For the Liberation of Ukraine, Not the Remilitarization of Europe
Breaking with False Neutrality in the Face of Imperialist Aggression
TL;DR
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine is an act of imperialist aggression against an occupied people, and revolutionary socialists must say so. Supporting Ukraine’s right to resist does not mean endorsing NATO’s strategic logic: the two positions are separable, and collapsing them has been the campist left’s central ideological operation.
The Fourth International charts the third road: direct solidarity with the Ukrainian workers’ movement, demand for unconditional debt cancellation, democratic control of defence production, and full support for Ukrainian refugees.
The full-scale invasion began at four in the morning on 24 February 2022. By the time most of the European left had assembled its first public statement, the frame was already set. Either you stood with NATO’s rearmament, or you stood — more or less openly — with Moscow. That was the choice on offer. It was a false choice then. It remains one now.
This is not a difficult theoretical question, whatever the tortured equivocators of Stop the War would have you believe. Russian imperialism invaded a sovereign nation with the explicit aim of destroying its national existence. Trotsky had a word for this: in 1939 he called it centuries of ‘colonial subjugation’ and the ‘destruction of national hopes’ through murderous purges. Putin has invented nothing new. He is continuing a project. The Baltic states know it. Moldova knows it. Kazakhstan, watching very closely indeed, knows it too.
The question for revolutionary socialists is not whether Ukraine has the right to resist. It does, without qualification. The question is what form our solidarity takes, and what organisational demands flow from it.
The Materialist Compass
Let us be precise about what class analysis actually demands here, because imprecision on this point has cost the British left dearly. Supporting Ukraine’s liberation struggle is not the same as endorsing NATO’s strategic objectives. The Irish Citizen Army accepted German weapons in 1916. The Vietnamese resistance took Soviet arms for three decades. In neither case did the provenance of the weapons transform the class character of the struggle. The source of arms and the nature of the struggle are analytically distinct categories, and the campist left’s insistence on conflating them is not a theoretical position: it is an alibi.
The Zelensky government has conducted a sustained class war from above under the cover of the invasion. Stripped labour protections. Extended working hours. Weakened collective bargaining. Attempted to subordinate anti-corruption institutions to executive control until mass mobilisations stopped it. Sotsialnyi Rukh — the Ukrainian socialist organisation — and the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine are fighting on two fronts simultaneously: against the Russian invader and against their own government’s neoliberal offensive. The Ukraine debate inside Your Party and across most of the British left barely mentions it. That omission is not accidental.
Against Enriching the Arms Industry
The enrichment of private defence contractors through this conflict is not an accident. It is the logic of capitalist war production. Raytheon, BAE Systems, Rheinmetall: their share prices rose from the morning of 24 February 2022 and have not come down. The answer is not — as the pacifist wing of the left implies — to withdraw support for Ukraine’s self-defence. The answer is to demand that defence production be brought under democratic control.
This means: defence production that expands and contracts according to actual security needs, not private profit; workers’ control of defence facilities with full transparency of accounts; immediate expropriation of the windfall profits extracted by contractors who have treated the occupation of Ukrainian territory as a business opportunity. The Fourth International resolution on Ukraine is explicit on the method: transitional demands that unite the broadest possible popular masses around concrete objectives that are in objective contradiction with the rules of the capitalist system.
At a security conference in Warsaw for EU parliamentary representatives, the question was posed: how is it that 500 million Europeans are begging 350 million Americans to stop 150 million Russians who are unable to win a war against 40 million Ukrainians? Søren Søndergaard — MP for Enhedslisten — speaking at the international Solidarity with Ukraine conference in Brussels on 26 March 2025 — was careful to separate the question from the conclusion its authors intended. Those speakers were building the case for general European rearmament. Søndergaard accepts the factual premise while rejecting the militarist inference entirely: if Putin’s Russia wins, it will not be because Europe lacked resources. It will be because of a lack of political will to support Ukraine. The European arms industry, he notes, has preferred selling to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian regimes. The constraint was never production capacity. It was that market forces were allowed to decide.
His conclusion is worth holding to: rather than using the war as the pretext for strengthening the military-industrial complex by giving big business a profit guaranteed by the state, the left should be arguing for taking control of the financial and industrial resources used to produce weapons, developing state arms production and confiscating the above-normal profits of the private arms industry. He adds the EU dimension: the conditionalities attached to the EU’s own Facility for Ukraine — 69 reform proposals pushing banking privatisation, rail liberalisation, asset disposal — are less discussed than Trump’s mineral-extraction demands but are, as Søndergaard correctly identifies, no less problematic.
Every socialist who supports military aid to Ukraine should simultaneously demand that such aid be funded through expropriation, not austerity. The estimated €190 billion in frozen Russian assets currently held primarily in Belgian accounts is the starting point. Progressive wealth taxes on the fortunes accumulated during the crisis come second. Under no circumstances should solidarity with Ukraine be leveraged as the pretext for cuts to European working-class living standards. That is not solidarity. It is predatory lending with a Ukrainian flag attached.
The Debt Question
The most under-argued demand on the left is immediate and unconditional cancellation of Ukraine’s external debt. Western governments have provided much of their support as loans. The consequence: Ukraine enters any post-war reconstruction period in debt bondage to the same financial institutions whose speculative operations contributed to European political instability in the first place. This is not a peripheral question. It is structurally central to what post-war reconstruction actually means for Ukrainian workers.
If your framework condemns arms manufacturers for profiting from the war, consistency demands you condemn the banks too. The Fourth International’s line connects Ukraine solidarity directly to the kind of anti-austerity politics that the left of Your Party already mobilises around. The bridge exists. Someone has to build it.
Ecosocialism and the Fossil Fuel Connection
Putin’s war machine runs on oil and gas. This is not incidental. Russian imperialism and fossil fuel extractivism are structural partners: hydrocarbon revenues fund the military, the military enforces the imperial project, and the imperial project suppresses the democratic movements that might otherwise challenge it. The ecosocialist case for energy transition and the case for supporting Ukraine’s liberation are not in tension. They are the same argument at different scales.
The bombardment of nuclear facilities, the destruction of agricultural systems across the steppe, the carbon footprint of the military operations themselves: these sharpen, not complicate, the ecosocialist response. Defending Ukrainian territory today creates the political space for the energy transition tomorrow. This does not mean endorsing NATO’s nuclear doctrine. It means understanding that the Russian imperial model is an ecological catastrophe with an army attached.
Direct Solidarity from Below
The international solidarity that matters is not government-to-government. It is the Sotsialnyi Rukh comrades organising under occupation, the activists of the Russian Socialist Movement driven into exile with their organisations banned and their members imprisoned, the feminist anti-war resisters facing criminal prosecution in Moscow. These forces need material support: sanctuary for political refugees, financial backing for underground networks, platform-sharing, legal aid for imprisoned comrades.
And the Ukrainian refugee question cannot be separated from the general refugee question. Full labour rights. Access to public services. An end to the differential treatment that operates as a racialised hierarchy within European asylum policy. Consistency on this point strengthens the anti-racist argument; it does not complicate it.
Women are at the forefront of both resistance to Russian imperialism and opposition to capitalist militarism. In Ukraine, women workers and feminists are organising against occupation and against their government’s neoliberal policies simultaneously. In Russia, the Feminist Anti-War Resistance faces severe repression for opposing the war. The solidarity movement that ignores this is not fully accounting for who is actually fighting.
Campism Is Not Anti-Imperialism
The ‘campist’ logic that treats Russia as part of an anti-imperialist bloc merely because it opposes Washington is not a theory of imperialism at all. It is an inversion of Marxist analysis: taking the geopolitical alignment of states as the primary analytical category, and deriving class analysis from that alignment, rather than the other way around. This is what Stop the War has done. This is what Counterfire has done. This is what the Morning Star, still carrying water for a Stalinist analysis that serious historians abandoned before the wall came down, continues to do.
Ernest Mandel spent the last decade of his life fighting exactly this tendency, because he understood that it had ‘hobbled the labour movement politically’ by leading to unconditional support for capitalist states and authoritarian governments. The fight for an independent socialist Ukraine belongs to the workers of Ukraine and Russia. Never to their capitalist oppressors, whether in Kyiv, Moscow, or Washington. This has not become complicated. It only appears complicated to those who prefer the comfort of a camp.
Decolonial Peace, Not Robbers’ Peace
Any lasting settlement must begin with the complete withdrawal of Russian troops and must reject any agreement that legitimises territorial annexations. A frozen-line ceasefire that leaves Russian forces in position is what the Fourth International has called a ‘robbers’ peace’, and history justifies the formulation. Every imposed settlement that rewards annexation becomes the prelude to further aggression. The Rhineland. Munich. And now, if the ceasefire advocates get their way, Zaporizhzhia.
The people of Kherson and the Donbas are not bargaining chips in a great-power negotiation. Their self-determination is not negotiable at a table they have not been invited to sit at.
The choice before the left is not between supporting NATO or supporting Putin. It is between building an independent working-class alternative capable of defending the oppressed, or allowing the initiative to remain permanently with competing imperialist blocs. The Fourth International has answered this question. The British left — most of it — has not.
Postscript: Hybrid Warfare and Community Defence
Russia’s war extends beyond conventional military operations. Cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, sabotage of civilian infrastructure, political interference across European civil society: these are not the accompaniments to conventional war but its extension by other means. The Baltic states and Moldova face this as an immediate material threat, not a theoretical one.
Socialist responses to hybrid warfare must avoid two symmetrical errors: the militarisation of civil society, and the scapegoating of migrant communities that ruling classes deploy to justify authoritarian measures. Community-controlled civil defence — organised through popular assemblies, designed for dual civilian and emergency use, accessible to disabled people who face disproportionate risk in every conflict — is the alternative. Not stronger states. Stronger communities.
The Ukrainian struggle demonstrates that popular resistance from below, often independent of government directives, is what actually works against imperial aggression. Building that kind of grassroots democratic resistance capacity across Europe is the task. Not NATO expansion. Not European rearmament on capitalist terms. The liberation of Ukraine and the liberation of European working-class politics are, in the end, the same project.
Note to readers: this article was updated in March 2026. Alongside adding a TL;DR and improved hyperlinks, we tightened the article and removed the citation to “how is it that 500 million Europeans are begging 350 million Americans to stop 150 million Russians who are unable to win a war against 40 million Ukrainians.“ This phrase appeared in an article by Søren Søndergaard as a question he had heard posed at a conference. Our citation mistakenly gave readers the impression these were his words. We are happy to correct the error.
# Building Bridges, Not Barricades: What Your Party Should Demand on Ukraine
Zarah Sultana is not Lindsey German. She is not the Stop the War Coalition. She does not deny Russia's imperial character or apologise for Putin's regime. She calls him a dictator and a gangster. She condemns the invasion without qualification. She applies class analysis to both leaderships, insisting that Zelenskii is no friend of the working class. She foregrounds the profiteering of arms manufacturers and the transfer of public wealth to the military-industrial complex. This is not campism. It is incomplete anti-imperialism, and the distinction matters enormously for how we engage with her.
Too much of the Ukraine solidarity left treats Sultana as if she needs educating about Ukraine's right to self-determination. She doesn't. What she needs is to be shown how her own analytical framework, consistently applied, leads somewhere more concrete than a generic call for diplomacy.
Start with what we share. Sultana is right that Zelenskii's government has used the war as cover for a brutal neoliberal offensive against Ukrainian workers. The Zelenskii administration stripped labour protections, extended working hours, weakened collective bargaining rights, and attempted to subordinate anti-corruption institutions to executive control until mass mobilisations stopped it last summer. Ukrainian trade unionists and socialists are fighting on two fronts simultaneously: against the Russian invader and against their own government's class war from above. This is precisely the kind of analysis Sultana's framework demands. Most of the Ukraine debate inside Your Party barely mentions it.
Sultana is also right that NATO is not a vehicle for Ukrainian liberation. The Fourth International has been crystal clear on this point: we support Ukraine's right to resist occupation not because we endorse the geopolitical strategies of Western imperialism, but because we recognise the Ukrainian people's right to self-determination against colonial subjugation. The question is not whether NATO is progressive. It is not. The question is whether an occupied people have the right to obtain the means of self-defence from wherever they can get them. The Irish Citizen Army accepted German weapons in 1916. The Vietnamese resistance accepted Soviet weapons for decades. In neither case did the source of arms transform the class character of the struggle. Sultana's blanket opposition to military aid collapses this distinction, treating all arms deliveries as identical expressions of Western militarism. They are not.
Here is where she goes wrong: her position, if implemented, would lead to Ukraine's annexation. An immediate ceasefire without the withdrawal of Russian troops means freezing the occupation. It means rewarding territorial conquest. It means telling the people of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas that their self-determination is negotiable. This is not peace; it is an imperialist settlement imposed on the occupied. The Fourth International calls this a "robber's peace," and history vindicates the terminology. Every imposed settlement that rewards annexation becomes a prelude to further aggression.
But those of us who support Ukraine solidarity inside Your Party need to foreground the common ground before pressing the disagreement. Because the real opportunity here is not winning an argument about arms deliveries. It is building a concrete platform of demands that Your Party can champion, demands that flow directly from Sultana's own class analysis.
Three demands should be non-negotiable for any socialist worthy of the name.
First: the immediate and full cancellation of Ukraine's external debt. Western governments have provided aid primarily as loans, drastically increasing Ukraine's debt burden. This is not solidarity; it is predatory lending disguised as humanitarian concern. A socially just reconstruction of Ukraine is impossible while Western capital holds the country in debt bondage. Sultana's critique of arms manufacturers profiting from the war applies with equal force to the financial institutions profiting from Ukraine's reconstruction. Your Party should be demanding debt cancellation as loudly as it demands an arms embargo on Israel.
Second: direct, institutional links between Your Party, the British labour movement, and Ukrainian independent trade unions and socialist organisations. Not through government channels. Not through NGOs. Through the workers' movement itself. Sotsialnyi Rukh, the Ukrainian socialist organisation, has been calling for exactly this kind of solidarity. The Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine has been fighting Zelenskii's anti-labour legislation while simultaneously supporting the resistance. These are the forces Sultana's class analysis should lead her to champion. They should be the centrepiece of Your Party's Ukraine policy, not an afterthought.
Third: expanded and unconditional support for Ukrainian refugees across Europe, with full labour rights, access to public services, and an end to the differential treatment that Sultana herself has rightly condemned as racist when applied to Palestinian refugees. Consistency here strengthens the anti-racist argument; it does not weaken it.
The Ukraine debate inside Your Party has been framed as a binary: NATO militarism or diplomatic capitulation. Sultana already knows this framing is inadequate. What she needs is a bridge from her existing analysis to a programme of working-class internationalism that transcends both options. The Fourth International's position has always been that a third road exists: solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance from below, opposition to both imperialist camps, and transitional demands that connect the struggle against occupation to the struggle against neoliberalism.
Your Party members who care about Ukraine should be building that bridge. Treating Sultana as an adversary rather than an incomplete ally is the surest way to burn it.
In a postscript, we have added an analysis of Russian hybrid warfare tactics and community-based responses, introducing the "internationalism from below" framework that connects Ukrainian popular resistance to broader international solidarity-building efforts.