Steve Sweeney, Ukraine and Russia

Steve Sweeney, international editor of the Morning Star, has written to us: “An article written by Jim Denham in the 15/6/2022 issue of Solidarity... states that I have ‘publicly backed the Russian invasion’. I would be grateful if you could point to where I have done so...”

As Solidarity has said, this based itself on Sweeney being a platform speaker (in a personal capacity) at the “Victory Day” meeting held in May by George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain (WPB), at the Venezuelan Embassy’s meeting hall.

Sweeney didn’t say “I back the Russian invasion” at that meeting, so we withdraw those words. We invite readers to study what Sweeney did say and the meeting he spoke at. It’s on YouTube. In opening it, the chair said: “That very fascism which we here are gathered to celebrate being vanquished [in World War Two] has not disappeared from the earth. It lives on in the imperialist forces, and they have very much nurtured those forces and using them to wage a proxy war in Ukraine. We’ll hear more about that from Steve...

“We have extended an invitation to the Russian Embassy. We have just heard that sadly they will not be able to join us, but they send their greetings... To them, this is not just an event to be marked in the past... because of their ongoing struggle with those same forces of fascism which they vanquished in 1945”.

In introducing the last speaker of the meeting, Harpal Brar, to whom Sweeney gave a standing ovation, the chair again stressed “so many parallels between this conflict and the Great Patriotic War, the great anti-fascist war, that we are here to celebrate”.

Brar’s newsletter Lalkar described the Russian invasion as “heartily welcome”. “The Russian intervention in Ukraine... the military challenge to this long erosion of Russian security has been a long time coming and is heartily welcome”.

Galloway and the Workers’ Party have avoided such exact words, but Galloway’s comment was: “Russia has a point... The Ukraine is being turned into an armed Potemkin state by the United States and by NATO, and no Russian leader could possibly allow that development go unchecked...”

WPB: “As Sergey Lavrov [Russia’s foreign minister] asked rhetorically, did Kiev expect to carry on for another eight years of sabotaging Minsk and attacking the DPR and LPR unchallenged?”

Sweeney’s 45-minute speech was mostly claims of the prevalence of Nazism, fascism, and far-right repression in Ukraine. His comments included:

“If I were in London tomorrow, I would get the biggest red flag I could find, I would make it to the Russian Embassy, and I would wave it in honour of the 27 million people [USSR people dead in WW2] whose graves these people [today’s left-wing supporters of Ukraine] are trampling over”.

He talked of “memorials where the tanks, the first tanks that rolled into Berlin in 1945, have been draped with the flag of Ukraine: the very forces that those tanks defeated in 1945”.

“The West... is using Azov as its proxy force, as we’ve seen in Syria and elsewhere... as an imperialist battering ram against Russia. But also, behind Russia is China, and that’s really what this war is about...”

“We shouldn’t be under any illusion that this is a proxy war between NATO and Russia. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is lying to you”. Some on the left, like Socialist Worker, call it a “proxy war” but also explicitly condemn Russia’s war-making. Sweeney made no such condemnation.

“Russia has shown great restraint and has largely left the transport infrastructure... intact”.

Sweeney made a point of recounting conversations with a woman from near Mariupol whom he met after she fled to Lviv.

She told him (he claimed) that she was not frightened of the Russian forces, who were treating people well, but of Ukrainian forces who “had terrorised that region... for the last eight years”.

Eliciting applause, Sweeney said: “Russia is achieving all of its objectives in Ukraine, and that is very clear”.

He wound up: “We must campaign for an end to the ban on the Communist Party of Ukraine... Unity to defeat fascism... I’ll finish with the words of Josef Stalin on the Great Patriotic War: Ours is a just cause. Victory will be ours”.

We offer Steve Sweeney space in this paper equivalent to this article to reply if he thinks we misrepresent his views.