In Russia, an intercontinental ballistic missile has been tested that can beat any missile defence shield that US imperialism seeks to put in place. Pointing to the fact that the US has chosen to leave the ABM Treaty and cannot therefore reasonably complain at Russia’s actions, Putin said: “[The US is] stuffing Eastern Europe with new weapons – a new base in Bulgaria, another in Romania, a site in Poland, radar in the Czech Republic. What are we supposed to do? We cannot just observe all this.”
Also in Russia, the revisionist Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) has won mayoral elections in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad).
On 25 May, Ukraine’s president Yushchenko (the US puppet) issued a decree putting interior ministry troops under his personal command, but the government declared the move unconstitutional, and the soldiers themselves refused to obey Yushchenko’s orders.
In a frantic bid to maintain his control over the Ukraine, where he has in fact very much reduced support, he dismissed 3 of the 18 constitutional court judges, but these judges too have defied his dismissal. It has been agreed between all parties that new parliamentary elections will have to be held, but as yet no date has been decided for this.
There has been a furore over Estonia removing a bronze statue of a World War II Soviet soldier from a public park, which is quite rightly seen as a pro-Nazi measure.
This has led to mass public protests both in Estonia and in Moscow, as well as two nights of riots on the streets of Tallinn, and, it is claimed a ‘war in cyberspace’: a data flood aimed at Estonia’s government computer system has come close to shutting down the country’s digital infrastructure, clogging the websites of the president, the prime minister, parliament and other government agencies, the biggest Estonian bank and several daily papers.
