Several weeks ago I wrote a post giving my take on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in which I argued that the roots of the present conflict lay in US/NATO expansion and advocated for the West to de-escalate the situation. Much of that article still holds up, but it appears I have been proven wrong about Russia not planning to invade Ukraine. As of this time of writing they are already invading Ukraine, with explosions having taken place in several major Ukrainian cities and tanks rolling in. The Minsk Agreement is basically dead, and war seems to be inevitable.
Clearly I have to swallow some humble pie. I was wrong about the possibility of invasion and I accept that. I wrongly assumed that Russia would not risk triggering a full-blown war that it might lose while it is surrounded by NATO bases, but it looks like Russia has declared its intention to wage war. For me the penny dropped on Monday, when Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he effectively declared that Ukraine is a fake country created by the USSR, describing it as a foreign policy blunder by Vladimir Lenin, and that Russia should not have allowed it or any other former territory of the Russian Empire to secede.
Shortly after the speech, it was confirmed that Russia officially recognised the self-declared breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent countries, and as it turns out this was done so that Russia could send troops and tanks into the Donbas under the pretence of “peacekeeping”. If that sounds like the US claiming to be peacekeepers in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and other countries that they were actually bombing and plundering, that’s because Russia is exercising exactly the same kind of imperialist aggression in eastern Ukraine, and sure enough the Russian Federation Council authorised the use of military force by Putin outside of Russia, and now he has declared war on Ukraine.
With the prospect of preventing the outbreak of war all but extinguished, an already noticeable campism has completely overtaken the discourse at large. By campism, I refer to the tendency to view the world as a binary struggle between two geopolitical camps, one being the “imperialist” camp and the other being a supposedly anti-imperialist camp. Within the left, campism is an all too familiar cancer, with some on the left declaring that defeating US imperialism requires offering critical if not unconditional support to countries such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria and other such countries, and this leads them to ignore the actual class character of their governments and sometimes outright deny the abuses committed by these countries against their own people. In most of the mainstream media, however, you see a different campism, which frames the conflict as one between “democracy” (the West) versus “autocracy” (Russia, China et al), which sometimes others in the left buy into for fear of being associated with the pro-Russia campists. The pro-Western campism is no less foolish, as it ignores the actual imperialistic nature of the West and the authoritarianism of Western governments, as well as the fact that the US has aided and abetted neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
In the context of the present conflict in Ukraine, one campism demands that we “stand with” Ukraine, meaning unconditionally support the NATO/EU axis in practice, against the growing threat of authoritarianism from Russia, while the other campism demands that we support Russia against NATO imperialism and the fascists in Ukraine. In this article I am here to explain why this is utter nonsense, and why we should side with neither Washington nor Moscow. The simple truth is that both sides of the conflict are authoritarian to the bone. Both of them have imperialist designs for Ukraine, and they will both prop up fascist elements in pursuit of their goals.
Firstly let’s adress the pro-Western campism, as that will be the simplest, with the pro-Russian campism addressed at greater length later on. What supporters of the Western side of the war routinely ignore is that while Putin is indeed an autocrat, many Western governments including America, Canada, France and Britain are ratcheting up authoritarianism at home, with many states in the “land of the free” enacting laws that oppress minorities (particularly LGBT people, who will now be targeted by a Texas law that allows the state to confiscate trans children from their loving parents), restrict women’s rights, criminalise protest and allow reactionary murderers to run over protestors, among other atrocities. You may balk at this and say this is just the Republicans, but Democrats control both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, and they have shown no real interest in doing anything to stop them.
While proclaiming itself to be the champion of democracy around the world, the US in fact supported far-right and neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine for the explicit purpose of overthrowing the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych. After Euromaidan, these far-right elements roamed the streets, at least for a while, and the new government of Ukraine incorporated the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion into its national guard. As the civil war progressed, they have managed to advance to high positions within the Ukrainian state. Andriy Parubiy, one of the co-founders of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine, became chairman of the Verkhovna Rada in 2016. Oleksiy Honcharuk, who was spotted attending a neo-Nazi rock concert, became Prime Minister of Ukraine in 2019, briefly serving for about six months. Post-Maidan Ukraine also passed a law designating Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as “heroes of Ukraine” and criminalising criticism of those groups, despite the fact that both those groups committed pogromist violence against Jews and the fact that the OUN were outright Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust. Of course you probably didn’t hear about that from the BBC or CNN.
These Nazis have also been fulsomely promoted by sections of the mainstream media. Fox News recently platformed Serhiy Sternenko, a former leader of the Right Sector group who was involved in the 2014 Trade Union Hall massacre, presenting him as a “Ukrainian activist”. Western media outlets have also had a funny habit of falling for neo-Nazi political stunts. Not that we should be surprised. After World War II, the US hired Nazis to work for NASA, and NATO even had Adolf Heusinger, a former Nazi, as chairman of its military committee. But don’t bring any of this up to the liberals, who will surely brand you a Kremlin stooge for bringing up things which are already a matter of public record and have been acknowledged even in the bourgeois press. To them, the fact that you criticise the American line in any way and advocate for peace is proof that you are a fifth column.
Some in the Western left, particularly what we may call the liberal-left, have uncritically accepted NATO’s version of events, and portrayed anyone on the left that doesn’t as a Russian apologist. Vaush has frequently done this, including in a video wherein he practically depicts Jeremy Corbyn as an appeaser for the high crime of not wanting to go to war in Ukraine. He tells us that the only warmonger is Russia, but that is to ignore the NATO bombing of Libya, the NATO invasion of Iraq, and NATO’s bombing and dismemberment of Yugoslavia. It’s also curious how much of the commentary seems to have forgotten about Yugoslavia, insisting that the last major European conflict was World War II as if the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s never happened.
In a thread which seems to have gone viral, a self-professed “leftist” (in reality a liberal social democrat) from Finland named Janne Korhonen argued that Finland should join NATO because the alternative is becoming a Russian colony and, as a result of this, having its social democracy dismantled and its assets sold off to Putin’s friends. The trouble with this argument is that a similar process has already happened in other NATO countries. For example, Britain has been a NATO member since it was founded, and while a member of NATO and the EU, we had Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, who proceeded to dismantle British social democracy as it had existed since after the war, and sell off almost all of our nationalised industries to private owners, and successive governments would even sell off the NHS itself piece by piece, as they have been doing for nearly two decades. The same thing has been happening in the US under Reagan, East Germany after reunification, Canada under Mulroney and successive governments, and even Hungary under Orbán. Hungary is a member of NATO, and it still wound up with an autocrat who hands parts of his economy over to his chums, but you would know that listening to people like Korhonen who slavishly peddle the pro-NATO line.
That adequately covers why pro-Western campism is foolish. My other posts on Ukraine go into a bit more detail. Now it’s time to discuss why pro-Russian campism is equally as foolish if not treasonous to all leftist values. Let’s first discuss Russia’s point of view and Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine, as this has been regurgitated by his willing left-wing enablers for the past few days on Twitter. Putin claims that he is fighting Nazis in Ukraine and that he is there to “deNazify” and “demilitarise” Ukraine. Ever since the Euromaidan, Ukrainian neo-Nazis have been heavily used by the Russian government and Russian state media in its war propaganda against Ukraine, which often framed the Ukrainian people themselves as Nazis, and many on the international left have uncritically accepted this framing. So on the morning of the invasion they hailed it as Russia triumphing over Nazism once again, which mush seem odd considering before the invasion he said he would show Ukraine what “true decommunization” is like. It is also odd that none of these campists ever considered that Putin may be reviving the old arguments used to justify the US invasion of Iraq – that the US has to invade because the terrorists who did 9/11 might be there and that Saddam was supporting al-Qaeda or something – and reapplying them to Ukraine with a cynical appropriation of antifascism for what are fascist ends.
At any rate, while it is true that Ukraine does have neo-Nazis in high places and has employed them in its national guard, the idea that Russia is any different is frankly delusional. Russia has employed the services of a private military contractor known as the Wagner Group, whose ranks are filled with neo-Nazis and whose leader, Dmitry Utkin, has been photographed with Nazi tattoos and has been photographed with Putin himself. Among the men who helped capture Crimea for Russia was a man named Igor Girkin (a.k.a. Igor Strelkov), who later became the de facto commander of the Donbas separatist forces. Girkin was an open admirer of the White Army, and founded the Russian National Movement party which openly wants to restore the Russian Empire.
Some on the left have supported recognition for the breakaway “people’s republics” on the grounds that they are merely exercising self-determination, often with an insistence that this is in line with socialist internationalism. Left-wing supporters of Donetsk and Luhansk might be shocked to find out that those countries are not proletarian republics, but are actually fascist countries, and in fact Donetsk has welcomed foreign fascists seeking to fight on their behalf. A number of appalling human rights abuses have been committed either by the Donetsk government or under its watch. In 2014, Donetsk militants attacked a gay club and robbed it of jewellery and other items. The following year the DPR’s Deputy Minister of Political Affairs remarked that “A culture of homosexuality is spreading … this is why we must kill anyone who is involved in this”. The Donbas People’s Militia had also engaged in pogromist violence against Romani people in Sloviansk, with eyewitnesses reporting separatists beating women and children and stealing from the homes of Romani people. Many Romani have had to flee Donetsk entirely. Many individuals accused of being “subversives” were also forcibly disappeared in Donetsk, including journalist Stanislav Aseyev, and such crimes were openly acknowledged by Alexander Zakharchenko, who was head of the DPR until his assassination in 2018. Zakharchenko also regarded Ukraine as a country run by “miserable Jews”, and called on Cossacks to “take their country back”.
Luhansk is not much different in this regard. The Prizrak Brigade, which often professed itself to be a socialist militia and has been portrayed in the past by The Morning Star as an anti-fascist force, is in fact a highly reactionary group of glorified thugs who have been supported by the Interbrigades, a National Bolshevik volunteer group associated with the Other Russia party of Eduard Limonov. After its commander, Aleksey Mozgovoy, was assassinated in 2015, The Morning Star‘s Eddie Dempsey wrote an article eulogising him, which has since been deleted. What’s rather curious is that Dempsey’s supposedly antifascist organisation, “Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine”, linked to a 45-minute video which claimed that Movgovoy was murdered in a “Jewish sacrifice”, and that Ukraine is run by Jews. In fact, Mozgovoy was clearly the kind of reactionary who would associate with all manner of scumbags who he had under his command, including a neo-Nazi named Alexei Milchakov, who literally made videos of himself killing puppies. Another Luhansk leader, Igor Plotnitski, asserted that the Maidan movement was being controlled by Jews. I’m struggling to grasp how these are supposed to be left-wing allies, but that’s probably because I don’t view politics principally from the lens of USA vs. Russia, as some on the left do.
Putin and his supporters claim that military action is necessary because Russia’s security interests are at risk, expecting us to believe that Russia is the helpless victim of EU/NATO expansion. While it is certainly true that NATO has been relentlessly expanding eastward despite assurances to Russia that it wouldn’t, as even the Los Angeles Times has admitted, that in itself does not justify an invasion, and at any rate Ukraine had no desire to attack Russia, nor did any of their leaders see any gain in invading them. Meanwhile, Putin made perfectly clear in his rambling speech on Monday that his designs in Ukraine have less to do with NATO expansion and more to do with restoring past imperial glory, arguing that “Ukraine actually never had stable traditions of real statehood”. At any rate, you don’t get to claim that you’re the victim after you’ve launched a full-scale invasion against another country. Even Aaron Maté, who has normally ran apologetics for Russia, admitted that Putin had options other than launching a full-scale invasion.
Further more, the “legitimate security interests” line can also be debunked with a simple look your world map. The argument goes that Ukraine’s accession to NATO would represent a legitimate threat to Russia as it would represent a NATO springboard right into the heart of Russia through which NATO may attack Russia. The trouble with this argument is that Russia already shares a land border with a total of five NATO countries. Mainland Russia is bordered by Norway, Estonia and Latvia, all NATO countries. The Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian semi-exclave on the Baltic coast which was created by the USSR, shares a land border with Poland and Lithuania, which both became NATO countries after the collapse of their communist governments. In other words, Russia is already physically encircled by NATO, but up until this point it has seen no need to invade any of those countries. Instead its invasion attempts have targeted countries that are not yet part of NATO, namely Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine. As the current war between Ukraine and Russia progresses, Putin is already turning his attention to other non-NATO countries near its border, namely Finland and Sweden, threatening “military consequences” if they attempt to join NATO.
By the way the line that Russia is the aggrieved party and that Russia’s actions are all America’s fault is not principally confined to Stalinists, Marxist-Leninists and campist “anti-imperialists”, at least not anymore. Increasingly we are seeing this line being taken up more and more by the far-right. Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP and the Reform Party, blamed the EU and NATO for Russian aggression even after Russia invaded. Farage has previously gone on record to state that Vladimir Putin is the leader he most admires. Arron Banks, co-founder of Leave.EU and one of UKIP’s biggest donors, also blamed the EU for Putin’s invasion, accusing it of having “stoked the fire burning in Eastern Ukraine”.
Much of the American far-right has also taken the side of the Kremlin. Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s chief strategist and head of Breitbart News, proclaimed that Russia are the good guys because they are “anti-woke”, and suggested that discussion of Russia as an aggressor is a “complete scam”. Lauren Witzke, Republican candidate for Senator from Delaware, praised Vladimir Putin for upholding “Christian values” against the global “Luciferian regime” and deporting immigrants. Stew Peters, a far-right radio conspiracy monger, defended Russia by comparing Euromaidan to Black Lives Matter (in a derogatory manner of course) while also comparing pro-Russian separatists to the January 6th insurrectionists. Lance Wallnau, a far-right Christian evangelist, praised Putin for clamping down on “the LGBTQ doctrine”, by which he of course means LGBTQ rights. The day before the invasion, Tucker Carlson did a segment on his show in which he defended Russia and claimed that Democrats and the media want you to hate Putin, and implied that modern day Russia is better than America because supposedly he doesn’t fire you being racist. This was on the same day in which Fox News platformed Serhiy Sternenko as I mentioned earlier.
Don’t lose too much sleep though, the precious honour of the Kremlin is still being defended with zeal by the campist (sorry, “anti-imperialist”) parts of the left, to the point that the line between tankies and fascists appears to be blurring. On the day of the invasion, Caleb Maupin frequently posted to Twitter in defence of the Kremlin’s position on Ukraine, describing its critics as “punks”, “lame”, and on the same side as the Nazis, ignoring the fact that many Nazis actually support Russia. Josh Jackson, who also supports the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk, presented the invasion in a deliberately one-sided manner so as to cast it as simply neo-Nazis getting their comeuppance, failing to mention that most Russians don’t even want this war. Jackson Hinkle outright denied that Russia was firing missiles into Ukraine, describing it as a false flag operation by the Ukraine Army. Most disturbingly, popular left-wing streamer Hasan Piker defended Russia and took Kremlin line uncritically, insisting that Crimea is rightfully Russian territory and openly stating that he does not care about Ukraine’s constitution or regional sovereignty, claiming that the Russian annexation of Crimea somehow isn’t imperialism, even going so far as to assert that Hitler’s annexation of Austria was not much of a problem.
This is not only disturbing, but it is also emblematic of how easily pro-Russia leftists (as well as pro-Russia rightists) repeat the Nazi-esque arguments for Putin’s territorial expansions. Putin claims that Ukraine is rightfully his territory on the basis that a significant amount of ethnic Russians live in the Eastern side of it, just as Adolf Hitler did when conquering Austria and the Sudetenlands in Czechoslovakia. The same argument has been fielded by supposed leftists who have abandoned all their left-wing values, such as Jimmy Dore.
Left-wing defenders of Russia might also be shocked to learn that, much like the US and Canada, they have also been oppressing the indigenous Sámi people in Murmansk, with Sámi activists facing intimidation, drugs being planted into personal property, and even threats of exile because big corporations want to extract resources from their land. Yes, you read that correctly. The country which campists tell us we should support because it is an “anti-imperialist” power is literallythreatening indigenous people to clear their land for corporate exploitation just like the US government does. It makes you wonder how people like Caleb Maupin, Josh Jackson, or the CPGB-ML or any of these campist grifters sleep at night, or how any of their gullible followers manage to believe a single word they say about Russia being any better than America.
The reality that we on the left have to accept is that America isn’t the only big bad empire bringing war and death to this land. Russia is also a reactionary imperialist power, and one can even argue that Russia is the vision that America’s most openly reactionary elements have for their own country. As it stands, however, they are already very similar socieities. Both of them are intent on establishing large spheres of influence through military conquests, justified through phoney pretexts. Both of them are willing to threaten other countries to get what they want, and show willingness to flagrantly violate international law. Both of them have contempt for democracy at home and aborad. Both of them are run for and by an elite oligarchy which controls nearly all the wealth while the poor masses starve in grinding poverty and languish in misery. Both of them oppress protestors, particularly anti-war protestors as Russia has been doing recently. Both of them oppress minorities and actively make their lives more difficult, and both countries are willing to commit war crimes to get what they want.
The main difference between two imperialist rivals is while the US isn’t quite fascist yet, Russia is already there. Russia under Putin is a preview of what the fascism of the future might look like: elections still formally take place but they are openly rigged, and many opposition parties still tow the government line anyway (take a look at how Starmer is leading the Labour Party and you’ll see how Britain is already headed in a Putinesque direction), the media is almost entirely controlled by the state and acts as a glorified sternographer for the Kremlin, opposition activists and critics are disappeared, jailed or even assassinated, the economy is run exclusively by a handful of oligarchs who buy off politicians of the ruling party, civil liberties are curtailed in the name of protecting “public morality” and “Christian values”, the real history is replaced by a whitewashed version of it that glorifies the nation, and power is centralised into the hands of a single individual.
So what is the the left to do? Well, for starters, we must completely reject campism and its proponents. The world is not a binary between the evil US empire and everyone that opposes them. Not everyone who opposes the US is the good guy, and not everyone who criticises the so-called “anti-imperialist” countries is a CIA shill. We must recognise that Russia is imperialist just as the US is, and we need to stand firmly against imperialism.
To that effect, we must also refuse the calls for the war. We must not allow for our countries to rush headlong into a catastrophic war in Europe, which experts have said could feasibly escalate into a nuclear conflict. Even if, like me, you messed up and wrongly predicted that Russia would not invade Ukraine, don’t go rushing off to join the army just to make tyourself feel more righteous.
The primary goal for the left at this point is to bring about peace in the region, and one of our main demands should be for Vladimir Putin to stop invading Ukraine and lay down his arms. While this alone would not solve every problem, it would drastically reduce tensions and calm the fears of many Ukrainians and people across the world. Since it is unlikely that Putin will willingly do this, he must be made to do this by the governments of the rest of the world. The left must pressure governments to target the wealth of Putin’s oligarch friends, and demand that they do everything within their power to de-escalate the situation.
In Britain in particular, we must be relentless in pointing out the abject hypocrisy of the Tory government, which has been persistent with its tough talk on Russia while the party itself continues to take donations from Russian oligarchs. Perhaps this contradiction being brought to light by war in Ukraine may prove instrumental in finally bringing down the awful government that we have had for over a decade. As a matter of fact, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the opposition, Labour actually had a serious plan to tackle the influence of Russian oligarchs, including their funding of the Conservative Party, and John McDonnell had a six-point plan which might actually have accomplished that had Labour been elected. Back then, the same respectable politicians and pundits dismissed Corbyn and McDonnell for pointing out what every mainstream news outlet does today.
At the same time, we must be ready to oppose the hawishness of Starmer’s Labour Party, whose leader has already labelled the Stop the War Coalition as allies of dictatorships for the crime of wanting peace in the world, who threatened 11 of its MPs into removing their names from a petition calling for peace, and whose MPs are already toying the idea of forcing British Russians to choose their nationality, a measure which will notably not hurt the oligarchs who are supporting Vladimir Putin.
We are passing through a seismic historical moment which will profoundly alter our understanding of the world and the political landscape at large. I can see that there is already a sea change happening as a result of invasion. The credibility of the campist left now lies in smouldering ashes, their entire arguments about Russia having been debunked by none other than Putin himself, who is surely laughing at every leftist who ever treated him like some socialist ally, let alone gave him the benefit of the doubt. Outlets such as The Morning Star and groups such as the Communist Party of Britain seem to have changed their tune shortly after, and are now finally recognising that Russia is equally as imperialistic as the US in their reporting and statements. Gone are the days when there was any excuse for campism, and hopefully those tendencies will be buried in the dustbin of history alongside the reactionary imperialist forces that have been playing the workers for fools. In the meantime, we must stand for no war, except the class war.
East of Eden 