Sean Thompson responds to Alan Thornett’s piece published yesterday, and offers his views on the current state of the war in Ukraine.
Neither Washington nor Moscow – nor Brussels?
I have enormous difficulties with Alan’s piece. Not, of course, because of any sympathy with the vulgar and ignorant ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ attitudes and the last poisonous residues of Stalinism and emotional attachments to the long dead USSR and ‘actually existing socialism’ that have infected much of the British social democratic left for so long. My problem is that Alan’s simplistic analysis of the conflict have led him towards some frankly reactionary positions.
He is of course right that Russia’s invasion was indefensible and that the Ukrainian people have every right to defend themselves, but to characterise the conflict simply as a war of national liberation against an unprovoked invasion is to fatally oversimplify the situation. From almost the very beginning it was to some extent a proxy war between two imperialist powers; Russia and the USA, along with its European hangers-on (and as time has gone on, increasingly so). But it also has had, at its root, elements of an on-going civil war between almost equally unattractive ethnic Russian separatists in the east of the country and Ukrainian speaking ultra nationalists in the west.
In the first few weeks of the war, during which the Russian Army was, to its surprise, repulsed in its original plan of a quick victory, there was a reasonable chance of stopping the war developing into the appalling meat grinder it has become. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators seem to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement in April, under which Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries. However, Boris Johnson played a key role in persuading Zelensky to make the disastrous decision to break off talks. It’s clear that the eventual settlement will be more or less that which was almost agreed three years ago – only now with the added ingredient of Trump’s predatory seizure of Ukraine’s natural resources.
Alan seems to accept uncritically the idea that Russia’s invasion was driven by an aggressive territorial expansionism that, I assume, if unchecked in Ukraine, would inevitably lead to the invasion/annexation of first, the Baltic States, then one by one the old satellites, until the glory days of Stalin and the Warsaw Pact are revived. I don’t believe that Putin is territorially expansionist in that sense. He is driven by Great Russian chauvinism and by a (not entirely unjustified) paranoid suspicion of the USA and NATO. He has shown, in propping up the ethnic Russian enclaves of Transdniestria and Abkhazia, and in his annexation of Crimea that he is quite prepared to use brutal military force to seize areas he considers part of Russia or ‘defend’ areas where ethnic Russian majority populations under real or imagined threat – areas that include, as far as he is concerned, the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. However, there is no evidence that he has any plans to expand the territory of the Russian Federation by annexing any of the former Soviet republics or satellites, still less of any plans for Russian tanks to roll across western Europe. Ironically, it is Trump’s USA, looking back to the golden days of of the Spanish-American War, that is now the most territorially expansionist of the imperialist powers
Alan’s apparent acceptance of American and Western European cold war strategists’ assessment of the ‘Russian threat’ has led him to write that the Left ‘should therefore support the forming of a European coalition to replace the USA as guarantor against Russian expansionism’, in effect a reconstructed NATO. Worse, he goes on to write that ‘ We recognise that this will mean higher defence budgets.’ So this is what it comes to: socialists calling for a western military alliance (NATO minus Trump), British troops on the Russian border and rearmament – although I suppose we should be grateful that Alan is proposing a wealth tax to pay for it all rather than cuts to welfare or foreign aid
After three years of war, in which hundreds of thousands have died and millions forced from their homes, it’s time for Russia, Ukraine, and the West to recognise that there’s only one way to put an end to the ongoing slaughter: lay down arms and come to the negotiating table. It’s ironic that Trump, for all the wrong reasons, seems to have come to the same conclusion.
It looks like a peace deal (on probably rather worse terms than those available at the start of the conflict) will be done over the heads of the Ukrainians in the coming weeks – and all the death and suffering will have been for nothing. When it’s all over there may be some debate over who won, but there will be no question about who has lost – as always, it’s ordinary people – the working class masses of Ukraine and Russia. Never has the slogan we chanted on CND marches in my youth seemed more apposite – Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism.
Although I share Sean Thompson’s views about the European efforts to increase military spending and coordination, I do not think his analysis of the nature of the war in Ukraine is accurate.
Firstly, I think the term proxy war is over-used and not well defined by those who raise it to support their argument. Wikipedia, for example, claims that the Spanish civil, Vietnam and Korean wars were proxy wars. I take issue with that: the actual belligerent has to have a much closer relationship to those “sponsoring” them, as shown in other examples Wikipedia uses. It is not as if the Western imperialists wanted to “fight Russia” via the Ukrainian army: offering asylum to Zelenskyy hardly fits in with that view.
People who support the proxy war idea constantly bring up the story about Boris Johnson telling Zelenskyy not to settle with Putin in April 2022. Sean says that the terms on the table were similar to those currently being discussed. That may or may not be the case, but the situation is entirely different: Ukraine was pushing the Russian forces out of the Kiev region and had no reason the negotiate away Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, as Zelenskyy says in this article (which also deals with the alleged role of Boris Johnson):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/12/zelenskyy-rejects-claim-boris-johnson-talked-him-out-of-2022-peace-deal
As for the situation now, who are we, as citizens of the western imperialist powers, to tell Ukraine to come to a settlement and relinquish large chunks of their territory? Making reference to an alleged ultra-nationalst state and “ethnic Russians” (no: they are Russian speakers,except for those transferred in, in particular since 2022) is presumably supposed to question Ukraine’s sovereignty over these areas, something that Russia guaranteed when Ukraine unilaterally gave up nuclear weapons in 1991.
Yes, the Ukrainian government is neoliberal and authoritarian, and promotes nationalism. This has hindered their war effort and is being combated by the independent trade unions, feminists, LGBT movement socialists and anarchists in the country. You don’t get a good view of the forces supporting the struggle for independence by looking simply at the right.
If there is a peace deal in the next few weeks, will the struggle -as Sean claims – have been for nothing? Surely this is like saying the struggle now is for nothing, irrespective of a peace deal? Again, it is not for to tell the Ukrainians to give up the fight, but what we can say is that they have given Putin a bloody nose. They forced him out of Kyiv and have inflicted huge casualties on Russian forces. Sean says that the working classes of both countries have been the ones who lose, but that is not the responsibility of the resistance, rather it is Putin’s. The struggle may make Putin think again about his next move following any peace agreement. It has held off the much more heavily armed forces of a country with 3 times the population, which has had to import North Korean fighters, conscript criminals and rely on Iranian technology. Putin may want to expand into the Baltic States and Moldova, but it is questionable whether he is capable of doing so or that the Russian people will let him. This is a tremendous service the masses of Ukraine have provided the working class of the world and Europe in particular. Putin, meanwhile has fostered the expansion of NATO, European militarism and given succour to far right movements on every continent.