This commentary is by Ashley Smith of Burlington, who works for Spectre Journal and is a member of the Champlain Valley Democratic Socialists of America and the Tempest Collective.
Vladimir Putin’s regime has launched a brutal invasion and occupation of Ukraine. It is a war of imperial aggression whose aim is to install a puppet government as an opening to further attempts to reclaim Russia’s former sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
Putin’s forces are killing and wounding untold numbers of Ukrainians and have driven over one million into Europe as refugees. Progressives, the left, and antiwar activists must oppose Russia’s war and do everything in our power to stop it. We should stand in solidarity with Ukraine and its people’s fight for national self-determination.
At the same time, we must oppose intervention into this war by the U.S. and NATO. That would turn it into an inter-imperial war, which would be nothing less than World War III and this time one between nuclear powers.
In reality, the U.S. and NATO states have no moral standing to criticize Russia. Only those suffering from political amnesia can believe their claims to stand for national sovereignty, democracy, social justice and equality.
These powers still have the blood of Afghans, Iraqis and Yemenis on their hands. They have committed and are committing the very same atrocities in those countries that Russia is in Ukraine.
Moreover, the U.S. and its European allies are in part the cause of Russia’s imperial aggression. They decided to expand NATO after the Cold War to include as new members states freed from Russia’s former empire. In response, Putin has aspired to reclaim them.
We should be under no illusions that NATO is some pacificist and democratic institution. As its first secretary general, Lord Ismay, famously said, its function was “to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the U.S. in Europe.”
In other words, it is an entirely imperial project designed to carve out a U.S. sphere of influence on the continent against imperial rivals. And it is the military means to enforce the U.S. and EU neoliberal economic system that has impoverished workers throughout Europe. Even worse, when NATO lost its ideological justification after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. repurposed it to become part of a global police force, deploying into Afghanistan as part of its colonial occupation.
Moreover, the U.S. through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is a direct oppressor of Ukraine. These international financial institutions oversee Ukraine’s $6 billion debt. The interest payments on those loans amount to 12 percent of its annual government budget, siphoning off funds that could otherwise go to social programs to redress the country’s profound inequalities and poverty.
The U.S. and NATO will not stop Putin’s war and certainly will not liberate Ukraine. Their intervention would risk turning the war into a global conflagration, putting us all at risk.
Liberation can only be won by mass struggle from below by three forces.
First, the Ukrainian military and civilian resistance to the invasion, which has at least initially stopped Russia from sweeping through the country.
Second, the Russian antiwar movement. Thousands of Russians have poured out into the streets against a war they oppose, risking arrest at the hands of Putin’s police, which has detained over 9,000 at last count.
On the heels of those protests, politicians, officials, artists and even sports stars have all come out against the war. If those sentiments spread into Russian troops, they could put down their weapons and end the war immediately.
Third, the international antiwar movement, which has erupted around the world against Putin’s invasion. Hundreds of thousands have marched in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance.
The key question in this global movement is what we should demand. To begin with, we must demand that Russia immediately withdraw all its troops, including those in Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
We must stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance. We should defend their right to self-determination and self-defense, including securing defensive weapons to protect themselves against Putin’s intent to rule or ruin their country.
We have to oppose any U.S. or NATO intervention into the war. As part of that, we must stop the new militarization of the EU and the U.S. to confront Russia, but also China, which has positioned itself as Moscow’s imperial sponsor. The last thing we need is more weapons for imperial powers already at each other’s throats.
Instead, we should open the world’s borders to Ukrainian refugees, as well as all migrants, including Africans and Arabs who are denied entry by the EU. They, just as much as white Ukrainians, have the right to flee military, political and economic oppression in their countries and find safe haven internationally.
Finally, we must call for the cancellation of Ukraine’s debt so that when the Ukrainians liberate their country from Russian occupation, they are not trapped in a western debtors prison. Only then can they win independence and rebuild their country however they see fit.
Putin’s war has ushered in a whole new epoch of war by and between great powers. We must rally an international movement of solidarity from below in a fight for a society that puts people before profit and empire.
