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| 12-March-2026 |
Russian bombing of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and blocks of flats has continued uninterrupted this month, while attention has been diverted by the criminal US-Israeli military adventure in Iran. Ukrainian cities are emerging from their hardest winter yet, during which Russia tried its best to freeze them into submission.
How, or whether, socialists in Europe get their heads around the political and practical challenges posed by Russia’s war is surely very, very far down the list of things that most Ukrainian people care about right now.
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| Demonstration in London on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, February 2025. Photo by Steve Eason |
I will argue that, whatever small steps we have taken, to support Ukrainian resistance in the spirit of internationalism, are overshadowed by our collective failure to understand and discuss the profound changes caused by the Russian war and to work out effective responses.
By “we”, I mean socialists who from the start supported Ukrainian resistance to imperialist attack. In this first article I offer a view of what we have done and not done. In a second article, I comment on the enduring influence of those who oppose Ukrainian resistance, in practice, words or both.
The small steps we have taken can be summed up as follows. First, sections of the organised labour movement have given direct, material support to their Ukrainian counterparts in the form of medical and other supplies. While this is probably a relatively small component of the overall flow of support from civil society and from Ukrainians living in Europe, up to and including military equipment and volunteer soldiers, it is significant.
Second, we have sought to unite support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, and indeed for the tiny, fiercely suppressed anti-war movement in Russia, with the massive anti-war movement that opposed western governments’ support for Israeli genocide in Gaza. We raised our voices against the hypocrisy of governments who sought forcibly to silence pro-Palestinian voices while permitting Ukrainian ones.
Demands on western governments from within the labour movement to take stronger specific actions in support of Ukraine, by making economic sanctions more effective or freeing up supplies of particular types of weapons, have in my view been less effective, due to the relative weakness of the labour movement politically and the crisis of social-democratic parties across Europe.
Our most serious failure, though, in my view, has been the lack of deep-going discussion about the way that the Russian war has changed Europe, and what that means for the labour movement and social movements.
Too little attention is paid to Ukrainian socialists’ attempts at critique. Meaningful discussion about military issues that stare us in the face is almost completely absent, in the UK at least. Clear thought about what war and its effects means for society, for social movements, for working people as the motive force of change – as distinct from what it means for the state – is rarely articulated.
One consequence of this failure is that our responses to crude “anti-imperialism” that makes Ukrainian resistance invisible – voiced recently, for example, by Zarah Sultana – are insufficiently robust.
Among Ukrainian socialists’ critiques, there is an implicit challenge to us in western countries in the reflections by Taras Bilous on the last four years of war, building on his widely-circulated “letter to the western left” written on the day Russia invaded.
Asked about prospects for a negotiated peace and security guarantees – the lack of which is a key outstanding obstacle to a settlement, according to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky – Bilous said:
In the context of the collapse of the international order, no written security guarantees are reliable. For Ukraine, there are two main security guarantees: the army, and the fact that Russia has suffered heavy losses in this war. Now they will think twice before attacking us again.
Bilous on one hand points up the significance of the direct Russia-Ukraine negotiations that are now taking place, as distinct from the US-Russia “great power” farce. On the other he sees no evidence that Putin has abandoned his plan to destroy the Ukrainian state, and sees calls to surrender the unoccupied part of Donbas to Russia as, potentially, “just a step towards this”.
These stark warnings imply dilemmas for socialists across Europe. If the only real “security guarantees” are the force of arms, what does that mean in Estonia? Lithuania? Poland? What does it mean further west?
Hanna Perekhoda, a Ukrainian socialist who lives in Switzerland, argued last year that any left-wing perspective had to start not from the nation-state or European community, but the “global working class”. It has to “keep in mind that neither human life nor workers’ rights, nor the environment can be protected” in any state trapped in the “zone of influence” of imperial extractivist powers such as Russia, China or the US.
In her view, this requires socialists in Europe, first, to “ensure the structural survival of a democratic space” and, second, to “fight from within that space to redefine its political and social content”. In the Baltic states, Poland and Finland, this means “rebuilding their stocks [of armaments] and reinforcing infrastructure”. She continued:
When your neighbour is the world’s second military power, bombing cities daily, spending a third of its budget on war and calling your country a “historical mistake”, the ability to defend yourself is not an arms race. It is survival.
Eastern European states can only undertake this with the help of western European allies, Perekhoda writes. In western Europe, “the threat is different. Less about invasion, more about the rise of the far right”; and defence means:
[C]ountering disinformation, protecting infrastructure, blocking foreign money in politics, defending against cyberattacks, sabotage, and energy blackmail. And helping those who need weapons immediately for their survival.
Perekhoda argues that socialists should not oppose the production of weapons; the real battlefield is who controls it; “the problem is letting the market decide what is produced, for whom, under what rules”.
If we in western Europe are not discussing these issues, what are we playing at? It is not Ukrainian comrades’ job to sort out our problems. They have enough other things to worry about. It is to our collective shame that Oleksandr Kyselov, a Ukrainian socialist based in Sweden, should mark the fourth anniversary of all-out war by protesting that:
Too many of the European left are busy stretching familiar old frameworks over a changed world. As if continuing to hope that, should they just deny, condemn, and denounce loudly enough, selectively pontificating about internationalism while reinforcing the borders of their national units, they will be spared the new reality of the world.
There are (at least) two sides to the discussion we need to have: one (“political”) concerning any effect we might have on the situation now, when all decisions about military matters are effectively in the hands of the ruling class, its state and its puppet politicians; and, second (I’ll call it “movement-focused”), about principles around which to build a movement strong enough both to counter the state and to bring about social transformation.
On the political side, socialists in Nordic countries are streets ahead of us in the UK, perhaps because they are geographically closer to Russia.
Bjarke Friborg of the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark underlined in a recent interview the “very real” threat posed by Putin’s regime, “not necessarily in terms of ‘tanks rolling into Paris’, but certainly as a threat to democracy, sovereignty and the principle that borders can not be changed by brute force”. He continued:
We oppose Russian imperialism just as we have opposed American and NATO imperialism: not by supporting one bloc against another, but by defending the right of peoples to self-determination and supporting democratic and progressive forces in Russia and its client state, Belarus.
Friborg argued that “opposing militarism” and recognising “the need for people to resist aggression” are entirely compatible, and formulated this in terms of “popular defence – a democratic defence based on citizens and rooted in civil society, not a militarised state apparatus serving the interests of business, the arms industry and imperialist interventions”. The alternative to “popular defence” is to leave the field open to authoritarian powers.
There is no contradiction between military support for Ukraine and criticism of NATO and the arms industry.
Where do socialists in the UK stand? In October last year, a group of us held a (small, not publicly advertised) discussion about “How we can effectively support Ukrainian resistance, while opposing general European rearmament”. A friend who opened the discussion – let’s call him Gerald – began by saying that he didn’t think this was possible; that we could not do one without the other (in contrast to Friborg’s view).
As I understood it, Gerald reckons that European nations’ military spending has been relatively low in recent years, and that without multi-billion-euro investment in weapons systems, they would be unable to counter Russian militarism in eastern Europe.
Military technologies (about which I know very little) were also referred to in our discussion. The extent to which the US, European countries, Israel and others rely on each other for these is relevant.
Where could we start, in forming a collective view of this difficult subject? The working-class and socialist movements can and must pick and choose which actions of the capitalist state we support, and which we oppose. We must pick and choose technologies.
We support building schools and employing health workers; we oppose building new airport runways. Why can’t we support the provision of air defence systems to Ukraine, while opposing sinking billions into Trident and aircraft carriers? Why can’t we call on the government to refuse to purchase Israeli-made weapons systems?
In order to develop a socialist approach along these lines, we need, for a start, an honest assessment of the extent and nature of the Russian military threat (i) to Ukraine, (ii) to other eastern and central European states, and (iii) to western Europe (likely in the form of cyber and other sabotage, covert support for right-wing parties etc).
Furthermore, we need an honest assessment of the limits of European “democracy” that claims to be defending Ukraine – the same “democracy” that reinforces the power of corporations against working people, that supported Israel’s genocide to the hilt and that maintains a “fortress” against defenceless refugees. This is the issue raised point-blank by Hanna Perekhoda, as I mentioned above.
It is this “democracy” that controls military technology. Its claims that investment in military systems is justified by support for Ukraine need to be assessed in that context. We know that that support is strictly rationed, and that it goes alongside the continuing arms trade with Israel, the Gulf states and other autocracies.
In my view, political demands that the European “democracies” supply to Ukraine defensive weapons it needs must be integrated into broader opposition to imperialist militarism, as Friborg does. Could the call for a Europe-wide embargo on arms sales anywhere except Ukraine, mentioned by Taras Bilous, be a starting point?
One UK politician has timidly hinted that there are good, and bad, weapons supplies: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister. In September last year, he lifted restrictions on the use of public support for munitions production “in light of Russia’s invasion of and continued war against Ukraine”, but blocked new awards of public money to defence companies trading with Israel, due to the “plausible evidence of genocide” in Gaza.
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| Ukrainian soldiers with anti-aircraft gun, Rivne, April 2023. Photo: Creative commons/ Ukrainian ministry of defence |
The Plan urges increasing weapons supply and tighter sanctions on Russia, and calls for Ukraine’s international debt to be cancelled and for frozen Russian financial assets to be transferred to Ukraine.
It also advocates “an emergency ‘Save Ukraine’ summit of European and allied nations” be convened, “for necessary military and financial support”. In my view this is a pandora’s box.
How would the labour movement, and/or politicians allied to it, stop such a summit being a vehicle for European governments to compel Ukraine to do their bidding? What can we learn from the experience of the conferences on Ukrainian economic reconstruction in 2022-23, at which European corporations jostled for pride of place in post-war EU-financed programmes?
There is a dearth of frank, serious discussion about the logic of such political demands.
We need discussion, too, about how such political demands about arms supplies, addressed to the UK and other reactionary governments, relate to broader socialist principles on which the development of the labour movement and social movements can be based. (This is what I meant, above, by movement-focused approaches. It is underpinned by the idea that socialism implies the transformation of the whole of society, by society, with the working class at its centre, as distinct from political changes in the state.)
Opposition to imperialist militarism, and support for all those attacked by it, has to be at the centre, in my view. This means, for a start:
🞺 Working to unite European support for Ukrainian resistance to support for Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism and genocide – in other words, working to unite movements of human liberation on both sides of the geopolitical divide.
🞺 In the UK and Europe, supporting the human rights of all refugees and asylum-seekers in the face of governments’ racist, divisive manipulation of rules to play off Ukrainian refugees against those from African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries.
🞺 Bringing together such basic internationalist principles with the struggle to reverse the assaults on working-class living standards and public services in the UK and Europe, that is, to direct the fight on these issues against capital, to counter the extreme right-wing attempts to set working-class people in Europe against Ukraine and/or against refugees and migrants.
🞺 Cooperation and coordination with Ukrainian labour movement and civil society organisations, which are allied with the right-wing Zelensky government against Russian aggression, but in conflict with it in their efforts to extend social and civil rights, to resist authoritarianism and corruption in the Ukrainian state, and to resist economic policies designed to suit western corporations.
Such basic principles are not heard loudly enough. Our banner “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime” is warmly welcomed on demonstrations, but that remains a minority’s slogan. Voices such as Adeeb Shaheen’s, identifying the commonality of struggles against western and Russian imperialism, need to be amplified.
If support for Ukrainian resistance is not anchored in such principles, there is a danger that it will be turned into an adjunct of Labour’s militarist politics.
That seems to be the current mission of Paul Mason, the left-turned-right journalist, who parades his support for arms supplies to Ukraine, while simultaneously expressing “pride” in Labour’s backing for Israeli genocide, applauding the authoritarian clampdown on pro-Palestine protest and bemoaning Labour’s punishment by left-wing voters.
Mason advises the government that the UK’s general rearmament programme can be to society’s benefit.
Identification of Ukraine’s struggle with imperialist militarism is anathema to genuine solidarity with Ukrainian resistance, and the mirror image of “campist” opposition to that resistance, that I have written about in a second article.
🞺 A linked article: Russia’s war: stop trying to delegitimise resistance
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