Red-Green Labour does not have a formal position on the war in Ukraine. However, we broadly support the right of Ukrainian self-determination and oppose its oppression, occupation and invasion.
Here Alan Thornett offers a personal view of the conflict.
Tomorrow we will post an article offering a contrasting perspective.
Trump upends the world order
By Alan Thornett.
The political geography of the world has changed dramatically since Donald Trump — a far-right, xenophobic, misogynist, sociopathic, and convicted felon— who apparently does not know who started the war in Ukraine — entered the White House for a second term.
Trump now runs US government through a group of supper-rich bullies, led notoriously by Elan Musk, who have scant regard for anything other than money, and the world view of Vladimir Putin. Millions are already suffering and dying around the world as US aid which has been keeping them alive is summerly withdrawn.
At the same time Trump is trashing the alliance between the USA and the Western European powers — the Atlantic Alliance — established after WW II. He is ripping up the legal rule book (inadequate as it is) along with human rights, worker’s rights, and equality legislation. If he is allowed to carry this though we should not assume this situation will be reversed after Trumps term of office.
The Ukraine war
Ukraine has been at war with Russian Federation since 2014, when the Russia annexed Crimea. In February 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine in an all-out unprovoked illegal invasion. In September 2022, Russia annexed Donbas along with Kherson and Zaporizhia.
The recent humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky, an outstanding Ukrainian war leader, who has held Russian forces at bay for three years, by Trump and his deputy Vance, as soon as it became clear that he wanted long-term security guarantees in return for any agreement on Ukrainian mineral assets — was outrageous. He was then effectively thrown out of the White House.
Whether it was wise for Zelensky to countenance an agreement on Ukrainian mineral deposits at this time can be discussed, but a one-side agreement that that gives nothing to Ukrainian is totally unacceptable.
Trump’s contention that a ‘deal’ on Ukrainian mineral assets, with Americans working in the country, is the is the best security guarantee you can have, is nonsense. As Zelensky has said, it did not stop them in 2022 launching a full blown invasion when there were thousands of foreign nationals, including Americans, in the country and it would not stop them now.
The White House clash, however, put Zelensky under extreme pressure — as it was designed to do.
European response
Fortunately, when key European states (plus Canada and Turkey) met on Sunday March 2 they not only backed Zelensky, but pledged to replace USA with Europe as the main guarantor of the Ukrainian struggle for independence and sovereignty. For European countries — inside or outside of the EU — a Putin victory is unthinkable, particularly for countries with a land border with the Russian Federation.
Macron and Starmer put themselves forward as leaders of what Starmer termed a ‘coalition of the willing’ to see this through. Starmer also offered UK peace-keeping troops if an agreement is signed — though this could be a long way off.
Starmer told the gathering of about 30 heads of state that “Europe is at a crossroads in history” and will have to do the heavy lifting in the war in the future whilst maintaining a US military ‘backstop’ against future Russian expansion. He also announced that Britain would raise its defence spending from the current 2.2 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent by the end of this Parliament, and would go further in the next Parliament.
He is, however, using a truly shameful cut in the foreign aid budget to fund this project. He has again ruled out a wealth tax that some Labour MPs are rightly calling for. This cut led to the resignation of Annaliese Dodds as Minister for Development in protest. She lost 40 per cent of the aid budget in the process.
Trump suspends US military aid
On March 3 Trump suspended all military aid to Ukraine, including intelligence information, and materials already in the pipeline or at forward bases in Poland — in a move which was hugely damaging to the Ukrainian war effort. It was a blatant attempt to force Ukraine into a surrender on Putin’s terms under the guise of a ceasefire. The same Putin who (unsurprisingly) welcomed the new line from the White House.
An emergency conference of the 27 member states of the EU only took place on Thursday March 6 to allow EU to take an official position.
The President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that they were facing an extraordinary situation involving the necessity to ‘rearm Europe in order that the EU could support Ukrainian when the USA was withdrawing its support. She proposed an additional 800bn Euros to the EU defence fund most of which would come from a loosening of the fiscal restraints currently on member states as far as military sending was concerned. It would boost the defences of EU member states and lessen the impact of US withdrawal.
A Post-truth world
Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian of Sunday March 9, presented Trumpism as a threat not only to the concept of truth, but to the Enlightenment that informed the American constitution.
“The founding fathers”, he says “baked reason, truth and free speech into the US constitution. That’s all gone now”… “The US has gone mute. Its Enlightenment-based constitution and the accompanying values, once held to be universal, are being torched in near silence. Only fealty to Making America Great Again, by repudiating its notable traditions, is permitted – at home and abroad. The profundity of this is beginning to be recognised”…
“The unashamed project is to reshape the world economic and political order so that it serves only the interests of the US — as if it did not already. Can Britain really be a bridge between this vision and Europe, as Keir Starmer wants? Such differences are (Surely) unbridgeable.”
That Trump can be persuaded to provide backstop for Ukraine in the war, and that Starmer himself can act as a bridge between Washington and Moscow, and hopefully win Trump back into the fold, is unlikely in the extreme. It is true that Starmer also supports Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and rightly insists that it must be present in all negotiations, but any strategy that is based on such an ambiguity is inherently dangerous.
Trump is now firmly in the orbit of Putin, and they have much in common as far as right-wing politics are concerned. They both think that there are only two genders, men and women, for example, determined at birth, and to suggest anything else is wokism. They are both opposed to human rights, gender equality, and civil-rights such as same sex marriage, and rights at work.
When Trump says he wants peace he means peace on Putin’s terms, a neo-colonial arrangement where Ukraine is divided up between Russia and the USA, with Russia keeping the territory it has won through an illegal war and, with the US free to exploit Ukrainian mineral wealth.
Key developments
Three earlier developments tell us that the world order has definitively changed, and that the security guarantees, provided by successive US administrations in return for the recognition that the USA was ‘the leader of the western world’, are already dead:
- The meeting Trump arranged in Saudi Arabi between his own top officials and the top officials of Putin, including Putin’s personnel hit-man Sergey Lavrov, with Russian missiles still raining down on Ukrainian cites, over the future of Ukraine with the Ukrainians excluded.
- The US opposed a European-drafted resolution at the UN condemning Moscow’s actions and supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Trumps representatives opposed it along with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and Hungary. Trump went on to claim — fantastically — that Ukraine started the war and that Zelensky was an unelected dictator.
- Trump’s contention that Canada should be the 51st state of the USA and that the US should own both the Panama Canal and Greenland. This is not just the rantings of a deranged individual he really means it and doubles down on it every time he gets the chance.
A ‘deal’ on Ukraine
After the public humiliation of Zelensky Trump announced that Zelensky was ready to sign whatever was put in front of him, and he was excluded from the Jeda meeting where a new deal was discussed. At the end the meeting it was announced that a ‘deal’ had been reached, around a one month ceasefire, which had the support of the Americans and the Ukrainians and the ball was now in Putin’s court.
It was hardly mentioned that at Zelensky’s successful insistence military aid including intelligence was restored — a remarkable and important achievement under the circumstances. The ball it was said was now firmly in Putin’s court and the delegation (and indeed Trump) had high expectations of a positive response.
The problem was that both the delegation and Trump had a completely unrealistic — or completely cynical — expectation of Putin and when Putin said ‘yes please but no thanks’ the whole thing fell apart. Putin was deliberately ambiguous because he wanted to stay on speaking terms with Trump, but the condition he insisted upon made it clear that a ceasefire on an terms was the last thing he had in mind. He said for example that he wanted “a frank discussion on the reasons for the war” — which he started.
Zelensky rightly described Putin’s response to the plan as “manipulative” and called for more sanctions on Russia. It should be noted that through all of these meeting, including a phone call with Trump, that Putin made no concessions. Everything he said was in line with his objective which is to reduce Ukraine to a vasal state under his control.
The matter is now however is in Trump’s court, and we await developments.
The issue today
The issue today, is not whether Trump can be won over to liberal democracy, but whether Europe has the capacity to provide Ukraine with the security guarantees it needs in place of the USA and the answer to that has to be a definitive yes — providing it can be mobilised fast enough. Europe has a population of half a billion, and some of the most advanced economies in the world, and given the necessary political will, Europe is capable of seeing Ukraine though to victory, particularly since it is in their own self-interest to do so.
Ukraine now has the biggest army in Europe, and it is the best trained and most battel hardened. It is producing 30 per cent of its own military equipment, and this is rising rapidly — particularly with drones, as its attacks on Moscow bare witness. It is also a politically conscious army in that it knows why it is fighting and what defeat means — Ukraine as a subordinate territory of the Russian Federation and the USA.
The German elections
Even Friedrich Merz’s, the leader of the German Christian Democrats, who won the recent German election on a platform of fiscal conservatism, and is now the German Chancellor in waiting, has radicalised. He told a press conference that: “This is the beginning of a new, dangerous era in European security. It would be his “absolute priority immediately after victory for the CDU/CSU was confirmed, to create unity in Europe as quickly as possible, so that, step by step, we can achieve independence from the US”. He added: “I never thought I would have to say something like this on TV.”
There has not been a more pro-American politician in Germany than Merz. He worked for the investment company BlackRock and was the long-serving chairman of the influential lobbying group Atlantik-Brücke (Atlantic Bridge).” He is now calling for a fund of a trillion Euros to back Ukraine.
The Italian political commentator Nathalie Tocca, writing in Guardian of March 12th, under a headline: “Out of Putin’s war and Trump’s Treachery, a New Europe is Being Born” tells us:
“A new Europe is being born and it is easier to say what it is not than what it is. It is not the EU, or not the one we have long taken for granted. The 27-country union is simply not equipped to take decisions with the speed and level of ambition necessary to confront the dramatic, life-or-death, fast-changing geopolitical and security moment its citizens face. Moreover, the EU now includes Trojan horses such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the populist nationalist Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, who are plainly working on behalf of Putin’s Russia and Trump’s US.”
“This is a new Europe, coordinated by leaders such as Macron, Starmer, the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk. They share threat perceptions and the will to address them.” Again, however, it must be stressed that funds raised for the defence of Ukraine must be progressive, in other words taxing the rich.
Nato
Much of the narrative on the left during the Ukraine war has been about Nato. Putin says that it was Nato expansionism that led to the war in Ukraine and the Stop the War Coalition, which contains the bulk of the British far left, says the same.
In fact Nato expansionism, along with so-called “denazification”, were the Kremlin’s main pretexts for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. war has been about Nato expansionism. It is true that it has gone from 30 members to 32 with the acceptance of Sweden and Finland as membership. They applied to join, however, because they saw it as protection in the new situation created by Trump— not because of a Nato recruitment drive.
In fact Trumpism is undermining Nato as a military alliance, it is already a shadow of its previous self. A defensive alliance only works if its members believe that the other members, particularly the big ones, really will come to their aide if they are attacked. Once that belief is gone — as it surely must be given the role of Trump today — it no longer means anything. The idea that Trump would commit the USA to the defence of anyone else is delusional.
Solidarity
Some on the left have been right to prioritise solidarity with Ukraine and to work within the Ukraine Solidarity committee (USC). The majority of the radical left however supported the Stop The War Committee, which limited its position to peace in Ukraine, which we have rightly defined as campist. Campism is the belief that the world is divided into competing political groups of countries and that we should support one or other of such camps.
Simon Pirani on his People and Nature blog has a good analysis of this. He say the following about Nato expansionism: “In the real world things are not so simple. (i) Russia has had NATO countries on its borders since 2004. (ii) Ukraine (historically) has never had a NATO membership action plan. And public support for joining NATO was very low, until Russia invaded in 2014. Cause and effect are mixed up, time and time again.”
“The Ukrainian population is literally invisible on the Stop the War web site. The Stop the War Coalition does not support the political integrity of Ukraine or its right to exist as an independent nation or the right to resist when they are invaded. There is no mention on the Stop the War site of Russia as an imperialist power.”
Conclusions
We continue to work within and through the USC and therefore to support the right of Ukraine to self-determination.
We recognise that fundamental structural changes have taken place in the world order that has existed since WW ll.
We should therefore support the formation of a European coalition to replace the USA as the guarantor against Russian expansionism. Such an alliance is better than one led by Putin, Trump, Netanyahu or Xi Jinping.
We recognise that this will mean higher defence budgets and these should be funded by the introduction of wealth taxes to ensure that the rich pay the biggest share.
Ukrainian nuclear power plants to be closed down as soon as possible after the war, in favour of clean renewable energy.
Ukrainians must be present at every stage of any negotiations and must take the final decisions, particularly in terms of territory ceded. It must include a full exchange of prisoners of war and the return of the 17,000 abducted children.
Any settlement must be socially just and respect the sovereignty and territorial rights of Ukraine.
Ukraine must have the right to choose what alliances it wishes to be a part of.
Sanctions must be increased against the Russian Federation, in particular oil, and the full implementation of the ones already in place. This must also include the frozen Russian assets held in Belgium, which are variously estimated from €125 billion to €190 billion. Russian sanction breaking must be stopped.
We do not oppose peace keeping force including troops from the UK in the event of an agreement.
Alan Thornett, 21th March 2025
