The Conscription Paradox: Why Western Leftists Who Weaponise Ukrainian Mobilisation Betray the People They Claim to Defend

Evade the Ukrainian draft and, if the country falls, you will eventually be conscripted by the Russian military.

A mother at a protest in Kyiv. Out of 24 pupils in her son’s school class, men serving in the armed forces come from only two families. She is not making an abstract point about geopolitics. She is describing a class reality that Western leftists, who have never been within a thousand miles of a mobilisation centre, presume to interpret on her behalf.

The protests that swept at least eleven Ukrainian cities from late 2023 through early 2025 represented, as International Viewpoint reported, “the first sustained social protest movement during wartime.” The slogans were precise: “Soldiers are not made of iron.” “It’s their turn now.” “Everyone is responsible for victory.” “A dignified rest for the fallen and the living.” These are not the slogans of people who have stopped believing in their country’s right to exist. They are the slogans of people who understand that a war of national liberation is being fought on terms that favour the wealthy and punish the poor.

Vitalii Dudin, chairperson of Sotsialnyi Rukh, has named what is happening: “The ruling class is grabbing this opportunity to push through its shock doctrine of neoliberal austerity, anti-worker legislation, and curtailment of social rights. This is the double challenge that the people of Ukraine face.” The “economic reservation” system allows enterprises to exempt employees from the draft by paying fees or demonstrating economic necessity. In practice, wealth buys safety. The poor fill the trenches. Law 5371 stripped workers in small and medium-sized enterprises of collective bargaining rights under cover of martial law. The Draft Labour Code, if passed, would represent what Dudin calls the greatest attack on workers’ rights in Ukrainian history. And the removal of General Zaluzhnyi in February 2024, after he requested 500,000 additional troops to enable rotation, was followed by the scrapping of the 36-month demobilisation provision from the draft law: a “major breach of trust” between the state and the people defending it.

Every word of this is true. Every word of it matters. And every word of it is being weaponised by Western leftists who have no interest in solving these problems but find them very useful for justifying their refusal to support Ukrainian resistance.

The betrayal disguised as solidarity

Here is the mechanism. Andrew Murray, writing in the Morning Star under the headline “Cynical power play lies behind the war in Ukraine,” argues that “the pouring in of arms” is part of an “escalating degree of integration of Ukraine into US/NATO planning.” The Morning Star’s Nick Wright has drawn comparisons between Ukrainian conscription and “British/NATO militarism,” using mobilisation problems to argue the war is “unwinnable.” Murray returned to this theme in late 2024, noting that “in 2024 the thesis was that Ukraine lacked sufficient weapons; now it is sufficient men,” concluding that “the Ukrainian army is on the brink of collapse.”

Alex Snowden of Counterfire has argued that the Ukrainian front line is “crumbling” and that Ukrainian society will “buckle soon,” deploying this as justification for immediate territorial concessions. The SWP references “mobilisation abuses” to bolster its claim that workers should not support either side in the conflict. Stop the War Coalition statements invoke Ukrainian “war-weariness” and “forced service” as part of the case against military aid.

Notice what is happening. Genuine grievances articulated by Ukrainian workers, the class bias of conscription, the erosion of labour rights, the exhaustion of soldiers without rotation, are being extracted from their context and repurposed as arguments for abandoning the resistance. The mother protesting in Kyiv is demanding fair mobilisation, not capitulation. The families carrying banners reading “It’s their turn now” are demanding that the rich share the burden, not that the war end on Putin’s terms. Sotsialnyi Rukh fights the Zelensky government’s neoliberalism while simultaneously insisting, as Dudin puts it, that “the Ukrainian labour movement does not intend merely to repel the invasion; it also seeks to ensure a more egalitarian, socially responsible and democratic future.”

The Western campist left inverts this. It takes the Ukrainian workers’ demand for a more just war and converts it into an argument for no war at all. That conversion is the betrayal. And it is a betrayal with consequences, because the only “peace” currently on offer is Trump’s: Crimea and the Donbas recognised as Russian, NATO membership prohibited, a minerals deal that turns Ukraine into an extraction colony for American capital.

What the people actually fighting say

Taras Bilous, editor of Commons/Spilne and a member of the Territorial Defence Forces, wrote his “Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv” in February 2022, published in Dissent Magazine while the city was under artillery fire. His argument is worth quoting at length because it addresses precisely the dynamic this article describes: “Solidarity should look like supporting the right of the oppressed to defend themselves. Invoking the Ukrainian far right or Ukrainian corruption and oligarchs shouldn’t be an obstacle for the solidarity of people with the direct victims of Russian bombs and Russian imperialism.”

Bilous has described the early days of the invasion as “a spontaneous, solidarity-based resistance that emerged from the first minutes of the invasion.” He acknowledges that the transition to a more rigid, class-biased conscription system represents a failure of the Zelensky government to trust the self-organisation of the masses. But his conclusion is the opposite of the campist one: these problems must be solved through democratic pressure and socialist organisation within Ukraine, not by denying the country the means of survival. He joined the Territorial Defence Forces because, as he has said repeatedly, “if we didn’t join the armed forces, the left in Ukraine would cease to exist.” That is not a metaphor. Russian occupation means the liquidation of every trade union, feminist organisation, and socialist group in the occupied territories.

Denys Pilash of Sotsialnyi Rukh has framed this as a question of the “rotation crisis” being political rather than purely military. “Ukrainian soldiers face an impossible contradiction,” he told International Viewpoint: “they defend democracy whilst being denied basic rights. No rotation schedules. No fixed service terms.” Pilash identifies the soldiers’ demand for rotation as a class demand: the insistence of the worker-combatant on “dignified rest.” But he has also been unequivocal that “invoking the Ukrainian far right or Ukrainian corruption and oligarchs shouldn’t be an obstacle for the solidarity of people” with those under bombardment.

A predictable objection presents itself here: that left activity inside a bourgeois army is a contradiction in terms, that military discipline necessarily criminalises dissent, and that Bilous and his comrades have effectively surrendered their political agency by enlisting. The objection sounds logical and is empirically false. Bilous has continued publishing political analysis in Commons/Spilne and Dissent Magazine throughout his military service. Sotsialnyi Rukh members who serve have maintained their organisational affiliation and their public critique of the Zelensky government’s labour policies. The Confederation of Free Trade Unions (KVPU) has publicly opposed Law 5371 and the Draft Labour Code without interruption since 2022. The family protest movement operated openly under martial law across eleven cities. Is the space for dissent constrained? Of course. War constrains everything. But the space exists because people fight to keep it open, and anyone who claims that left organising inside a bourgeois army is impossible by definition must explain the soldiers’ soviets of 1917, the revolutionary cells in the French army during 1917-1918, and every instance of rank-and-file military organising from the Invergordon mutiny to the GI resistance movement during Vietnam. Trotsky’s entire proletarian military policy was premised on the opposite assumption: that revolutionaries enter the bourgeois army precisely to organise within it, to be, as he put it, “the best soldiers in the army, but also the best representatives of the interests of the workers.”

The Russian Socialist Movement, in its statement “Against Half-Solidarity and False Pacifism” published via International Viewpoint, directly addresses the Western left’s appropriation of mobilisation grievances. The RSM calls this “’false pacifism’ disguised under Left slogans,” arguing it “reveals a petty-bourgeois nature characterised by egocentrism... it is egocentric because it is reduced to the struggle with one’s national government.” The RSM is not making this critique from a comfortable distance. Its members face “foreign agent” designation, average eight-year prison sentences, and the dissolution of their organisational structures. When they say that “Ukraine requires liberation instead of ‘peace’” and that “Putin’s worldview according to which the strong have a right to beat the weak has to be dealt a severe blow,” they are speaking from inside the machinery of repression.

The Feminist Anti-War Resistance signed the “Right to Resist” counter-manifesto alongside Ukrainian feminists, insisting on “the essential difference between violence as a means of oppression and as a legitimate means of self-defence.” FAS identifies the Russian state’s “hyper-masculine” image as the connective tissue between military conscription and domestic violence, between the war abroad and the patriarchal violence at home. Their analysis connects Putin’s mobilisation to the broader structure of patriarchal power, and it does so while their members inside Russia face arrest for writing anti-war slogans on banknotes.

The “realism” objection

A second predictable critique must be confronted honestly: that all of this is fantasy. That Sotsialnyi Rukh has no mass base. That the KVPU operates under enormous pressure. That the rotation protests, however brave, have not reversed a single government policy. That the Ukrainian left, scattered between the army, exile, and a civil society hollowed out by three years of total war, is in no position to impose the demands this article describes.

Much of this is true. Sotsialnyi Rukh is not a mass party. The KVPU’s legal challenges proceed slowly against a government that holds emergency powers. The rotation protests forced a public debate but not a policy reversal; if anything, the removal of Zaluzhnyi and the scrapping of the 36-month demobilisation provision represented the government’s answer to the protesters: silence. The Ukrainian left’s capacity to organise is constrained by martial law, by the general mobilisation that has pulled its cadres into military service, and by a political culture that equates dissent with treason. Nobody writing honestly about Ukraine in early 2026 should pretend otherwise.

But here is the question the “realists” never answer: what follows from this? If Sotsialnyi Rukh’s demands are fantasy, should Ukrainian workers simply accept the class character of conscription without complaint? If the KVPU cannot reverse Law 5371 under wartime conditions, should we stop demanding collective bargaining rights? If the rotation protests failed to change government policy, were the mothers wrong to march?

Dismissing these efforts as vapid from a Western armchair, while the organisers face Russian artillery and Ukrainian state pressure simultaneously, is not realism. It is the comfortable cynicism that has always justified abandoning solidarity with the oppressed. Every revolutionary movement in history has looked “unrealistic” to those who measured it against the power arrayed against it. The Bolsheviks in July 1917 had fewer than 25,000 members. The CNT-FAI’s social revolution in Barcelona lasted months, not years. The solidarity movement in Poland operated for a decade under martial law before it broke through. Small, constrained, pressured organising under wartime conditions is not nothing. It is what socialist organising under wartime conditions looks like. It is what it has always looked like.

The demands themselves, debt cancellation, labour rights, democratic participation in decisions about the country’s future, are not utopian. They are specific, achievable, and directly connected to the sustainability of resistance. Pilash’s analysis in International Viewpoint is precise: soldiers who are denied basic rights, denied rotation, denied any say in the country’s future, are soldiers whose morale and commitment erode. The removal of the 36-month demobilisation provision did not strengthen the Ukrainian army. It provoked a crisis of trust. The erosion of collective bargaining did not improve wartime productivity. It created resentment. An army that fights for a society worth defending fights harder than an army that fights because the alternative is prison. The “realists” who dismiss the Ukrainian left’s programme as fantasy are, in fact, dismissing the preconditions for effective resistance.

The paradox that isn’t one

Western leftists who oppose Ukrainian conscription while claiming socialist credentials face an embarrassing historical problem: socialists have used conscription in defensive wars throughout the twentieth century. The paradox dissolves once you understand the distinction the tradition has always drawn.

Leon Trotsky was explicit. In 1940, developing what he called the “proletarian military policy” in discussions with the American Socialist Workers Party, Trotsky argued: “We cannot oppose the compulsory military training by the bourgeois state just as we do not oppose compulsory education. Military training in our day is a part of education. What we must do is to take this training out of the hands of the military clique and put it under the control of the workers’ organisations.” His formulation was precise: “Conscription? Yes. By the bourgeois state? No.” Trotsky insisted that revolutionaries must “go with their generation” into the army rather than adopt pacifist abstention: “We should not and cannot skip over the stage of the masses’ own experience. We must say: ‘We are with you, our class, in this war. We go with you into the army. We will be the best soldiers in the army, but we will also be the best representatives of the interests of the workers.’”

The Bolshevik experience after 1917 embodied this logic. The Red Army transitioned from a volunteer force to a conscripted one through the decrees of 1918-1919. Trotsky, as People’s Commissar for War, justified this as the only means of ensuring the revolution’s survival. But early Red Army conscription was strictly class-selective: workers and poor peasants were armed, while the “exploiting classes” were excluded. The mechanism was compulsory. The class content was revolutionary.

Lenin’s theoretical framework provides the scaffolding. In his polemic with Rosa Luxemburg over the “Junius Pamphlet” in 1916, Lenin argued: “National wars waged by colonial, and semi-colonial countries are not only possible but inevitable in the epoch of imperialism. This ‘epoch’ by no means precludes the possibility of national wars, waged, for example, by small (let us assume, annexed or nationally oppressed) states against the imperialist Powers.” He added, devastatingly for those who would collapse all wars into a single “imperialist” category: “Only a sophist would deny that there is a difference between imperialist war and national war on the grounds that one can be transformed into the other.” And in “Socialism and War” (1915): “Just wars are waged either to protect a nation from external attack and attempts at its enslavement, or to emancipate peoples from the yoke of capitalism.”

The Spanish Republic conscripted soldiers during the Civil War. The POUM and CNT-FAI, who had initially favoured volunteer militias, accepted the necessity of compulsory service even as they argued for workers’ control of the army. Cuba has maintained mandatory military service since the revolution. The pattern is consistent: socialists oppose the bourgeois control of conscription, not the principle that an embattled society may require its citizens to defend it. They fight for democratic control, for class equity in who serves and who is exempted, for soldiers’ rights and rotation, for the political agency of those who fight. They do not stand outside the struggle and pronounce it illegitimate because the mechanism of mobilisation is imperfect.

The domestic Leviathan

There is a grim logic circulating among Ukrainians that the Western campist left has never confronted. Evade the Ukrainian draft, with all its injustices, and if the country falls, you will eventually be conscripted by the Russian military. Not hypothetically. This has already happened.

The analytical report by the human rights organisation ZMINA documents systematic forced conscription of Ukrainian citizens in occupied territories. Men were grabbed at checkpoints and off streets in the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” and sent to the front with minimal training, often used as first-wave cannon fodder. Oleksiy Trusov, Mykyta Bayenko, and Andrii Khlebnikov were sentenced to fifteen years in Ukrainian courts for high treason, despite testifying they were forcibly mobilised at checkpoints. Ruslan Mikhaliov, a man with congenital visual impairment, was forcibly recruited into the “DPR” army as a gunner. The US State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Report on Russian-Occupied Areas of Ukraine confirms the systematic character of these practices.

As Ukrainian analysts have put it: “The Kremlin forces Ukrainians from occupied territories to go to the front to fight against their own homeland. This is a deliberate strategy to use people in occupied territories as a convenient resource.” The choice facing Ukrainians is not between conscription and freedom. It is between an unjust domestic conscription system that can be reformed through democratic struggle and a foreign occupation that conscripts you into fighting against your own people with no possibility of resistance.

When the RSM demands that Western countries ease immigration for those fleeing mobilisation, they frame this as draining the Russian army of manpower while providing safety for those who refuse to participate in imperial aggression. When the “Go by the Forest” (Idite Lesom) Telegram initiative provides legal and logistical support for Russian deserters, they emphasise that refusing to fight is an act of resistance against a state that “does not value the lives of its own citizens.” Solidarity with deserters and conscientious objectors on both sides is a socialist duty. But solidarity with deserters is not the same as opposing the right of an invaded people to organise their own defence.

The convergence nobody talks about

Ukrainian activists have noted what should be obvious: the rhetorical convergence between the Western campist left’s arguments about Ukrainian conscription and the arguments of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and the right-wing “realists” who also cite Ukrainian “manpower shortages” to push for territorial concessions. Both argue the war is unwinnable. Both cite Ukrainian war-weariness. Both use the injustice of mobilisation as evidence that the population doesn’t really want to fight. Both conclude that Ukraine should accept a deal that rewards the aggressor.

Stop the War and the Trump administration arrive at the same destination by different routes. The campists get there through “anti-imperialism” that recognises only Western imperialism. Trump gets there through transactional indifference to the sovereignty of smaller nations. The result is identical: the partition of Ukraine over the heads of Ukrainians.

And here is the challenge that the critics of Ukrainian resistance, from every direction, consistently refuse to meet: what do they propose? Murray cites the Ukrainian army’s manpower problems but never says what should happen: accept the Trump deal? Snowden declares the front line is crumbling but offers no alternative except capitulation dressed as negotiation. The SWP invokes “neither Washington nor Moscow” but provides, as Workers’ Liberty noted in Solidarity 749, “no proposals for joint working-class action.” The campist left critiques every programmatic alternative while offering none of its own. That is not realism. It is paralysis dressed as sophistication.

The Western leftists who weaponise Ukrainian conscription against the resistance are engaged in a profound moral and political bankruptcy. They take the legitimate grievances of Ukrainian workers, strip them of context, and deploy them in the service of a conclusion those workers reject. They ignore the voices of Ukrainian socialists who fight on two fronts simultaneously. They erase the Russian anti-war left, whose members face prison sentences that exceed those for murder, and whose analysis of “false pacifism” is aimed directly at them. They invoke a tradition, revolutionary socialism, that has never been pacifist, that has always distinguished between the class content of wars and the mechanism of conscription, and that has always insisted on the right of the oppressed to defend themselves by any means necessary.

The mother protesting in Kyiv did not carry her banner so that Andrew Murray could cite her exhaustion in the Morning Star. She carried it because she wants a fairer war, not because she wants surrender. The least the Western left can do is listen to what she actually said.