Spotlight on Ukraine: The Claims That Circulate, and What the Evidence Shows
Expanded Version: More Claims - Part 9 of “With Washington and Moscow
TL;DR: Part 9 of the ‘With Washington and Moscow’ series. Not an analytical piece: a tool for conversations that happen at short notice in group chats, meetings, and pub debates. Each entry is self-contained. Where the evidence is genuinely contested, it is described as such. Twenty claims are answered. The 2014 coup claim has to explain why the coup produced an OSCE-observed presidential election in which the far-right candidates took under 2 per cent between them, and a parliamentary election that autumn in which Svoboda fell from 10.45 to 4.71 per cent and out of the Rada. The civil war claim runs into Igor Girkin, the FSB colonel who seized Sloviansk and later said he pulled the trigger of this war, a hostile witness the Kremlin has since jailed. The “not one inch eastward” pledge was real and verbal, and Russia then signed the 1997 Founding Act accepting that every state chooses its own security arrangements. The Johnson-at-Istanbul story rests on one Arakhamia sentence while omitting the next one, and on a visit that came ten days after the talks ended. The proxy claim collapses against Kursk, the refinery strikes and the Chevron tankers. Also covered: language law, Minsk, the UN Nazism resolution, Russia’s imperialist character, polling that shows Ukrainians wanting negotiations while a majority still refuses to cede Donbas, Baltic and Georgian agency in NATO accession, the 1914 analogy, and the claim that Ukraine can be freed only by revolution in Russia.
Updated 8 November 2026. Entries 19, 20 and 21 are new in November. Entry 17 has been corrected. Entries 1, 4, 11, 12 and 16 have been corrected against their sources, and statements of Fourth International positions now link to the primary texts in the Red Mole archive.
Many of these claims circulate simultaneously through Russian state media and MAGA-aligned outlets — a convergence examined in Part 10 of this series. This document addresses the factual substance regardless of the source.
1. ‘The CIA staged a coup in 2014 and installed a far-right government in Ukraine’
Victoria Nuland’s phone call, in which she discussed with the US ambassador which opposition politicians Washington preferred, is real and does constitute evidence of US interference in Ukrainian politics. But interference is not a coup, and the interference did not produce a far-right government: it produced an election in which the far right was comprehensively rejected. Yanukovych was removed not by putsch but by a unanimous vote of the Verkhovna Rada — including members of his own Party of Regions — after he fled to Russia. He was removed by Ukrainian parliamentarians, not installed by Americans. The coup narrative requires you to explain why the existing parliament remained in power, the “CIA’s coup” produced an election, and why that election produced a result in which the CIA’s preferred far-right parties lost decisively.
2. ‘There were eight years of civil war in the Donbas before the invasion — Russia was responding to an ongoing conflict’
The framing does real work. If the Donbas conflict from 2014 was a civil war — a spontaneous uprising of Russian-speaking Ukrainians against Kyiv — then Russia’s 2022 invasion becomes a response to eight years of Ukrainian aggression against its own population rather than the continuation of a Russian imperial project. The framing is formally applicable in the same way that calling Afghanistan in the 1980s a civil conflict was formally applicable: Afghans were fighting, but the external sponsorship was central and publicly documented.
The most important witness against this framing is not a Western government or a Ukrainian source. It is Igor Girkin, the former FSB colonel who led the April 2014 seizure of Sloviansk, the operation that initiated armed conflict in the Donbas. Girkin has said publicly that he ‘pulled the trigger on the war’ and that without his unit’s intervention the conflict would have ‘fizzled out.’ The Moscow Times reported his statement in November 2014: ‘I was the one who pulled the trigger of this war. If our unit hadn’t crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out.’ This is not a Ukrainian government claim, a NATO briefing, or a Western newspaper’s inference. It is the account of the man who did it, speaking about his own actions.
Girkin is a former officer of Russia’s Federal Security Service. The armed formations he commanded in 2014 were organised, supplied, and directed by the Russian state — a finding confirmed by the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team examining the MH17 shootdown, which placed Girkin’s forces at the centre of the operation that brought down the aircraft. The ‘separatist’ leaders were not local figures who spontaneously took up arms; they were Russian intelligence and military personnel operating under cover of local grievance.
Girkin was arrested in Russia in July 2023, charged with extremism after publicly criticising Putin’s conduct of the war he himself initiated. His arrest does not rehabilitate him. It does make him harder to dismiss: the Kremlin imprisoned its own commander for the crime of saying the 2022 invasion was being run incompetently. He is not a Western asset. He is a Russian nationalist who started a war on Russia’s behalf and later fell out with the government that sent him. His account of what happened in 2014 is the account of a hostile witness to the Ukrainian case — and it confirms the Ukrainian case.
3. ‘The conflict is fundamentally about ethnic and linguistic divisions between Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking communities’
The ethnic framing has an obvious appeal: it presents the conflict as a tragic collision of communities rather than an act of aggression, and it appears neutral. It is wrong about the main thing.
Start with the personnel. Zelensky is a native Russian speaker, raised in Kryvyi Rih, who learned Ukrainian as an adult and still speaks it with an accent. The Azov Regiment, which Russian propaganda identifies as the flagship of Ukrainian ethnonationalism, takes its name from the Sea of Azov — a coast predominantly Russian-speaking since Tsarist colonisation in the eighteenth century. The Ukrainian far right, to the extent it exists as a significant political force, draws heavily from regions and communities that the ethnic conflict model would place on the Russian side of the divide. The categories break down under examination.
More importantly, the timing does not fit. The immediate trigger of the 2013-14 crisis was not an ethnic confrontation. It was President Yanukovych’s last-minute suspension of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement in November 2013, under direct Russian economic pressure. Russia had explicitly threatened trade consequences if Ukraine signed. The Euromaidan protests that followed were not a movement of Ukrainian speakers against Russian speakers. They were a movement about economic and political sovereignty: whether Ukraine had the right to choose its own trading relationships and institutional alignments. Russia’s stated concern, expressed clearly in Kremlin communications at the time, was losing the economic leverage that made Ukraine part of its sphere of influence.
Ukraine’s trade reorientation since 2014 makes the underlying interests visible. Russia was Ukraine’s largest trading partner before the crisis. By the early 2020s the EU had become its primary trade partner. That shift — not linguistic grievances — is what Russian intervention was designed to prevent. The class interests at stake are not those of Russian-speaking communities in the east. They are the interests of a Russian state and bourgeoisie whose economic leverage over a neighbouring country was being dismantled by that country’s sovereign choice. An analysis that calls this an ethnic conflict is not wrong about every detail. It is wrong about the main thing.
4. ‘Russian language rights were suppressed in the Donbas, justifying Russian intervention’
Ukraine’s 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law gave regional official status to any language spoken by more than 10% of a region’s population — including Russian across the eastern and southern oblasts. After Yanukovych’s departure, the Rada voted to repeal it. The acting president Turchynov declined to sign, under pressure from domestic and international opinion to avoid inflaming the situation in the east; the repeal vote, though real, never took effect. The law remained in force until February 2018, when the Constitutional Court struck it down for procedural violations in the way it had been passed.
Ukraine’s 2019 Language Law, passed under Zelensky, made Ukrainian mandatory in public and official life — the civil service, the courts, public-facing retail, public events — with sector-specific requirements phased in over time, and with explicit exceptions for minority language use in private, in media, and in education, including in Russian. The law did not prohibit Russian; it required functional Ukrainian literacy for public roles. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, which monitors minority rights, recommended amendments to certain provisions but did not characterise it as suppressive of minority rights overall.[1]
The distinction being collapsed here is between a state promoting its majority language in public life and a state prohibiting a minority language. The first is standard practice across Europe. The second would be a serious human rights violation. The 2019 law falls within the first category: state promotion of a majority language in public roles, with explicit protections for minority language use in private and community life. The Venice Commission’s concerns were specific and technical, not a finding that Russian speakers faced systematic suppression. If requiring officials to operate in the national language justified invasion, Russia would have grounds to intervene in Latvia, Estonia, the French regions of Belgium, or Wales. Russia has not chosen to make that argument, which suggests the language rights framing is a post-hoc justification rather than a genuine principle.
5. ‘NATO promised not to move one inch eastward’
The phrase comes from US Secretary of State James Baker’s verbal assurance to Gorbachev on 9 February 1990, during negotiations over German reunification. Baker said NATO’s jurisdiction would not extend ‘one inch eastward.’ This is confirmed by declassified documents held at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, and is broadly accepted among historians. What is disputed — and the answer matters — is whether it constitutes a binding commitment. It was an oral assurance, never written into any treaty, and subsequent US administrations explicitly said no such commitment had been made. The verbal assurance was never enshrined in treaty. Russia did raise concerns about NATO expansion through the 1990s — those objections are documented — but the instrument through which Russia negotiated its actual position was the 1997 Founding Act, and Russia signed it.
The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine surrendered the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, committed the US, UK and Russia to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It says nothing about NATO membership (which, to be clear, no wing of the Trotskyist movement advocates).
The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act is where the legal framework was established. Russia signed it. It explicitly established that both parties accepted the right of every state to choose its own security arrangements. In exchange, NATO committed not to permanently station substantial combat forces or nuclear weapons in new member states — a commitment NATO argues it has honoured, through the distinction between permanent stationing and rotational deployments — a distinction Russia contests. Yeltsin used the Founding Act to make NATO enlargement politically survivable at home: Russia joined the Partnership for Peace, participated in the architecture of post-Cold War European security, and accepted that the states of Central and Eastern Europe could join NATO if they chose. The ‘broken promise’ narrative requires treating Baker’s 1990 verbal assurance as binding while treating the 1997 treaty Russia itself signed as irrelevant. That is not how international law works, and it is not how the Russian government treated it at the time.
6. ‘Ukraine was planning to let the US build military bases on Russia’s border, forcing Russia’s hand’
Ukraine’s constitution, Article 17, explicitly prohibits the stationing of foreign military bases on Ukrainian territory. This is not a post-2022 addition; it has been in the constitution since 1996. Ukraine adopted a formal policy of non-bloc status and neutrality in its 2010 Law on the Foundations of Domestic and Foreign Policy — a law passed under the pro-Russia president Yanukovych, who wanted to improve relations with Moscow. Ukraine had no active application for NATO membership before the 2022 invasion: the Membership Action Plan had never been granted, and NATO’s own position was that Ukrainian membership was a long-term possibility rather than an immediate prospect. A 2016 European Parliament briefing described NATO membership for Ukraine as ‘a distant prospect.’ The 2019 constitutional amendment adding NATO membership as an aspiration was passed after Russia had already annexed Crimea and started the Donbas war — as a response to aggression, not a provocation of it.
The premise of the argument — that Russia invaded to prevent NATO bases or imminent membership — requires ignoring Ukraine’s own constitution, its formal neutrality law, NATO’s actual position, and the sequence of events. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, when Ukraine was formally neutral and had no NATO membership application. The invasion preceded any serious membership prospect; it did not follow one. And the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, to which Russia was a signatory, committed it to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity regardless.
The December 2021 Russian ultimatum makes the argument harder still to sustain. Two months before the full-scale invasion, Russia issued formal security demands requiring NATO to roll back to its 1997 borders, remove troops and infrastructure from all states that had joined since then, and permanently exclude Ukraine from membership. These demands were not addressed to Zelensky, who had won 73% of the vote the previous year on a platform of deescalation and diplomacy. They were addressed to NATO and the United States, and they were unanswerable by any democratic Ukrainian government: no elected Ukrainian leader could permanently cede the country’s sovereign right to choose its own security arrangements on Russia’s instructions. Russia’s conditions for not invading had nothing to do with what Ukraine actually did or who governed it. They required Ukraine’s permanent strategic subordination.
7. ‘Ukraine and the US voted against a UN anti-Nazi resolution’
The resolution is ‘Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism.’ Ukraine and the United States have voted against it. The EU member states and the UK have abstained. The resolution is annually tabled by Russia. It is opposed not because its signatories support Nazis but because, as Ukraine’s mission to the UN has stated, the resolution is instrumentalised by Russia to provide legal and rhetorical cover for its ‘denazification’ pretext for invading Ukraine. Voting for a resolution that Russia deploys as justification for its invasion is not an expression of anti-fascism.
8. ‘Boris Johnson scuppered a peace deal at Istanbul in April 2022’
The claim rests on a single television interview given by Davyd Arakhamia, Ukraine’s lead negotiator, in November 2023. Arakhamia said Johnson ‘came to Kyiv and said that we will not sign anything with you.’ That sentence is quoted constantly. What is quoted far less often is the sentence that follows, in the same interview: ‘there is no, and there was no, trust in the Russians that they would do it.’ Arakhamia said Ukraine’s primary reason for not signing was the absence of any credible enforcement mechanism — not Johnson’s visit. The timeline is also awkward for the claim. The substantive Istanbul sessions were 29–30 March 2022. Reports of the Bucha massacre became public internationally from 1–2 April, as Ukrainian forces entered the town. Johnson arrived in Kyiv on 9 April — ten days after the talks had already concluded without agreement, and a week after the images from Bucha had shifted Ukrainian public opinion against any settlement.
What Russia was actually demanding at Istanbul matters here and is rarely mentioned by those who repeat the Johnson claim: a permanent cap on Ukraine’s armed forces at 85,000–100,000 personnel (Ukraine then had around 250,000); prohibitions on specified categories of heavy weapons; a constitutional ban on NATO membership; and, in the original draft, Russia itself as one of Ukraine’s security guarantors — the state conducting the invasion would guarantee the invaded country’s security. Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, also frequently cited, said he felt ‘blocked’ in his mediation efforts but also said Russia had ‘given up on killing Zelensky’, suggesting the terms were shifting in ways that had nothing to do with London.
The evidence available, including the sources campists themselves cite, does not support the claim that Johnson killed a deal Ukraine was ready to sign. It supports a more complicated picture: terms that Ukraine had serious reasons to reject on their own merits, a trust deficit produced in part by the Bucha massacre, and a post-hoc narrative that conveniently externalises the breakdown.
9. ‘Western leaders admitted the Minsk agreements were never meant to be implemented — proving Western bad faith’
The statements are real. In December 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Die Zeit that the Minsk agreements had given Ukraine time to build up its armed forces. Former French President François Hollande made similar remarks to Le Monde. Former Ukrainian President Poroshenko made analogous statements. These are genuine admissions and they circulate widely because they are real.
What is less often examined is what they show — and what follows from them.
Both sides used the Minsk period to consolidate their positions. Ukrainian forces strengthened defensive lines in the east. Russia used the same period to establish deeper control over occupied territories, integrate local armed formations with Russian command structures, and prepare what was already evidently planned as a larger war. Russian ceasefire violations during the Minsk period were documented by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission, whose reports were available in real time — Russia broke the accords immediately and repeatedly, including spectacularly in the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport in January 2015. Ukraine was not the only party buying time, and it was not the first to violate the terms. Zelensky, for his part, accepted the Steinmeier formula in October 2019 — a significant concession that would have granted Donbas special autonomous status — and Russia did not reciprocate.
More importantly, the Minsk agreements concerned a specific question: the status of separatist-controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Even accepting the worst reading of Ukrainian bad faith, non-implementation of an agreement about two partially-occupied oblasts in eastern Ukraine does not provide justification for the full-scale military invasion of the entire country on 24 February 2022. Russian forces attacked Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia — cities and regions with no connection to the Minsk framework whatsoever. The scale of the 2022 invasion is incommensurable with the grievance the Minsk narrative identifies.
The argument also requires amnesia about who made Minsk necessary in the first place. The agreements were a response to an armed conflict that Igor Girkin — the Russian FSB officer who initiated it — has said he ‘pulled the trigger on’. Ukraine signed Minsk under military pressure, after Russian intervention created a conflict Ukraine then had to manage. Examining the quality of Ukraine’s response to that situation without examining how the situation was created is not a material analysis. It is a moral audit applied selectively.
10. ‘Ukraine is simply a proxy of the United States and NATO, with no independent agency’
A proxy army does what its sponsor tells it to do. The record of this war shows Ukraine repeatedly not doing what Washington tells it to do — on military strategy, on which targets to strike, on when and where to operate, and most recently on whose commercial interests to protect.
The cases divide usefully into four categories.
Advice Ukraine openly rejected. In February 2022, as Russian forces approached Kyiv, the United States offered to evacuate Zelensky. He refused — ‘I need ammunition, not a ride’ — and remained in the capital. This was not a symbolic gesture; it was a decision that sustained Ukrainian state continuity and changed the course of the war. A proxy would have taken the evacuation. Throughout 2024, Washington urged Ukraine to halt or limit drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, citing concerns about Russian retaliation and disruption to global oil prices. Ukrainian officials defended the targets as militarily legitimate and continued the campaign.
US material restrictions that Ukraine circumvented. For much of the war, the Biden administration prohibited the use of US-supplied ATACMS missiles inside Russian territory, primarily over escalation concerns. These restrictions were progressively loosened under pressure — first for limited cross-border use near Kharkiv in 2024, then for longer-range use in November 2024. Ukraine did not wait. It developed and deployed domestically-made long-range drones capable of striking deep inside Russia specifically to operate outside the restrictions on US-supplied weapons. The restriction shaped what Ukraine asked for; it did not shape what Ukraine did.
Operational decisions made without US knowledge or approval. Ukraine’s August 2024 incursion into Kursk Oblast was launched without prior US notification. Washington initially sought clarification and subsequently said the operation was consistent with US policy — but the sequence matters: Ukraine acted, then the US responded. Named Biden officials later expressed concern that deploying experienced troops into Russia weakened Ukraine’s defence around Pokrovsk in the Donbas. That is the friction you get between an ally with its own strategic logic and a sponsor with different priorities. It is not the relationship between a puppet and its handler. Earlier, US officers urged Ukraine to concentrate its 2023 counteroffensive in a single thrust south towards Melitopol and to launch earlier. Ukraine distributed forces across multiple fronts and delayed the offensive on its own judgement.
US commercial and economic interests in direct conflict with Ukrainian war aims. The most recent episode makes the pattern visible in the starkest terms. The Trump administration warned Ukraine against attacking non-Russian vessels in the Black Sea after strikes affected tankers connected to US company Chevron’s oil operations. The stated concern was not military strategy or escalation risk: it was protection of American corporate interests. Ukraine’s Black Sea campaign — targeting Russian oil revenue, the shadow fleet, and military logistics through occupied Crimea — continues regardless. Ukrainian public opinion is with it: in October 2026 KIIS found 80 per cent of Ukrainians want refinery strikes to continue even if the US stops or limits aid, against 11 per cent who would stop them. If Ukraine were a proxy of American power, Chevron’s commercial interests would be Ukraine’s operational constraints. They are not.
None of this is to say the relationship is one of equals, or that US military and financial support has not been decisive in sustaining Ukraine’s capacity to fight. It has. But influence over a country’s ability to fight is not the same as control over how it fights. The proxy war argument requires Ukraine to have no independent strategic agency. The record of this war is a sustained refutation of that claim, across four years and multiple administrations.
11. ‘The left that supports Ukraine is backing NATO imperialism’
The Fourth International, whose analysis informs this series, calls for the dissolution of NATO. Its Executive Bureau’s statement of 1 March 2022 states: ‘We demand the dissolution of NATO.’ The 2025 World Congress resolution repeats the demand as dismantling all NATO, CSTO, and AUKUS military blocs, and the International has opposed NATO since its foundation. Supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself is not the same position as supporting NATO. These are two separate questions, and conflating them is how the campist argument avoids the harder one. The FI’s position is that the fight against NATO expansion passes through the uncompromising defence of the national and democratic rights of people threatened by Russian imperialism: you do not advance anti-NATO politics by abandoning the people Russia is killing.
The strongest evidence that this distinction is real comes not from any Western left organisation but from the left closest to the situation. The Finnish Left Alliance, which held a principled non-alignment position for decades and was ‘fiercely against Finland joining NATO’, acknowledged after the 2022 invasion that it ‘had basically failed to provide any credible alternatives’ to NATO membership for a country facing Russian aggression. The party that had most reason to know what Russian power looks like drew the conclusion that the campist left in Britain refuses to draw. The Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialnyi Rukh and the journal Commons — neither of which is a NATO institution — have argued consistently that Ukrainian workers fighting the invasion are not fighting Washington’s war. The Fourth International works with Sotsialnyi Rukh directly. Their analysis, as people who live under the situation rather than observe it from London, deserves more weight than it receives.
The FI’s position is not a compromise between two indefensible extremes. It is a united front framework: defend the right to resist, criticise the state conducting that resistance, build the working-class movement within it. That is exactly what Sotsialnyi Rukh and Commons are doing, with the solidarity of trade unionists, socialists and anarchists in Russia and around the world. The campist left in Britain that cannot distinguish between supporting Ukraine’s working class and endorsing NATO has not found a more principled position. It has found an excuse to look away.
12. ‘Russia is not an imperialist power — it ceased to be imperialist in October 1917’
This claim does explicit political work. If Russia is categorically non-imperialist, its military actions are by definition responses to Western aggression rather than aggression in their own right, and the logic follows: Russian missiles hitting British weapons factories would be legitimate anti-imperialism. The conclusion is not a reductio ad absurdum. It was stated openly in a Palestine solidarity group chat in August 2026 by someone making this argument.
Three things are wrong with it.
First, Russia is not the Soviet Union. The USSR dissolved in 1991. Whether the Russian state constitutes a clean break from the Soviet Union or a modified continuation is a question Marxist analysis has debated; what is not in analytical dispute is that contemporary Russia operates as a capitalist state: private bourgeoisie, oligarchic class formed through privatisation, a stock market, no meaningful public ownership of the means of production. A capitalist state reconstituted through the ‘loans-for-shares’ privatisations of the Yeltsin era — in which former Soviet assets were transferred to a new oligarchic class at knockdown prices, creating the billionaires who subsequently filled London’s property market — is not straightforwardly continuous with a workers’ state. Putin modified Russian capitalism; he did not reverse it. A 2024 estimate by the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration put the state sector at 48.5% of GDP in 2023, using a broad definition that includes state-influenced enterprises alongside directly state-owned firms — and down from 51.7% in 2022.
Third, the argument proves far too much. If Russia ceased to be imperialist by virtue of its 1917 revolution and has not resumed that status despite reconstituting a capitalist class and waging colonial wars against neighbouring peoples, by the same measure the United States is not imperialist either. The USA has undergone its own political transformations. It has a large state sector. It has periodically rolled back certain forms of market orthodoxy. The criterion that exempts Russia from the category of imperialism, applied consistently, would have to exempt the very power the campist left identifies as the primary enemy. At that point the category has ceased to do analytical work and is functioning as a label applied selectively to reach predetermined conclusions.
The Fourth International’s February 2025 World Congress resolution characterises Russia as imperialist. It describes the Kremlin’s ‘Greater Russian imperialist ideology’ and the destruction of whole towns ‘to impose the hold of Great Russian imperialism’. This is not a NATO position. It is the position of the international current whose framework this argument invokes while reaching the opposite conclusion.
13. ‘Describing Western class interests in this conflict is a complete Marxist analysis of why it is happening’
The claim about Western interests is substantially true, and it deserves to be stated clearly before anything else. BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are working with the Ukrainian government to establish a reconstruction bank designed to channel hundreds of billions in private investment into Ukraine. Western arms manufacturers have profited from the conflict. Trade union rights in Ukraine have been gutted under wartime legislation. Ukrainian reconstruction is, without question, an opportunity Western finance capital intends to exploit. None of this is in dispute. The Fourth International’s 2025 resolution condemns Trump’s demand for ‘repayment’ of past aid through the seizure of Ukraine’s mineral and rare earth resources, and calls for the full cancellation of Ukraine’s debt.
What is in dispute is whether describing these interests constitutes an explanation of why the war is happening. It does not. Having interests in an outcome is not the same as causing it. Western capital also profited massively from the Marshall Plan. That is not a Marxist argument that Western capital caused the Second World War. The question of who benefits from a conflict and the question of who initiated it are different analytical tasks, and collapsing them produces an analysis that is frozen at precisely the point where the conclusion would become inconvenient — namely, the question of what Russia was doing and why.
A complete material analysis follows the money in all directions. Russia is extracting resources from occupied Ukrainian territories on a significant scale: occupied Ukrainian territories contain an estimated $350 billion in natural resources, and Russia has moved systematically to exploit mineral deposits, agricultural land, and industrial infrastructure in the areas it controls. Ukrainska Pravda reported in May 2026 that Russia was planning extraction operations across eighteen mineral deposits in occupied southern Ukraine. If material interests explain this conflict, Russian material interests in Ukrainian territory are at least as relevant as BlackRock’s interest in reconstruction contracts — and they precede the invasion rather than following it.
The Ukrainian working class also has material interests, and a class analysis that accounts for Western capital and Ukrainian oligarchs while omitting them is not a complete analysis. It is a selective one. Ukrainian workers have an interest in not being killed, in not having their cities destroyed, in not being deported to filtration camps, in national self-determination. These interests do not disappear because the Zelensky government’s economic policy is hostile to labour rights. The working class of a country under colonial invasion has interests that are not reducible to the politics of the government that happens to be defending it. That distinction is the starting point of the Fourth International’s analysis, not a footnote to it.
The specific question that this argument does not answer — and which has not been answered in any version of it — is: if it is Western industrialists and finance capital who want this war, how do you explain that it is Russian troops who are fighting it? Describing Western interests does not explain Russian action. These are different analytical tasks, and a Marxism that cannot distinguish between them is not a sharper analysis. It is a shorter one.
14. ‘The resistance has no popular mandate — Ukrainians never voted for this war, and it is sustained only by forced conscription’
Two distinct claims are bundled here and deserve separate treatment.
On the 2019 election: Zelensky won the presidency in April 2019 on a platform of implementing the Minsk agreements and pursuing a negotiated settlement with Russia. This is true. The conclusion drawn — that Ukraine therefore has no mandate to resist — is false. Zelensky won promising to implement Minsk; Russia violated the ceasefire repeatedly throughout the 2014–2022 period, as documented by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in real time; and in February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion with the stated objective of regime change and the elimination of Ukraine as a separate political entity. A political mandate granted before an invasion does not bind the invaded population to accept the outcome of that invasion. The relevant precedent is not obscure. The United States elected Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 on a platform of keeping America out of the war in Europe. Pearl Harbor changed the situation. What changed Ukraine’s situation was Russia’s decision to invade.
On forced conscription: the existence of conscription does not delegitimise a war of national defence. Every major war of national liberation in the twentieth century involved some form of compulsion. The question the conscription argument never answers is: what is the alternative? The populations of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories have not found occupation preferable to conscription. Filtration operations have processed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians; the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia was documented by the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on that basis; cultural and political life in occupied territories has been systematically erased. The alternative conscription is being compared to is not peace. It is this.
What Sotsialnyi Rukh and Commons — Ukrainian socialist organisations — actually argue about conscription is worth noting. They do not demand an end to mobilisation. They demand that its burden be borne equally: that the oligarch’s son be called up as readily as the labourer’s, that soldiers retain the rights of workers, that the weight of a just war stop falling on those least able to refuse it. That is a class argument about how the resistance is conducted, not a claim that it should not be.
Added since publication
15. ‘NATO’s eastward expansion was simply the pure will of the American elite; the accession states had no real agency in the process’
The claim does specific work: if enlargement was decided in Washington and merely imposed on Warsaw, Tallinn and Tbilisi, then those states’ stated reasons for wanting membership can be dismissed as manufactured consent, and Russian objections to enlargement become objections to American aggression rather than objections to the choices of Russia’s neighbours. Andres Kasekamp’s 2020 study in the Journal of Strategic Studies, based on interviews with the American, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian officials who ran the accession process, states plainly that most accounts of enlargement treat it as the execution of American grand strategy, and sets out to correct the record. His conclusion is unambiguous: Baltic inclusion ‘was not the outcome of a preordained US grand strategy, but was demand driven.’
The demand ran from the Baltic capitals to Washington, not the reverse, and for years Washington was not interested. Estonian foreign minister Lennart Meri began pushing for NATO membership in 1990, before the USSR had dissolved. By 1995 all three Baltic governments had formally adopted NATO membership as policy, and were told, repeatedly and at senior level, that it would not happen. US Defence Secretary William Perry said so publicly in 1996. Secretary of State Colin Powell, as late as March 2001, said no agreement on enlargement existed and a ‘zero option’ was possible. The Pentagon opposed Baltic membership specifically, worried about arms control fallout with Russia. What changed the outcome was not a Washington plan executed on schedule; it was, in Kasekamp’s account, three small states running a decade of coordinated lobbying, reform and diplomatic manoeuvring against the reluctance of their own prospective allies. The Fourth International’s press saw the demand from below as it happened: in 1989 International Viewpoint defended Sajudis against Moscow’s divide-and-rule tactics in Lithuania and reported the human chain of at least a million people across the three Baltic republics.
The Russian side of the story confirms this from the opposite direction. Boris Yeltsin met Clinton in Helsinki in March 1997 specifically to extract an oral pledge that NATO would never admit the Baltic states or any other former Soviet republic. Clinton refused. If enlargement were simply the American elite exercising its will, there would be no need for Yeltsin to keep losing that argument to states with a fraction of Washington’s power, and no need for Russia to offer the Balts a unilateral security guarantee in October 1997, which all three governments rejected outright, unwilling to trade sovereignty for a promise from the state that had annexed them in 1940.
Georgia removes what remains of the argument’s cover, because it is the case where the population voted directly. A non-binding referendum in January 2008 returned 77 per cent support for NATO membership, months before the Russian invasion that August. Public support has not collapsed since; National Democratic Institute polling has shown Georgian approval running from the high sixties to the low eighties throughout the years that followed, including well after Georgians had every practical reason to reconsider.
None of this settles what NATO is structurally once these states join it, and the accession process itself contains the evidence for why not. In February 2003, the ten states awaiting membership, organised as the Vilnius Group, published a letter backing the American position on Iraq: a document drafted in the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, with the direct involvement of the US lobbyist coordinating their campaign. It enraged Jacques Chirac, who said the signatories had missed a good opportunity to keep quiet, and it gave Donald Rumsfeld his line about ‘new Europe’ against ‘old’. Estonian prime minister Siim Kallas told Bush exactly what Bush wanted to hear on Saddam Hussein in the Oval Office that September. None of the Baltic governments believed the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; all three deployed troops anyway. The demand for membership was genuine and the states pursuing it had real agency, and the price of exercising that agency was aligning with Washington on a war that had nothing to do with Baltic security, because the accession process ran through Washington’s goodwill regardless of who was doing the demanding.
Ilya Budraitskis, a leading member of the Russian Socialist Movement until it was forced to disband, is right that this agency has to be taken seriously as agency. What the Iraq letter shows is that agency exercised inside an alliance structured around one dominant power still has to pay that power’s price, and it is worth asking what Budraitskis himself makes of that price, since he has.
Set against the Finnish Left Alliance’s own reckoning, examined above, Budraitskis and Yudin’s position stops looking like a break from the Fourth International’s programme and starts looking like an application of it. The Left Alliance held the doctrinaire line against NATO membership for decades and found, when the test came in 2022, that it had no answer for a population facing exactly the threat the Balts and Georgians have lived with since the last century. An action programme for a state under active Russian threat cannot include withdrawal from its own security guarantee; the demand is hopelessly distant from where the broad vanguard in Tallinn, Tbilisi or Vilnius actually stands, and pressing it there generates not a united front but isolation.
The demand for NATO’s dissolution does not disappear. It moves into propaganda: the manifestos addressed to the workers’ vanguard and to other revolutionaries, where the Fourth International is right to keep advancing it, framed within the wider question of self-determination rather than thrown at Estonian or Georgian workers as a test of loyalty. Read this way, Budraitskis and Yudin are not contradicting the Congress resolution. They are doing the work it does not itself perform.
What gives the propagandist demand content, and what Budraitskis has been consistent about since well before the Yudin paper, is solidarity and direct organisational links with the Russian opposition itself: socialists, anarchists, the independent workers’ and national movements that Putinism has spent a decade criminalising. A security architecture that supersedes NATO is not built by Baltic states disarming their own defence. It is built, if it is built at all, by a Russia whose working class has broken the regime that makes NATO membership rational for its neighbours in the first place. That is the one place where Budraitskis’s position and the FI’s actually meet without needing reconciliation, and it runs through the defeat of Putinism from inside Russia, not around it.
(Red Mole Guide No. 15 sets out the propaganda/agitation distinction and the action programme question in full; readers wanting the underlying method should go there.)
16. ‘Ukrainian public opinion has turned against the war — 69% now favour a negotiated settlement’
The Gallup figure is accurate and significant, though it is now more than a year old. In polling conducted in July 2025, 69 per cent of respondents in Ukraine favoured a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, against 24 per cent who supported fighting until victory. In 2022 those figures were essentially reversed. The shift is real and deserves to be acknowledged.
What it does not show is what the campist argument needs it to show. Wanting negotiations is not the same as accepting Russia’s terms. Through 2026, KIIS has asked whether Ukraine should hand all of Donbas to Russia in exchange for security guarantees, and the share calling that unacceptable has risen from 54 per cent in January to 61 per cent in October. The picture is not uniform. A Rating poll in early October 2026 found 59 per cent would accept some territorial concession, but 56 of those 59 points were conditional on Western security guarantees. A population that wants the killing to stop while most of it refuses to surrender territory without guarantees is not a population that has accepted the invasion.
The shift in opinion tracks the military and political situation rather than a change in fundamental will. The partial withdrawal of US military support under the Trump administration in 2025, the continued attrition on the eastern front, and three years of sustained bombardment of Ukrainian cities all constitute rational grounds for preferring a negotiated outcome to continued war. War-weariness under those conditions is evidence of the scale of human suffering the invasion has caused. It is not evidence that Ukrainians believe the invasion was legitimate or that they have concluded occupation is preferable to resistance. The populations of Russian-occupied territories — filtered, deported, forcibly conscripted into the Russian army — are the control group for what acceptance of Russian control actually looks like.
The Russian-conducted referendums in occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts in September 2022 are sometimes cited as evidence of genuine popular preference for Russian rule. Those referendums were conducted under military occupation, without independent monitoring, over four days, with armed soldiers accompanying ballot collectors in some documented instances. The OSCE declined to monitor them. Official results claimed 87–99% support for annexation in regions where pre-war polling showed no significant separatist sentiment. Zelensky’s most pro-Russian rival in the 2019 presidential election received 11% of the vote nationally and was not running on a platform of annexation. The referendums did not produce evidence of Ukrainian preference. They produced numbers.
17. ‘Supporting workers who struggle against a government targeted by US imperialism is backing a regime-change operation’
The argument was stated plainly during a discussion in August 2026. On this view, encouraging Russian workers to struggle against Putin, or Iranian workers to struggle against the theocracy, while those countries are under attack from the West, amounts to supporting US imperialism. The same logic turns up in discussions of Hong Kong, Venezuela and China: workers and oppressed peoples in states targeted by US power cannot be supported against those states without giving cover to Washington. The conclusion is that solidarity must wait until the geopolitical situation is resolved.
The position has a name, and it isn’t internationalism. It is campism generalised beyond Russia and Ukraine into a universal rule: workers everywhere are entitled to solidarity, except where that solidarity might embarrass a state in Washington’s crosshairs.
Every authoritarian government in a country the US has targeted has described its domestic opposition as a CIA operation. The Soviet Union said it of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, of the Czechoslovak reform movement in 1968 and of Solidarność in 1980. In each case Western intelligence services took an interest, as they do in any instability among adversaries. In each case the movement itself grew out of conditions inside the society concerned. CIA interest in a popular uprising is evidence that the CIA noticed it. One person in the same Spotlight discussion group put it simply: ‘Involvement of CIA etc after it started is not the same as dismissing it as an imperialist plot.’
The practical test is direct. Since the US and Israeli strikes of February 2026, Iran has executed at least 34 people in connection with the January uprising, and teachers’ union activists have been arrested for protesting against the executions. In Hong Kong, Lee Cheuk-yan, founder of the now-dissolved Confederation of Trade Unions, was convicted of inciting subversion in August 2026 and sentenced to seven years in September. To call solidarity with them backing the US empire, you have to believe that the IRGC’s execution chambers and the Hong Kong courts express working-class power, and that the people being imprisoned and killed are tools of imperialism. That turns a Marxist analysis on its head. The Fourth International has never found the two positions hard to hold together: its statement of 28 February 2026 opposed the US and Israeli war on Iran and, in the same text, backed the Iranian people’s own struggle to overthrow the regime.
August 1968 shows where this logic leads. The executive of the Communist Party of Great Britain condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. A hardline minority inside the party defended it as a blow against counter-revolution, and much of that minority later left to form the New Communist Party. The Fourth International demanded an end to the occupation on 22 August, within a day of the tanks crossing the border. On the ground, the tanks were crushing a reform led by Czechoslovak communists who wanted the right to organise and speak freely. The campist left’s difficulty in 2026 in telling working-class struggle from CIA destabilisation repeats that minority’s failure. The test is which side the workers and oppressed are on, whatever Washington prefers.
18. ‘Russia only ever wanted the Donbas and Crimea — it has no interest in ruling the rest of Ukraine’
This argument is sometimes stated as ‘Russia’s goals are limited’ and sometimes as ‘it was always a Special Military Operation, not a full invasion.’ The terminology matters: ‘Special Military Operation’ is Russian state language, adopted by the Russian government precisely to minimise the scale of what it was doing and to evade the legal consequences of declaring war. Using it is not a neutral descriptive choice.
The military record makes the ‘limited goals’ argument extremely difficult to sustain. If Russia’s objectives were confined to the Donbas and Crimea, the assault on Kyiv in February and March 2022 is inexplicable. Russian forces advanced on the capital from multiple directions simultaneously — from Belarus in the north-west, from Chernihiv in the north-east, from Sumy in the east. The Kyiv region, Chernihiv Oblast and Sumy Oblast have no connection to the Donbas framework whatsoever. The Bucha massacre — the killing of civilians documented by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Kyiv Oblast — occurred in a region Russia would have had no reason to enter if Donbas and Crimea were its only objectives. It took a Ukrainian military counteroffensive to force Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions in late March 2022: not a Russian decision to halt at the limits of stated aims, but a military defeat.
The same pattern repeats in the south and east. Russian forces occupied Kherson city — on the west bank of the Dnipro, well beyond the Donbas — and held it until November 2022, when another Ukrainian counteroffensive forced withdrawal. They were driven from significant portions of Kharkiv Oblast in September 2022, again under military pressure. The planned Russian amphibious landing at Odessa — aborted after Ukraine sank the cruiser Moskva in April 2022 — was designed to seize Ukraine’s main Black Sea port, 500 kilometres west of the Donbas line. Russia’s territorial reach across the south was not a miscalculation about the limits of a limited operation. It was the intended operation.
Russia’s own stated war aims in February 2022 — ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’ — were not defined by territory. They were defined by political regime: the removal of the Ukrainian government and the replacement of Ukraine’s political and security orientation. Putin’s July 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, published six months before the invasion and widely read as a statement of intent, denied that Ukraine constituted a separate nation at all. ‘We are one people,’ he wrote — a claim that, applied militarily, has no limiting principle of the kind the ‘limited goals’ argument requires.
The December 2021 Russian ultimatum is the clearest evidence of what Russia was actually demanding. It required NATO to roll back to its 1997 borders, removing troops and infrastructure from every state that had joined since then. It also demanded that Ukraine be permanently excluded from NATO membership. These demands were addressed to Washington and Brussels, not to Kyiv, and they concerned the entire post-Cold War European security order. No demand about Donbas or Crimea appears in the ultimatum. Russia’s actual negotiating position, as stated in the month before the invasion, had nothing to do with the specific territories the ‘limited goals’ argument assigns to it.
What Russia wants from Ukraine does not require direct annexation of the whole country to be correctly understood as control of the whole country. Britain controlled Ireland in several forms over two centuries: a subordinate Irish parliament before 1801, direct rule from Westminster under the Union, and after 1921 a Free State whose formal independence came with British control of the treaty ports, an oath to the Crown and dominion limits on its foreign policy. Through all of them the constant was a guarantee that Ireland could not act against British interests. Russia’s December 2021 demands — permanently barring Ukraine from NATO, permanently restricting its military capacity, permanently subordinating its security arrangements to Russian approval — describe the same structure, and so do Putin’s current terms as the Fourth International’s 2025 resolution lists them: recognition of the annexations, replacement of the government, drastic cuts to the armed forces and permanent exclusion from NATO. Annexing the Donbas and Crimea while achieving those conditions would have met Russia’s actual objectives. Annexing the Donbas and Crimea without them would not have.
19. ‘This is 1914 again: defending Ukraine is defending Belgium or Serbia, and the left that does it is repeating the social-chauvinism of the Second International’
The argument arrived in a Red Mole comment thread on a Monday evening in November 2026, as two slogans: ‘Defend Belgium’s self-determination! Defend Serbia’s self-determination!’ The implication is that any socialist who backs Ukraine’s defence is a reincarnation of the leaders who voted war credits in August 1914.
Lenin did face the Serbian question, and his answer is the one the analogy relies on. In The Collapse of the Second International he accepted that Serbia’s war against Austria was the one genuinely national element in the war. Had that war stood alone, he wrote, it would have been ‘the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie’. It did not stand alone. To the other ninety-nine per cent of the belligerents, the war was the politics of imperialism, and the Entente that was ‘liberating’ Serbia was trading Serbian interests to Italy. He held up the Serbian Social-Democrats, whose deputies voted against war credits, as the best example of socialists doing their duty.
The obvious reading is that this settles the matter: a small nation, a real grievance, a great-power patron, and Lenin still backed the vote against. But that is not quite right either. Lenin’s judgement rested on a fact about 1914. The Serbian front was one theatre of a war in which the armies of both great-power blocs were fighting each other, and Serbia’s fate would be decided by which bloc won. Apply the same test to Ukraine. No NATO army is fighting Russia. The armies in the field are Ukraine’s and Russia’s, joined in Kursk by North Korean troops. The two powers the analogy casts as rival blocs are not at war with each other. They are negotiating over Ukraine’s head, on terms that divide its territory and its mineral wealth between them. That is the thesis of this series, and the Fourth International’s International Committee put it bluntly in February 2026: the Trump regime is willing to sacrifice Ukraine to appease Putin. The commenter who raised Belgium says much the same: he expects Russia’s economic influence in a post-war Ukraine to come ‘in collaboration with U.S. imperialism’. A war in which the supposed rival blocs settle terms together is a different animal from the one Lenin was describing.
The same comment adds that Ukrainian workers’ support for the war counts for little, since most Western workers also supported 1914. That comparison fails on the question of whose war each was. The social-chauvinists of 1914 put the workers’ movement behind their own states’ wars for colonies and annexations, and they suspended the class struggle at home for the duration. Ukrainian workers are defending the towns they live in against an army that has annexed four of their regions, and Sotsialnyi Rukh, which backs that defence, has kept campaigning against the government’s wartime labour legislation. In May 2022 it urged Ukrainians to block Bill 5371, which stripped most workers in small and medium firms of collective bargaining, as unconstitutional and incompatible with EU and ILO standards. Lenin’s Serbian comrades opposed their government’s war because it had become part of the imperialist war. Ukrainian socialists support their country’s defence and fight their own government on wages, union rights and conscription, which is roughly what Lenin asked of socialists in a genuine national war and almost the reverse of what Scheidemann did.
(Part 11, ‘Serbia 1914 or Ireland 1916’, takes the comparison further.)
20. ‘Ukrainian self-determination can only be won by revolution: Ukrainian and Russian soldiers turning their guns on their own rulers’
Stated in the same thread: Ukrainian self-determination cannot come from defeating Russia with Western arms. It can come only from Ukrainian soldiers and workers turning on their own ruling class and uniting with Russian soldiers and workers against Putin.
So why is Ukraine the only semi-colony whose liberation has to wait for a revolution in the country oppressing it? Nobody told the Algerian FLN to hold off until French conscripts mutinied. In 1937 Trotsky argued that Chinese workers belonged in the front ranks of the war against Japan, keeping their political independence from Chiang Kai-shek. He did not make that conditional on Japanese soldiers coming over first. The Vietnamese were never asked to suspend their war until the GI resistance inside the American army matured, though that resistance was real and the Vietnamese worked to encourage it.
The argument also gets the sequence the wrong way round. Revolutions in Russia have followed military defeat abroad. The 1905 revolution came after Port Arthur and Tsushima, and February 1917 came after the collapse at the front. A Russian army defeated in Ukraine is the likeliest opening for the movement inside Russia that the argument says it wants. Asking Ukrainians to stop fighting so that Russian workers can overthrow Putin takes away the development most likely to weaken him, and Russian anti-war socialists have said as much themselves. The Russian Socialist Movement’s émigré branch made the argument in February 2023, pointing to the abolition of serfdom, 1905, 1917 and perestroika as changes at home that followed setbacks abroad.
Appeals to Russian soldiers are already being made. The Fourth International’s first statement on the invasion called on them to refuse to take part and on socialists to organise solidarity with them, and Ukraine’s own military intelligence has gone further. Its ‘I Want to Live’ surrender line has run since September 2022, and by October 2024 it reported more than 40,000 applications from Russian servicemen. It is a state programme with state purposes, and socialists can say what they like about who runs it. It has still put more Russian soldiers in contact with the people they were sent to kill than any appeal from the Western left has managed, and it exists because Ukraine is still fighting. What Ukrainian workers can do with their own organisations after a settlement drafted in Washington and Moscow is the harder question, and the revolutionary-means argument skips past it towards a fraternisation it has no plan for and no route to, beyond telling the people being invaded to wait.
21. ‘Azov is the leading force in Ukraine, and NATO arms it’
The claim usually travels attached to something true. In the Facebook thread that prompted this entry, a self-described internationalist set it beside an account of four beaten soldiers in a house outside Kyiv, and when asked by what metric Azov led anything, he replied that it was self-evident, whichever ruler you employ.
Take the ruler anyway. Azov began in 2014 as a volunteer battalion founded by Andriy Biletsky, whose politics were the reason the United States barred it from American weapons and training for a decade. It was absorbed into the National Guard, became the 12th Special Purpose Brigade, and on 15 April 2025 became the core of the 1st Azov Corps. By early 2026 Ukraine’s land forces had eighteen corps, two of them in the National Guard. Estimates of the Azov corps’ strength run from up to 20,000 to 40,000 to 80,000, and a spread that wide tells you nobody outside the general staff really knows. The detail the claim leaves out is what the corps is made of. The Bureviy, Chervona Kalyna, Kara-Dag and Lyubart brigades were folded into it, none of them carrying Azov’s political history, and its ranks are filled now by men the territorial recruitment centres send it. A prominent formation, then, rated highly in the Ukrainian press and given hard ground between Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka. One corps among eighteen.
The NATO half of the claim is truer than its critics like to admit. The alliance as such supplies nobody; its member states do. On 10 June 2024 the State Department announced that the brigade had ‘passed Leahy vetting’, lifting a ban imposed about ten years earlier over concerns about its founder. American weapons reach Azov legally and openly, and conceding the point costs the case for Ukraine nothing. The inference drawn from it costs a great deal more. If a far-right-founded unit using American weapons makes the war inter-imperialist, then Soviet rifles in the hands of the Spanish Republic’s worst Stalinist commanders made 1936 a war between Moscow and Berlin in which workers had no side, and hardly anyone who repeats the claim is prepared to follow it back that far.
The corps commander, Denys Prokopenko, call sign Redis, was made Hero of Ukraine in March 2022 for the defence of Mariupol and promoted to brigadier general in February 2026. Both are on the record. Before the war he belonged to the White Boys Club, the Dynamo Kyiv ultras group whose own shop, Reporting Radicalism found, sells many items carrying hate symbolism, and Ukrainian profiles from Hromadske to Suspilne say he got the nickname there, among the ultras, and never changed it. The newer claim, relayed by Ivan Katchanovski and attributed to Artem Furmaniuk, an investigative journalist who has watched the Azov leadership publicly for years, is that he took the call sign from the SS commander Wilhelm Rediess, and took it in that same milieu before the Maidan. Furmaniuk’s own text could not be found for this entry, and until it is the etymology remains an allegation, one the terraces story does nothing to settle. Defending the corps by defending its commander’s nickname would be a strange hill for socialists to choose.
Then the house. On the evening of 2 November about 200 people gathered outside a house on Soniachna Street in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, on the western edge of Kyiv, after a woman in a medic’s uniform livestreamed claims that men inside were being held and beaten. The worst of it fell away within days. Police denied that anyone had died; there were 26 draftees in the house, not forty in a basement; and the 14-year-old whose photograph became the face of the affair had, according to the state child affairs service, come with the crowd and hurt himself falling from the fence. The woman has been charged with obstructing the armed forces, revealing the location of military units and organising mass riots, and the SBU says another of those it detained provoked the clashes for money. What survived is serious enough. Four men in the house were injured and taken to hospital. On the night, the police said one man’s bruises came from a road accident. Anna Skorokhod, the MP who was at the house that evening and later visited the four in hospital, says she saw bruises and haematomas on their bodies and that all four told her they had been beaten, though none had serious injuries and none described torture; the broken spine, the stoma caused by beating and the deaths were not borne out. One had been held there 37 days, and why, she said, she had no answer. One of the four told her money had been demanded from him in the unit; the other three said it had not. All four have given statements to the police.
The unit’s commander, Pavlo Kurchenko, said one man was there ‘in quarantine to adapt after going AWOL’ and another had been moved there ‘to prevent further incidents of personnel being encouraged to go AWOL’. His account has since shifted. He told Ukrainska Pravda that only two of the 26 had been brought in after going absent without leave, though the corps had earlier said all four of the injured had, and he has put at least two of the injuries down to drink or drugs. The State Bureau of Investigation has opened criminal proceedings, and the military ombudsman was at the scene.
The comfortable reading for supporters of Ukraine is that the whole affair was a Russian operation. The arrests point that way, and Kyrylo Budanov says the woman’s phone shows she planned it with the Telegram channels that broke the story. They settle less than they seem to. The Kyiv Independent, which had a reporter at the fence that night, found no hard evidence that Moscow instigated the unrest, and said in the same breath that frustration with the draft is real and abuses well documented. Moscow certainly amplified it. NewsGuard counted 1,490 articles from the Pravda network in seven languages by the following afternoon, and the claim that the boy had been imprisoned in the basement was reposted by Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, travelling through the same aggregator accounts that carry the Kremlin’s line on everything else, which is the convergence Part 10 traced and which parts of the British left still read as independent reporting.
A paid provocateur needs something real to provoke about. Complaints to the parliament’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, about the conduct of staff at the recruitment centres rose from 18 in 2022 to 6,127 in 2025, and more than 6,000 had arrived by 1 October this year. His annual report calls it a systemic crisis and concedes that not every complaint held up on checking. His own monitoring visits found unlawful restrictions of liberty and beatings, and 34 cases went into the register of pre-trial investigations last year. None of that was invented in Moscow. Who beat the four men in that house is the question the investigation exists to answer, and the left that backs Ukraine’s resistance has more reason than anyone to want the answer honest, which means wanting an inquiry that does not answer to the corps whose house it was, something the Ukrainian state at war has not yet shown it will allow and the British left, busy deciding whether the story was true or Russian, has not yet thought to demand.
This document is updated as the evidence develops. Where it describes what the Fourth International said, it links to the full text at fi.redmole.org or iv.redmole.org. Corrections welcomed in the comments, with a source.
[1] I favour bilingualism policies in places like Belgium, Finland and Ukraine because majorities and large minorities who cannot speak each other’s languages may struggle to move beyond their linguistic identity and, in the case of essentially monolingual Russian speakers in the Baltics, they may depend on media curated by the Russian state. If only one community is bilingual, it may overdetermine the whole. I am not a fan of Ukraine’s blunt approach to bilingualism, especially given its impact on minority-language areas such as Hungarian-speaking Zakarpattia and Romanian-speaking Hertsa. But the proof is in the pudding: 50 years ago, most Russian-speaking Ukrainians were only passively bilingual; by 2017, even most in the East of Ukraine were fluently bilingual.
I also want to thank 'Viento Sur', the magazine of our Spanish comrades, which has translated with excellent article: https://jordanrussiacenter.org/blog/on-donbass-and-what-some-of-my-russian-facebook-friends-think