By George Banks
In the wake of Ukraine’s surprise counter-offensive in Russia’s Kursk region, which started on 6 August and resulted in Ukraine capturing over 100 villages, Russia has now regained the initiative on its own territory. The manoeuvre was intended to pull forces away from Donetsk but ended up leaving Ukrainian forces stretched. As a result, Russia is also slowly but surely gaining ground in the East, which has remained the central theatre throughout the conflict.
With the war in Ukraine reaching a critical stage, the politics of Britain’s main anti-war activist organisation, Stop the War, are being disseminated widely, with the organisation achieving renewed prominence on the British left as a result of its role in the movement against the Gaza genocide. Stop the War’s perspective on the Ukraine war is a blend of the politics of the two major political tendencies which support it and make up the bulk of its members – Counterfire and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB).
Counterfire’s politics amount to a combination of pacifism and a misapplication of Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’, originally developed to deal with imperialist power at war with one another or colonial repression. The war is characterised as simply ‘the Nato proxy war in Ukraine’. They admonish the Ukrainian resistance for fighting back, blaming ‘Western intransigence over negotiations’ for ‘bringing the world closer to catastrophe’. A major theme is the threat of escalation into a wider conflict, ‘threatening the future of humanity’. While this possibility should not be discounted, Counterfire’s propaganda treats this outcome as a near certainty, at variance with the true situation, which has seen the conflict devolve into a grinding war of attrition, with Russia slowly but steadily strengthening their positions and capturing new territory.
The threat of a wider war between Russia and Nato, while remaining a possibility, increasingly appears the most unlikely scenario for the future development of the conflict. In fact, this development would run counter to the war aims of Nato, which has thus far been to regulate its support with the aim of wearing Russia down, but not intervening decisively enough to allow Ukraine to achieve victory for fear of sparking open conflict between the imperialist powers.
At the same time, Counterfire paints a grim picture of Ukraine’s chances of victory, stating that ‘Nato’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine is failing’ and that Ukraine will soon be pushed into peace talks by the West that are ‘likely to happen in the next year’. In this, they unintentionally expose the contradiction between the war aims of Nato and Ukraine, or at least its working class. While Nato may be prepared to support Ukraine to a certain point, the protracted and expensive war of attrition is already causing a waning of support for the Ukrainian resistance in the Western imperialist centre.
With the upcoming elections in the US and Trump promising to ‘get it resolved very quickly’ using his ‘very good relationship with Putin’, continued Western support for Ukraine has never been more uncertain. This is even acknowledged by Counterfire’s Chris Banbury who states that ‘he has made it clear he wants to pull the plug on this war’, and even if Harris wins that she will ‘be tempted… to put the unpleasant reality behind her early on.’
The Communist party takes a more openly pro-Russian ‘campist’ position, inherited from its days as an uncritical supporter of the USSR. While denouncing attempts to ‘silence voices for peace and reconciliation’, particularly those which ‘do not propagate the world-view of Western imperialism and NATO’ and condemning sanctions against Russia ‘in order to create more favourable conditions for a ceasefire’, they do not call for Russia to immediately withdraw its troops from Ukraine, making this demand conditional on Nato committing to a ‘neutral Ukraine’.
Mixed in with this are warnings about the likelihood of an imminent World War and utopian illusions about the emerging progressive role of a global ‘track to multipolarity’ in which ‘new values are being asserted’. They assert that the US and Nato bloc ‘doesn’t want to accept this new reality and is willing to go to war to prevent it, possibly even to nuclear war’. This interpretation only serves to provide a justification for Putin’s initial attempt to extinguish Ukraine’s existence as an independent state, then to annex one third of its territory. Ultimately, the positions of the two organisations can co-exist comfortably under the banner of Stop the War, since they resolve into the same thing – capitulation before Russian imperialism.
Fight Imperialism
Stop the War’s propaganda only tells one side of the story, focusing on the conflict’s character as an inter-imperialist proxy war. While the conflict does represent an intensification of the inter-imperialist struggle between Nato and Russia, with each side seeking to manoeuvre to their own geostrategic advantage at the expense of the Ukrainian and Russian working class, Stop the War ignores the war’s fundamental character as a just struggle for national self-determination against an invasion by imperialist Russia, a nation which has historically oppressed it.
While their condemnation of Nato’s objectives, before as well as after the war began is entirely justified, the exclusive focus of Stop the War’s analysis on this aspect of the conflict, ignoring the predatory role of Russia’s invasion, leads them into serious error. As part of this message, they underplay the significance of Putin’s crime of invading the Donbass on the basis of the supposed consent to this, because of the Russian speaking majority in the affected region; ‘the views of Ukrainians living in the territory controlled by Russia… are typically not counted. But we do know from polls taken prior to the invasion that this population has consistently demonstrated a higher prevalence of pro-Russian attitudes.’
Regardless of their supposed pre-war attitudes, no-one is in favour of having their city flattened or their home destroyed. A referendum at gunpoint does not amount to self-determination for the people of Eastern Ukraine, and Russia has not invaded to liberate the ethnically Russian population, but rather to seize the region’s strategic and industrial resources.
Stop the War’s analysis misses the fundamental truth — that while the inter-imperialist struggle between Russia and Nato is an important aspect of the war, it is not its predominant characteristic. If an open war were to break out between the imperialist blocs intervening in Ukraine, the struggle of the Ukrainian people for their self-determination would not disappear, but it would need to be resolved through a revolutionary struggle against both sides. But this is currently not the case, nor is it likely to be in the short term.
Despite the narrative pushed by Stop the War, we are not dealing with an open war between Russia and the NATO countries – though the Western powers, above all the US, have a major influence on the conduct and aims of the war. However, for Ukraine and its workers and peasants, the war is still primarily a war of self-defence against an invading oppressor state.
Ukraine is not itself an imperialist power nor is it a member of the EU or Nato which have repeatedly rejected or deferred its applications to join. Socialists should oppose its joining Nato, just as we opposed the eastward expansion of the imperialist alliance.
We defend the resistance of the Ukrainian people, their right to carry on that struggle by whatever means they can, and their right to self-determination and sovereignty. At the same time, we call on the Ukrainian people to place no confidence in, and give no political support to, Zelensky and Nato, which, as they have shown, only want to exploit and oppress them. We defend Ukrainian socialists and workers persecuted by Zelensky’s regime. We oppose his neoliberal policies, which would subject Ukrainian workers and farmers to the austerity of the IMF and super-exploitation by Western multinationals. We oppose his anti-union laws and bans on political parties which are not actually undermining the country’s resistance.
But we are totally opposed to an imperialist peace at the expense of the Ukrainian working class. Against the reactionary leadership of Zelensky and Nato, revolutionaries argue for the working class to come to the head of the resistance struggle. We say – Russian troops out of Ukraine, no to the inter-imperialist cold war and self-determination for the populations of Crimea and Donbas. If the Kyiv government and Nato try to force Ukraine to surrender to Russia’s demands we would support a mass revolutionary struggle for a workers’ government to continue resistance. In the period ahead, we fight for an independent socialist Ukraine, since nothing short of that can bring a just and lasting peace.
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