Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland secretary Peter Cooper responds in Heckle to an article by Stop the War Coalition Scotland secretary Sophie Johnson which claimed and welcomed that “popular enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine has all but disappeared”.
Sophie Johnson’s article for Conter in the name of “the antiwar movement” is an attack on the Ukraine solidarity movement.
Most of it is familiar, if repugnant, stuff – repeating all the usual Stop the War tropes (typically echoed by the likes of the Morning Star) about the war being a NATO-instigated inter-imperialist war, while leaving absent any Russian responsibility for invading another country, and denying any agency to the Ukrainian people and government.
Johnson claims that the course of the war has vindicated the demands of her movement since the beginning of the war for an immediate ceasefire, peace talks, and refusal of arms to Ukraine to defend itself against its giant neighbour.
She latches onto Russia’s (limited, but real) battlefield successes, and exaggerates war weariness in the west and in Ukraine, to make her case about popular support for Ukraine, which she contrasts with the undoubted vibrancy of the Gaza mobilisations.
By contrast, there is not a word of criticism in her article of Russia’s aggressive and ethnocidal conduct, let alone any reference to the Stop the War Coalition’s formal but rarely-mentioned demand for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.
Much of Johnson’s argument hinges on recent Russian success on the battlefield (at the cost of 1,500 dead and wounded a day). According to her, this has caused an increasing recognition of the inevitability of peace negotiations by Western leaders such as Germany’s Olaf Scholz (who will be out of office by February).
Peace
We all want peace. The question is, and has always been, peace on what and on whose terms? It is for Ukraine and Ukrainians alone to decide that question, without coercion by threats of withdrawal of economic and military aid from its western “allies”.
Everyone agrees, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, that peace negotiations will probably take place in 2025. As Johnson recognises, much will depend on Donald Trump, but despite his typically bombastic claim that he will “end the war in a day” through a deal with Putin, this is far from certain.
If enforced, Trump’s policy has only one meaning: to force Ukraine into, at the very least, surrendering to Putin the occupied 20% of its land, home to 25% of its citizens before the first Russian invasion in 2014.
But Vladimir Putin has so far been completely uncompromising. He will demand more than the territory he has conquered.
The problem is that Putin currently has no incentive to make peace except perhaps on the terms he laid down in June: annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts – Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, half of which he still doesn’t control – plus the effective neutralisation of the remaining Ukrainian state (refusing to allow it to join not only NATO but also the EU), making Ukraine as independent as Belarus (i.e. not at all), in addition to the lifting of all western sanctions on Russia. This would leave the rest of Ukraine defenceless against further Russian attacks.
Perhaps Putin’s demands are too great even for Trump to be able to swallow without looking weak. By doing so, he would be vindicating Putin’s strategy of achieving his expansionist aims by military violence. It would be a defeat for the right of nations to self-determination and a victory for authoritarian rulers everywhere.
As well as Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, India’s Modi, China’s Xi and, yes, Israel’s fellow indicted war-criminal Benjamin Netanyahu would all be quietly celebrating such a move by Trump, as US imperialism gave them additional pretexts to carry on terrorising and murdering their troublesome oppressed nations.
Johnson claims that the coming of peace negotiations are a vindication of the “antiwar movement” which has advocated for unconditional peace negotiations, de-escalation, and opposed US and its allies’ arms supplies to Ukraine. Of course, it is nothing of the sort.
If Stop the War’s demands had been implemented at any point, there would have been no meaningful negotiations. Ukraine would have been fully occupied by Russia within months, and/or a puppet government installed, and its programme of ethnocide, the disappearing of Ukraine, implemented.
Proxy war or national liberation war?
Johnson’s article uncritically reeks of all the usual Stop the War tropes. Everything is subsumed under the abstract, crude, and fallacious view that Ukraine’s war is solely a US/NATO proxy war against Russia – no mention, let alone discussion, of the right of Ukraine to exist as an independent nation state, nor, because it is systematically denied, of any agency on the part of the Ukrainian government and people.
For Johnson and her co-thinkers, Ukrainians are useful fools and passive tools in the hands of their US imperialist masters, except of course when they have the temerity to “unrealistically” demand the weapons and the right to use them to win.
By contrast, for the solidarity movement, the war has always had a dual character. It is both a war of national liberation, and a US-led proxy war.
We support Ukraine’s fight first and foremost because it is a national liberation struggle against its historic oppressor – Russia’s – attempt to dominate and/or to disappear it as a nation, culturally, politically and physically.
“The war has always had a dual character. It is both a war of national liberation, and a US-led proxy war.”
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Ukrainian and Russian history knows about the massacres, deliberate starvation of millions in the 1932-33 Holodomor, the suppression of the Ukrainian language and culture, and denial of national self-determination under Tsarist and Soviet rule alike.
Many writers, such as Owen Matthews, attribute Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s shocking cover-up of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster as the last straw which broke the union’s back. The consequence was the 1991 referendum decision to support independence in every oblast (region) of Ukraine, including in the only majority Russophone oblasts, Sevastopol and Crimea.
Russian oppression of Ukraine and Ukrainians has resumed since 2014, but Johnson makes no mention or discussion of Russia’s imperialist war aims – no mention or discussion of Russia’s brutal conduct of the war, the systematic rape, torture, mass deportations from the occupied territories, the kidnapping and forcible adoption of tens of thousands of children, forced Russification of society etc. which has created such hatred of Russia in Ukraine, including amongst its Russian-speaking people. That’s why Ukrainians fight back.
We have never denied that the US is pursuing a proxy war in Ukraine for its own ends. But this is true of every war of national liberation since WW2, and earlier.
Vietnam, South Africa, Angola, and Cuba were all national liberation movements supported by Soviet Russia as proxy wars against the US or its puppets during the Cold War. The Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions would almost certainly not have survived without such aid.
What is unusual and difficult for many western leftists to get their heads round is that since the 1991 Russian counter-revolution, and especially since 2008, it has resumed imperialist service, with the overt aim of its current leadership to (at least) reassemble the pre-1917 tsarist empire – and that necessarily means reincorporating Ukraine into Russia by fair means or foul.
In this war Russia is the aggressor, while the US, and (most of, but not all) its NATO allies, to varying degrees, are supporting Ukraine, for their own ends, few of which concern its right to self-determination. These include weakening Russia’s imperial and military ambitions and subordinating the EU to US interests.
Half-hearted allies
Johnson makes great play of Ukrainian exhaustion, including desertions, after nearly three years of full-scale invasion by its much larger neighbour. Sadly, much of this is true. But Johnson doesn’t address the question of whose responsibility for this state of affairs it is.
Of course, it is above all Russia’s. Without the invasion, there would have been no war. But it is also the responsibility of the US and of its NATO allies, who have failed to provide the weapons – fighters, tanks, etc. – and munitions Ukraine has needed even just to hold the line, let alone to throw the Russians out.
There is a degree of US-Russian collusion here, some of which is necessary, but some of which is decidedly not.
The necessary collusion is that which has prevented the war escalating into a potential world war. This includes, for example, the correct refusal of the US and its allies to make Ukraine a no-fly zone. This would inexorably lead to direct combat between NATO and Russian aircraft, likely triggering escalating an out-of-control mutual retaliation.
But the US has not even provided to any Ukrainian city, other than Kyiv, the “iron dome” defensive weapons which it has provided to Israel, for example. Biden’s excessive caution has prevented the Ukrainian military from launching US/UK long-range missiles to strike military targets in Russia, to counter the 2,000lb glide bombs launched from within Russian borders to pulverise Ukrainian troops and cities with impunity.
The failure of western governments, including and especially the UK’s, to impose sanctions on Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) has allowed Russia to generate billions of dollars in revenue to finance its war.
If Ukraine’s armed forces were properly equipped, given the weapons to win, and sanctions on Russia systematically applied, Ukraine could still win this war.
Some of the responsibility for the course of the war also lies with the neoliberal and oligarch-dominated Ukrainian government, for example its handling of the low troop morale, faced with Russia’s slow but seemingly relentless advance.
This has been exacerbated by, for example, the absence of troop rotation, and corruption including widespread draft-dodging by the sons of the wealthy and well-connected. But much of this goes back to the NATO countries’ failure to provide sufficient aid and arms, and therefore hope of victory.
By contrast, Johnson fails to mention any of Russia’s economic and military difficulties. For example, Russia’s push on the eastern front is costing it dearly in dead and injured – an estimated 1,500 a day, i.e. an unsustainable 45,000 troops a month. Similarly, the Russian government is now spending an equally unsustainable 40% of its revenues on the military.
Johnson weirdly but revealingly attacks the pro-Ukraine left for “the shallowness of an internationalism which defers to the politics of the state instead of trying to establish an antagonistic class politics”.
What does that even mean? Does she think that Ukrainian, Russian, and now North Korean troops should shoot their officers and fraternise with each other? Just how would she propose to achieve that simultaneously and lastingly?
This is la-la land, designed only to give a rhetorical veneer of “class politics” to her argument. Of course, in reality she and her co-thinkers are precisely deferring in practice to the politics of the aggressive, authoritarian, imperialist Russian state.
Community mobilisation
Since the full-scale invasion, there has been an historically unprecedented level of popular and community mobilisation in support of Ukrainian refugees in our Warm Scots Welcome. This has included people opening their homes, sometimes for years on end, helping to organise social and cultural events, setting up Ukrainian Saturday schools.
There has been an equally impressive effort at local and national level to send financial, material, medical, and military support to Ukraine. To list just a few examples, there are Babyboxes and Beyond, Sunflower Scotland, Dnipro Kids and Spiders for Ukraine (whose camouflage nets are apparently much sought after by soldiers on the front line). Much of this magnificent internationalist effort has gone unsung and unreported.
Johnson contrasts the alleged unpopularity of UK government policies of support for Ukraine with the support gained by the movement in solidarity with Palestine. However, these turn out to be remarkably similar.
After nearly three years of the normalisation of the full-scale invasion and soaring energy prices blamed on the war, levels of popular support for the UK government continuing to support and arm Ukraine – 54% for and 17% against, according to a recent Ipsos poll – have held up remarkably.
These figures are very similar to a YouGov poll finding that 55% of people support the UK ending the sale of arms to Israel for the duration of the conflict in Gaza. Only 13% want to see the continuation of arms sales.
In other words, the majority of the UK public back the UK government’s economic and military support for Ukraine, while rejecting the UK government’s position of supplying arms to Israel in equal measure.
Political solidarity
Of course, the failure of UK governments, both Tory and now Labour, to provide sanctuary to the Palestinians of Gaza on at least the same terms as it has provided to Ukrainians is criminal. It is a function of UK foreign policy towards Ukraine and Palestine respectively. But the UK’s discriminatory asylum policy is neither the fault of Ukrainians, nor of the solidarity movement.
On the other hand, it has been difficult building a political solidarity movement, primarily because the majority both continue to support Ukraine’s fight to retain its independence while also believing that UK governments have, broadly speaking, already ‘done the right thing’ in providing economic and military aid.
But what of the left abandoning Ukraine, as alleged by Johnson?
The past year has seen the slow but steady progression of the pro-Ukraine left in the trade unions, for example in the UK’s largest union, UNISON, whose conference voted overwhelmingly to affiliate to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. The university lecturers’ union, the UCU, also voted to affiliate. The conference of the largest English education union, the NEU, was only prevented from voting to affiliate by the union’s campist left cynically filibustering the motion.
In Scotland, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland (USCS) has gained the affiliation of the left-wing Scottish Green Party, the support of the SNP left, and more recently support from significant chunks of the environmental left (Greenpeace UK, FoE Scotland, Uplift, Global Justice Now Scotland) for our campaign for sanctions on the transportation of Russian LNG by UK shippers like Glasgow-based Seapeak.
We in USCS will continue to build a real “antagonistic class politics”, which includes building support in Scottish and UK unions and civil society organisations for their Ukrainian counterparts, who are simultaneously defending the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression and against attacks by Ukraine’s neoliberal government.
Contributor
Peter Cooper is a life-long socialist and retired CWU member. A veteran of international solidarity movements including the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the Troops Out Movement, he is now secretary of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland (USCS).
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