    ‘Get it while it lasts – new customers only.’  *Although a relevant change of circumstances such as a change in your condition classes you as a “new claim” and therefore under the new rules.

Despite it being only five years since the worst global pandemic in a century affected half the UK population killing quarter of 1 million, the government proclaimed its surprise that the numbers of people with long-term health issues have increased at all since 2020. Another example of them paying zero attention to people they would rather clap than pay during the pandemic.

That fatigue, respiratory issues and depression are running riot apparently has no link to what an ill-prepared society and our class had to survive under their watch. 

That the scale of benefits is so high, if nothing else, tells us what an unhealthy ‘shitpit’ surviving capitalism is. Ironically, maybe only a Labour government masquerading as the people’s friend could carry out such an assault on such vulnerable groups and hope to get away with it.

The financial reasoning of such decisions is of no interest to us as revolutionists. The well-being of our class versus the protection of the interests of the rich and their wars is always a political decision and, as such, we find no justification ever in the latter outcome. Democracy serves us no better than dictatorship on this.

It is however another irony that a decision driven by the desire to send us to war and increase the manufacture of disability is to be funded by the starving of the existing disabled communities.

We saw such a strategy fail already in the plan to cut winter fuel payments.  While at first glance significantly different demographics, there are some striking similarities: Both ‘passive’ recipients of hard fought for state benefits – though now deemed less entitled; both largely seen as passive politically – physically limited and without economic muscle.  Consequently, both are not just seen as vulnerable but beatable. 

What the state failed to notice is that elder people and people with disabilities are not discreet entities like trans people, migrants, or asylum seekers, but diversely dispersed throughout every house and community in the country. Embedded enough for every sinew of our class to scream no!

That such opposition to injustice can be seen and shared on such a widespread level needs extension to those truly vulnerable communities made invisible by prejudice. The lesson of the response to disability and the elder community should be extended to every section of our class because we are all targets for elimination to facilitate and finance the coming war.

Division is diversion! Labour didn’t invent that.  The state requires all its political representatives to divide our class in whatever way it can to divert us from seeing the importance of our unity in our struggle against it. 

At times it tries to get us to participate in this by ‘othering’ the other dispossessed of our class, on race, gender, origin, sexuality etc.  Each time we fall for this ruse we widen the opening of the avenue of attack back to the main targets of class and vulnerability in all its diverse forms again. 

Racism breeds attack on disability, disability discrimination breeds attack on our class made workless by capitalism, et cetera.  The cycle of division and defeat begins and ends with the ‘isms’ and the targeting of difference.

The partial defeat of Labour in power was led by activist mobilisation and opposition of our class. The scale was small but indicative of potential. To upscale we need to link struggles of one community with another and identify the ultimate challenges that confront us – growing austerity and impoverishment to meet the war aims of the state’s imperial ambition. 

Hunger and austerity are about war and our opposition must oppose war with the energy it refuses division and poverty.  Resistance, survival and victory are both the right and obligation of our class.  It is our necessity not just to survive from day to day but to abolish an economic class system that offers us no better way of survival. 

The class struggle is the peace movement, and victory on the Homefront is its defeat of their plans for war!

Article by Dreyfus

Statement from the Anarchist Front of Iran and Afghanistan condemning state wars

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We, the anarchist front of Iran and Afghanistan, reaffirm our unshakable and principled position:

Every war – on every scale and on every excuse – initiated or sustained by states, must be unequivocally condemned.

Countries, regardless of their shape or appearance, use war as a tool for survival and control. And in this process, the lives, dignity and future of ordinary people are trampled under their feet.

At a time when the world is once again plagued by violence, bombs, death, displacement, and insecurity, we insist on this ongoing truth: the real victims of war are always the people—not the countries, not ideologies, not borders.

Our fight, as always, is not for the redistribution of power among the elites, but against the institution of the state itself and all forms of organized control.

We stand in solidarity – carefully and decisively – alongside the people of Iran, Afghanistan and the wider region.

What we are witnessing today is, on the one hand, the blatant crimes of the Israeli regime, targeting civilians in Gaza and elsewhere with wild cruelty. On the other hand, we see the Islamic Republic of Iran manipulating public fear, playing geopolitical games at the cost of the lives of Iranians, and imposing the burden of war on society.

We see the Islamic Republic not only as the outbreak of a regional war, but as part of a global chain of control and oppression – a regime that has for decades been attacking the Iranian people with censorship, poverty, imprisonment, torture and execution, and recklessly endangering millions through military provocations.

While we condemn the atrocities of the Zionist regime in the harshest terms, we also state that the struggle against the Islamic Republic is part of our broader struggle against all states and structures of control – a struggle that will continue.

We fight for a world without borders, without countries, without armies or authorities – a world in which humanity, life and freedom are at the center. Our main war has always been the war against political authority, totalitarianism and the state itself.

Iran and Afghanistan anarchist front

June 13, 2025

For the creation of a global network of revolutionary anarchists and anti-Leninist communists!

anarcomnet

We reproduce the article from Tridni Valka from their blog CLASS WAR see link at the end

We publish here a text from the German-speaking group AST (Anti-political Social-revolutionary Tendency) that we translated into English and French. Our overall assessment is that we appreciate the militant efforts of these comrades, especially when it comes to revolutionary defeatist action, i.e. the struggle against capitalist war and peace.

There are, however, unresolved points of disagreement in their contributions, particularly on the all-too-famous “question of the party” and its corollary “the transition period”, the question of the State in general and the capitalist State in particular, and not to mention the tricky issue of the very essence of democracy. For communists, the latter can only be grasped as the negation in action of class antagonism (and its revolutionary overcoming) as well as their merging into a national (re)conciliatory entity called “the people” – whether “sovereign” and voting, or under the yoke of a “dictator” or a one-party system, is of little importance. It’s clear that the dividing line is not between “democracy” and “dictatorship”, but between revolution and counter-revolution, between the abolition of capitalist social relations and their consolidation, even if it means painting them red, or even red and black. Fascist or anti-fascist, democracy is always the dictatorship of capital.

In the present text, the AST comrades elaborate in abundance their critique of “the party”, which they too quickly equate with the Leninist party, the Bolshevik party… When criticizing what they call “Party Marxism” (Parteimarxismus), what we see as to be particularly targeted are in fact “the builders of parties and internationals”, the “bearers of consciousness for the class”, this “socialist consciousness [that] is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously” (Kautsky quoted by Lenin in “What is to be done?”).

But more generally, and beyond the terms and expressions used, we can see here a first disagreement with the comrades of AST about the organization of the struggle of the proletariat, which emerges spontaneously from the fertile soil of capitalist social relations, which necessarily asserts itself as a force, as a full energy, and which must bring down any materialization of the social dictatorship of the value, commodity, money, i.e. of Capital and its State. This social force, this destructive energy of “the existing” which destroys our humanity, it’s the proletariat which gets organized as a class (against all classes and for their definitive abolition!), which gets organized as a party (against all parties and for their as well definitive abolition!), which gets organized as a party that is not a party “in the traditional sense of the term” (as the comrades of the KAPD already affirmed over a century ago), but that is in practice an anti-class, an anti-party!!!!

The proletarian revolution has nothing in common with the political “revolutions” of the bourgeoisie. So, the organization of the proletariat as a party has nothing in common with bourgeois political parties and especially not with the Leninist conception of the party. What we refer to is the distinction between the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of Anarchy, of socialism, of communism. (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)

The proletariat organized as a party does not aspire to democratically conquer power but, on the contrary, arises from the imperious necessity to liquidate this power, this democracy and everything which separates the proletariat from its humanity, from its Gemeinwesen.

There was a time, in the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th, when the formula of the proletariat organizing itself as a class, and therefore as a party, was very well assimilated into the international discussion. It wasn’t a problem for any sincere militant of our class, even among those who claimed the Black Flag of Anarchy. Among the most militant of them, Malatesta, for example, openly referred to the “anarchist party”: “By anarchist party we mean the ensemble of those who are out to help make anarchy a reality and who therefore need to set themselves a target to achieve and a path to follow”. Or in another way thirty years later he was persisting and signing: “We anarchists can all say that we are of the same party, if by the word ‘party’ we mean all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies.”

Class and party are not two different historic entities which should be separately defined only to form a relationship later. On the contrary, they are the distinct expressions of one and the same historic being: Communism. The party is the communist movement constituted as an international force, the organization of the revolutionary class which will bring about communism, arising spontaneously and developing on the basis of a community of interests and perspectives, a real community of proletarian struggle.

This tendency towards the worldwide organization of the proletariat, towards its programmatical affirmation and its organic centralization confronts all the forces and ideologies of the counter-revolution.

Or in other words, we are partisans of the revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat, that is, of the “historical party” of the world communist revolution, which springs up spontaneously from the soil of bourgeois society and has nothing to do with self-proclaimed vanguardism. The self-organization of the proletariat, class independence, and direct action are inseparable and mean struggling without intermediaries or representatives; that is, struggling outside and against unions, parties, elections, parliaments, bourgeois legality, etc.

Considering that, when the proletariat rises up and shakes the capitalist order, the right and left wings of Capital unite into one single party against it, that is, “the party of democracy”; in return, the “historical party” of the revolutionary proletariat is a party against democracy, that is, against the social dictatorship of Capital and its State over the proletariat.

The “historical party” is not a formal party in the “traditional” sense, or a State like the Leninist parties wrongly called “communist”. But it is a party of action which, although it needs to structure itself in order to organize revolutionary tasks, goes far beyond formal aspects. It is the proletariat itself that organically organizes and acts as a revolutionary class. It is the real movement that terminates and overcomes the present state of things. It is the party of communism and anarchy against the party of democracy. It is the revolutionary self-organization of the proletariat in action.

A second disagreement also appears clearly in the point 2 “For the revolutionary destruction of all States”. The proletariat in struggle confronts all the organized forms of the capitalist State, which imposes and realizes the social dictatorship of the value valorizing itself through wage labor, exchange, world market, money… But against this reality, our class must organize, structure and impose its world dictatorship of human needs against Capital and revolutionary terror against bourgeois forces, and this process will not be achieved by simply erasing words and expressions that might seem awkward. This is somewhat clumsily expressed in the AST text: “In the world revolution there will therefore be classless and stateless communities as well as capitalist States”. But they fail to see how they confront each other in a life-and-death struggle…

The proletarian dictatorship means abolishment of existing social relations: abolition of wage labor, abolition of useless professions and productions, elimination of exchange relations from all aspects of our lives, abolition of economy and production for profit and subordination of all productive forces to human needs and needs of the world revolution, disappearance of the difference between work and leisure, city and countryside and all other separations, violent destruction of the State and its replacing with organs of proletarian revolutionary self-organization, all of that which the triumph of the revolution turns into a global human community. Through this historical revolutionary process, the proletariat (as last existing class) abolishes itself and thus the whole class society and fully develops worldwide human community.

The dictatorship of the proletariat thus means the violent abolition of wage labor, abolition of the capitalist mode of production and all the social relations it reproduces. It is necessarily violent, repressive and despotic as well as subversive process that uproots the very social fabric of capitalist reality. It directly and immediately imposes the satisfaction of our human needs, which we are dispossessed from under capitalism by our very role as a class, whose labor power is exploited and whose products of labor are alienated from us.

There will be a violent insurrection against the State, in which the proletariat will seize the means of production and the infrastructures of communication and distribution, and violently attack and overthrow the centers of State power. Then the proletariat will expropriate factories and land to produce for the direct satisfaction of its needs, rather than for the profit of capitalists. Proletarians in uniform will turn their weapons against their own generals, stop fighting the capitalists’ wars, loot weapons depots and share them with the rest of the proletariat, and together, they will release prisoners and storm the centers of power. The capitalist State will be attacked from all sides and actively repressed and subverted by our class violence. Not only the government and the forces of repression, but also the State as a totality, as a system of capitalist social relations – i.e. trade unions, citizenship, faith, family, education, etc. – will be absorbed into the maelstrom of the revolutionary abolition of the existing. This process, which we call the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the transition period between capitalism and fully-achieved communism, is by no means embodied in “apparatuses of violence separate from the society”, as the AST text assumes, but rather as a dialectical unity between the struggling proletarian class and its most far-sighted leading elements, whose motricity, if not a guarantee of the revolution’s success, at least pushes it to its ultimate consequences.

Let’s be clear, this can only be achieved by extending the revolution worldwide, and all human activity must be subordinated to this goal. There’s no such thing as “socialism in one country” (or group of countries), as the Bolsheviks/Leninists of all kinds claim (including even the libertarians who drool with admiration over the “Rojava Revolution”, the Zapatista “Free Communes” or “Free Palestine”, ad nauseam) – on the contrary, it’s an absolutely counter-revolutionary position! The concept of “socialism in one country” was nothing but a tool to enable and justify the strengthening of capital’s dictatorship over the proletariat in Russia at the hands of the Bolshevik party and its policies.

In order to realize the organized activity of the society up to the achievement of communism, the proletarian revolution must violently destroy all the institutions and apparatuses of the counter-revolution which seek to maintain the dictatorship of value against human needs. We must insist on this point – it means the active suppression of wage labor, of exchange (trade), of any form of regional or local autonomy that could become the basis of future nationalist reaction, of freedom of expression and association for counter-revolutionary forces…

But to come back to the AST’s text, may the few and other points of disagreement we emphasized not spoil the pleasure of sharing internationally and submitting for collective criticism this contribution by comrades who, with strengths and weaknesses (as any revolutionary internationalist militant structure developing under the black sun of capital), are trying to outline and affirm the program of communism and the direct action of the proletariat in struggle. And in this sense, the development/consolidation of our world proletarian community of struggle, to which the present text contributes, beyond the division into ideological families, seems to us more than necessary, and indeed inescapable!

Have a good reading!

CW.

Link to the AST article: https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/ast-for-the-creation-of-a-global-network-of-revolutionary-anarchists-and-anti-leninist-communists/

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party and “democratic confederalism”: the end of a farce

anarcomnet

Taken from the translated article via KPAC/Cras

After 25 years in prison, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan decides to bring down the curtain and dissolve his party. The party was founded in 1984 on the basis of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, but after its leader read Murray Bookchin in prison, it declared itself a “democratic confederalist” party, offering a very peculiar reinterpretation of Bookchin’s ideas as a mixture of Leninism and social democracy with feminist and ecological discourse, all against the backdrop of the cult of personality of the leader.

The PKK actually ran in Turkey’s parliamentary elections a few years ago and won several seats, but because it did not lay down its arms, Erdogan’s government classified it as a “terrorist organization” and it became illegal again.

At the same time, several political shifts have emerged in recent years that could affect the legal status of Ocalan (sentenced to life imprisonment). In October 2024, Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party and a key ally of President Erdoğan, suggested that Öcalan’s sentence could be reviewed if the PKK laid down its arms. Later in February 2025, Ocalan called on the PKK to dissolve itself and give up the armed struggle, prompting the group to declare a ceasefire and announce its future dissolution, which finally happened a few days ago.

According to its recent 12th Congress, the PKK has “destroyed the policy of denial and destruction imposed” on Turkey’s Kurdish population and “brought the Kurdish question to a point where it can be resolved through democratic politics, thus fulfilling its historical mission.” Without a doubt, the only thing that can resolve this is for the former PKK leaders to enter the Turkish parliament, as they have always planned, as part of new political parties free from the historical burden of the PKK. Despite his more or less straightforward statements, Ocalan eventually conceded defeat and is positioning himself as a future social democratic leader after his apparently negotiated release. We will soon see him at the head of a new party. Who knows whether he will again stick to his particular interpretation of Bookchin’s ideas, hoping they will bear fruit, or perhaps take a more traditional position, this time closer to European social democracy.

Despite the disastrous and bitter historical experience of anarchism mixing with movements, trade unions and political parties that put “national liberation” above social revolution, today, in the twenty-first century, many anarchists join such movements, which inevitably end up betrayed in some parliament, begging for a place in power. A position, this time closer to European social democracy.

Let’s not let ourselves be distracted any further. A true anarchist movement is one that openly advocates social revolution above all else, including the “liberation” of any “people” or “nation,” simply because any “national liberation” (even if cloaked in feminist or environmentalist garb) is nothing more than a deception whose goal is to replace one government with another, one oppressor and exploiter with another, deceiving us with promises of “becoming one of us.” Only a social revolution that destroys the government and establishes anarchist communism from the bottom up, organized in free communes, can achieve the liberation of the peoples. And no political party will ever achieve that, even if it calls itself “democratic confederalist.”

Full KPAC/Cras article – https://aitrus.info/node/6310

Original Spanish article – https://bibliotecadigitalbdela.blogspot.com/2025/05/se-cae-la-farsa-del-confederalismo.html

War resistance in Ukraine amidst the hype about peace talks

anarcomnet

“By refusing to be controlled, you take control of your life.” Archival poster from early 2013

From our comrades assembly.org.ua

It is already officially recognized that after the law on partial decriminalization of unauthorized leaving a military unit (SZCh in Ukrainian) and desertion came into force, desertions from the army of Ukraine have increased significantly. “I spoke with our elite units, both with the Airborne Assault Forces and with the Marines: the number of SZCh increased by 60%,” said Roman Kostenko, secretary of the parliamentary defense committee, at the end of January. Seeing that the ground is slipping from under its feet, the Ukrainian state is trying to take punitive measures.

We recently wrote about the post of war correspondent Yury Butusov on December 31 which received a wide resonance in Ukraine. In the post, Butusov described how 1,700 people fled from the 155th Mechanized Brigade “Anna of Kyiv” before the first shot was fired. By the time it was sent to France, there were already 935 fugitives. In France itself, more than 50 fled. Less well known is that on January 8, the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) detained a senior lieutenant from this brigade, who himself went into SZCh and incited his fighters to do the same. He was taken from the Rivne region to Kiev and sent to custody without bail. Then, the former brigade commander, Colonel Dmytro Ryumshin, was detained with the possibility of bail for 90 million hryvnya ($2,161 million, a very large sum of money in Ukraine). According to the SBI, there may have been a scheme operating in the brigade in which those wishing to leave the country were registered for money. “If I’m not mistaken, about 12 draft dodgers were included in the lists for training in France,” said bureau spokesperson Tatyana Sapyan on the air of the telethon.

The magazine Forbes reported on January 27 that the second brigade of the Ukraine’s Armed Forces was in the process of disintegrating within a month during deployment at the Donetsk front. We are talking about the 157th Mechanized Brigade, which consisted of new recruits and was sent to defend Pokrovsk. There are a total of 8 such brigades of the 150th series,“that formed in 2023 or early 2024 and, after a lengthy period of training, began arriving on the front starting late last year. The brigades are big, some with roughly double the usual 2,000 manpower billets of a Ukrainian ground combat brigade. But they’re also fragile—with inexperienced leaders, too few modern armored vehicles and poor morale that often results in a high desertion rate. (…)There were reports of brigade troopers taking one look at their trenches—and promptly abandoning their positions,” the publication noted. According to it, the brigade had not received the necessary combat training and “began falling apart before they even arrived in Pokrovsk.” It was the second such case in a month.

On December 25, in the public Telegram group UFM which provides assistance in leaving Ukraine, a member wrote:

“My wife’s brother escaped from training without a weapon (I won’t say the exact date), three days later the cops were already looking for him at his registered address, and he was on the cops’ criminal wanted list..… So everything is going fast now. It was a week ago. He went to the place of registration to surrender himself, there were familiar cops (he wanted to negotiate), but something went wrong, and as far as I understand, he was again shoved in the training center, but in where he lived. Before that he was caught by TCR [Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support] in Kirovograd region. Now he’s in Kharkov, [there is] no contact with him. All this he personally told, as well as the fact that in the training schools of Vinnitsa region they kick people with a buttstock if you f*** off, he lost a few teeth..…”

Despite this intensification of the efforts to persecute deserters, the possibilities of the repressive system are still very limited. A man from Kharkov named Andrey reported on January 12: “As for the search. There is one character who disappeared into the sunset in June. Recently cops checked him for the 4th time when he was coming from work —he was not wanted. So it’s a lucky break. He works as a packer in the workshop. Unofficially, of course. He’s been on a relatively quiet sector, northbound, so it didn’t come to the meat grinder. It’s more likely the liver that needs to be repaired, not the head.” Another resident of Kharkov, who went into SZCh last summer together with his commander and the entire company from the southern front, was mentioned by us last month — he now lives at home and goes to the store, and no one is looking for him. On the morning of January 13, the disappearance of the first company commander with the rank of captain was discovered in the 3rd Mechanized Battalion of the 143rd Mechanized Brigade near Kupyansk. The mobilized officer left his weapon, took his personal belongings and personal car.

There is also new evidence of mass desertions from training camps in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where those mobilized in Kharkov are usually sent. We wrote a little earlier about massive desertions in this area. One woman in Kharkov shared the following information anonymously on January 30: “I talked to a local policeman, he says every day there are about 100 people near Novomoskovsk who go into SZCh. The efficiency of efforts to catch them is so-so. In my opinion, network marketing has better recruitment rates. How many a day they catch out of these 100 he will not, of course, say. He complained that there is a lot of paperwork”.

On the same day, January 30, the above mentioned journalist Yury Butusov posted information, according to which in some radio engineering brigade of the Ukrainian Air Force ten radar station operators had been taken for marine rifle positions. “Each operator has more than two years of experience, but no one asked for their opinion. After receiving the information, three military men made certificates of care and resigned, three went into SCZh”. It is strange that there were only three! On February 2, the Assembly received the following information: “In our military unit, in the summer, you could still officially go abroad on vacation. Then two of us didn’t return and the unit commander forbade us from going abroad on vacation… and I was transferred from the Air Force to the Land Troops at zero [front line], and it took me 7 days to figure everything out. And I went into SZCh. And then a buddy policeman picked me up in his car, he drove from home. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have left there. They would hit the brake at every checkpoint, but the [service] certificate decides. He gave me a ride home. If only it had been to the border… I was going from the Zaporizhzhia region, the checkpoints there are crazy. We had many guys who went into SZCh on their own, then they were caught at the checkpoint and sent them back to the infantry on the move to zero [to the front line].” Since the interlocutor is still in Ukraine, we will not give other details.

Against this background, individual rebellions receive a particularly strong resonance in the media. According to the Rivne Regional TCR, during the check of military registration documents on February 11, unknown persons of mobilization age inflicted bodily harm on their employees and damaged transport. Despite the arrival of the police, the attackers fled and are wanted. The next day, according to the Kharkov Regional TCR, in some district enlistment office of Kharkov their serviceman was sprayed with tear gas and injured with a knife. The suspect was detained by the cops.

Two examples of workplace struggle from women convicted by local courts of Kharkov on November 19 and on February 12. In the first case, some controller of the Kharkov metro automatic checkpoints, according to the investigation, messaged at least 8 times from November 2023 to April 2024 in one of the Telegram chats how the enlistment teams operated at the subway station. The judge found the woman guilty and sentenced her to five years in prison with a three-year probationary period. She was released from custody and her cell phone was confiscated. Another one from February 2022 to August 2024 supposedly stole 10 sets of earrings, 19 rings, three necklaces and two chains from the Quetzal jewelry store. The total amount of material damage caused to the entrepreneur for whom she worked was 2,281,581 hryvnia (about $55 000). “She disposed of the jewelry at her own discretion. In the courtroom, the accused fully admitted her guilt. She noted that she had drawn the appropriate conclusions for herself and that this would not happen again,” the court verdict states. She was sentenced to five years in prison and was taken into custody in the courtroom, she must also pay the store owner 2,281,581 hryvnia in material damages and 56,796 hryvnia in favor of the state for conducting expertises.

The loudest story of this winter occurred in the usually quiet Lubny district of the Poltava region. On January 31, a resident of Poltava, Yevgen Shcherbak, was being transported to a military unit for training, accompanied by servicemen from the district enlistment office. Intend on evading service, he called his relative’s partner, Vadym Kuzub, from Lubny and told them the bus route. During a stop in Pyriatyn, the Lubny resident in a grey balaclava and pixelated pants killed one of the guards with a hunting rifle he had brought with him. Shcherbak and Kuzub disappeared with the dead soldier’s automatic rifle. However, the next day the head of the regional police reported their arrest. The two men were born in 1984 and 1988, respectively. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that the shooter previously served in the territorial defense at road checkpoints.

Piryatin shooter Vadim Kuzub on trial. From the state TV

The murder suspect Vadym Kuzub admitted his guilt at a court hearing on February 3, confirming that he had helped his woman’s relative escape. According to him, he wanted to scare the guards, but he failed, and then he fired his weapon. “The ambulance arrived about 40 minutes later, and he died quickly. I didn’t know that he had died, I thought he was alive. I didn’t want to kill him, I just wanted to take Shcherbak Yevgen.” The shooter’s lawyer, Valery Masyuk, said that his client is actively collaborating with the investigation. Yevgen Shcherbak, who fled from the enlistment agents, is now charged with obstructing the activities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Both are in custody without the right to bail.

There are not as many stories from the army of the neighboring chamber as there were in our previous piece about this. For example, the Telegram channel “Atesh”, working for Ukrainian intelligence in Crimea, on January 2 gives the following information from its agents: “They report that in the village of Lazurnoye in the Kherson region, Russian occupiers are complaining about a sharp increase in the number of breakdowns of equipment arriving at the repair base. The Russians suspect that the growing number of breakdowns of watercraft (boats and jet skis) is due to deliberate sabotage by the Russian military themselves. Russian military personnel are increasingly choosing sabotage as a way of survival, which disrupts the plans of the Russian military team to use these watercraft to force the Dnieper.” They narrate about how the watercraft are disabled in a post on December 9: “The number of cases of sabotage among Russian military personnel is growing, aimed at avoiding being sent to storm the islands in the Dnieper delta. Soldiers intentionally break engines, puncture rubber boats and even transmit coordinates to the Ukraine’s Defense Forces about the location of boat bases and fuel reserves. It is known that three service investigations related to sabotage have been recorded in the 126th Separate Coastal Defense Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces. For the Russian command, this has become a real problem.” On February 1, another channel of the Ukrainian special services, “I Want to Live”, posted photographs and data of a group of Russian convicts from the 1437th Motorized Rifle Regiment. According to the post, at least 8 stormtroopers went on the run near Pokrovsk. “In short, we have some deserters here. They are hiding behind that they are the 300th [injured], they want to storm something, take a car and come to Selidovo, so the situation is quite serious. Now I will give you their call signs if they introduce themselves (…) These are dangerous people, warn anyone nearby if possible,” says the voice on the audio recording.

Nikita Posmetukhov. From the VK page

On February 10, the Southern Military District Court reported on another incident in the battles for the Dnieper delta in the Kherson region. Corporal Nikita Posmetukhov from the 70th Motorized Rifle Division of the RF sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of four colleagues, including two officers. On the night of November 28, 2023, Posmetukhov was drinking with his fellows, then took an assault rifle and went to the command dugout, the document says. When he knocked on the door, patrolmen called out to him. He started shooting at them and killed a junior sergeant. Then he got into the dugout and shot a lieutenant colonel, captain and private (they were sleeping at that moment). After that, the shooter was detained by two privates. As noted in the document, the attacker got angry at Captain Komarovsky, which was not killed or wounded. He applied disciplinary punishment to Posmetukhov and promised to send him to the assault unit.

Overall, our forecast from last year is being confirmed step by step. The number of Russian assaults and their pace of advancement since the start of 2025 have dropped sharply, the trend seems too long and strong to have been caused only by the weather conditions. It appears that the drop is due to peace talks, during which the Russian authorities hope to achieve a deal with the new administration of US President Donald Trump.