Sultana Is Right About Zelensky. Now What?
Your Party needs a working-class solidarity programme for Ukraine, not another round of left-wing shadowboxing
Zarah Sultana says Volodymyr Zelensky is no friend of the working class. She is correct. The Zelensky government has used martial law to gut collective bargaining rights for 70 per cent of the Ukrainian workforce through Law 5371. It has conscripted trade union organisers while allowing the wealthy to buy exemptions through “economic reservation” schemes. It has privatised strategic state assets at fire-sale prices to single bidders. It has signed a minerals deal granting the United States 50 per cent revenue sharing over Ukrainian lithium and titanium reserves. Since the full-scale invasion, 2,747 workers have been injured and 677 killed on the job, many without receiving state-promised compensation. Vitalii Dudin, leader of the Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialnyi Rukh, calls the proposed Draft Labour Code “the greatest attack on workers’ rights” in the country’s history. Sultana’s class instinct on this point is sound, and she should say it louder.
The problem is that almost nobody in the debate around Sultana and Ukraine is willing to start from this acknowledgement and build something useful on it. Instead, we have a recursive argument that generates heat, clarifies nothing, and leaves Ukrainian workers no better off than before anyone opened their mouths. Sultana’s critics attack where the disagreement is deepest. Sultana and her supporters retreat into calls for peace that lead nowhere. And the concrete solidarity programme that could actually win a majority in Your Party, change material conditions for Ukrainian workers, and inoculate the new formation against the campist politics that serve the Kremlin’s interests? Nobody proposes it. That silence is the real scandal.
The critics: who they are and what they say
The left-wing critique of Sultana’s position on Ukraine is extensive and, in places, devastating. It is also remarkably scattered across formations that appear unable to coordinate with each other, let alone with Sultana.
The most sustained institutional critique comes from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. The AWL has published a stream of articles in its weekly paper Solidarity tracking Your Party’s development and Sultana’s politics with forensic attention. In “Zarah Sultana’s ‘new-party’ project” (Solidarity, 7 July 2025), the AWL warned that the new formation offered “vague sub-Corbynite politics in place of working-class socialism” and no suggestion it would “play any noticeable part in coming battles over benefit cuts and NHS and trans rights.” By 26 August, Simon Nelson was asking in “Sultana-Corbyn: where is the project going?” why no regional organisers had been appointed and why the 800,000 sign-ups had received no political direction. On 5 November 2025, in “YP members still want democracy” (Solidarity 755), the AWL assessed Sultana’s appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking and concluded that on Ukraine she was “slightly better than the Stop the War line, condemning Russia’s invasion and affirming Ukraine’s right to self-determination, but then undercut this by calling the conflict a ‘proxy war,’ urging negotiations, and suggesting support for Ukraine is driven by the arms industry.” That same piece described her politics as “a collection of leftish tropes without structure or depth.”
These are sharp observations. But notice where the AWL chooses to focus. Its Ukraine critique of Sultana centres on the arms question: her failure to support military aid, her equation of all weapons transfers with profiteering. When the AWL reviewed the positioning of left groups around the new party in “Sultana, Corbyn: what left groups say” (Solidarity 749, 6 August 2025), it noted that the SWP had gone for “general protests for ‘welfare not warfare’, de facto for opposition to arming Ukraine rather than for ‘tax the rich’” but offered no alternative programmatic demands around debt cancellation, trade union solidarity, or opposition to IMF conditionalities. The AWL is right about arms. It has nothing to say about the solidarity programme that might actually win a hearing in Your Party.
Louis Palmer’s piece for Roar News, “On the Frontlines of Delusion: Left Populism’s Neglect of Ukraine” (29 December 2025), represents the sharpest journalistic assault. Palmer called Sultana’s interventions “reality-divorced” and “highly disappointing,” characterising her analysis as shaped by a “fisheyed view” borrowed from the Post-Soviet Left circles she has engaged with in Paris. He asked pointedly whether Sultana has “ever once asked a single Ukrainian for their opinion,” including “a not-insignificant number of her constituents.” Palmer noted that more than two-thirds of Ukrainians approve of Zelensky’s wartime performance. The piece lands blows. But Palmer, like the AWL, frames the debate as fundamentally about whether Sultana supports Ukrainian resistance sufficiently. He does not propose what a working-class solidarity programme for Ukraine might look like inside Your Party.
George Allison, writing for the UK Defence Journal on 29 October 2025 under the headline “Zarah Sultana’s NATO stance doesn’t add up,” argued that her denunciation of NATO as “an imperialist war machine” represented “strategic confusion” and a “moral gesture that collapses under scrutiny.” Allison pointed out a genuine contradiction: Sultana condemned the invasion as “deplorable” in February 2022 while demanding UK withdrawal from the alliance that has deterred Russian aggression against Poland and the Baltics. But Allison writes from a defence establishment perspective that has no purchase within Your Party. His critique, however accurate on its own terms, is strategically useless to anyone trying to shift the new formation’s politics.
Patrick Porter’s piece in The Critic, “The Folly of Disarmament,” called Sultana’s remarks “shallow” and distinguished her from the “proud tradition of serious thought” on the British left, citing George Orwell and Aneurin Bevan as figures who understood that defending democracy sometimes requires material force. Porter argued that Sultana “assumes that withholding support from Ukraine would somehow end the war,” whereas the likely result would be “unchecked conquest” and “atrocities.” Again, correct. Again, addressed to a readership that has no connection to the 800,000 people who signed up for Your Party.
The most personally devastating critique came from outside Britain altogether. Galina Rymbu, the Russian poet and feminist activist now living in Ukraine, published an “Open Letter to Zarah Sultana” on Heckle.scot in November 2025. Rymbu accused Sultana of meeting with individuals in Paris who “cannot represent or know the peoples of Russia and Ukraine.” She identified the Post-Soviet Left and “Peace from Below,” organisations Sultana has engaged with, as vectors for “neo-fascist and alt-right narratives” dressed in socialist rhetoric. Rymbu warned that influential leftists who wash their hands of the conflict “strengthen the Putin regime to such an extent that it becomes incompatible with all life on this planet.” She noted that PSL sources cited by Sultana had spread conspiracy theories, including the claim that the war was instigated by “females” to organise an “androcide” against Ukrainian men. This is an extraordinary charge against a sitting MP from a woman who has lived through both Russian repression and Ukrainian bombardment. It received almost no coverage in the British left press.
Khaled Malachi, writing in Issue 38 of Communist (the Revolutionary Communist Party’s paper), in a piece titled “NATO, Ukraine, and Zelensky: Zarah Sultana hits out against Western imperialism,” offered a more sympathetic but still critical view. Malachi welcomed Sultana’s “blunt criticism” of NATO but argued she lacked “a thorough understanding of war and imperialism based on a clear Marxist perspective.” He critiqued her for talking in “vague, liberal terms about the need for ‘peace’ and ‘diplomacy,’” describing such language as “woolly” and “utopian.” Malachi asserted that the alternative to war is not “neutrality” but the “struggle for world socialism.” His own organisation’s prescription is scarcely more operational than Sultana’s, but his diagnosis of the vacuity of her peace rhetoric is precise.
And then there are the critics from the other direction. The AWL’s August 2025 survey of left groups noted that Alex Snowden of Counterfire had criticised Sultana on 3 August for “failing to back Stop the War and its stance on Ukraine.” Andrew Murray, the Communist Party of Britain figure who served in Corbyn’s leadership team, gave a “detailed and rather downbeat account” of Your Party’s formation on 16 July 2025, making clear the CPB’s preference for a loose “alliance around Corbyn” rather than the membership-led party Sultana advocates. Sultana is thus attacked from both flanks simultaneously: too pro-Ukraine for the Counterfire/Morning Star axis, too pro-peace for the AWL and Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. Neither flank proposes a synthesis.
The strategic error: fighting where you lose
Here is the pattern. The AWL, Palmer, Allison, Porter, Rymbu, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign: every one of these critics focuses the debate on the question of arms to Ukraine. This is where the disagreement with Sultana is deepest, where the argument is most principled, and where it is least likely to shift anything inside Your Party.
The demand to arm Ukraine will not win a majority in a party whose founding conference was consumed by factional manoeuvring over dual-membership bans and collective leadership structures. Everyone involved knows this. The AWL, which has attended Your Party’s regional assemblies and published detailed reports on their proceedings, knows it. Anticapitalist Resistance, which is active inside the formation, knows it. The campists around Stop the War know it and are delighted, because as long as the debate stays on this ground, nothing practical happens.
What none of these critics have proposed, at least in any public form, is a programme of working-class solidarity demands that could command majority support in Your Party while drawing a clear line against campism. Yet such a programme exists. Ukrainian socialists have articulated it repeatedly.
The embarrassment of telling the truth
Sultana’s assertion that Zelensky is no friend of the working class is precisely what Ukrainian socialists themselves say. Sotsialnyi Rukh’s March 2025 manifesto, “For a Ukraine Without Oligarchs and Occupiers,” links military victory directly to socialist economic reforms. Dudin has documented the systematic erosion of labour protections. Taras Bilous, editor of Commons and a soldier in the Territorial Defence Forces, has written that the struggle is for a society with democratic space for criticism and dissent, not for the perpetuation of Zelensky’s neoliberal project.
Yet many of Sultana’s critics treat any criticism of Zelensky as suspect, as though acknowledging the class character of his government somehow weakens the case for Ukrainian self-determination. Palmer’s Roar News piece cited Zelensky’s approval ratings as a counter to Sultana’s class critique, as though electoral popularity under martial law settles the question of labour rights. The Workers’ Liberty assessment of 5 November described Sultana’s critique as “calling the conflict a ‘proxy war’” without engaging with the substance of her Zelensky criticism.
The honest position is this: Zelensky’s government is waging a legitimate war of national defence while simultaneously conducting a class war against its own workers. Supporting Ukraine means supporting the first and opposing the second. Sultana is right about the second. She is wrong, or at best strategically silent, about the first. Her critics are right about the first. They are embarrassed, or at least tactically evasive, about the second. Neither side has synthesised the two into a programme that Your Party could actually adopt and act on.
The impotence of peace without solidarity
This brings us to the most damaging consequence of the current impasse. Sultana’s calls for peace, diplomacy and de-escalation are not wrong in the abstract. Nobody wants the war to continue. But in the concrete political situation of early 2026, “peace” without a solidarity programme is not neutral. It is a vector for Russian victory.
The Trump-Putin settlement delivers exactly what the “anti-war” left demanded: negotiations, territorial concessions, the rehabilitation of annexation. The terms are: Crimea and the Donbas recognised as Russian, NATO membership prohibited, demilitarisation enforced, a minerals deal that turns Ukraine into an extraction colony. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign’s December 2025 AGM declaration described the Alaska summit as “replaying the appeasement script of the 1930s.” When Sultana demands peace without specifying the class content of that peace, without demanding debt cancellation, without opposing IMF conditionalities, without supporting Ukrainian labour movements, she leaves the field open for the only “peace” currently on offer: the robber’s peace of Trump and Putin.
The Waging Nonviolence analysis of January 2026, “Two Reflexes Breaking the Left,” categorised Sultana as representing a “values-first reflex” that prioritises moral consistency over material outcomes. Malachi in Communist called her language “woolly” and “utopian.” Both assessments, from very different political positions, converge on the same point: calls for peace without a programme of working-class solidarity amount to a sophisticated form of abandonment.
And the campists know this. The Stop the War Coalition, the Morning Star, the residual networks around Andrew Murray: they are perfectly content for Your Party’s Ukraine debate to remain stuck between “arm Ukraine” (which will never pass) and “peace and diplomacy” (which means nothing without content). Both positions, in their current form, leave the campists unchallenged. Both allow the politics of functional accommodation with Russian imperialism to persist inside Your Party without ever being named, confronted, or defeated. Snowden’s critique of Sultana from Counterfire, reported in Solidarity 749, was not that she failed to support Ukrainian self-determination but that she failed to back Stop the War’s line on Ukraine. That is the axis of campist influence inside the new formation, and neither Sultana’s peace rhetoric nor the AWL’s arms demands do anything to disrupt it.
What Your Party Should Actually Do
The way out of this impasse is not another argument about NATO. It is a concrete solidarity programme rooted in the demands of Ukrainian workers themselves: demands that Sultana could champion without abandoning her anti-militarist principles, and that her critics could support without pretending the arms question doesn’t exist.
Denys Pilash of Sotsialnyi Rukh has been explicit about what solidarity looks like. He demands arms, yes. But he also demands unconditional debt cancellation, opposition to IMF structural adjustment, support for Ukrainian trade unions against the Zelensky government’s anti-labour legislation, and the confiscation of frozen Russian oligarch assets for democratic reconstruction. Oleksandr Kyselov, writing in International Viewpoint in December 2025, argues for the “least unjust peace” while insisting that Ukraine’s bargaining position depends on “military capacity, economic resilience, and international backing.” The Brussels 2025 Declaration, endorsed by activists from over twenty countries, lays out a comprehensive programme: debt cancellation, opposition to neoliberal shock therapy, democratic control of reconstruction funds, direct support for Ukrainian labour movements. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign’s own December AGM declaration demands the cancellation of Ukraine’s debt, opposes the imposition of Trump’s 28-point plan, and calls for solidarity with those persecuted in Russia for opposing the invasion.
Your Party should adopt the core of these demands. Unconditional cancellation of Ukraine’s sovereign debt, which now exceeds 100 per cent of GDP. Opposition to IMF structural adjustment conditionalities attached to loans. Demand that the British government use its influence to oppose Law 5371 and the Draft Labour Code, conditioning any future support on the restoration of collective bargaining rights. Confiscation of frozen Russian oligarch assets held in the City of London for democratic reconstruction managed by Ukrainian workers’ organisations, not by BlackRock. Direct institutional links between British trade unions and their Ukrainian counterparts: the FPU, the KVPU, the “Be Like Nina” health workers’ union. Sanctuary and material support for Russian anti-war exiles, whose organisations like the Feminist Anti-War Resistance face average eight-year prison sentences for their opposition to Putin’s invasion.
This programme has three strategic advantages.
First, it is grounded in the actual demands of Ukrainian socialists rather than in the geopolitical abstractions that have paralysed the Western left. Sotsialnyi Rukh, the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine, and the Fourth International have all articulated these positions in detail.
Second, it is achievable within Your Party. Debt cancellation, opposition to IMF austerity, oligarch asset confiscation, trade union solidarity: these are demands that a broad left party can unite around without splitting over NATO membership. The six affiliated unions that sent delegates to the USC’s December AGM (GMB, Unite, Unison, UCU, PCS, ASLEF) already back this agenda.
Third, and crucially, it inoculates Your Party against the campist influence that currently operates unchecked.
Because here is the political reality. The Stop the War Coalition’s position, the Morning Star’s position, the position of every organisation that spent three years calling for negotiations while opposing arms, has now converged with the Trump administration’s position. Both demand Ukrainian territorial concessions. Both treat Ukrainian sovereignty as negotiable. Both prioritise “stability” with Russia over the self-determination of an invaded people. If Your Party adopts a solidarity programme that centres Ukrainian workers’ demands, that names the Zelensky government’s class war against its own people while defending Ukraine’s right to exist, it draws a line that the campists cannot cross without exposing themselves.
Sultana is right that Zelensky is no friend of the working class. She is right that arms manufacturers profit from the war. She is right that working people in Britain face a cost-of-living crisis that military spending exacerbates. None of these truths require abandoning Ukrainian workers to partition between empires. What they require is a programme: concrete, detailed, rooted in class solidarity rather than geopolitical abstraction, and capable of commanding a majority in a party that 800,000 people signed up for because they wanted something better than what Starmer’s Labour offers.
The recursive debate between “arm Ukraine” and “peace now” serves nobody except the people who benefit from the left’s paralysis. The AWL publishes another article in Solidarity. Palmer writes another broadside in Roar News. Rymbu’s extraordinary open letter disappears into the void. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign passes another declaration that Your Party never reads. And Sultana calls for peace while the only peace on offer is Trump’s. Ukrainian socialists have offered Your Party a way out. The question is whether anyone in the new formation, Sultana included, is willing to take it.