THE Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) has accused the United States of stoking tensions on the country’s border with Russia.

The US, EU and Britain hastened to express support for Ukraine this week as fighting intensified on its front line against anti-fascist separatist forces in the Donbass, where the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics have been at war with Kiev since seceding in 2014.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says 24 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the region so far this year, including two on Tuesday alone. Between a ceasefire being signed last July and the end of 2020, just four Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the Donbass conflict.

Kiev points to Russian military exercises along the border as a threat, though Moscow has denied allegations that it intends to bolster the Donbass separatists with regular troops.

Mr Zelenskiy has mobilised army reservists in response, and called on Western powers to authorise Ukraine’s inclusion in a programme for prospective members of the US-led Nato military alliance. Ukrainian diplomat Alexei Arestovich described the country as “the right flank of Nato,” prompting the KPU to retort that it had become “a Nato colony.”

The KPU said that repeated scares over hypothetical Russian invasions had been raised by the Ukrainian authorities since 2014, but pointed out that neither Russia nor Ukraine had anything to gain from renewed fighting in the Donbass when both are struggling with the coronavirus pandemic.
 
“But the United States urgently needs this in order to cut off Russian gas and Russian raw materials from Europe,” it argued, calling Ukrainian hawks “headless traitors ready to sacrifice their people for the profits of US corporations.”