Since dawn on February 24, the Russian army, under the orders of Vladimir Putin, has been engaged in a full-scale attack on Ukraine. Armoured columns have invaded along four axes, the Russian air force has been bombing military sites, airports and almost all the major cities, and the Russian war fleet is about to take control of the Sea of Azov and the Ukrainian coast.
Presented by Putin as a “special military operation” aimed at ensuring the “demilitarisation” and “denazification” of Ukraine, this attack very quickly revealed itself for what it was: a large-scale blitzkrieg with the direct objectives of putting the Ukrainian army out of action, occupying most of the country, overthrowing President Zelenskiy and replacing him with a puppet government.
The under-equipped Ukrainian army, with often obsolete weapons and very little air support, is holding out. But Putin’s Blitzkrieg has already failed due to the resistance of the Ukrainian people who, far from giving in to panic, are multiplying initiatives to counteract the invader (erecting barricades and more barricades, making Molotov cocktails, forming militias). The atmosphere in Kiev and Kharkiv has been reminiscent of Madrid in 1936 and Budapest in 1956. In Ukrainian, the words for No Pasaran are Ne Proyty (не пройти)!
A huge wave of solidarity has spread across Europe offering not only official assistance, but also countless spontaneous initiatives. The outbreak of a major war in Europe has shocked many people. Moscow’s repeated threats over the past three months and Washington’s strident warnings had seemed mere psychological warfare.
But the images of ravaged apartment blocks and columns of refugees are not from Iraq, Syria or Yemen, but from next door, and the threats of nuclear weapons, which seemed relegated to memories of the Cold War, are back on front pages. Which makes it all the more remarkable that war in our midst, immediately following the trauma of the pandemic, has generated such cross-border solidarity. We fully subscribe to this movement, but we believe that we also need political solidarity.
This requires explanation. We are whole-heartedly supportive of the Ukrainian people, and totally opposed to Russia’s imperialist aggression from internationalist and democratic viewpoints, which defend national self-determination and the world solidarity of workers and oppressed people. This solidarity is not to be confused with the support given to Ukraine by the Atlanticist defenders of US hegemony, always ready to instrumentalise or even sacrifice the “Ukrainian card” in the Great Game of global power competition. Our solidarity obviously has nothing to do with the duplicity and hypocrisy of the so-called “sovereignists”, “progressives” and “pacifists” who place the aggressor and the aggressed back to back and in reality give implicit support to Putin.
The stakes of war are judged first by the the belligerents’ objectives. Putin is waging a war of imperialist aggression on the model of the wars waged for centuries by the Russian Tsars. It is no coincidence that on his Kremlin office’s wall hangs a portrait of the most reactionary and warmongering of them all, Nicholas I (1825-1855). To justify the aggression, Russian propaganda has invoked two pseudo-justifications that have been taken up in chorus by Putin’s supporters and dupes.
The first justification is blatant lie of the supposed neo-Nazi character of the political regime in Ukraine. Ukraine, like all the countries in Europe, has far-right political and paramilitary forces. In view of the electoral results, these are much less influential than for example in France or Flanders.
Since the Maidan Square movement in early 2014 (absurdly described as a ’coup d’état by a fascist junta’), and despite the war situation in the Donbass, Ukraine’s government has guaranteed basic political freedoms. The country has held two free elections, and there has been political alternance ( president elect Petro Poroshenko was defeated in 2019 by outsider Volodymyr Zelenskiy). In this instance, Putin’s propaganda is simply recycling an old procedure used by the Soviet secret services, to call their opponents ‘Nazis”, especially the socialists and communists they wanted to assassinate (Trotsky, Tito, Imre Nagy, the leaders of the Spanish POUM and the Jewish BUND).
This lie is all the more shameless as it comes from the offices of Putin, head of an autocratic power that has stifled political freedoms and the independent press, increased the number of assassinations and imprisonments of opponents and journalists, and strangled the autonomous expressions of civil society. His entourage includes Aleksandr Dugin, the ideologist of Eurasism, and Dmitry Utkin, head of the mercenaries of the Wagner Group and an admirer of Adolf Hitler. Let us add that Putin has become a ’godfather’ of the European far right, from Marine Le Pen and Mateo Salvini to the leaders of the Austrian FPÖ, whom he supports politically in the media and financially, and whose xenophobic and homophobic discourse he amplifies.
Putin’s second pseudo-justification is that the attack is a defensive response to NATO’s eastward expansion, encirclement and preparations for an attack against Russia. We must be very clear on this point. We are not and have never been supporters of NATO. We believe that 30 years ago, after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the break-up of the USSR, it would have been preferable, in order to put a definitive end to the division of Europe, to dissolve NATO and create a new pan-European security structure encompassing all of Europe’s states.
We believe that in the future, ways must be found to relegate NATO to the museum of Cold War memories. But NATO did not cause this war and putting the blame on NATO is a diversion. Ukraine’s membership of NATO has been frozen since 2008, and Germany and France have repeatedly told Putin in recent weeks that it was not on the agenda. The situation in the Donbass and the front line between the secessionist protectorates and the rest of Ukraine had also been frozen since 2015. The presence of American or other troops or equipment in the Baltic States or Romania was mainly symbolic and could not be interpreted as preparation for a military attack. At the beginning of 2022, Russia was threatened neither by NATO nor by Ukraine.
The international crisis and the subsequent war were triggered by in cold blood, and at a moment Putin chose. Why now? From 1947 onwards, Europe had been divided in two, following Yalta. Each hegemonic power was allowed to intervene within its own sphere of influence without fearing the reaction of the other half: the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the CIA organised a military coup in Greece in 1967.
The USSR’s implosion in 1989-1991 ended the Yalta division, with effects similar for Russia to those of a major defeat in a major war. NATO gradually filled the gaps by expanding to include the former satellites of the USSR. US policy in this area was guided at least as much by its desire to condition the European Union and block its autonomy as by hostility and distrust of Russia.
But over the last ten years, the world has been shifting, with the rivalry between the United States and China coming increasingly to the fore. Putin decided to take advantage of the United States’ global retreat, their new focus on confrontation with China, their recent rout in Afghanistan and their tensions with the EU to negotiate something resembling a “new Yalta” - to settle on new stabilised spheres of influence. He wanted to negotiate, like a good Chekist, with a gun on the table or, more accurately, pointed at a hostage - in this case Ukraine. The negotiation got stuck and he fired the gun.
Putin’s logic is classic 19th-century imperialist logic. What he calls “legitimate security interests” means that the great powers are entitled to spheres of influence: a glacis, buffer states, client states, dependent states, protected states for these great powers to control and ensure that they conform to their interests.
Putin does not reproach NATO for being an imperialist structure, he reproaches it for hindering his will to reconstitute a Russian imperialist sphere of influence worth its name (his sphere of influence is at the moment limited to Lukashenko’s Belarus and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria). Ukraine, which had become since 2014 a de facto state largely independent of Russia, represents the first prey in the reconstitution of Russian imperialism. Others will follow, in the Balkans, the Caucasus or Africa...
There is an additional dimension to this, particularly concerning Ukraine. In a long article published in July 2021 and in his speech of February 21, 2022, Putin amply explained his rejection of the historical legitimacy of a Ukrainian people. Ukrainians are a single branch of the great Russian people, and the existence of an independent Ukrainian state is only the result of a diabolical anti-Russian design by Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution.
While it is true that Lenin was one of the very few Russian statesmen ever to recognise the right of Ukrainians - whom he compared to the Irish - to form their own state, Putin’s rage has deeper roots. It reflects the resurgence of the reactionary ideology of Panslavism, which throughout Russian history has served as the basis for the despotism of power, for the rule of the knout in social relations, and for warlike adventures and conquests in the West, South and East. No one knows Putin’s precise war aims, but one thing is certain: he has already made quite clear the ideology that Russia could use to annihilate the independence and freedom of the Ukrainian people.
However, from the very first day in Russia, the war has been met with demonstrations in favour of peace and respect for Ukraine’s independence. The so-called “Slavic brotherhood” invoked by Putin is expressed in a manifesto by Russian feminists calling on “the whole world to support Ukraine at this time and refuse to help Putin’s regime in any way”. Never before have there been such large-scale anti-war demonstrations. Solidarity, the most active support possible and the defence of the brave Russians who are facing repression by Putin’s regime are absolutely vital if we want to stop this war and restore friendly relations between Russians and Ukrainians. International condemnation and Russia’s diplomatic isolation also play an important role and will help to strengthen the anti-war movement in Russia.
This war must end. There must be a ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory. To this end, the most important task must be to give the widest possible support to Ukrainian resistance. It is the decisive element in contributing to the rollback of the Russian war machine.
The Ukrainian themselves are fighting in self-defence. They must be given the greatest possible material and human support, and we therefore support the sending of arms and the participation of volunteers.
But legitimate support for resistance does not mean that NATO countries should go to war against Russia. This prospect would considerably increase the risk of a nuclear war in Europe. The US and the EU are also great powers with their own imperialist interests, objectives and ambitions, and it is on the basis of these that a general European war would be fought.
The issue of Ukraine’s fight for freedom would almost certainly fade into the background. Time and again, the United States has encouraged and supported struggling populations for a while, and abandoned them when they no longer served their strategic interests: let us recall what happened to the Shiites in southern Iraq who rose up against Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in 1991, or Georgia during the confrontation with Russia in 2008, or the Syrian Kurds left to Erdogan in 2019. The leadership of the resistance to aggression as well as the terms of future negotiations and peacemaking must remain in Ukrainian hands.
We are convinced that even if the vastly superior weaponry of the Russian armies allows them to overwhelm the territory of Ukraine, popular resistance will continue in various forms. As supporters of international solidarity of workers and peoples, we call on the citizens of our countries to increase their support for this resistance and to demand that their governments respond to the fair demands of the Ukrainian people.
Jean Vogel
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