Russia

Over 50 members of the GMB union at three plants of the multinational Veolia in Notts began a strike for pay rises on Monday 25 September. Despite a half-yearly turnover of £23 billion and huge profits, the company has paid most workers only the national minimum wage over the 13 years of its operation so far. Notts County Council manages a contract involving Veolia and several district and borough councils to process recyclable waste from local authorities in its area. The strikers are picketing in the way it should be done: challenging every lorry that tries to gain entry, successfully...

Unite’s policy on Ukraine is an EC statement passed at this year's policy conference. It is much better than the only motion submitted to that conference. But it takes a wrong and unclear position on the key issues. It remains unpublicised. It is reproduced below. But, for reasons known only to those who labour in the inner sanctum of Unite’s head office in Holborn, the statement has not yet been made public and released to the union’s own membership.

Yevgeniy Prigozhin, leader of PMC Wagner, former close ally of Vladimir Putin and recent mutineer, has been confirmed dead

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has had his jail sentence extended by 19 years

Vladimir Kikadze’s “Special Operation: The Ukrainian Front of the War Against Russia“, published in Moscow earlier this year, is a truly dismal book

Gender transition surgery was banned in Russia on 24 July 2023.

On Monday 17 July Russia pulled out of the UN- and Turkey-brokered deal

Some supporters of Ukraine at Durham Miners' Gala (8 July). On the right are Ukrainian trade unionists Oksana and Pavlo Holota with an NGPU miners' union flag brought specially from Ukraine It is now slightly more than 500 days since Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s imperialist war, launched with the intention of abolishing Ukraine as an independent entity, to subordinate Ukraine to Russian political power, has been a disaster for not only the Ukrainian people, but for the Russians too. The war has also broken down important global economic bonds, especially in...

The Prigozhin-Wagner mutiny of 23-24 June failed. Nevertheless, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries — only 2,500 to 5,000 troops in total — managed to overrun two major southern Russian cities and get to within 200km of Moscow before a deal was struck and Wagner returned to their bases. Putin felt obliged to come to terms with the rebels. Prigozhin is an advocate of a harsher Russian war in Ukraine and his rebels were demanding the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the head of the army, Valery Gerasimov, be removed for incompetently prosecuting Russia’s war. Prigozhin objected to an...

The immediate crisis for Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime is over. A deal was reached with the Wagner coup leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He turned his Moscow-bound troop convoy around, late on Saturday 24 June, and sent his fighters back towards their bases in southern Russia and occupied Ukraine. As we go to press on 27 June, there are hints the deal may not hold, but we don’t know. The Wagner troops had killed a dozen Russian helicopter crew, shot down after attacking the Wagner insurgency. Wagner fighters, who had overrun the Russian cities of Rostov and Voronezh, evacuated their positions and...