How Should Antiwar Socialists View the Conflict in Ukraine?
A response to Matthew Strupp's article "The US Proxy War in Ukraine and Socialist Anti-War Strategy"
Introduction: Russian Intervention as a Response to NATO/Ukrainian Provocation
Eight months ago, in my piece “The Ukraine Tragedy: Made in America,” I discussed in detail the historical and geopolitical context of the current Ukraine/NATO vs. Russia war. I also put out several videos on my YouTube channel about the conflict during its early months. My conclusion then, as now, was that far from being an unprovoked attack, the Russian military operation that began on Feb. 24, 2022 was a long-predicted response to a series of provocations by the US and its proxy, Ukraine, that began with the US-backed, fascist-led 2014 coup in Ukraine, and posed a genuine threat to Russia’s security. Beyond that, Russia’s military operation was an intervention in an 8-year-long war by the Ukrainian government against its own people in eastern Ukraine. It occurred in response to a request by the governments of the besieged regions (the independence-seeking Donetsk and Luhansk provinces of eastern Ukraine) for Russia’s help in defending themselves from a major escalation by the Kiev regime’s military. According to Donetsk intelligence sources, Kiev was planning a full-scale invasion to squash the independence movement once and for all. And, looking at the broader geopolitical context, the coup, the 8-year effort by the US and its NATO allies to build up Ukraine’s military, the numerous economic sanctions by the US against Russia, and the endless stream of provocations by both the US/NATO and Ukraine were all part and parcel of the US’s effort to maintain its global hegemony. In fact, the US has made no secret of the fact that its plans for maintaining full-spectrum global dominance involve destabilizing and ultimately overthrowing the Russian government and dismembering Russia.
The stated purpose of the Russian special military operation (called that because it was at the time a fairly limited military mobilization) was to protect the people of the Donbass region, and in the service of that goal, to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Whatever else one might speculate is motivating Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine, observation of what has taken place over these past 11 months makes clear that Russia has indeed been conducting its operation in a manner that suggests it is pursuing these objectives, and has made considerable progress in diminishing Ukraine’s military capacity.
I had originally intended to do an update on events in Ukraine since my May article. However, there are many people highly qualified in analysis of military conflicts such as Scott Ritter, Brian Berletic of The New Atlas, the hosts of The Duran, etc. who have been giving regular and detailed updates throughout the conflict, so please see their extensive body of work for such details. So instead, I decided to write a response to an article/talk I came across by Matthew Strupp, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and of the unfortunately barely-existing peace movement in the US. In my previous videos as well as my writing here, I have lambasted a faction of the Western left, led by “NATO socialists” such as Howie Hawkins in the US and Olivier Besancenot in France, that has unfortunately called for arming Ukraine. However, as Max Parry pointed out in an excellent article in Covert Action Magazine, even most of those in the faction of the Western left calling for peace in Ukraine nonetheless characterize the Russian military operation as an invasion carried out on behalf of Russia’s alleged imperialist ambitions, and appear to regard the thousands of victims of the Ukrainian military’s violence in the Donbass as what Herman and Chomsky called “unworthy victims,” since the deaths of these innocent victims of NATO’s proxy in Kiev go unmentioned.
Though in some ways better than most of the perspectives that fall in this camp (e.g., he at least acknowledges that there’s been a civil war in the Donbass, though he gives no specifics), Strupp’s view of the conflict in Ukraine largely shares these shortcomings. So, let’s have a closer look at what Strupp has to say.
Discussion of Matthew Strupp’s Article, “The US Proxy War in Ukraine and Socialist Anti-War Strategy”
Points of Agreement
On the positive side, Strupp’s assessment of the US role in the conflict and its overall motives overlaps significantly with my own assessment (presented at length here a few months ago). He approvingly presents the assessment of British communist Mike Macnair that the US is a “declining global hegemon” that “is primarily motivated by a need to constrain the rise of any potential peer competitor…a capitalist state which is economically strong enough to subordinate the economies of other states to its own, as the United States does.” He acknowledges that “…the US end game is that laid out by Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbignew Brezhinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard—the full subordination of the Russian economy to that of the United States through another regime change, and even the partition of the Russian state into smaller US dominated units…” Strupp also seemingly “gets” that Russia genuinely perceives the US as a threat. He writes: “From the Russian perspective, the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union have been characterized by near-total encirclement by US power and influence,” which is indeed the case. NATO has added 14 members since 1991 despite promising Gorbachev that it would not expand east of Germany, deployed offensive weapons in the new member countries, and conducted frequent military exercises near the Russian border, and its member countries have imposed numerous economic sanctions on Russia and sent large quantities of weapons to Ukraine.
Strupp also engages in a fairly detailed, albeit somewhat sanitized, discussion of Ukraine’s history during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, noting that the collapse of the Soviet Union turned the fact that Ukraine was sharply divided ethnically between a largely ethnic Russian (and overwhelmingly Russian-speaking) population in the east and a pro-Western, Ukrainian-speaking, and in some cases Ukrainian nationalist population in Western Ukraine from essentially a non-issue when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union into a major source of tension. He continues, “the Ukrainian nationalist political project required subordinating this Russian language majority area to their national project, which involved the promotion of the Ukrainian language at the expense of others like Russian and Hungarian. It also involved a retelling of history in a Ukrainian nationalist vein, so the Soviet legacy and the war against the Nazis were downplayed in favor of what was deemed true Ukrainian patriotism. Thus the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera became the quintessential national heroes for this strand of politics in spite of that organization’s extensive ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews and its alliance with Nazi Germany.” (We’re not to the disagreement section yet, but I can’t help noting here that “ethnic cleansing” is a curious euphemism for what was actually a genocide of colossal proportions.)
Strupp goes on to note that the 2013-2014 Maidan protests were, particularly in Kiev, “considerably dominated by far right organizations such as Right Sector,” that “The Western media and intelligence apparatuses pushed the movement into a regime change operation…” and that the US went out of its way to make sure that the coup government was pro-Western and did not allow any “pro-Russian” elements. And once the new government took power, he writes, it immediately passed legislation restricting Russian language use in education, threatened to end Ukraine’s decades-long lease of the site of the Russian naval base in Sevastopol (which he claims “triggered the Russian annexation and occupation of [Crimea]”), and amended its constitution to explicitly commit to NATO and EU membership as soon as it was offered. He states that “these developments triggered the separatist movement and civil war in the Donbass, with the two oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk declaring so-called [sic] People’s Republics…” and attributes responsibility for the lack of success of the attempts to resolve the conflict (the Minsk and Minsk II agreements) to Ukraine’s refusal to honor the agreements. Finally, Strupp recognizes the thoroughly reactionary character of the Ukrainian regime: “Another feature of Ukrainian politics since 2014 has been the ongoing attack on all progressive features of Ukrainian society under the aegis of ‘de-communization’. On the symbolic level, this has meant tearing down statues of Lenin and other Soviet monuments and repudiating the celebration of the anti-Nazi Soviet war effort in favor of Ukrainian nationalist history. On the material level, it has meant privatization, attacks on social welfare, and anti-trade union laws.”
I concur with much of his assessment here. But as with his reference to the portion of the Holocaust that took place in Ukraine as “ethnic cleansing,” in his reference to “the material level” he makes no mention whatsoever of the violent character of the Kiev regime. And overall, to be honest, there was about as much that I disagreed with as agreed with in this piece. Below, I discuss in detail where I think Strupp’s piece goes astray.
Points of Disagreement
The Military Situation and Russia’s Rationale
First was his superficial and inaccurate characterization of the status of the war as involving “the two sides trading offensives and gaining and losing territory respectively in the East.” Even during the initial few months of the conflict when Russia only had approximately 150,000 troops mobilized and largely refrained from attacking infrastructure such as the power grid that typically constitutes a wartime target (which is part of the reason Russia has called this a “special military operation”), Russia took control of about 20% of Ukraine’s territory, and residents of these areas voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Its military superiority is obvious to anyone who has been paying close attention to the conflict.
And Strupp appears not to understand what Russia’s objectives were: to demilitarize Ukraine, to denazify it, and to protect the Donbass region and Crimea. Capturing territory, other than the part of the Donbass that was under Ukrainian government control, was not a major objective, nor could it have been given that Russia sent in roughly half the number of troops that Ukraine fielded. But with its major advantages in firepower (e.g., 8 to 1 superiority in artillery and similarly overwhelming advantages in missiles and drones), Russia has demilitarized Ukraine to a major extent—Ukraine has lost an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 troops (many times the losses of the Russian military), and it is losing weaponry at a rate far faster than the West can supply it. To compensate for its heavy loss of men, the Ukrainian government has taken to conscripting men at gunpoint, as well as extending the draft age up to age 60 and not allowing men aged 18-60 to leave the country. Things are only getting worse for Ukraine now that Russia has mobilized an additional 300,000+ troops and is systematically taking out Ukraine’s infrastructure, making it more and more difficult to move troops around and supply them. It has always been just a matter of time before Ukraine lost this war, and it is accomplishing nothing by continuing to fight other than prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Revolutionary Defeatism?
A second problem I had with this article was its invocation of Lenin’s concept of “revolutionary defeatism” as a guiding framework for leftists’ outlook on the Ukraine War, which he characterized as “reactionary on both sides.” Briefly, revolutionary defeatism involves workers wishing and even actively working for the defeat of their own government during a war, so as to put a strong workers’ movement in a better position to overthrow capitalism thanks to the weakened state of their defeated country’s military. As Lenin put it in 1914, “From the viewpoint of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the defeat of the Tsarist monarchy and its army, which oppress Poland, the Ukraine, and many other peoples of Russia, and foments hatred among the peoples so as to increase Great-Russian oppression of the other nationalities, and consolidate the reactionary and barbarous government of the Tsar’s monarchy, would be the lesser evil by far.”
Over the next couple of years, the defeatist slogan evolved into urging that workers in every country involved (all of which were capitalist, imperialist powers) adopt the position that the defeat of its country’s government in a war would be of benefit in achieving workers’ aims. However, of course, it is logically impossible for every involved country to lose a war; if there are losers, that means there are winners. So, ironically, adopting revolutionary defeatism in Country X put one on the same side as imperialists who were citizens of its opponent, Country Y, who were cheering for their own side’s victory. Given this conundrum, Lenin ultimately rejected revolutionary defeatism altogether. And in fact, Russia was not defeated during World War I—its side won—but the war nonetheless weakened the government and ultimately facilitated the occurrence of the Russian Revolution, during which Russia’s military largely turned against the Tsarist government. On the flip side, Germany was defeated, and as we all know, its workers’ movement was ultimately smashed by the Nazis. In short, historical events made clear that revolutionary defeatism could not serve as any sort of generally applicable principle—not to mention that all of this begs the question, “Where does a strong workers’ movement exist?”
That does not mean, however, that we cannot readily identify wartime situations where victory by one side and defeat by the other is an objectively lesser evil (even though war is always evil, though sometimes unavoidable). Is it really an accurate characterization of the NATO/Ukraine vs. Russia war to say that it is “reactionary on both sides,” and leave it at that? Of course, I agree with Strupp that the war is reactionary on the US/Ukraine/NATO side. However, although it would be equally simplistic to characterize the war as a “good guys” (Russia and its allies in the Donbass independence movement) vs. “bad guys” (the US, Ukraine, and their NATO allies) struggle given that Russia is a capitalist state, characterizing it as “reactionary on both sides” is a profound false equivalency. Very few communists (principally, those who were strict pacifists) characterized World War II as “reactionary on both sides” and left it at that; the vast majority, while recognizing that World War II was largely an inter-imperialist conflict (the exception being the socialist, albeit Stalinist, Soviet Union, which played the most decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany), nonetheless recognized the fascist Axis powers as the greater evil, and wished for their defeat. Granted, defeating the fascist Axis powers hardly constituted defeating fascism altogether, since there were still fascist powers elsewhere, and since the US has so assiduously supported fascists and other reactionaries since World War II. But was the defeat of the overtly fascist Germans, Italians, and Japanese not a lesser evil than their victory would have been?
Reactionary on Both Sides?
Fast forward to the present conflict in Ukraine. Is it any more accurate to say that it is “reactionary on both sides, part of right-wing nation-building projects,” as Strupp claims—and, ergo, it doesn’t matter who wins (not that there is any doubt about who will win)? No, it is quite inaccurate, and is based on a number of misapprehensions of the situation.
First, although the Russian government is far from being some sort of left-wing or even particularly progressive regime, the contrast between Russia, where the Communist Party is the second-leading office-holder in the Duma and expressions of Nazi ideology are banned and its proponents often prosecuted and jailed, and Ukraine, where communists are relentlessly persecuted (and even tortured and killed) and Nazis like Bandera are hailed as national heroes, is noteworthy. So, for that matter, is the contrast between Russia, which does not have hundreds of foreign military bases, doesn’t try to overthrow foreign governments at the drop of a hat, doesn’t try to sanction countries into economic oblivion, and hasn’t launched hundreds of military operations in the last 3 decades, and the US, which is guilty of all of these things and more.
Strupp downplays the extent to which Ukraine has been a far-right horror show since the 2014 coup. He even, as noted earlier, minimizes the crimes perpetrated by Bandera’s OUN during and after the Holocaust, characterizing them as “ethnic cleansing” rather than as involving some of the worst acts of genocide of the mid-20th century. One fourth of the Jews killed during the Holocaust lived in Ukraine. Bandera and his followers were Nazis, and so are their ideological descendants in the 21st century who led the 2014 coup and have remained a powerful force in Ukraine in great disproportion to their numbers. General Zaluzhnyi, head of the Ukrainian armed forces, is himself a supporter of Bandera. Bandera’s birthday is a national holiday in Ukraine, celebrated by the Ukrainian parliament (Rada), which tweeted an image of Zaluzhnyi posing under a portrait of Bandera, who they quoted as follows: “The complete and final victory of Ukrainian nationalism will come when the Russian empire [at the time he presumably meant the Soviet Union] ceases to exist.” Anti-Slavic racism was, and is, a central component of Nazi ideology. Russians are called the dehumanizing term “orcs” by Ukraine’s Nazis. When Crimean citizens voted overwhelmingly (96%, with a massive voter turnout) to join Russia in 2014 after the Maidan coup, which they overwhelmingly opposed, the coup government retaliated by cutting off the main water supply to those uppity orcs.
The election of an ethnically Jewish/Russian President, Vladimir Zelensky, in 2019 did nothing to change the character of the Ukrainian regime. The Zelensky government has repeatedly threatened to invade Crimea—whose citizens first voted for independence from Ukraine in 1991, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Since the launch of the SMO in February 2022, Russian prisoners of war have repeatedly been tortured by Ukrainian forces, such as by being deliberately shot in the legs, or having their eyes gouged out, as well as murdered. Civilians who merely accepted food rations from Russian troops have been massacred by Ukrainian security forces for being “collaborators”; the Ukrainian government maintains a “kill list” which lists people (foreign as well as domestic) targeted for assassination because of their opposition to the Ukrainian government or its war, and not only Ukrainians on the list but Russian journalist and academic Daria Dugina and Italian journalist Andrea Rochelli have in fact been assassinated. Ukrainian troops have been deliberately targeting civilians in the Donbass region (who are mostly of Russian descent) for almost 9 years now. An advisor to President Zelensky, as well as Ukrainian news commentators, have openly called for genocide against Russians—and indeed it has been argued that the violence and cultural oppression carried out against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (which took 14,000 lives in 8 years) was already at a genocidal level. None of this was mentioned by Strupp.
A second issue with Strupp’s “reactionary on both sides” perspective is that even though Strupp recognizes that the US ruling class wants to weaken and enact regime change in Russia and mentions that Russia perceives the US as a threat, he doesn’t appear to take the threat to Russian sovereignty particularly seriously himself. The war is just “reactionary on both sides”; what took place on Feb. 24 was simply a “Russian invasion,” and the “immediate reason” for it “isn’t clear.” We should “stand with the Russian peace movement”; never mind that it is a thoroughly pro-Western movement that represents a tiny minority of the Russian population. The majority of the Russian people, who view the military operation as a necessary measure for the security of their country and their fellow ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, are dismissed by Strupp as dupes of state media propaganda.
Russians, with a strong historical memory of the Nazi invasion that took over 25 million Soviet lives as well as in most cases a personal memory of the havoc that Western imperialism wreaked on their country in the ’90s, have good reason to be legitimately concerned about the threat the US and its Nazi-dominated, anti-Russian proxy next door poses to their country’s safety and sovereignty. Of course, they know about the assassination of Daria Dugina, and know that other Russians are on Ukraine’s kill list. They are well aware that NATO, which previously dismembered Yugoslavia and Libya, has similar plans for Russia. They are also well aware that Ukraine has repeatedly threatened to invade Crimea which, irrespective of the opinions of Western imperialists, has been part of Russia not only since 2014, but for most of modern history. And hatred of not only the Russian government, but Russians, has been stoked to such an extent in the West that Russian athletes are banned from international competitions such as Wimbledon and the World Cup, their nationality elided from sporting associations’ websites, while Russian musicians are fired from their jobs or have contracts terminated, and known Russians residing in the West are harassed on the basis of the simple fact that they are Russian—or it is demanded that they denounce their government. (To be sure, most Westerners don’t appear to hold Russians’ nationality against them—Russian athletes still get tremendous crowd support from what I’ve seen, for example.) Is it any wonder that most Russians want their country’s military to defeat Ukraine and NATO—especially given that Ukraine and the West have, at least since April when Boris Johnson pressured Zelensky to back out of a potential peace agreement, been unwilling to even consider a peace settlement that takes Russia’s security concerns, to say nothing of the well-being of the long-suffering residents of the Donbass region, into account?
Speaking of residents of the Donbass and Crimea, although Strupp at least acknowledges that there’s been a civil war in the Donbass and that Crimea is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Russians, beyond that, there’s no mention of their existence or what they might wish for (or fear). Strupp describes the return of Crimea to Russia in 2014 as “the Russian occupation and annexation” of Crimea, and characterizes it simply as being triggered by Kiev’s threats to cancel the lease on Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea; he makes no mention of the 2014 referendum in which 96% voted for Crimea to rejoin Russia, a decision that later polls (reported in Forbes Magazine!) as well as interviews with independent journalists indicated Crimeans were very happy with. Needless to say, he also doesn’t mention that 94% of Crimeans voted for independence from Ukraine back in 1991 when it was still part of the Soviet Union, or that in 1994, 73% voted for Presidential candidate (President of Crimea, that is) Yuri Meshkov, who advocated Crimea leaving Ukraine and joining Russia. Following that, 78% voted for a referendum that called for autonomous governance within Ukraine, and 83% voted for the right of Crimeans to hold dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship. The next year, the Ukrainian government abrogated the Crimean constitution, abolished the post of President, and deported Meshkov to Russia at gunpoint. Thus, it was Ukraine, not Russia (as Strupp implies), that thwarted the popular will of the overwhelmingly ethnically Russian Crimean population, and continues attempting to do so to this day, with the backing of the US.
The plight and will of residents of the Donbass similarly receive short shrift from Strupp. Although he mentions that the coup triggered a separatist movement and civil war, he refers to the breakaway republics as the “so-called” Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. He makes no mention of the 2014 referendums in which 89% in Donetsk and 96% in Luhansk voted for independence from Ukraine—an unsurprising outcome given that opinion polls indicated that the overwhelming majority of people in these regions opposed the Maidan “revolution.” Nor does he mention that cities within these republics, such as Kramatorsk and Mariupol—as well as nearby cities such as Melitopol in the Zaporizhzhia oblast (oblast = province, essentially)—had been under the control of the Ukronazis for several years, or the brutal prisons where those Nazis tortured people. And no mention is made of the details of the civil war, of the fact that the Ukrainian military deliberately targeted civilians there for 8 years, with over 8000 civilians killed as of March 2022, nor of Ukraine’s dramatic escalation of violence against the Donbass region in mid-February.
In short, Strupp, like others in the faction of the Western peace movement that condemns the Russian “invasion” as an imperialist adventure, misses the most fundamental facts about the conflict that began in 2014: Residents of the Donbass did not want to be part of a country whose government was dominated by forces that hated and violently oppressed ethnic Russians and even speakers of the Russian language; accordingly, they voted to secede from it; that decision was met by 8 years of violence that continued despite sincere efforts to negotiate peace and appeared ready to escalate into a full-scale attempt at military conquest by early 2022. Did they not have the right to ask for the help of their powerful neighbor in defending themselves?
The conduct of the war by the Ukrainian side has given every indication that it accords no respect to the rights of residents of eastern Ukraine where the bulk of the fighting has taken place (or ethnic Russians or government opponents elsewhere in Ukraine). Even civilians fleeing the war zone have been attacked, with at least 50 killed in one attack on the Kramatorsk train station alone. As even the Washington Post conceded (and Amnesty International confirmed, only to later take their report back), the Ukrainian military has, in violation of the laws of war, set up military bases and positions in schools, hospitals, and other civilian areas, putting the lives and safety of the residents at risk. A situation in which all manner of human rights are completely disrespected has prevailed throughout Ukraine, particularly in the eastern oblasts where there is the largest population of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians. In the east especially, being part of Ukraine was not, or was no longer, perceived as safe. Thus, it should not have come as a surprise that in September, Donetsk, Luhansk, and two other eastern Ukrainian oblasts, Zaporizhzia and Kherson, organized referendums calling for secession from Ukraine and joining Russia. These referendums were observed by 133 international election observers, many of whom were sanctioned and some of whom were smeared in their nations’ media or fired from their jobs for their trouble—to join Russia. Strupp’s comment on this is,
Most recently, Russia has held plebiscites for annexation in four oblasts it controls: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. They report percentages in the high 90s in favor of annexations in all four territories. No doubt many supporters of the Ukrainian government will have fled the area, chosen not to vote, or feared the consequences of voting against annexation, so these results can’t be regarded as very meaningful…
“No doubt,” “many supporters of Ukraine” fled the area, chose not to vote, or feared the consequences of voting against annexation, he asserts, with no evidence whatsoever. But given his lack of knowledge of what the results of the referendums actually were (over 99% in favor of joining Russia in Donetsk and 98% in Luhansk, but 93% in Zaporizhzia and 87% in Kherson) and his misinformed claim that it was Russia that organized the referendums rather than the people who lived in these regions, perhaps it is justified to conclude that his opinion on the matter can’t be regarded as very meaningful, either.
In any case, let’s grant that some who supported the Ukrainian government had fled the area, chose not to vote, or feared the consequences of voting against annexation. But Strupp’s one-sided view doesn’t even consider the possibility that some people may not have voted for fear of the consequences of voting for annexation or just voting at all. Ukraine threatened to attack polling stations, resulting in four of the five days of voting being held in the neighborhoods and apartment buildings where people lived: The Ukrainian military that his and my tax dollars are supporting went out of its way to disrupt the referendums by threatening to escalate its attacks on the region (which it did). Moreover, many people were unable to vote because Ukraine still occupied parts of Donetsk, Zaphorizhia, and Kherson, and refugees from a war zone generally flee because it’s a war zone. That obviously doesn’t necessarily mean, in this case, that they are supporters of the Ukrainian government.
To me, it seems obvious that residents of these four regions, particularly those living in the Donbass republics that have been getting viciously attacked by the Ukrainian military and fascist militias (which are now part of the military) for nearly 9 years and who already voted to leave Ukraine in 2014 (and always opposed the coup regime), have ample motivation to not want to any longer be under the thumb of the Kiev regime—which, in addition to being brutal, undemocratic, and virulently Russophobic, has turned Ukraine into the poorest country in Europe, and further impoverished it by persisting in a war it could end any time it wanted. We cannot say for sure what the balance of sentiments in these regions is, but if I were a betting man, I would bet that a considerable majority genuinely prefer being part of Russia to being part of Ukraine. Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett summarizes what she heard from Donetsk residents about the reasons they supported the referendum and wanted to become part of Russia here:
they waited 8 years for this
they are tired of being bombed by Ukraine, they want peace & feel joining Russia will bring this
they were not intimidated or forced to vote, many (like Syrians) faced potential shelling in order to do so, many volunteered in order to ensure the referendum went ahead
they've long since given up caring what western commentators & "news" say about them (the same who whitewashed Ukraine's 8+ years of war crimes against the civilians of the Donbass).
Other independent journalists who have spent time in the Donbass heard much the same sentiments from countless residents they interviewed during the referendums— essentially this: “Why would I want to live in a country that kills its own citizens merely because in this part of the country most people either are ethnically Russian or speak Russian? Why would I want to live in a country that discriminates against me for wanting to speak Russian? Voting to join Russia is a no-brainer!” Many of them were fine with being part of Ukraine once upon a time, but ultimately they saw becoming part of Russia as the best option for achieving peace—a peace that they have longed for for nearly 9 years. Many children in the Donbass have grown up knowing nothing but war. Who would want that?
Strupp’s Tendentious Interpretation of Putin’s Feb. 21, 2022 Speech
So, could it be that the aspirations of the people of the Donbass to be free of the yoke of the reactionary Ukrainian regime are sincere, but the motivations of the Russian government, which after all primarily represents the interests of Russia’s capitalists, are nonetheless fundamentally reactionary, as Strupp claims? Strupp suggests that Russia’s intent was in essence to re-establish the Russian empire, and claims that Russia wanted to conquer the whole of Ukraine:
Perhaps if Russia had gotten the victory it wanted in the initial stages of the war with its offensive aimed straight at Kiev and had been able to occupy the whole country it could have become an imperialist power able to subordinate the Ukrainian economy to its own.
The only evidence Strupp presents for his view, aside from the fact that Russia is capitalist, is that Putin supposedly said at the beginning of the war (in his speech on February 21, 2022, in which he recognized “the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic”) that the Ukrainian nation was “a fiction invented by Lenin.” Actually, what Putin said was that
modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia—by separating, severing what is historically Russian land. Nobody asked the millions of people living there what they thought. [emphases mine]
Then, both before and after the Great Patriotic War [what we in the West refer to as World War II], Stalin incorporated in the USSR and transferred to Ukraine some lands that previously belonged to Poland, Romania and Hungary. In the process, he gave Poland part of what was traditionally German land as compensation, and in 1954, Khrushchev took Crimea away from Russia for some reason and also gave it to Ukraine. In effect, this is how the territory of modern Ukraine was formed.
So, Putin is not saying that all of Ukraine should belong to Russia. He is pointing out that the specific boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR were arbitrary and continued to arbitrarily shift over time, culminating with Krushchev arbitrarily “giving” Crimea, overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Russians, to Ukraine—and never once asking the residents of the region whether they wanted to be part of Ukraine or some other entity. This seems like an odd thing for someone intent on imperial conquest of Ukraine to point out.
Putin went on to point out that although it did not create huge problems during the existence of the Soviet Union, this arbitrary mushing together of eastern Ukraine, the entirety of which has a plurality of ethnic Russians, with western regions where a significant faction were radical nationalists who hated Russians, became hugely problematic once the USSR broke up and Ukraine became an independent nation. Ironically, this is precisely the point that Strupp makes:
Of course, after the fall of the USSR, all the individual SSRs become independent states and the presence of a large Russian ethnic and language minority in Ukraine becomes a source of division rather than one of unity and a considerable political problem for both Ukraine and Russia.
Of course, there is much to criticize about Putin’s politics both as expressed in this speech and in general. But the relevant point here is that, even if in a narrow sense Strupp’s paraphrasing of what Putin said about the nature of Ukraine is correct, the inference that Putin’s remarks in this speech constitute evidence that Putin and his governing United Russia party intended to conquer Ukraine is absurd.
First, as previously mentioned, Russia initially deployed only about 150,000 troops. Even though in terms of weaponry Russia had an overwhelming advantage over Ukraine (despite Ukraine having arguably the most powerful army in Europe other than Russia’s, thanks to years of NATO countries arming and training it), 150,000 troops is nowhere near what would be needed to occupy a country the size of Ukraine. It wasn’t even, as it turned out, an adequate number of troops to achieve the more limited objectives that the Russian government announced it had for the operation, once NATO countries began sending Ukraine tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons to (partially) replace what Ukraine was losing on the battlefield; hence the recent deployment of several hundred thousand more troops.
Second, Russia waited 8 years from the time hostilities broke out in the Donbass before launching its military operation—and many Donbass residents have expressed to independent journalists that they wished Russia had intervened sooner. Moreover, rather than accepting the results of the Donbass republics’ referendums declaring independence from Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government helped broker and co-signed peace treaties (Minsk I and Minsk II) between the Kiev government and the rebel Donbass governments that, among other things, continued to treat these regions as part of Ukraine.
It was actually opponents of Putin’s party, most notably the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (the second-largest holder of seats in the Duma, Russia’s parliament—quite a contrast to Ukraine where communists are banned from holding office or organizing a party, jailed, and even tortured and assassinated), that first formally proposed recognizing the DPR and LPR as independent. In fact, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov publicly called for inviting the two republics to join Russia in 2018, a move that, had it been carried out, undoubtedly would have brought Russia and Ukraine into direct military conflict. Moreover, in a modern-day version of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades that fought against Franco’s fascists in Spain, some communists from Russia and elsewhere have been fighting since 2014 alongside the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s militias against the Kiev regime’s military and the fascist paramilitary groups (now largely incorporated into Ukraine’s military). Putin, in contrast, evidently believed for many years that it was possible to peacefully resolve the conflict between the Kiev regime and the Donbass (which involved an underlying conflict between NATO and Russia), attempted to do so via the Minsk Accords, and continued to do so through draft treaties put forward by the Russian government in December 2021. Recently, in a meeting with mothers of Russian and Donbass soldiers, he said that it had been a mistake for Russia to not recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk and be open to their joining Russia sooner, and that many lives might have been saved had they done so.
An Aside: Is China an Imperialist Competitor to the United States?
Though the principal focus of Strupp’s article, and mine, is the conflict in Ukraine, he takes a brief detour to talk about China, in the context of presenting a view of the global geopolitical situation, a principal feature of which is the strong alliance between Russia and China. He writes:
In my view, China can be understood as having undergone a transition to capitalism without an overthrow of the Communist Party regime in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s, though it is a complex social formation with significant elements of state ownership and control. It is attempting to become an imperialist power on par with the United States in a similar way that Japan was able to upgrade itself into a major power in the late 19th century…
He goes on to argue that the US proxy war in Ukraine is important to the US because it sees Russia, with its powerful military, as a key ally of China in the latter’s supposed efforts to replace the US as the principal imperialist hegemon.
As I discussed in more detail in a recent piece titled “Is China Capitalist?”, there are many reasons to dispute the above characterization of the Chinese state. Of course, there are many large capitalist firms in China—in fact, China now has more firms in the Global Fortune 500 than the US, though many of them are state-owned. And inequality has indubitably increased in China since its “opening up” phase began in 1979. However, the Chinese economy’s historically unprecedented rapid growth, averaging a 9.4% annual growth rate between 1979 and 2018, and uninterrupted by any economic crisis up until the COVID pandemic began, has dramatically lifted the living standards of almost everyone in China, and that growth along with the targeted poverty alleviation program implemented under Xi Jinping’s leadership in 2013 have lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty. Life expectancy in China recently surpassed that in the United States. China is also the only country in the world that pursued a zero-COVID policy for nearly 3 years, saving millions of lives in the process; it is far and away the world leader in development of renewable energy and high-speed rail as well as reforestation; and its political and economic relations with other countries are on a cooperative basis. Although of course private multinational corporations exploit people everywhere they go, according to many observers, the Chinese government creates economic win-win situations all around the world. China is building more than 1000 schools in Iraq, for instance, and in the long run will be building thousands more. It just completed a high-speed rail project in Laos; it is building highways, airports, hospitals, schools, etc. in dozens of countries all over the world; the vast majority of the world's countries are joining the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s massive global infrastructure development program. China recently completely forgave the loans it had given to a number of African countries, and sent them food aid to boot. Unlike its chief economic rival, it does not have foreign military bases, and it does not foment coups, impose economic sanctions on other countries, rig other countries’ elections or their media landscape, or otherwise engage in policies that promote political and economic destabilization in other countries. And not surprisingly, people around the world notice. People in general in the Global South have a very favorable opinion of China, and, unlike most Western leftists, socialist leaders in Global South countries draw a very sharp contrast between the way China relates to the world and the way the US relates to the world.
The Elephant in the Room Revisited: Countries That Are Backing US Hegemony vs. Countries That Are Resisting It
In an article I wrote a few months ago, “The Elephant in the Room IS The Elephant in the Room,” I discussed what I regard as the central fact about the current geopolitical situation: On the one hand, the US has been the dominant power in the world—politically, economically, militarily, and ideologically—ever since World War II, and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, but on the other hand, its dominance is being increasingly challenged by the economic rise of China, Russia, and various Global South countries, the repeated failure of the US to impose its will militarily around the world, and the increasingly organized resistance to that hegemony. At the same time, US efforts to continue its hegemonic status have become increasingly both desperate and commonplace, as exemplified by its greatly increased rate of military interventions since the fall of the Soviet Union; its outright theft of other countries’ property, such as stopping countries’ tankers and seizing their oil, or stealing and selling oil, natural gas, and wheat from Syria; its imposition of economic sanctions on dozens of countries; its relentless propaganda campaigns to convince citizens of the US and other countries that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” that Syria used chemical weapons against its citizens, that Russia colluded with Donald Trump to rig the 2016 US election, that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang, and the list goes on; its escalating censorship, smear campaigns or economic sanctions against, or even in some cases imprisonment of dissidents (e.g., Julian Assange); and, of course, its backing of anti-government protests and terrorist groups in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Ukraine, Nicaragua, and many other places.
Its allies in Europe, Canada, Australia, and a few other places support all of this (so far); most of the world does not, and indeed there is increasing resistance to all of this. We are increasingly moving from a unipolar world in which the US and the aforementioned subordinate imperialist players have exerted global dominance for many, many decades to a multipolar world in which the US will no longer be the #1 economic and political power.
There is nothing the US can do about it, beyond incinerating the world in a nuclear holocaust, but it will continue flailing about in trying to stop the rise of China, Russia, and others. Given its intransigence, the world has increasingly become divided into two camps consisting on one hand of the US and its overwhelmingly European-descended allies who are continuing to try to dominate the world for the benefit of their ruling classes and on the other hand of most of the rest of the world, who are forming alliances through BRICS (a soon-to-be-greatly-expanded economic alliance initially consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, efforts to develop alternatives to the US-dominated global financial system, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, etc.
Of course, it would be equally as inaccurate to characterize the rivalry of these two global camps as white hats/black hats/good vs. evil as it would be to characterize it as nothing more than a struggle between forces seeking global dominance a la World War I. The vast majority of the countries in the “axis of resistance” to US hegemony are capitalist, there’s an abundance of corruption in many of them, etc. But they are on the US’s shit list (and 39 of them are currently sanctioned) precisely because they are resisting US hegemony and attempting to pursue independent economic development (one of Russia’s mortal “sins” from the US perspective is that its energy and mining sectors, banking system, and assorted other industries are largely under state control), and are forging cooperative economic and political ties with each other toward that end. Especially given the substantial economic growth of so many countries in this camp during the 21st century, it’s hard to escape the impression that this collective effort of the majority of the world’s countries to get the US/European boot off their necks will be a net positive for the world.
Moreover, all is not hunky-dory in the hegemon’s camp. It has become increasingly apparent that the US, out for itself above all else as always, is attempting to sabotage the economies of not just the countries it has sanctioned, but Europe’s as well. Though undoubtedly US officials (wrongly) thought that the draconian economic measures imposed on Russia after it launched its operation in Ukraine would leave Russia’s economy in ruins, it’s hard to imagine they weren’t aware that getting Europe, which until a year ago got the majority of its natural gas from Russia, to forego that natural gas would wreak havoc on its economic situation and cause European countries to turn to the US for supplies of vastly more expensive liquified natural gas (which still will scarcely make up for lost imports from Russia). And although those who investigated the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines that provided the bulk of that gas are so far keeping mum about the results of their investigation, it is hard to imagine that the US, which is by far the chief beneficiary of this sabotage, was not involved. (Secretary of State Anthony Blinken blurted out in a news conference that the destruction of the pipeline provided the US with a “tremendous strategic opportunity.”) Is the US’s aim to provoke the deindustrialization and economic decline of Europe, so that it provides further fodder for the US’s global exploitation machine? It seems highly likely that this is US leaders’ conscious intent. With any luck, this will backfire and many European countries will ultimately stop allying themselves with the destructive US elephant, but we will have to wait and see.
What Would Peace Between Ukraine/NATO and Russia Look Like?
With all that I have said above, what should our overall conclusion be about the NATO/Ukraine-Russia conflict? First, this war is a horrible tragedy for the Ukrainian people. Approximately 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers and perhaps 10,000 civilians in Ukraine proper have been killed, as well as an unknown number of civilians in the eastern regions that are now part of Russia, and are still being deliberately attacked by their former compatriots. A far greater number have been wounded, and the Ukrainian economy lies in tatters, kept afloat only by tens of billions of dollars in Western aid. Roughly 1/10th to 1/5th the number of Ukrainian casualties are casualties on the Russian side, a tragedy for the Russian nation on a far greater scale than that of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were for the United States. The collateral damage to the global economy that has resulted from this conflict has been great, and will increase the longer it continues. And the (mushroom) cloud that hangs over all of this is the possibility of escalation into a direct, all-out war between Russia and NATO/the US. Peace is an imperative.
But, although those who consider residents of the Donbass who have been living in a war zone since 2014 to be “unworthy victims” think Russia started this war on Feb. 24, 2022, in fact Russia intervened in an ongoing war in an effort to finally bring it to an end. And all available evidence suggests that Russia is not trying to conquer Ukraine; it is instead (in collaboration with its allies, the DPR and LPR militias) attempting to achieve the goals that it announced at the beginning of the SMO last February 24 and pursued in peace negotiations last spring—to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine and thereby bring peace to the Donbass, to get Ukraine to declare neutrality and give up its ambitions of joining NATO, and to get Ukraine to acknowledge that Crimea and the Donbass regions are now part of Russia based on these regions’ own citizens exercising their right of self-determination. (Of course, the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions were not mentioned in the Feb. 24 announcement of the SMO, but citizens in these regions also voted to join Russia, and these regions will not return to Ukraine.)
In short, for a peace agreement to be reached, Ukraine will need to stop talking about retaking Crimea and the Donbass, which are ludicrous objectives given its colossal military disadvantage; it will need to abandon its intransigent pursuit of fighting Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” and, essentially, unconditionally surrender. Given the stubbornness of both the Kiev regime and its NATO “allies” up to this point, it is unlikely that this will occur until the decisive defeat that is unfolding on the battlefield as I write this proceeds further. Indeed, it is now apparent from statements by former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and former German Prime Minister Angela Merkel that the Minsk Accords were nothing more than a ruse by the Ukraine/NATO side to buy time to build Ukraine’s military up and prepare for a showdown with Russia—one that the collective West has been gunning for this entire time, and will be very reluctant to abandon.
According to Strupp, my position that the only way peace can be achieved is with a defeat of Ukraine/NATO by the Russian military and allied groups is “utterly marginal on the left to an almost comical degree.” But, while it may be “comically marginal” to some Western leftists, there’s a whole world out there beyond their purview that, due to their understanding of many of the facts I have described above, appears to feel differently. That includes numerous independent journalists and commentators such as Scott Ritter, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou of The Duran, Danny Haiphong, Eva Bartlett, etc., many of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers. Ritter is internationally known for his public denunciation, in his role at the time of chief weapons inspector for the UN, of the US’s claim that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” Recently, Ritter commented that
There is no chance in hell that there will be peace in Ukraine [short of Ukraine unconditionally surrendering]. None. Why? Who are the Russians going to negotiate with? There is no partner out there that Russia would ever trust. Russia made this mistake once [when it participated in negotiating the Minsk Accords]… The way this war ends is with Russia dictating unconditional terms of surrender to a defeated Ukrainian Nation.
It is not that Ritter, or I, or anyone else who takes this position, want the war to continue. It’s a horrible tragedy, and the sooner it ends, the better. But, again, the point that Ritter and others have made is that the US/NATO and the Ukrainians have wanted this war ever since the 2014 US-backed coup took place, and are bound and determined to fight “to the last Ukrainian.” The US and its allies wanted this conflict to happen because it fits in with their objective of weakening, destabilizing, and overthrowing the Russian government—and in the case of the Ukrainian Nazis, their objective of committing (further) genocide against Russians. As long as they think there’s a chance of that happening, they’re not going to end the conflict until Ukraine is decisively defeated.
A large part of the international community likewise holds NATO/the US responsible for the occurrence of this war. A recent study at Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute, for Public Policy provides a glimpse of the stark contrast between the views of Russia on the part of Westerners and the views of those elsewhere in the world. While the views of what Westerners bizarrely call the “international community” (i.e., the white countries, along with a couple of pro-Western Asian countries) are overwhelmingly negative toward Russia (87% disapprove) as well as China (75%
disapproval), in the rest of the world, 66% have a favorable view of Russia (and 70% have a favorable view of China), despite the fact that the poll was conducted in 2022—clearly implying that they do not share the West’s outrage at Russia’s military operation. In contrast, of course, the understanding that the Western countries that formerly colonized them—and particularly the US government, which has been principally responsible for inflicting so much violence on them—are not their friends in the 21st century, either, is widely held in the Global South. It’s worth noting that one phrase from the Sandinista National Anthem is “Luchamos contra el yanqui, enemigo de la humanid” (“We fight against the Yankee, enemy of humanity.”).
And dissent from the US agenda is manifest on the diplomatic front. Routinely, votes at the UN on various issues, including the conflict in Ukraine, go massively against the US and its relatively small circle of strong allies. Recently, fewer than 1/3 of the UN’s member countries voted to support a Ukrainian resolution condemning Russia for its military action in Ukraine. Meanwhile, 87% of the world’s countries have refused to back US and NATO-led efforts to impose sanctions on Russia. And at the recent UN General Assembly annual meeting, numerous countries’ heads of state or diplomats essentially called out the US for being a global bully, and called, in the words of Nicaraguan foreign minister Denis Moncada, for a global rebellion against the “imperialist and capitalist system” that is “bleeding the world dry.”
In short, in the Global South, the US is widely seen as a warmongering gangster, and its European and other Western allies as its sinister accomplices; Russia is not perceived this way. Although for diplomatic reasons, the vast majority of the many governments that number among Russia’s allies (China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc.) must adopt an officially neutral stance on the war, many of them also hold NATO squarely responsible for this conflict and many others.
At the beginning of his talk, Strupp quotes the statement by the DSA (the organization to which he belongs) about the war. Among other things, regarding settlement of the conflict, it calls for “an immediate ceasefire and the total withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine,” and it makes a vague demand for “immediate diplomacy and de-escalation to resolve this crisis.” It also demands that the US withdraw from NATO (fat chance) and “end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this crisis.” It does not make any demands of Ukraine, such as that it withdraw its troops from the Donbass region, stop threatening Crimea, declare neutrality, etc. Since Strupp does not offer any alternative to the DSA statement’s peace proposals, I assume he agrees with it.
But even based on the information he presented about the US’s ruthlessness about attempting to maintain its global hegemony, its “purely destructive pattern of behavior,” and its concomitant desire for regime change in Russia and “full subordination of the Russian economy to that of the United States,” as well as his discussion of the influence of ethnic nationalism in Ukraine and its government’s right-wing character, discrimination against the Russian language, and refusal to honor the Minsk agreements, surely he can see that the DSA’s statement is inadequate. We all want peace, but for peace to happen, there needs to be a realistic and explicit recognition of the preconditions that must be met. Russia is not going to simply withdraw unilaterally from Ukraine (or from what is now western Russia, the four regions that voted to join Russia) without the threat Ukraine and its NATO backers present to Russia and ethnic Russians being neutralized one way or another. In order for that to happen, there will need to be further demilitarization of Ukraine so that it can no longer pose a threat, a guarantee of Ukraine remaining neutral (no NATO membership or NATO troops or bases on Ukrainian soil), a recognition that Crimea and what was once eastern Ukraine have made their choice to become part of Russia and will remain with Russia (even freaking Henry Kissinger has recognized that peace will require territorial concessions on Ukraine’s part!), and a general demilitarization of Eastern Europe and renegotiation of arms treaties. Most of this (recognizing the four newly acquired territories as part of Russia being the exception) was outlined in the draft treaties Russia presented to NATO and the US back in December of 2021, which propose a collective security framework for Europe as a whole. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian is one of many diplomats who have argued that peace will only be possible when Russia’s legitimate security demands are met. He is right.