Of all the satellites and former constituent countries of the USSR, none has been more unstable than Ukraine, which over three decades has suffered economic collapse, coups and counter-coups, secession, annexation, civil war and now a full-scale war.
We all share our revulsion at the invasion of Ukraine. Russia today is a parasitic kleptocracy founded on wholesale plunder of the corpse of the Soviet state; a regional imperialist power vying for scraps in the scramble for spheres of influence. Putin’s belated claim to be “fighting fascism” is belied by his patronage of far-right forces worldwide. His purported “defense of the right of the peoples of Donetsk and Lugansk to self-determination” is cynical; tens of thousands of Chechens have died fighting Putin’s forces for that very same right. He resorts to Russian Orthodox medievalism by rubbishing Ukraine’s very national identity, dismissing it as an artificial construct “created by Bolshevik Communist Russia”. Behind his message “we are ready to show you what genuine de-communisation means for Ukraine” lies the threat of extinction of Ukraine as a nation, in the worst tradition of the Tzarist “prison house of nations”.
However, Russia’s actions are not irrational or capricious, as many critics imply. All the evidence refutes the claim that “since 1991, US imperialism had been sending signals of its willingness to allow the Kremlin to benefit from its own sphere of influence”. On the contrary! It is precisely because the US military are “focused on the increasing antagonisms between China and the USA” that they are so intent on first weakening China’s nuclear-armed potential ally.
Following the collapse of the USSR, the USA and its allies had imposed upon Russia constant humiliation. NATO’s encirclement of Russia was calculated to provoke from Russia just the same reaction as that of the USA to the siting of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. In that case, the USA had wisely agreed to a deal under which its own missiles were discreetly withdrawn from Turkey.
In the last thirty years, NATO has expanded over a thousand miles eastwards. It has placed anti-ballistic launch systems on Russia’s borders and conducted countless military exercises. The objective of Ukrainian membership of NATO was formally adopted in 2008, reaffirmed in 2014, and repeated both in August 2021, when Biden and Zelensky formally declared the admission of Ukraine to NATO as “the immediate aim”, and again in November 2021, when NATO announced: “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance”.
Warnings against the expansion of NATO into former Soviet satellite states, and specifically Ukraine, had been sounded by almost the entire diplomatic establishment: by proven hawks like Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Robert McNamara, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, Robert Gates; former defence secretaries, former US ambassadors, even the current CIA director Bill Burns… They spelt out that “for the Russians what happens in Ukraine is an existential matter… What would we do if the Russians… established a force in Mexico?... Everything we are doing… seems to be aimed at prolonging the fighting… We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence... Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era... the beginning of a new cold war… a tragic mistake”. [See How The West Brought War to Ukraine, Siland Press, Massachusetts.)
In flagrant disregard of these warnings and of the undertakings previously made to Gorbachev in 1991 in return for Russia’s withdrawal of 400,000 troops from East Germany – negotiated as a quid pro quo for Germany’s reunification – NATO had swallowed up former Warsaw Pact countries and even former constituent parts of the USSR, fourteen in total, systematically bringing a hostile military alliance right up against Russia’s borders, and openly preparing the incorporation of Ukraine itself.
When the Russian ambassador to the USA complained that “the situation is extremely dangerous… an existential threat for Russia”, the US Secretary of State’s retort was: “There will be no change.”
The USA has withdrawn unilaterally from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty; armed and trained the armies of former Warsaw Pact countries; and held regular joint military exercises inside Ukraine, including naval exercises in the Black Sea involving 32 countries.
The former CIA director and former secretary of defense Leon Panetta has admitted that “the USA, backed by the whole of NATO, is in a long proxy war with Russia, with Ukraine as the battlefield”.
The USA and EU had promoted anti-Russian “colour revolutions” in a range of countries formerly within its sphere of influence, including twice in Ukraine. The 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements, brokered by France and Germany, had offered a ceasefire and guaranteed autonomous status within Ukraine to the Russian-speaking peoples of Donbas; but these were unilaterally violated by the regime in Kyiv, which encouraged the incorporation into the Ukrainian army of openly fascist paramilitary forces, as autonomous units in a civil war in which some 14,000 lives were lost. The USA, UK and Canada trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops; the CIA trained the Azov battalion and right-wing paramilitaries; and on the eve of the Russian invasion, Kyiv had massed 130,000 troops on the borders of Donbas.
The USA and NATO have pursued a policy of calculated provocation, not intervening directly but engaging in a protracted covert proxy war, just as they did during the 1980s in supporting the mujaheddin when Russia was at war in Afghanistan (with deadly consequences that backfired catastrophically when their surrogates proceeded to turn their weapons on them).
Neither Washington nor Moscow, nor even Kyiv, have the right to determine the status of the disputed territories of Donbas and Crimea. Just as for the people of the Western Ukraine, they too have a democratic right of self-determination. The population of Crimea are mostly Russians who suddenly found themselves Ukrainian citizens within a unified Soviet Union due solely to the whim of a capricious Khrushchev, who personally gifted it to his Ukrainian satraps in 1954. Donbas was the industrial powerhouse of the USSR, and its inhabitants mostly Russian-speaking descendants of workers historically transported there from elsewhere in Soviet times. It’s a matter solely for the populations of those regions to decide their status for themselves.
The war could be ended tomorrow by 1) a guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality; and 2) genuine self-determination for the peoples of Donbas.
This is not the first imperialist war fought on the pretext of defence of the rights of small nations, in feigned sympathy for the Serbs, the Belgians or the Poles. Trotsky warned that “an imperialist war, no matter in what corner it begins, will be waged not for ‘national independence’ but for a redivision of the world in the interests of separate cliques of finance capital”; that Marxists are not concerned with “episodic shifts of military fronts during a new brawl of the imperialists, but with the uprising of the proletariat and its victory over all the imperialists.”
Popular outrage and protest are perfectly legitimate responses to this brutal invasion, but the task of socialists is to expose the truth: that this war is just one expression of the crisis of world capitalism; that our allies are the workers of Russia, Ukraine and the world, and the best help we can give them is to overthrow our own capitalists.
Russia, hands off Ukraine. Immediate withdrawal of occupation forces.
No trust in NATO.
Oppose all sanctions, arms supplies and escalation of the war.
Solidarity with the people of Ukraine in defense of their democratic rights.
Self-determination for the peoples of Donbas and Crimea on the basis of a genuinely democratic referendum.
Mutual demilitarization of the border territories on either side.
Unity of the workers of Russia and Ukraine to overthrow their corrupt reactionary oppressors.
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