UKRAINIAN and Russian workers lived side by side through the 20th century. Millions laboured and fought together as comrades and sacrificed themselves to defend Soviet socialism from the Nazis.

Thirty years after the tragic dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was hailed by many in the West as the “end of history” and the start of a uniformly liberal, peaceful world, the restored capitalist class of the Russian Federation now dredge up medieval historiography to justify a pointless war in the present.

Opinions on whether we should take Putin’s casus belli of “denazification” at face value, whether we stand in solidarity with a Ukrainian government that has been liquidating the Ukrainian left from 2014 to the present day, or whether “our own” Western militarists and media pundits have our class’s interests at heart, when they flirt with escalating the situation into a full-scale international war between Nato and Russia, is beyond the scope of this article. Leave it to the armchair pundits to pore over the deluge of misinformation and judge which group of workers most deserve death.