To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
January 29, 2023
Re: The voices from Ukraine ignored by the anti-Ukraine left
by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
One illustration of how far
much of the radical left has departed from internationalism is its
silence about the left-wing in Ukraine, and its ignorance of what
Ukrainian life actually is. It writes off the Ukrainian left-wing, as
well as the rest of the Ukrainian people, as American or NATO pawns. It
is shameful for anyone professing to be revolutionary or
anti-imperialist to have such a contemptuous attitude to the masses of
a country which is fighting for its national existence against a
reactionary occupier. Moreover, this ignorance about Ukraine is
complemented by a similar ignorance about Russia, where the
anti-Ukrainian left talks incessantly about whether Putin feels
provoked about opposition to Russian imperialism, and not about the
situation of the Russian working masses. This issue of the D/SWV list
concentrates on giving some idea of the real situation in Ukraine and
where to find additional information about it. <>
Adam Zivo is a Toronto-based columnist for IN Magazine’s. which describes itself as “a national magazine celebrating Canada’s LGBTQ2 community”). He has spent time in Ukraine during the war, and paid special attention to the experience of the gay community and of African foreign nationals. He reports both on what life is like in Ukraine and on on how certain section of the left doesn’t want to allow a true picture of Ukrainian life to be drawn. The following is from his account at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1604473430425841664.html.
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Earlier this year, an editor at a progressive publication pressured me to misrepresent interviews I'd conducted with black queer refugees in Ukraine because he refused to believe that they didn't consider racism or Nazism a huge issue in the country.
He rewrote my article opening to make racism in Ukraine seem harsher, and then asked that I remove sections where the refugees mentioned that Ukraine had evolved over the past 10 years and that racism and Nazism weren't major issues for them anymore.
He ignored the screenshots I'd taken of conversations with other racialized refugees, such as @mariamposts, supporting the narrative that Ukraine had become a fairly inclusive country. He also ignored my previous work with Indian refugees in Warsaw.
The editor claimed that it was not the publication's job to rebut negative claims about Ukraine, but to just give snapshots of the refugees' experiences – except he seemingly only wanted to use snapshots of their lives if they portrayed Ukraine as racist. It was so disingenuous.
It got so bad that he asked me why I was preoccupied with discussing racism and Nazism in the story – as if those weren't vitally important topics to touch upon when discussing gay black refugees in Ukraine (it was also only <20% of the total word count).
When I pushed back, he became rude and unprofessional, to the point where I decided to withdraw my article from the publication.
It was a powerful reminder of how, for some western journalists and editors, Eastern Europe can only be seen as a backwards and brutish place that is statically stuck in the past. The chauvanism and prejudice is exasperating.
This happened months ago, but it popped up in my head today as I've been interviewing representatives from the Jewish Ukrainian community and pondering why so few international media outlets have platformed local Jewish voices when discussing the myth of rampant Nazism.
For anyone interested, here is the article in question – I ended up
getting it published in @INMagazineCA. <>
by Adam Zivo
Excerpts — the full text is at https://inmagazine.ca/2022/07/july-august-2022-cover-story-what-its-like-to-be-a-black-queer-refugee-in-ukraine/:
... Ukraine has been a safe haven for many foreign nationals. Some have stayed in the country because they do not want to return to the countries where they were born, and fear they may not be accepted in other countries. Others have decided to stay because they enjoy Ukrainian life, with some having married locals and started families in the country.
Most foreigners have left as a result of the war – for example, over 85 per cent of Ukraine’s Indian nationals have been evacuated from the country. In cities where it was once commonplace to bump into Africans, few can now be spotted. The foreign nationals who remain are rare stragglers.
Now imagine being LGBTQ+ while facing these challenges. I sat down to talk with two gay Nigerian men in Ukraine, John and Valentine... The two of them – one out from a young age, one not out at all – did not know each other until they were introduced during the research phase of this article (aka: we all grabbed drinks together), but their stories are nonetheless very similar. Both are in their late 20s and had come to Ukraine as students, and while they had initially been motivated to stay in Ukraine mostly because they did not want to return to Nigeria, over time they came to love the country. Both of them came from religious families where homosexuality was not accepted, and neither of them attended church anymore.
To protect their privacy, Valentine asked that only his first name be used and John asked to use a pseudonym. Both requested that potentially identifying details about their professional and student lives be kept private.
Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine had a large international student population – local universities are very affordable and Ukrainian degrees can provide a gateway to jobs in the European Union. As a result, there were many Africans in Ukraine’s major cities. For that same reason, there were other minority communities, too – for example, there were approximately 20,000 Indians in Ukraine before the war, of which about 90 per cent were students. But these communities have now almost entirely disappeared.
Many of these international students studied in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city with a population of almost 1.5 million people, which has a large number of universities and a reputation for research, particularly in medicine and science. The universities helped create an African community – John said that it was impossible to walk through Kharkiv without bumping into a fellow African.
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John and Valentine both noted that Ukraine had become significantly less racist over the past decade. When they first arrived, the country was culturally “closed” to foreigners, but attitudes have changed as Ukrainians became increasingly exposed to other ethnicities. “Now we have a lot of Africans working with young people, a lot of integration, a lot of interracial relationships, and we have foreigners mingling with Ukrainians,” said Valentine. “They get to understand that these guys are cool.”
Simultaneously, Ukraine had become much more accepting of LGBTQ+ people. John and Valentine partially attributed this transformation to the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, where Ukrainians overthrew a corrupt pro-Russian government and warmed to more European values. Endeavouring to show that Ukraine’s future was European, not Russian, Ukrainians made an effort to be more tolerant of minority groups. ...
... In his early years in the Ukraine, John was unhappy not only with the claustrophobia of the African community, but with the chasm between foreigners and Ukrainians. Though Kharkiv’s foreigner population was large, non-nationals tend to keep to themselves. The international students often ghettoized themselves among university peers, reducing opportunities for making intercultural connections. When John moved to Kyiv several years ago, everything was different, he told me. There was more anonymity, openness and freedom, which made it easier to be gay. Though the city had a smaller proportion of foreigners, fewer of them were students and they were more integrated into society. “Everyone has been really nice and accepting. In my years of living in Kyiv, I’ve experienced two hostile people. And it hasn’t been really bad. Just a drunk person and some grandfather who was unhappy with me speaking Russian.” ...
... Most of Ukraine’s Africans left immediately, typically in groups, some of which were arranged by local churches. International churches were a lifeline, providing them with shelter and aid. After the sixth day of bombing, Valentine began to feel as if he was the last African left in Kharkiv. He eventually left by train for Lviv with some of his Ukrainian colleagues. ...
He was concerned that an international fixation on racism had pitted foreigners against Ukrainians, and might invite hostility against foreigners like himself who decided to stay in the country. “It was blown out of proportion, definitely. There were some cases, but it was not that bad,” he said.
... For Africans who had made an attempt to settle down in Ukraine and start a new life there, the tragedy of war runs deeper. “Some of them have families that are Ukrainian. Some of them are married. Africans came and married Ukrainians and started raising their families here,” said John. ...
They had come to this country simply looking for education, and they had found, against their expectations, a home for themselves. Ukraine was where they had spent their 20s and had come into themselves as gay men, despite occasional problems with prejudice. They had watched the country grow more cosmopolitan with each year, to the point where the society they found themselves in could hardly be recognized as the one they had arrived to. After a decade in Ukraine, they did not want to leave. Not unless it was on their own terms. <>
A new book promoted by the Ukrainian Solidarity Campaign helps fill in the picture of what’s going on inside Ukraine, as well as in Russia. It provides a refutation of the lies from the Russian war propaganda machine. Appearing in October last year, It is a collection of writings by Ukrainians and socialists around the world, edited overall by Fred Leplat and Chris Ford. See https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/2022/09/17/ukraine-voices-of-resistance-and-solidarity/.
Mick Antoniw is the Labour member of the Welsh Parliament for Pontypridd, a second generation Ukrainian and trade union lawyer.
John-Paul Himka is a professor emeritus of History at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has published extensively on the history of Ukrainian socialism.
Taras Bilous is a Ukrainian historian, an activist of Sotsialnyi Rukh/Social Movement, and editor of Spline/Commons: Journal of Social Criticism).
Oksana Dutchak is co-editor of Spline/Commons: Journal of Social Criticism).
Yuliya Yurchenko is a member of Sotsialniy Rukh/Social Movement and the author of Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: from Marketisation to Armed Conflict (Pluto Press, 2017).
Viktoriia Pihul is a Ukrainian feminist, anti-capitalist, and a member of Sotsialnyi Rukh/Social Movement.
Nataliya Levytska is the Deputy Chairperson of the NGPU (Independent Mineworkers Union of Ukraine)
Eric Toussaint is the spokesperson of the CADTM International. His books include Debt System (Haymarket books, 2019) and Bankocracy (Resistance Books, 2015).
Vitalii Dudin is President of Sotsialnyi Rukh/Social Movement. He researches the impact of neoliberal reforms and the social consequences of European integration.
Bohdan Ferens is a founder member of the Social Democratic Platform.
Ilya Budraitskis is a member of the Russian Socialist Movement. He is the author of of Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia (Verso, 2022).
Niko Vorobyov is a Russian-British freelance journalist and author of the book Dopeworld (Hodder & Stoughton, 2020).
Gilbert Achcar is a Lebanese socialist. His books include The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (Routledge, 2006) and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (Saqi, 2016).
Simon Pirani was the editor of the British mineworkers’ union journal
(1990–95) and his books include Change in Putin’s Russia: Power Money
and People (Pluto Press, 2010).
Stephen R. Shalom and Dan La Botz are both socialists and editors of New Politics, an independent socialist forum for dialogue and debate on the left, based in the USA. <>
As most of the main anti-war organizations in the US are opposed to the
Ukrainian resistance and unwilling to denounce Russian imperialism, a
number of left-wing sites for solidarity with the Ukrainian people have
developed. These sites support both the Ukrainian resistance and the
labor and left-wing movements in Ukraine. They include
* the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign
(https://linktr.ee/ukrainesocialistsolidaritycpgn),
* the Ukraine Information Group
(https://ukraine-solidarity.org/),
* the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine
(https://ukraine-solidarity.eu/), and
* the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign
(https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/).
In January another left-wing solidarity group declared itself, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US)-https://linktr.ee/ukrainesolidaritynetwork. It not only supports Ukraine’s war of self-defense, but calls for the cancellation of Ukraine’s debts by the international Western imperialist financial organizations, and it supports the struggles of Russian working people, whose interests are also harmed by the war.
The new organization doesn’t explain how it differs from the other left-wing solidarity organizations, and so why it was formed. Nevertheless, the formation of this group, which is endorsed by a number of well-known activists (who may also endorse other Ukrainian solidarity groups too) shows the importance of international support for the Ukrainian resistance and the left-wing social movement inside Ukraine. Its statement is international in spirit and content, and it reinforces that the true left supports the Ukrainian people. We hope it is able to bring new people into the solidarity movement!
The Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) reaches out to unions, communities and individuals from diverse backgrounds to build moral, political and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s criminal invasion and their struggle for an independent, egalitarian and democratic country.
The war against Ukraine is a horrible and destructive disaster in the human suffering and economic devastation it has already caused, not only for Ukraine and its people but also in its impact on global hunger and energy supplies, on the world environmental crisis, and on the lives of ordinary Russian people who are sacrificed for Putin’s war. The war also carries the risk of escalation to a direct confrontation among military great powers, with unthinkable possible consequences.
It is urgent to end this war as soon as possible. This can only be achieved through the success of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Ukraine is fighting a legitimate war of self-defense, indeed a war for its survival as a nation. Calling for “peace” in the abstract is meaningless in these circumstances.
The Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) supports Ukraine’s war of resistance, its right to determine the means and objectives of its own struggle—and we support its right to obtain the weapons it needs from any available source. We are united in our support for Ukraine’s people, their military and civilian defense against aggression, and for the reconstruction of the country in the interests of the majority of its population. We stand in opposition to all domination by powerful nations and states, including by the United States and its allies, over smaller ones and oppressed peoples.
We uphold the following principles and goals:
1) We strive for a world free of global-power domination at the expense of smaller nations. We oppose war and authoritarianism no matter which state it comes from, and support the right of self-determination and self-defense for any oppressed nation.
2) We support Ukraine’s victory against the Russian invasion, and its right to reparations to meet the costs of reconstruction after the colossal destruction it is suffering.
3) The reconstruction of Ukraine also demands the cancellation of its debts to international financial institutions. Aid to Ukraine must come without strings attached, above all without crushing debt burdens.
4) We recognize the suffering that this war imposes on people in Russia, most intensely on the ethnic and religious minority sectors of the Russian Federation which are disproportionately impacted by forced military conscription. We salute the brave Russian antiwar forces speaking out and demonstrating in the face of severe repression, and we are encouraged by the popular resistance to the draft of soldiers to become cannon fodder for Putin’s unjust war of aggression.
5) We seek to build connections to progressive organizations and movements in Ukraine and with the labor movement, which represents the biggest part of Ukrainian civil society, and to link Ukrainian civic organizations, marginalized communities and trade unions with counterpart organizations in the United States. We support Ukrainian struggles for ensuring just and fair labor rights for its population, especially during the war, as there are no military reasons to implement laws that threaten the social rights of Ukrainians, including those who are fighting in the front lines.
(The statement is as in https://linktr.ee/ukrainesolidaritynetwork. There were more than 100 initial signatures, and the full list can be seen here. <>
Two major figures in CODEPINK, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, have just published a new book “ War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict”. It says the Russian invasion is illegal, but it presents Ukrainian resistance as far worse, a Western plot which threatens the destruction of the entire world. The words “right to self-determination” never appears in the book, and the word “colonial” is only used with respect to Western imperialism, but never with respect to the three decades since 1991 in which the Russian bourgeoisie has been trying to restore its control over the former republics of the USSR, or with respect to Russian history at all. It totally ignores the Ukrainian left, as well as the importance of Ukrainian mass movements in gradually improving Ukraine.
Eric Draitser has written a major review of this book and dealt with a number of its distortions of history. Draitser has an unrealistic assessment of the role of Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, and various other figures as supposed anti-imperialists in the past, but just for that reason, he is utterly shocked by the new book. He brings out a tremendous amount of information about Ukraine and Russia that the anti-Ukrainian left ignores, such as the fact that post-Soviet Russia and NATO collaborated over the years, or that the Russia sent fascists into eastern Ukraine, and relies on them as the supposed true voice of the Donbas. And he stresses that Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies utterly ignore the voice of the people of Ukraine and of the left-wing inside Ukraine, and indeed also of the anti-war movement in Russia and the plight of the Russian working people. It turns out that internationalism can’t be divided up into compartments — those who don’t sympathize with the Ukrainian resistance aren’t likely to sympathize with the Russian working people either.
There are some points in Draitser’s article that I disagree with, such as presentation of the Qadaffi as destroyed by NATO rather than by the uprising of the Libyan people, or his praise of the supposed anti-imperialism of part of Benjamin’s rant. Also, while Draitser points out that Russia has imperialist features, he cites Kagarlitsky calling it “sub-imperialist”, rather than imperialist. But if Russia, which is one of the present-day militarist great powers with an economy based on its own version of monopoly capitalism, isn’t imperialist, then none of the other European powers could be considered imperialist either. Nevertheless, Draitser’s article is well-worth careful reading, and brings up many facts that the anti-Ukrainian section of the left covers up.
Below are excerpts, and the entire article can be found at https://www.tempestmag.org/2023/01/making-sense-of-the-ukraine-war/.
Our job is to help others understand violence: who is perpetrating aggression, who is victimized, and how we can stop it. Our job is to make sense of the senseless.
With that principle in mind, the new book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies (of the antiwar group CODEPINK) fails on every level. It offers a myopic view of Russia’s war in Ukraine that sees the entirety of the conflict through the lens of U.S.-NATO aggression without making even a perfunctory attempt to engage with the many other critical aspects of the war: oligarch rivalries, capital accumulation, imperial revanchism, anti-communism, resource extraction, and more.
The book makes no effort to understand Ukrainian perspectives beyond casting the entire society as nameless and faceless pawns of U.S. imperialism. Similarly, the authors don’t bother to engage with any Russian perspectives—except those of Vladimir Putin ... [It] omit(s) Russia’s military intervention in Kazakhstan in January 2022 to crush a worker uprising. The authors studiously avoid even a superficial analysis of the nature of the so-called People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, how the situation came to be, or the players involved.
... even with respect to NATO, the authors fail to capture the complexity of its role since the end of the Soviet Union, carefully sidestepping the inconvenient examples of NATO-Russia collaboration.
It is distressing to see leaders of one of the most prominent antiwar organizations in the United States, in effect, upholding Putin’s left flank, offering up hollow condemnations of the Kremlin while using its propaganda to badly misinform the public about the nature of a war that has already shaken the global capitalist system and has the potential to end human civilization. ...
Benjamin and Davies are at their strongest when highlighting the vicious U.S.-NATO war machine, which sends arms and soldiers across the planet for military exercises, military interventions, and, of course, profits. ... However, as with everything in this book, the analysis is partial and ignores many of the critical elements of the NATO-Russia relationship.
Reading Benjamin and Davies one could easily reach the conclusion that Russia and NATO have been locked in a conflict since at least 2007, if not 1991, as NATO crept its way to Russia’s border, thus presenting Russia with an “existential threat.” That aligns them with Putin, who has made the same point countless times, including in his oft-quoted 2007 speech in Munich. Conveniently, however, both Benjamin and Davies, like Putin, ignore the fact that Russia was a critical NATO partner for much of the last 20 years.
Take, for instance, the fact that Russia hosted a NATO base inside its borders for many years, and that it was a critical linchpin of NATO’s imperial infrastructure allowing the U.S. and its “NATO allies and partners” to rain death and destruction on Afghanistan for twenty-plus years. Sounds a bit odd for a country that allegedly views NATO as an existential threat. In fact, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute noted, “Russia was the second largest supplier of major arms to the Afghan armed forces in the period [2001–2020], accounting for 14 per cent of imports, by volume. All of these deliveries took place between 2002 and 2014.”
Let us recall that Russia steadfastly refused to use its UN Security Council veto to prevent the NATO-led destruction of Libya, an egregious war crime carried out by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and other powers. ...
And, in perhaps the most distasteful of ironies, Benjamin and Davies, like some segments of the Left, allow Putin’s iteration of Bush-era neoconservative imperialism to go entirely unnoticed. How hard would it have been to point out, as I did in CounterPunch within the first two weeks of the war, that Putin was following the Bush-Cheney playbook? A little Azov Bandera Nazis in place of al-Qaeda terrorists, a few Ukrainian biolabs and a non-existent nuclear weapons program in place of “Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction,” make a nice little neocon war. ...
Like a cheaply made Russian knockoff of a carcinogenic Western consumer product, Putin attempts to replicate the worst of U.S. imperialism and adapt it to his own needs. While such cynicism is to be expected from the undisputed leader of the global far right, the credulity of some on the Left, including Benjamin and Davies, toward Putin’s words is unacceptable.
It is interesting to note that Benjamin and Davies quote liberally from numerous Putin speeches, including the now infamous February 21, 2022, address to the Russian people in which he formally announced the invasion. And yet the authors studiously ignore all of it save for the bits about NATO. I wonder why?
Could it be because in the same speech, Putin made very clear that the war was about righting a historic wrong perpetrated by the dastardly Vladimir Lenin and those insidious Bolsheviks with their crazy ideas about the right of nations to self-determination? Could it be because Putin quite openly declares the conflict to be neocolonial in nature? Don’t believe me. Here’s Putin:
“I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring
country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture,
and spiritual space. … Since time immemorial, the people living in the
southwest of what has historically been Russian land have called
themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. … So, I will start with
the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be
more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. …” . . .
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What Putin’s address reveals, and what Benjamin and Davies go to great lengths to ignore, is the fact that this war is, at its root, an imperial, revanchist, neocolonial war. From regarding much of Ukraine as “historically Russian land” to identifying it with Orthodox Christianity, Putin is quite openly declaring that Ukraine does not, in fact, have a right to exist. Or, to the extent that it does, it is exclusively Catholic, Western Ukraine, with the rest of the country belonging to Russia and Orthodoxy.
What do you call a war that has as its explicit goal the erasure of an entire nation? Supremacist? Genocidal? Colonial? Take your pick. Benjamin and Davies prefer to call it “self-defense.” Or to just not comment at all.
Seen from this perspective, perhaps we can finally “make sense” of Russia’s “senseless” criminal attacks on civilian infrastructure, such as Ukraine’s energy system, which Amnesty International, along with every other human rights body, describes as war crimes. Similarly, one can understand why Putin seems so cavalier about holding Europe’s biggest nuclear plant hostage, risking a catastrophic nuclear accident, since it would most acutely affect Ukrainians, who don’t really matter anyway. Likewise, we now can understand the attacks on Ukraine’s cultural institutions, including art and science museums, because a nation that has no right to exist surely has no right to its own unique culture. For Putin, Ukrainian culture is a figment of the Bolshevik imagination. (I’ve written about this erasure of Ukrainian identity elsewhere.) And, naturally, a people who do not exist have no rights.
One of the most stunningly asinine aspects of the book is the fact that it completely ignores Ukrainian society, Ukrainian voices, and Ukrainian perspectives. There is a grand total of one Ukrainian activist cited in the book, despite the fact that every day on both traditional and social media there are countless Ukrainians from all political persuasions active on every front of this war.
The sole Ukrainian voice belongs to Yurii Sheliazhenko, a pacifist and war resister. While one can certainly respect a person’s decision to be a pacifist, it raises the question of why this was the only voice included in the book. ...
Resistance. For Benjamin and Davies, the only Ukrainian worth talking to is one who does not resist Russia’s aggression.
Another inexcusable omission in the book is the complete absence of any Russian voices and analysis of Russian society and domestic issues that may have motivated Putin’s invasion. One gets the impression from Benjamin and Davies that Russia can be reduced to Putin and his ideas about the West, the world, and Russia’s place within it. How else is one to interpret the complete lack of any Russian perspectives? The authors mention in passing the repression by the Putin regime, the suppression and outright criminalization of independent media, and other measures taken by the Kremlin, but conveniently they do not seek analysis from Russian experts. ...
Perhaps such an analysis might have proven useful in making sense of this senseless conflict?
In what is a running theme of War in Ukraine, the authors spend many pages detailing the events of 2014 and the establishment of the “People’s Republics” without ever asking any of the key questions: Who created them? How? What is daily life like there?
Indeed, an uninitiated reader would be hard-pressed to identify anything about the “People’s Republics” from the book other than some vague explanation about “anti-coup” uprisings that led to their creation. ...
... What Benjamin and Davies omit is that nearly all significant early leaders of the “People’s Republics” were Russian-backed intelligence operatives and/or fascists with deep connections to the Russian state and fascist tendencies within it. For brevity, we’ll highlight just a few.
Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), a Russian FSB (Federal Security Service) colonel, was an early leader of one of the primary paramilitaries involved in fomenting the conflict in Donbas. Girkin admitted as much himself when he brazenly boasted about creating the war, stating, “If our unit had not crossed the border, everything would have ended as it did in Kharkiv and in Odesa.” One would think that a book written by leaders of a prominent antiwar organization would perhaps have included such relevant information about how the war actually began.
Pavel Gubarev rose to prominence in the early days of protests in Donetsk, leading anti-Maidan rallies, the seizure of government buildings, and eventually appointing himself the first “People’s Governor.” Gubarev spent formative years as a member of Russian Nation Unity (RNE), a far-right, neo-Nazi group where he participated in training camps, and internalized a Russian imperial revanchist politics aligned with Alexander Dugin, the influential Russian fascist ideologue and political operator. Konstantin Skorkin, a Russian journalist specializing in Ukrainian politics, noted that Gubarev is understood to have been connected to, and financed by, Russian fascist oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, who is both Dugin’s patron and was named in a federal indictment as one of the “main sources of financing for Russians promoting separatism in Crimea.”...
Malofeyev, Dugin, and Gubarev are all unreconstructed imperial revanchists who see the Russian-fomented war in Donbas as an opportunity to re-establish “Novorossiya,” the Russian imperial name for the region. Dugin himself is on record saying that the goal in Donbas was not incorporation into the Russian Federation but “restoration of the old Russian Empire.” ...
But aside from the “activists” on the ground doing Russia’s bidding in fomenting the war on Donbas, there was also pro-Russian neo-Nazi infiltration of the region that helped spark what became called a “civil war.” Among those groups were the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), described by Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation as
“ An extreme-right, white supremacist militant organization based in St. Petersburg, Russia [which] promotes ethnic Russian nationalism, advocates the restoration of Russia’s tsarist regime, and seeks to fuel white supremacy extremism in the West. RIM maintains contacts with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups across Europe and the United States…Members of RIM’s armed wing, the Imperial Legion, have fought alongside pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and been involved in conflicts in Libya and Syria. In addition to its ultra-nationalist beliefs, RIM is known for its anti-Semitic and anti-Ukrainian views.”
RIM was joined by Task Force Rusich, a Russian neo-Nazi mercenary outfit understood to be a cadre of the infamous Wagner Group. Task Force Rusich was especially brutal in summer 2014 when it was deployed to Donbas at the peak of the fighting that year.
I could go on and on naming all the individuals, groups, and oligarchs that are never even mentioned in a book purporting to make sense of a senseless war, but this is not a full catalog of all the players or the innumerable human rights abuses occurring in Donbas every day. Rather, it is an attempt to ask a fundamental question of both Benjamin and Davies as well as others parroting Russia’s talking points about Donbas: Why didn’t they bother to study the war before forming their political position on the issue? ...
Were this a simple disagreement among U.S. leftists, I would never have bothered to critique this book. But how we understand the nature of this war directly informs how we develop a sound leftist position on it and how we rebuild our international movement.
Reading Benjamin and Davies leaves one with the simple, straightforward analysis, dominant in some corners of the Left, that this is an easily understood proxy war between NATO and Russia. Seen through this distorted lens, one could understand why some on the Left call for an end to the war via “peace negotiations” (and dismembering of Ukraine) and oppose sending vital weapons to those fighting the Russian invaders. [O]pposing Ukraine’s right to defend itself and eject its invaders is an abandonment of every principle of internationalism, solidarity, and anti-colonial and, anti-imperialist politics.
However, a serious examination of the war and its many dimensions leads to the very different conclusion that Ukraine has been invaded by an aggressive sub-imperial state, which also happens to be the traditional colonial power in the region, and that resistance to such aggression is not only justified, but a prerequisite for the survival of the people of Ukraine and the defense of their right to self-determination. In fact, such an analysis leads to the logical conclusion that opposing Ukraine’s right to defend itself and eject its invaders is an abandonment of every principle of internationalism, solidarity, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics.
While I don’t know Davies, it is truly a shame to see Benjamin, whose work I’ve often found valuable and whom I’ve hosted on my podcast, degrade herself with such an embarrassing distortion of an extremely complex and exceedingly dangerous war.
Benjamin and Davies, like Noam Chomsky and Katrina vanden Heuvel (who contributed the preface to this book), are correct that the threat of nuclear war still looms over everything happening in Ukraine, and everyone globally should be concerned about that. They are also correct that U.S.-NATO imperialism is critical to understanding the invasion. Unfortunately, the book they’ve produced misinforms more than it informs and distorts more than it clarifies.
Benjamin and Davies have done a tremendous disservice to the people of Ukraine resisting an invasion, the people of Russia living under (especially those resisting) a criminal regime, and the international Left as a whole. And in so doing, they provide left cover for Putin’s war machine. Echoing Gupta, even if the Left in the United States lacks effective power at the moment, we must at the very least provide a serious analysis, based on historical truths as well as current political realities. Anything less fails all those suffering under the guns of imperial aggressors—in this case, the forces led by Vladimir Putin. <>
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