UK Socialist Workers Party supports Moscow's war against Ukraine

UK communist Brian G.'s public post on FB:

Socialist Worker, the weekly publication of the British Socialist Workers Party, in the name of anti-imperialism, has come out firmly against any Ukrainian effort to expel the Russian aggressor. The headline of it's current issue declaims: "Ukraine War Hell Escalates - Launch an anti-war offensive". The escalation to which they refer is the imminent Ukrainian counter offensive against the Russian occupation. Opposition to such a counter-offensive makes a mockery of their claim to stand for the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops. For the SWP, Ukraine has no independent agency. It is merely a puppet in a NATO-led proxy war against Russia. Hence they will not countenance any call for Russian withdrawal which would involve a defeat for Russia, or even a setback. Ipso facto this would signal victory or at least an advance for NATO and western imperialism. The hollowness of their Troops Out claim is also exposed by their allied campaign to prevent Ukraine getting the arms it needs to kick out the aggressor.

What's more, their call for troop withdrawal doesn't cover the whole of Ukraine.  In relation to president Volodymyr Zelensky's stated goal of expelling Russia from occupied Crimea we are told in this article: "… every politician (sic) knows the seizure (sic) of Crimea is precisely the scenario that could trigger Vladimir Putin to use tactical nuclear weapons." Hence, for the SWP, kicking Russia out of Crimea should not be an objective. By the same logic this prohibition would apply to other Russian annexed territory - Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Their is no sense in which the SWP campaign is anti-imperialist. At best it is simply a rehash of liberal pacifism. Anti-imperialism at minimum requires support for self-determination. This in turn requires that we stand for the defeat of the aggressor. It is a fake and a fraud to suggest that NATO is the aggressor. Putin self-consciously stands in the tradition of Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin. For Putin - as for the Czars and Stalin - the Ukrainian nation is an imaginary invention. Putin is quite clear: It was all the fault of Vladimir Lenin who in the early years of the 1917 Russian revolution granted Ukraine statehood and self-determination. For Putin Ukraine has always been part of Russia and he is determined that it remains so. NATO expansionism is simply an excuse used by Putin to support his imperial aims, which would continue to exist, NATO or no NATO.

For the past 30 years or so since the demise of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine people have struggled to build an independent nation state free from Russian domination. This is what gives to Ukraine the moral high ground. Its war against the Russian invasion has been given its dynamic by the mobilisation of workers and their allies and transformed it into a peoples war, worthy of support. It is this that has given the advantage to Ukraine against Russia, not the sophistication of its armaments. Nonetheless, Ukraine needs arms to fight. We support the right of Ukraine to get arms from wherever it can to  help defeat the aggressor - be it Britain, the US or other imperialist powers. The fact that various imperialist powers have their own self-interested motives for supplying the arms is not a reason to oppose Ukraine's acquisition of such arms. There is no reason to suggest that such a stance entails support for imperialism's war drive. This is an unwarranted amalgam. To the contrary, we oppose NATO's war drive, especially, here in the UK, that of the British ruling class. It would be wrong for class struggle fighters in the UK to demand that the British government provide military aid to Ukraine - that's for Ukraine to decide. There is no contradiction between defending Ukraine's right to acquire arms from NATO whilst at the same time standing for the dismantling of NATO and, in general, demanding not a penny, not a person to the imperial war machine.