Jacob Crosse – World Socialist Website May 18, 2024

On Friday, the New York Times reported that over the last several weeks and in recent days, high-level Ukrainian government officials have been pressing the Biden administration to provide sensitive intelligence information that would allow the far-right regime to launch military strikes deep within Russian territory.

While the US already provides Ukraine with some intelligence on the positions of Russian forces on the border, the Times reported that Ukrainians are pushing the Biden administration for more “real-time intelligence” so that drones and guided missile strikes could more easily evade Russian air defenses.

This is the second report in as many days from the Times, a conduit of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, that provide a glimpse into the well-advanced NATO plans for escalating the war against Russian in Ukraine. On Thursday, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown told the paper that the NATO alliance would “eventually” send combat troops to Ukraine, describing it as “inevitable.”

In the report Friday, the Times again cited comments from General Brown which he gave to reporters while on a flight to a NATO summit in Brussels. Brown told the paper that the Ukrainian government had been “asking us for help to be able to strike into Russia,” but that the request was broad and not “specific to a weapons system.”

The paper noted that while similar requests had been turned down in the past, as Ukrainian positions continue to wither in the face of unrelenting Russian artillery and glide bomb strikes, Biden “administration officials have begun to review” the Ukrainians request for the high-level intelligence access.

The US government is leading the war drive, and what the Times frames as “requests” from Ukraine are really decisions made by the NATO powers. Last month, members of both the Democratic and Republican Parties overwhelmingly voted in favor of a $95 billion military supplemental package. The war bill included over $60 billion for Ukraine and another $17 billion for Israel to continue its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

In response to the Biden administration’s plans to deploy NATO troops to Ukraine and escalate the war, Socialist Equality Party candidate for US president Joseph Kishore released a statement on X denouncing the “plans of the Biden administration,” writing that it would be “a massive escalation that enormously increases the danger of nuclear war.”

“Russian officials have already stated that they would respond to such a deployment by targeting NATO troops and military facilities within Ukraine and abroad,” Kishore wrote, adding, “This would mean full-scale war between NATO and Russia. There is a high probability that such a war would lead to a nuclear exchange.”

“The entire official narrative surrounding the war in Ukraine is a pack of lies,” Kishore stated.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not ‘unprovoked’—it was instigated by the imperialist powers through the relentless military encirclement of Russia. It is not about defending ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government, rife with fascists, rules through martial law and is criminalizing all left-wing opposition to the war. This includes the arrest of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a Ukrainian Trotskyist who opposes both the Ukrainian and Russian regimes on the basis of socialist internationalism.

Kishore observed that everything the Biden administration

claimed they would not do, because of the risk of all out war, they have subsequently done, from the targeting of Russian soil, to the transfer of long-range weapons and now the deployment of NATO troops…

The same capitalist governments who claimed to be defending “democracy” in Ukraine have armed, financed and politically justified Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These are criminal regimes that will stop at nothing in the pursuit of the interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy.

This reporter reached out to Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) as well as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to inquire if they supported sending NATO troops to Ukraine to fight Russia. As of this writing none of the politicians have responded. All had previously voted to fund the war against Russia.

Attempts by this reporter to solicit comments from the campaigns of Jill Stein (Green Party) and Cornel West (Independent) on the pending deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine have also gone unanswered as of this writing.

On her X account this year, Jill Stein last tweeted about the war in Ukraine on April 4, writing that Biden “seems determined to start WWIII and get us all killed before we can vote him out.”

It does not appear that West has issued a written statement on the war in Ukraine on his X account in 2024. Following the death of far-right Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny in February this year, West tweeted, “My prayers are with the precious family of the courageous Russian political prisoner the late Alexei Navalny…”

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