Solidarity with Ukraine

Submitted by AWL on 22 February, 2022 - 3:27 Author: Editorial
"Ukrainians will resist" banner

This was written before Russia attacked Ukraine on 24 February. But its basic line has, unfortunately, been confirmed.


Ukraine, an impoverished country of 41 million people, faces an army massing at its borders, much larger and more technologically advanced than its own.

On Tuesday 15 February Russia announced it was pulling back some of its troops. However, military units continued to pour forwards towards the border. Russian President Putin, a corrupt authoritarian, made the same lie last December.

The Russian military has surrounded Ukraine on three sides. It has, apparently, over 150,000 troops now ready within a few miles of Ukrainian territory. It has some inside the areas it grabbed from Ukraine in 2014, and now is set to send in more to the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” puppet enclaves, probably stepping up fire across their borders so as to seek a Ukrainian response which Putin can then cite as an excuse for a larger invasion.

Attack helicopters, tanks, heavy artillery are ready to go. Planes, missiles and special forces are in place. Russian shells — provocations - are landing in Donetsk in a breach of ceasefire agreements, and pro-Putin militia leaders are mobilising in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied eastern regions.

In the Black Sea Russian ships have been joined by warships from its Baltic and Northern fleets and are now conducting drills off Ukraine’s southern coast.

The US estimates that a full scale invasion would cost 50,000 Ukrainian casualties as the vastly superior Russian forces steamrollered over the country.

Putin calls Ukraine the “crown jewel of Russia”, as if Ukraine is some exotic decoration to be set in his crown. King Putin has written that Ukraine and Russia are “a single whole”. He openly denies that Ukraine has the right to self-determination.

Russia has a long history of dominating and oppressing Ukraine. Ukraine was denied independence, divided and exploited by the Russian Tsars and other European empires. A deliberately orchestrated famine in 1932-3, designed by the Stalinist ruling class to crush Ukrainian nationalism and opposition, killed perhaps eight million people.

Putin’s aim is again to subordinate Ukraine to Russia, ending its independence won in 1991 and asserted in 2014 after a period of tacit subservience to Moscow. To do that he intends to either invade or exert so much pressure on Ukraine that it signs away its sovereignty, levering Western powers into helping him do so.

In 2014, following a popular pro-Europe mobilisation which drove out a corrupt pro-Russian President, Putin began a frontal assault on Ukraine’s rights. His military grabbed and annexed Crimea in southern Ukraine. Then Russia set up two statelets, the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), carved out of territory on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.

At the time the Russian state was disappointed it did not receive more support among Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine. For sure any Russian occupation would face mass Ukrainian resistance.

A polling agency, Rating Group, conducted a poll amongst Ukrainians in December 2021 which found 72% of Ukrainians consider Russia a “hostile state” and only 12% thought Russia to be an ally.

Against a Russian war the Ukrainians have the right to fight for their self-determination, and we support that fight.

An attempt to annex Ukraine entirely would face bitter, long-term nationalist resistance. And that means such a military option is less likely for Russia than extending its existing enclaves, perhaps joining them up to Crimea.

One possible way Putin was exploring to subordinate Ukraine to Russia without war has been to exert so much pressure on Ukraine,with the help of Germany and France, who are frightened of war and want Ukraine to make concessions to Russia to avoid war, that Ukraine’s politicians sign away Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Minsk 2 was an agreement signed by Russia, Ukraine, the LPR and DPR in February 2015. Putin’s interpretation of that agreement is that the LPR and DPR are reincorporated into Ukraine as Russian-controlled entities with their own state apparatuses controlled by Russia and having a veto over Ukrainian foreign policy, while operating within the Ukrainian political structure. That version of Minsk 2 would destroy Ukraine’s independence. But not enough so for Putin; or Putin had decided that he couldn’t get Germany and France to put enough pressure on Ukraine that way. Putin moved on 21 February to recognise the DPR and LPR formally - to declare formally that Russia has already detached those areas from Ukraine to make them Russian satellite states.

Putin also says his actions are about NATO and NATO expansion after the collapse of the USSR. He says we should understand Russian “concerns” and “interests”, by which he means his concerns and his nationalist interests.

Some gullible socialists in the West have parroted Putin.

But the issue is wrongly put. Why consider Russian concerns above, say, Polish concerns, or the concerns of the Baltic states, or Finland? NATO does not threaten these countries, but Russia under Putin does. These states wanted to join NATO for justifiable fear of Russia. Those fears are being made worse, now, tying smaller European states more firmly into NATO.

Putin’s claim to be acting against Ukraine because Russia fears its own security is being compromised by NATO expansion is an invention. In any case, there is no real chance of Ukraine being admitted to NATO any time soon.

Putin’s methods are backfiring on his stated aim, to stop NATO expansion. Russian threats against Ukraine are building support for NATO membership in Sweden and Finland.

Sweden and Finland are not NATO members but Russian attacks on Ukraine make it more likely they will join. In January a poll of Swedes showed 37% in favour of NATO membership, up from 32% five years ago (with 35% opposed, down from 43% five years ago). In Finland, which was ruled by Russia from 1809 to 1917 and has a long border with Russia, 28% now favour joining NATO (up 8% from two years ago) and 42% are against joining (heavily down from the average 50-70% opposition over the last twenty years).

Socialist Worker sees the conflict even-handedly as an inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and Russia, and concludes that since we live in a US ally we should primarily denounce NATO. Here and now, the claim of equal threats is ridiculous. NATO is not massing troops on Ukraine’s border, or seizing Ukrainian territory to annex as puppet statelets, or threatening Ukrainian independence and the lives of millions of people in an imperialist war.

It would be different if Britain and the US had armies in Ukraine and aimed to fight Russia on Ukrainian territory in a much more general conflict. But nothing like that is happening.

SW sinks all the details of Putin’s actual war aims, and NATO’s actual inclination to conciliate Russia, into generalities.

Centrally, SW ignores the right to Ukrainian self-determination, regarding the right of 41 million Ukrainians not to be invaded as a sorry and uninteresting detail, rather than the central issue. There is no mention of Ukrainian rights in SW’s commentary on the conflict. Those rights are ignored.

Given its name, the Stop the War Coalition (StW) might be expected to oppose Russia’s war build-up. Wrong. StW, run by the SWP splinter Counterfire and a crew of Stalinists, many of whom actually support Russia but who are not quite brave enough to say so publicly, states, “As the clouds of war continue to gather over Ukraine, the British government, alongside the US, is ramping up the threat of war.” StW focuses entirely on NATO and the West and says nothing about the actual threat of war from Russia! Is a stupider position possible in the current situation?

Yes, let’s not trust the Western powers. Yes, let’s not offer them our political support. Yes, Truss and Johnson are clowns. But the idea that the main problem for Ukraine is the West, which has no army in the area, rather than the very real, massive invasion force Russia has assembled, is an evasion. It amounts to saying: never mind about the huge Russian army set to invade a weaker country and seek to annex or semi-annex it. That’s a detail. Let’s instead talk generalities about what NATO might do somewhere else.

Support the internationalists in Ukraine, support the anti-war left in Russia!

• On why socialists should oppose NATO, but not at the expense of muting opposition to Putin’s annexationist imperialism, read this

Comments

Submitted by Barry Finger on Fri, 25/02/2022 - 17:45

There is an additional unexamined wrinkle to this. NATO, as this editorial properly argues, is not an immediate threat to Ukrainian independence. But it still remains a threat to world peace and this danger is latent in its very structure. NATO is one of the entangling alliances that threaten not to contain, but to expand the conflict down the line. This is one of the lessons of the First World War.

Putin, by his own imperialist megalomania, has isolated Russia. China, sniffing out Putin’s desperation, has offered Russia an economic-political lifeline, in the hope that cementing such an alliance will provide a bulletproof cover behind which it can similarly move against Taiwan. Russia, in seeming deference to China, initiated its aggression after the propagandistic spectacle of the Olympics concluded.

If/when Russia succeeds in installing a puppet regime in Kyiv, the NATO alliance may likely be relied on as a first line supply conduit to the Ukrainian national resistance. These will consist of flows of strategic support, tactical weapons, medicines, training, etc. Socialists may properly argue that the Ukrainian resistance is well within its rights to accept assistance from whatever sources are available, as long as they credibly maintain their political independence and refuse to subordinate their struggle to the military expansion of Western-capitalist power. And where trade unionists and socialists seek to assert leadership over the nationalist resistance, we will mobilize international support on that basis.

The problem down the line then is this. If Russia goes after the resistance’s supply lines in NATO-allied nations in Eastern Europe, it may trip a cascading collective response on the part of mutually obligated member nations embroiling Europe in a cross-Atlantic conflict. This would be the perfect diversion for China to initiate a parallel aggression against Taiwan, with the aim of rewriting the world order on an even more reactionary anti-working class basis than now exists

We need to educate the public of the danger that alliances such as NATO portend and introduce alternatives that contain the big power conflict without abandoning Ukraine. Socialists need to be talking about international Workers’ Aid convoys to our comrades in the Ukrainian resistance—socialists, trade unionists, internationalists and independent democrats.

Future reliance on NATO as a bulwark against Russian-Chinese imperialism presages a reprise of 1914. We need to do what we can to avert this.

Yes, NATO is not the immediate threat to Ukraine, but without socialist intervention, it can be a tripwire for conflict expansion.

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