Ukraine

On 21 April Yuriy Aristov of Ukraine’s Defence Committee reported that the imperialist Russian war on Ukraine has caused $143.8 billion of damage. He added that a quarter of all infrastructure and about 8% of industrial facilities have been destroyed. On 12 March 2023, the UN Human Rights office stated it had recorded 21,965 civilian casualties in the country, although the exact figure is probably much higher. Over 8mn Ukrainian refugees are registered living across Europe and probably another 5mn are internally displaced. 80,900 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces are being...

The 17-19 April Scottish TUC congress overwhelmingly rejected a composite motion on Ukraine backing the line taken by the Morning Star and the Stop the War Coalition: blame NATO for the war; accuse NATO of escalation; and make vacuous calls for negotiations. Instead, congress backed a statement issued by the General Council which “rejected any suggestion of equivalence between the invader and the invaded” and expressed solidarity with Ukrainian trade unions, including their participation in the military resistance to the invasion. Arms The statement did not explicitly advocate (increased) arms...

The Morning Star used to hedge articles on the Ukraine war with a formal condemnation of the Russian invasion. Sometimes, too, there’d be a reminder to readers about the reactionary nature of Putin’s regime. No longer. A recent (3 April) editorial contains no hint of criticism of the invasion or of Putin. In fact, it gloats over the fact that “a resolution before the United Nations calling for Russia to withdraw from Ukrainian territory failed to attract votes from all but a tiny handful of states outside the North Atlantic alliance.” The obvious satisfaction taken in this vote (described as a...

Part two of this article is here In the last few months, I’ve encountered a slew of campist leftists, mostly from the West, on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other issues. The majority of them are purposefully equating the Ukrainian resistance to Nazism by emphasising the minority of right-wing nationalist elements in the Ukrainian resistance, acting as useful idiots for Putin and his Russia’s colonial war. Despite many Ukrainian socialists and anarchists speaking out about their needs for weapons and aid, and Russian soldiers whispering about the war crimes committed by the Russian military...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second year. Russian atrocities on Ukrainian soil, against the Ukrainian people, continue. The world has borne witness to the brutality of the Russian invasion.

I agree with WF in their argument that we should support Ukraine's right to seek arms for its self-defence, and with WF's call for us to campaign for strings-free economic aid to Ukraine to survive the war and to reconstruct after it, and for cancellation of debt.

The half dozen templated motions on Ukraine submitted to this year’s Scottish TUC congress (17-19 April 2023, Dundee) have been amalgamated into a single composite, to be discussed on the Wednesday morning of the congress. Masquerading as pseudo-pacifist "peace proposals", the composite is riddled with factual inaccuracies, political misrepresentations and empty phrase-mongering. Putin’s 2022 invasion was a continuation of the Soviet-imperialist repression of Ukraine dating back to Stalin. Denying the right of Ukraine to exist as a state and as a nation, Putin’s war aim was, and is, genocidal...

Kateryna Maliuta-Osaulova, International Officer of the Ukrainian Trade Union of Education and Science Workers, spoke at the Workers’ Liberty fringe meeting at NEU conference (4 April). The union organises 1.2mn workers in Ukraine. Firstly, we want to thank you for your position and for your support. It is very important to us and to the Ukrainian people to feel your solidarity. This war has not been going on for only one year. It started in 2014. That year we lost Crimea and the Eastern part of Ukraine. It looked like an internal war. From the outside it might have seemed like an internal...

In the 1938 article, “Learn to think”, Leon Trotsky argued that if fascist Italy sent weapons to aid – for its own malign reasons – nationalist rebels against France in Algeria, socialists in Italy should not oppose and even help that.

The half dozen templated motions on Ukraine submitted to this year’s Scottish TUC congress (17-19 April 2023, Dundee) have been amalgamated into a single composite, to be discussed on the Wednesday morning of the congress. Masquerading as pseudo-pacifist "peace proposals", the composite is riddled with factual inaccuracies, political misrepresentations and empty phrase-mongering. Putin’s 2022 invasion was a continuation of the Soviet-imperialist repression of Ukraine dating back to Stalin. Denying the right of Ukraine to exist as a state and as a nation, Putin’s war aim was, and is, genocidal...