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. Seventeen claims are answered. The 2014 coup claim has to explain why the coup produced an OSCE-observed election in which Svoboda fell from 10.45 to 1.16 per cent. 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, the polling shift to 69 per cent for negotiations alongside 80 per cent refusing territorial concessions, and Baltic and Georgian agency in NATO accession.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’
A coup is the sudden, illegal seizure of power. If the CIA staged a coup, the people who came to power should surely be its agents or tools. Ukraine held a presidential election on 25 May 2014, observed by the OSCE. A mainstream liberal-conservative, Petro Poroshenko, won 54.7% of the vote in the first round. The far right was routed electorally: Svoboda’s vote was decimated, from 10.45% in the 2012 parliamentary elections to 1.16%. Dmytro Yarosh of Right Sector received 0.7%. A coup, then, that produced a democratic election — and a democratic election that the far right lost by a factor of ten.
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.
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.
The actual political context makes the double standard visible. Ukraine’s far right received under 2% of the vote in 2014. Zelensky, who is Jewish and Russian-speaking, won 73% of the vote in 2019. Russia, meanwhile, hosts the Russian Imperial Movement — designated a terrorist organisation by the US State Department specifically for its neo-Nazi ideology — and has embedded ultranationalist symbolism and personnel into its military and state structures: the Z symbol, adopted as emblem of the invasion, has been widely associated with neo-imperial ideology; Wagner Group, until its collapse in 2023, was a paramilitary force whose founder Dmitry Utkin’s visible neo-Nazi tattoos became emblematic of its ideology — a force the Kremlin officially denied commanding while directing operationally. Part 6 of this series, ‘Nazi-Infested, Unless It’s Russia’, documents this in detail.
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. 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 February 2025 World Congress resolution states: ‘We demand the dissolution of NATO.’ 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 unconditional 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. 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.
Second, the claim misrepresents the Fourth International’s own tradition. The FI characterised the Soviet Union as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ — not as non-imperialist in all its actions. When the Soviet Union suppressed national liberation movements, the FI opposed it: in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Afghanistan from 1979. The conditional defence of Soviet social gains never extended to endorsing Soviet military intervention against independent nations. Applying Trotsky’s vocabulary to reach Stalin’s conclusions is not Trotskyism.
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. 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.
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.
Polling throughout the war has consistently shown majority Ukrainian support for continued resistance, including under conditions of severe material hardship. This does not settle the question — wartime polling is never uncomplicated, and the Zelensky government controls significant levers of public information — but the evidence runs against the claim that the resistance lacks popular support.
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.
Postscripts
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 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, writing from inside the Russian Socialist Movement’s own confrontation with Kremlin expansionism, 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. In polling conducted in early July 2026, 69% of respondents in Ukraine said they favoured a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who supported continuing to fight until victory. In 2022 those figures were essentially reversed: 73% for fighting until victory, 22% for a negotiated end. This is a real shift and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than explained away.
What it does not show is what the campist argument needs it to show.
The same polling consistently records near-universal Ukrainian refusal of territorial concessions to Russia. A June 2026 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey found that over 80% of respondents opposed ceding any occupied territory as part of a settlement — including Crimea, which Russia has held since 2014. A population that simultaneously wants negotiations and refuses to cede territory is not a population that wants to surrender. It is a population that wants the killing to stop on terms compatible with Ukrainian sovereignty. Those are not the same thing, and treating them as equivalent misreads what Ukrainians are actually saying.
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: encouraging Russian works to struggle against Putin, or Iranian workers to struggle against the theocracy, when these cuntries are under attack from the West, is functionally equivalent to supporting US imperialism. The same logic appears in discussions of Hong Kong, Venezuela and China: workers and oppressed peoples in states targeted by US power cannot be supported in struggles against those states without providing cover for Washington. The conclusion is that solidarity must wait until the geopolitical situation is resolved.
This position has a name. It is not internationalism. It is a campism that has generalised itself beyond Russia and Ukraine to a universal principle: workers everywhere are entitled to solidarity, except in countries where that solidarity might embarrass the states in Washington’s crosshairs.
The argument has a structural problem that its proponents do not address. Every authoritarian government in a country the US has targeted has described its domestic opposition as a CIA operation. The Soviet Union said the same of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, of the Czechoslovak reform movement in 1968, and of the Polish trade union Solidarity in 1980. In each case, the Kremlin was not entirely wrong — Western intelligence services did take an interest in all of these movements, as they do in any political instability among adversaries. In each case the movement itself was authentically generated by conditions internal to the society concerned. The existence of CIA interest in a popular uprising is not evidence that the CIA caused it. It is evidence that the CIA noticed it. On person in the same Spotlight discussion group said: ‘Involvement of CIA etc after it started is not the same as dismissing it as an imperialist plot.’
The practical test is direct. In 2026, Iranian workers and trade unionists were executed for participating in strikes and protests against the theocracy. Ukrainian and international trade union networks made solidarity with them. Hong Kong trade unionists were convicted this week under national security legislation that destroyed independent labour organisation. The claim that solidarity with them ‘backs the US empire’ requires you to believe that the IRGC’s execution chambers and the Hong Kong courts are expressions of working-class power, while the workers being imprisoned and killed are tools of imperialism. That is not a Marxist analysis. It is an inversion of one.
The historical consequence of this logic is well documented. The Stalinist left in Britain said in August 1968 that the Prague Spring was a ‘counter-revolutionary provocation backed by imperialist forces.’ What was actually happening was that Soviet tanks were killing Czechoslovak communists who wanted the right to organise independently. The campist left’s inability in 2026 to distinguish between genuine working-class struggle and CIA destabilisation is the same failure, reproduced. The test is not which side Washington prefers. The test is which side the workers and oppressed are on.
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’s nineteenth-century relationship with Ireland involved direct rule of some territories, a formally subordinate parliament for others, and a carefully managed dependency across the whole island: control over trade policy, security, foreign relations, and political life. The goal was not to administer Ireland from Westminster in perpetuity. It was to ensure Ireland could not act independently in ways that threatened 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. 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.
This document is updated as the evidence develops. Corrections welcomed via the comments. If you find a claim here that is wrong, say so with a source and it will be corrected.
The series concludes with Part 11: ‘Serbia 1914 or Ireland 1916’.
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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