The Stop the War Coalition and Ukraine

For the past ten years – ever since the country first registered on its political radar – the Stop the War Coalition’s coverage of Ukraine has been a succession of political and factual inaccuracies.

The Coalition dismissed the mass popular uprising of the Maidan as a fascist coup engineered by western imperialism. It excused and justified Russia’s subsequent seizure of Crimea. And then it denied the reality of direct Russian military intervention in the south-east of Ukraine.

In the run-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Coalition consistently substituted ‘anti-imperialist’ fantasies for an engagement with reality. The historical and contemporary role of Russian imperialism disappeared from view, overwhelmed by tedious historical excursions into the post-Cold-War expansion of NATO.

Since February 2022 the Coalition has distinguished itself by its failure to provide a platform for Ukrainian socialists, feminists and trade unionists, and by its failure to provide them with even a penny of financial or material support.

As a result, it has functioned as a recycling centre for Kremlin disinformation, combined more recently with its role as the British outpost of US foreign policy realism.

In an attempt to justify its reality-remote coverage of Ukraine, the Coalition has sought to take refuge behind the slogan of the early-twentieth-century German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht: “The main enemy is in the home camp.”

But Liebknecht’s slogan was not a licence to abandon criticism of the enemy in the other camp. Nor was it a licence to rewrite history in order to manufacture excuses for acts of imperialist aggression by the enemy in the other camp.

Liebknecht’s slogan was a call for international working-class mobilisation. In the hands of the Coalition it has been transformed into vacuous appeals for peace to be engineered by the governments of the imperialist powers – and a denial of class solidarity with Ukrainian workers.

This pamphlet puts the record straight – contrasting the reality of events in Ukraine over the past decade with the Stop the War Coalition’s shameless record of misrepresentation and falsification.