When the war started the supporters of Ukraine felt obliged to caveat their support.  They defended the supply of only ‘defensive’ weapons by Western powers and sanctions that would not hit ordinary Russians.  Now they complain that the weapons supplied have been insufficient, even though the amount already given has revealed serious shortages for those providing them, while the EU is on its 20^th sanctions package and they still want more. Sweden has just announced the provision of fighter aircraft and new missiles but we already know from experience that none of this will deliver a victory to Ukraine.

Even though they have admitted that weapons and sanctions are critical to success and are provided by Western imperialism for its own reasons, these reasons are treated as not critical to understanding the nature of the war.  They declare that Ukraine has the right to source help from wherever it can and have simply assumed – if the thinking behind it goes that far – that whatever price is attached is hardly relevant.

Nor have they made anything of the inescapable logic that the interests of Ukraine and Western imperialism have to be aligned for this support to exist; presumably assuming it has to be some sort of happy coincidence.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so my enemy is Russia and Ukraine is therefore my friend, regardless of what sort of friend this could possibly be.

The supporters of Ukraine have constantly damned such logic but here they are endorsing it.  The argument that class independence requires opposition to both Russian imperialism and Western imperialism, which includes Ukraine as its proxy, is not considered with failure to support the alliance smeared as support for Russia.

All the claims about who is the aggressor or fired the first shot; support for self-determination and Ukrainian ‘agency’, are only so much confounding claims that turn opposition to capitalist war into support for it. As Trotsky said in relation to Lenin’s view of imperialism:

“The question of which group delivered the first military blow or first declare war,” wrote Lenin in March 1915, “has no importance whatever in determining the tactics of socialists. Phrases about the defence of the fatherland, repelling invasion by the enemy, conducting a defensive war, etc., are on both sides a complete deception of the people.”

Self-determination is a right to create a new state for nationalities that are annexed or are colonial possessions, a right that does not automatically impose support for the creation of a new state, and which is subordinated to the political independence of the working class.  This is erased by support for the Ukrainian capitalist state, which oppresses its working class and has allied itself with Western imperialism; the idea that support for ‘Ukraine’ somehow means something else is nonsense.

To justify support for Ukraine requires that either Western imperialism is not an enemy or its role is insignificant – which hardly tallies with demands for ever more weapons and sanctions – and that Ukraine is some sort of neutral state rising above inter-imperialist competition, which its insertion of NATO membership into its constitution reveals as impossible to believe.  It is also not enough to claim that in this case Russian imperialism is the bigger enemy.

Being bigger makes no qualitative difference for socialists, and anyway, Western imperialism is much bigger and more powerful than Russia.  For socialists in the United States the main enemy is US imperialism; in France it is French imperialism and in Britian it’s British imperialism etc.  The main enemy is always at home, which is how we do not end up following our own ruling class and its state, especially in war. Not only are the pro-war lefts supporting Ukraine and its alliance with Western imperialism – calling upon it to be made stronger – they are also supporting their own imperialism.

Being the class traitors that they are, they fail to notice that whatever about the purported right of the Ukrainian capitalist state to seek weapons and money from Western imperialism, they require that the various Western imperialist states should be supported in providing them.  Are they going to claim that imperialism has a right to do so?

As they have admitted, these states do so for their own purposes and goals, which goals and purposes are advanced by the so-called socialists in these countries supporting their interventions.  In the inter-imperialist conflict, they have lined up behind their own imperialism – finding common ground in the claim that Russia is some sort of authoritarian state that Ukraine is not and that it represents a threat that its own ruling class and its imperialist state does not.

‘In stark contrast to Russia’ it is claimed that Ukraine has a ‘lively civil society’, except none of the examples quoted illustrates opposition to the war or to participation in it.  This means ignoring one of the most remarkable expressions of spontaneous resistance by Ukrainian workers.  The growing movement against ‘busification’ – the forced conscription into the army by kidnapping men off the street, at their homes or their workplaces – is a startling example of ‘lively civil society’ action.  However, since this speaks of resistance to the war and the Ukrainian state, and demonstrates the brutal authoritarianism carried out by it, it is not acknowledged.

Demands to oppose Russian authoritarianism, to listen to Ukrainian voices and recognise Ukrainian ‘agency’ are all made in order to support the Ukrainian state, its propaganda and its agency. But do the supporters of the war support this resistance to authoritarianism? Are these not also Ukrainian voices we should be called upon to hear? Is this not also Ukrainian ‘agency’? Or do they – like bourgeois politicians across Europe – promote a version of the war that has no room for the real world? 

For them, Western imperialism has become the defender of democracy in Ukraine, as it has always claimed.  The Zelenskyy regime, having prevented elections and extended martial law, claims that in return it is defending the democratic West, while this democratic West supports genocide and criminalises opposition to it.  Like its imperialist allies, Ukraine also supports Israel, proclaims its desire to be a European version of it – another Sparta in Europe – and has assisted US imperialism by providing hundreds of drone operators to those wonderfully democratic states in the Gulf.

Ukraine, which previously participated in Western wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, now intervenes in Africa, including in Somalia and Mali.  In Europe it touts itself as the largest army at the disposal of NATO to guard against a supposed Russian invasion and has moved from receiving arms and training from Western militaries to providing training and drone technology to them.  Does the pro-Ukraine left support Ukraine arming and training their own imperialist armies?  Why not?  Has it not supported the professed alliance for democracy?

On the most elementary grounds this alliance doesn’t pass the sniff test for any claim to democracy.  A state at war, that millions of its citizens have fled from and in which hundreds of thousands of those remaining are afraid to leave their home.  In which opposition parties and media are banned and the far right and its history is glorified by it, including its Nazi collaborators in the Second World War.  Its far right hugely expanded in size and power within its armed forces – celebrated as its most valiant fighters. But we are supposed to be unconcerned because the erstwhile comedian who is its President is Jewish.

Defending this are such figures as Starmer, Macron and Merz, of whom it can be confidentially said it is impossible to say who is most unpopular in their respective countries.  Starmer’s support for democracy includes abolishing jury trials and the criminalisation of protest, not to mention the small matter of approving war crimes committed in the continuing destruction of an entire people.  That the left supporters of Ukraine think all this is divorced from support for Ukraine merely shows that they have lost the plot. Or more accurately never opened the book.

Do they really think Starmer cares more for Ukrainian workers than British ones?  And if the obvious answer is no – one they have already accepted – isn’t it also obvious that he wants the war to continue irrespective of how many Ukrainians have to die?  And wouldn’t ‘winning’ entail escalation that would lead Russia to do the same?  At what point do the cheerleaders think the war may not be in the interest of the working class, or do they not have an answer for this because they haven’t considered anything but victory as morally admissible?  But what do they mean by victory, and is such a victory remotely possible? Is it easier to support the war when unlike those Ukrainians in hiding from conscription they won’t be doing the fighting and dying?

Are they saying that the Ukrainian working class should fight and die for the self-determination of a state that is already independent; that has been mired in corruption since its inception and in which the wealthy and those with connections can avoid the threat of forced conscription?  

Why do they think so many Ukrainians refuse to voluntarily join the army of such a state; a state they have repeatedly in elections tried to change but failed, now led into a war that is crippling the country while relying on the same outside forces that helped provoke it in the first place; and who are happy to see continue?

Ukraine is the biggest site of the kinetic violence unleashed by inter-imperialist rivalry.  To think that some sort of bourgeois democracy is the alternative to it is to have totally failed to accept what is in front of your eyes, that ‘democratic’ imperialism is a big part of the cause of the war, is bent on ensuring its continuation regardless of the cost, and is very definitely not any part of the solution.