Ukraine War: Where Do You Stand Now?

To Russia Supporters

Is this what you wanted? Russia is achieving its war aims. Soon Zelensky will be gone, Ukraine will be demilitarized and NATO’s eastern expansion will come to a halt. The U.S. will either agree to these terms and cede Ukraine to the Russian sphere of influence or Russian tanks will roll through Ukraine and impose them directly. Trump is quite transparent that his aim in striking a deal with Russia is to redirect military resources away from Russia and toward China. As for the fate of Ukraine, it only remains to be decided how much of its territory will be under direct Russian occupation and how much will be subject to neocolonial exploitation under the American boot.

Is any of this a victory for the working class in Ukraine, in Russia or anywhere else? Clearly not. Yet many leftists and socialist organizations actively worked toward this outcome by supporting a military victory for Russia. In the real world, a Russian victory is a humiliation for the U.S., but it does not advance the cause of the oppressed one bit.

Have recent developments led any of the pro-Russia socialists to introspect? Unfortunately, not. There is, however, an ominous silence in the air. At the very least, most seem to understand that there is nothing to celebrate about the current situation. The looming Russian victory doesn’t feel quite the same as when the Viet Cong marched into Saigon or even when the Americans fled Afghanistan with their tails between their legs. So, what went wrong? How did so many leftists take such a wrong position on one of the most decisive world conflicts?

The logic of the pro-Russian socialist position is the following. It starts by correctly presenting the war in Ukraine as a proxy war provoked by the U.S. expanding NATO to the very borders of Russia. And since the U.S. is the imperialist hegemon and Russia is only a regional power, these leftists declare that a Russian victory would weaken the U.S. and thus be in the interest of the international working class. However, this method is closer to accounting than to Marxism. It is not because something is a blow to imperialism that it is automatically progressive.

Marxism does not consist of pasting ready-made formulas onto any given situation. Rather, it seeks to advance the struggle for working-class emancipation starting from living reality. In the war in Ukraine, as in any other, Marxists seek to advance the unity of the proletariat across borders. But this unity is impossible if workers of a dominant nation support their own ruling class oppressing another nation.

In this sense, it matters that the U.S. is not directly invading Russian territory (as it did Iraq) but that Russia invaded Ukraine in response to U.S. provocations. Russia is not facing the threat of national oppression. It is the Ukrainians and the Russian minorities in Ukraine who face this threat. In fact, it has been clear from the outset that whoever wins the war, it will be at the expense of one of these two groups. This means that the unity of workers cannot be advanced by either side winning.

But what about U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Ukraine? Why won’t it amount to victory for the working class? The answer is simple. We are not witnessing a country being freed of foreign oppression but simply one oppressing power replacing another. Moreover, U.S. troops did not fight in Ukraine. A Russian victory is not a direct defeat for the U.S. military and will do little to foster discontent among its ranks or in American society more broadly. Again, this is quite different from Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. For the U.S., plan A was to use Ukraine to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. This having failed, it is moving to plan B: leave Ukraine to its fate, strike a deal with Russia and concentrate on China. How is this a victory for workers?

Early signs are not promising; but as the reactionary consequences of a Russian victory become ever clearer, we hope the socialists who support Russia will finally wake up and draw the appropriate lessons from this experience.

To Ukraine Supporters

It took Donald Trump only an hour to lay out in front of the world the real nature of the relationship between Ukraine and the United States. In his meeting with Zelensky in the White House, Trump made it clear that the U.S. expects Ukraine to be a subservient proxy. Trump’s humiliation of Zelensky was a grotesque display of Great Power chauvinism, but it is what you get when you tie your fate to the most reactionary force in the world. As Henry Kissinger said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

For the countless socialists who support Ukraine, Trump has capitulated to Putin. The truth is that the U.S. rulers never cared about Ukrainian independence. The cries to “free Ukraine” were cynically used by Western rulers for their own interests. Where Biden was a hypocrite, Trump is honest. The problem is that important sections of the left embraced the liberal propaganda of the Biden White House. For them the involvement of the U.S. is a secondary factor and what really matters is the fight against Russian aggression. Such a view was always based on denying the political dynamics in East Europe, where the U.S. has been on a constant offensive since 1990. But today, when the U.S. rulers are explicit that Ukraine is just a proxy, one must be totally deluded to think that Ukrainian national liberation was the central question in this war.

Since 2008, when NATO opened the door for Ukraine to join the alliance, the driving force of the conflict has clearly been the U.S. The Ukrainian ruling class made a pact with the devil, expecting that the U.S. would be ready to go all the way to confront Russia and defend “freedom.” Well, the chickens have come home to roost: Large parts of the nation are threatened by military occupation and Ukraine’s men lie slaughtered on the battlefield, with its cities bombed and its economy devastated. Once again, this shows that it never pays to subordinate oneself to U.S. imperialism.

The most consistent pro-Ukrainian voices on the left support the arming of Ukraine by the West, arguing that it matters not where the weapons come from as long as they are used in Ukraine’s national defense. In fact, we can see clearly that it does matter. The entire military strategy of Ukraine is dependent on support from the West. As such, the West dictated to the Ukrainian army how it should conduct the war. Now that the U.S. is planning to cut the flow of weapons (soon to be followed by the Europeans), Ukraine finds itself utterly incapable of independently defending itself.

Alignment with Western imperialism also has important political consequences. It enabled the Russian ruling class to invade Ukraine under the pretense of waging a defensive war against Western imperialism—the very force that devastated the Russian people following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then there are the chauvinist policies of the Ukrainian government, from banning the Russian language and the constant shelling of Donetsk to the plan to reconquer Crimea and the regions of Eastern Ukraine whose population considers itself Russian. Altogether, these made the Ukrainian war effort just as reactionary as that of the Russians.

We now see the disastrous consequences of the Ukrainian workers movement embracing the chauvinism of their government. Not only did this help mobilize the Russian people against Ukraine, but it also ruled out ever being able to convince the Russian working people to turn against the Putin regime and ally with their class brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Socialists everywhere must learn from this debacle!

Since February 2022, the war was only going to have a progressive outcome if the soldiers and workers of each side turned against their own rulers and united against their exploiters. This is not a pious wish but an objective necessity. The survival of the Ukrainian nation depends on workers getting rid of the Zelensky clique and breaking the bonds with Western imperialism. As for Russian workers, they have no interest in fighting for the subjugation of Ukraine for the benefit of the oligarchs, no less than they have an interest in the oppression of national minorities inside Russia. If they really want to throw back the threat of imperialism, they must seek to build an alliance with the workers of Europe through an internationalist strategy.

The ICL has been consistent in fighting for this approach. We have made clear that the U.S. is the main instigator of the conflict—as it is for most conflicts in the world. But we also warned against giving the Russian regime anti-imperialist credentials it does not in any way deserve. Throughout, we have fought for a perspective of fraternization, revolutionary defeatism and internationalism. Instead of the empty formulas used by the left to justify supporting one of the two reactionary sides in this war, our intervention has been guided by the most basic of Marxist principles: Workers of the World, Unite!