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| Volume 56 Number 26, September 12, 2026 | ARCHIVE | HOME | JBCENTRE | SUBSCRIBE |
The Soviet War Memorial in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park
in South East London
In Ukraine on August 24, agreeing to supply weaponry to the Zelenskyy regime and thereby ensure no peace in a conflict in which, as the saying goes, US/Britain and other NATO powers are cynically fighting Russia "to the last Ukrainian", new Prime Minister Andy Burnham claimed, "My nation kept the flame of European freedom alive in the 20th century, you hold that flame in the 21st", comparing the conflict in Ukraine to Britain's fight against Nazi Germany. He fails to mention that it was the Soviet forces, with Russia at its core, along with the communist partisans across Europe, who played the main role in the defeat of the Nazis, the turning point being Stalingrad and the great tank battles at Kursk. British forces, of course, made a contribution throughout, especially on such battlefields as in North Africa and, following the Normandy landings, in the final defeat of the Nazi forces. But there is no doubt the Soviet forces played the main role, and, for large parts of the war, faced the Nazis virtually alone.
Burnham fails to mention too that, while Ukrainian partisans fought heroically alongside Soviet forces, other Ukrainian forces supported the Nazis, committing appalling atrocities, and that their descendants, loyal to their wartime leader Stepan Bandera, with swastikas on their arms, played a leading role in the coup of 2014, and the subsequent assaults on the Russian-speaking population of East Ukraine, which provoked Russia's response, and that these forces were later incorporated into the present Ukrainian Army.
The same Andy Burnham, it must be said, refuses to openly condemn Israeli genocide and maintains the British government's complicity, along with other NATO members, in US/Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is shameful.
Burnham, it must be remembered, supported Bush and Blair's criminal invasion of Iraq. His claim of being a working class man of the people bringing a change of direction simply will not wash! Our response must be to build a people's front working for an Anti-War Government.