Peace – on whose terms?

HubMP2012J

JANUARY 6, 2024

Mike Phipps explains why we must continue to support Ukraine in its resistance to Russian aggression and occupation.

It’s clear that this winter is going to be the most challenging for Ukrainians since Russia’s war of aggression began nearly three years ago.

The energy situation is especially critical. In 2024, Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was subject to ten major bombing attacks, leaving generation capacity around 20% below what it should be. This winter electricity could be cut off in some places for 14 to 20 hours per day.

As Simon Pirani has argued, Russia’s war is above all a war on Ukraine’s civilian population, a view confirmed by UN and NGO reports. There have been massacres of civilians, rape used as a weapon, torture, forcible conscription and forcible deportations.

In the territories occupied by Russia, the occupying authorities are pursuing a strategy of forcibly expelling Ukrainian civilians and encouraging in-migration by Russians. Access to services, including medical, is increasingly conditional on people taking Russian citizenship.

Ukrainians will continue to need support from the global community, including humanitarian and military assistance – at a time when, polls suggest, support in Western Europe up until Ukraine achieves outright victory is falling sharply, and when the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president could also result in a drop in aid.

Recent Yougov polling in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and the UK found support for a negotiated peace rising, although not necessarily a majority in most countries. Instinctively, such news will be heartening to anti-war activists: after all, peace is better than war, is it not?

The problem is: what would be the basis for a so-called peace? The entire self-declared premise of  Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, spelled out in his 2021 essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, now apparently mandatory reading for the Russian military, is that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Moreover, the very existence of Ukraine within its present borders – frontiers which were recognised by Russia in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons – is to Putin an “anti-Russia project.”

In March last year, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and former President, ruled out peace talks and demanded a compete capitulation from Ukraine, saying “Ukraine is definitely Russia.”

It’s hard to say what a peace deal might look like in these circumstances. Earlier this year, Andrew Murray wrote on the Stop the War Coalition website: “Russia will need to accept a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state.”

But as Simon Pirani has pointed out, this is meaningless. Russia “did so, in the Belovezha accords that dissolved the Soviet Union (1991), and the Budapest memorandum under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (1994). Since 2014 Russia has been pounding Ukraine militarily, in breach of those agreements.”

Formally, the Stop the War Coalition (StW) calls for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. But you will find little coverage of the appalling war crimes committed by the invaders – well-documented by human rights organisations – or the resistance to them by often defenceless Ukrainian civilians. If any other occupying power was massacring civilians in cold blood, you would expect to hear about it from your local anti-war movement. Ukraine, however, is excepted.

Part of the reason for the refusal of StW to solidarize with the Ukrainian people in their fight against imperialist Russian invasion and occupation is their framing of the conflict as a ‘NATO proxy war’.  Just days before the Russian bombardment began in 2022, Tariq Ali mocked the notion of an imminent invasion as a “highly orchestrated media campaign” in an article entitled “News from Natoland”.

Even after the invasion, the evidence that Western powers were hell-bent on encroaching on Russian interests is scant. The sanctions that followed the aggression were notoriously relaxed on the crucial issue of oil, Russia’s largest source of export revenues. Fearing a hike in global oil prices, the US rejected an outright ban and proposed a price cap – too high to have much effect – which allowed Russian oil to continue to flow.

When the Ukrainian military hit Russian oil refineries with drone strikes in March 2004, Washington was displeased. Meanwhile despite the promise that Western firms would quit Russia en masse, only around 10% have actually done so. The evidence that Western countries are using the Ukraine conflict to put Russia into an economic and military chokehold does not stack up.

Nor does the idea that what the conflict is ‘really’ about is NATO expansion. The last time any country bordering Russia joined NATO was in 2004 – the small Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia. The only ones to join since then are four small Balkan countries nowhere near Russia. Ukraine is not likely to become a member of NATO – that’s the view of senior US officials who do not want the treaty obligations that would entail – although the invasion of Ukraine has strengthened support for NATO there.

Unsurprisingly, very few Ukrainians believe that their existential struggle against bombardment, occupation and assimilation is a ‘NATO proxy war’. Most civil society activists, peacebuilders and human rights defenders take the line of a 2023 appeal, signed by dozens of organisations, which stated: “This argument denies us our humanity and diminishes Ukraine’s history of hardwon independence.”

The appeal condemned abstract appeals to end the war as “calls to surrender our sovereignty and territorial integrity.” It stated: “We ask that international organisations and movements respect the right of Ukrainians to be at the front and centre of determining how to make their peace and how to defend themselves and their rights. We ask for respect for our calls for inclusion and that when it comes to determining our future there should be ‘nothing about us without us’. We object to conferences and marches for ‘peace in Ukraine’ where Ukrainians are neither meaningfully involved nor fairly represented.”

The Stop the War Coalition appear to take a polar opposite approach. It ignores the views of the vast majority of Ukrainians and peddles the myth – widely debunked – that the West is the major obstacle to peace, as if the Russian regime was merely a bystander in the conflict. It claims too that the West is pouring weapons into Ukraine – although even it admits that many analysts feel that the Biden Administration has not helped Ukraine nearly enough.

Ultimately, the StW’s position on the conflict is untenable, as others have pointed out. It wants peace negotiations that respect a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state and it wants an end to Western arms supplies to Ukraine. How will cutting off Western military aid bring Putin to the negotiating table? And what bargain would he drive if Western support were ended? With what would Ukraine be able to negotiate if Western aid were suspended?

In fact, for StW’s Lindsey German, shockingly, Ukrainian self-determination is secondary and the argument for it is “spurious”, as “Ukraine does not have self-determination from the Nato powers.”

As one commentator noted, “Insofar as StW had anything new to say about the war in 2024, it was summed up by the words ‘escalation’ (used over 50 times in the course of the year).” And this is the West’s, Biden’s, supposed escalation that is referred to: “Russia having North Korean troops in their own country is hardly sign of escalation on their side,” suggests Lindsey German,  bizarrely comparing the 10,000 North Korean combat soldiers participating actively in the conflict to the stationing of US troops in some West European countries.

So there we have it. In the ‘peace negotiations’ the Stop the War Coalition envisages, Ukrainian self-determination is a fiction: it’s just a question of how much land, materiel and people an isolated, and ideally disarmed (if Stop the War had their way) Ukraine would surrender to the Russian aggressors.

Seductive as calls for ‘peace’ sound after three grinding years of conflict, these basic truths should be remembered. Socialists and internationalists here and elsewhere should be first and foremost listening to what their Ukrainian counterparts are telling them – not parroting Kremlin propaganda in the guise of a misconceived ‘anti-imperialism’.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: Russian bombing of a school in Kramatorsk, July 21, 2022. Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=421090610058834&set=a.293060042861892. Author: State Emergency Service of Ukraine, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.