There is a test you can apply to any political argument about Ukraine. Ask: where else does this argument circulate? Who else is making it? If the same claim appears only in Socialist Worker, on Tucker Carlson’s show, and in a Russian Foreign Ministry briefing, that overlap is not a coincidence. It is a finding.
Here is the test run on a single sentence, published in the last week.
On 10 September, Aontacht Media, an Irish socialist outlet, carried a piece telling the Western left to stop backing Zelensky’s conscription machine (the Western left, of course, does not). In it: ‘In a 2023 interview, he confirmed that the main goal of the Ukrainian delegation was to imitate negotiations to win the time for Western military aid.’ He being Davyd Arakhamia, head of the Ukrainian delegation at Istanbul.
Arakhamia confirmed no such thing. What he told Nataliya Moseychuk on 24 November 2023 was that the delegation’s second aim was «затягувати час», to drag out time, «щоб виграти час для Збройних сил України», to win time for the Ukrainian armed forces, and that the delegation had been «димовою завісою ЗСУ», a smokescreen for the army. The Western-partners formulation belongs to an unnamed participant who told LB.ua the following day: «Ми мали виграти час, поки наші партнери на Заході отямляться й почнуть ухвалювати рішення». Two sources, one attribution, and between them the substitution that matters. The Ukrainian armed forces become Western military aid. Soldiers buying time for themselves become a proxy stalling for its sponsors.
Note the grammar, because it is doing work. The neutrality quotation later in the same Aontacht sentence sits inside quotation marks and is accurate. The Western-aid claim sits outside them, behind ‘he confirmed that’, which is the construction that asks to be believed without offering anything to check. Nobody fabricated a quotation here. Somebody attributed a position, which is harder to catch and, once caught, harder to defend.
I went looking for where the splice was made, expecting to find the sentence itself in Russian state media. Two deep searches in three languages found no instance of it anywhere before 10 September 2026. What they found instead was the reading, put into circulation on day one by a Russian politician.
On 25 November 2023, Ukraina.ru, the Ukraine-facing outlet of RIA Novosti, carried Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, on what Arakhamia had supposedly admitted: «Запад приказал Киеву выйти из мирного процесса», the West ordered Kyiv out of the peace process, «а все демонстрируемые усилия с украинской стороны оказались фикцией, обманом, чтобы выиграть время», and all the efforts displayed by the Ukrainian side turned out to be a fiction, a deception, to gain time. Fiction and deception, staged for the West, to buy time. That is Ulyanov’s sentence in everything but vocabulary, thirty-four months earlier, in the mouth of a Russian official.
Which is not the tidy finding either, and here is why.
On 28 November 2023, four days after the interview, Meduza published a long account of the affair under the headline ‘We had to buy time’. Those words belong to an anonymous member of the Ukrainian delegation who told LB.ua: ‘We had to buy time while our Western partners came to their senses and started making decisions that would ultimately allow us to keep fighting.’ Meduza attributes the line correctly in its body text and runs it above a story about Arakhamia, which is what headlines do. Since that day the two halves of the composite have sat in one widely read English-language article, one of them in the headline and the other twenty paragraphs down.
Whether that is where the sentence in the Aontacht piece came from, I cannot say and will not claim. What it does establish is that no Russian hand on a keyboard is needed to produce that sentence. A headline, a body text, three years of retelling and one writer working from memory will do it between them.
That detail spoils the neat version of my own argument, and I am keeping it because the neat version was wrong. The outlet where the two halves first sat together is Meduza, an anti-Kremlin Russian exile publication operating out of Riga under a foreign agent designation. A theory of convergence that requires the Kremlin to have written every sentence cannot account for that, and does not need to.
Sputnik spoils it further. On 25 November 2023 Sputnik reported that Arakhamia had given the delegation two goals, the second being to buy time and create a smokescreen for the Ukrainian military, and noted separately that Western states had been kept informed of the talks. Two facts, correctly separated, in a Russian state outlet. On this one point Sputnik was more accurate than an Irish socialist publication three years later, and any account of how this material travels has to survive that sentence.
So the Kremlin’s work here was not manufacture. It was framing, and the framing is in the record from day one. Margarita Simonyan of RT took Arakhamia’s remarks as proof that hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. The Russian Embassy in London posted that ‘with substantial #UK input, an off-ramp for a negotiated solution was missed’, which is the Boris Johnson story arriving in an official account within four days. And Slutsky supplied the reading that a writer in Dublin would reach for in 2026 without ever having heard of him: negotiations as fiction, staged for Western benefit. Nobody had to invent a quotation. They had to choose which true sentences to repeat, in what order, and under what description, and the choosing is the operation.
Now the argument itself.
One version arrived in the Spotlight Socialist Network chat in August 2026 in a modestly articulate form. Russia is an imperialist capitalist country. Ukraine is allied to American and European imperialists. This is therefore a classic inter-imperialist war. A Marxist refuses to support either side. The working classes of both countries should unite against their ruling classes.
Every sentence sounds correct. The conclusion is politically indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s since the method recommended is not material aid to the Ukrainian working class, but acceptance of Russia’s peace terms.
The concession that collapses the argument
The same message that made this argument also described Russia as ‘colonising’ Ukraine. That word was chosen; it was not accidental. Colonisation is what an imperial power does to a subject nation. It is not symmetrical. In a colonial war, there is a coloniser and there is the colonised, and Marxists have a settled tradition of knowing which side they are on.
The inter-imperialist war schema requires symmetry: two roughly equal imperial powers competing for dominance, with the working classes of both countries conscripted into a conflict that serves neither of them. That was the correct analysis of 1914. Britain and Germany were two imperial powers competing for markets and colonies, and socialists who called for revolutionary defeatism on both sides were right. The schema does not travel. Ukraine is not an imperial power. It has no colonies. It is not competing with Russia for markets or territory. It is fighting to exist. The analogy that fits is Ireland in 1916, as we argue in Part 11 of this series: a nation resisting colonial domination, for which the question of which imperial sponsor might benefit from its resistance is secondary to the question of whether it has the right to resist.
One other thing about 1914. The Marxist analysis of that war identified the enemy at home. Karl Liebknecht voted against war credits and was imprisoned for it. Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned for it. The Russian workers who oppose Putin’s invasion have drawn the same conclusion. Boris Kagarlitsky, one of Russia’s most prominent socialist intellectuals, was sentenced to five years in a Russian penal colony in February 2024 for opposing the war. The Russian Socialist Movement operates in exile. Members of the Anti-War Committee of Russia face arrest. The Russian workers who have applied the 1914 analysis honestly have not concluded that this is an inter-imperialist symmetry requiring neutrality. They have concluded that Russia started this war and Russia must stop it. Their analysis, developed at personal risk rather than from a comfortable distance, is closer to Sotsialnyi Rukh than to the campist left in London.
The multipolar myth
A softer version of the same argument runs like this: yes, Russia and China may be imperialist, but the countries that are actually being subjugated right now, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Palestine, would surely prefer a different balance of power to American hegemony. This is not campism in the strict sense; it does not defend Russia. It asks whether Russian ascendancy might be better for the global south.
Ask Sudan.
Russia armed the Rapid Support Forces, the militia responsible for mass atrocities in Darfur and across Sudan, supplying weapons routed through Libya. Wagner operations across the Sahel, in Mali, in the Central African Republic, in Niger, have backed whichever military faction gives Russia access to gold, uranium, and strategic position, regardless of what that faction does to the population it governs. In Syria, Russian air power in Aleppo conducted the same kind of civilian-targeting campaign that the ‘Western Mass Murder Alliance’ is rightly condemned for elsewhere. The multipolar world is not a world in which Palestine is free. It is a world in which two sets of imperial powers compete for leverage over the same populations.
The deepest version of this argument is the one raised in the same chat and worth stating directly: Russia is a branch of Western imperial logic. Tsarist colonialism drove east as the British drove south. The Russification policies that Ukraine resisted for centuries were the same civilisational arrogance as the French mission civilisatrice. Stalin’s deportations of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and Volga Germans were colonial population transfers of exactly the type the West conducted in its own empires. Under Putin, the death rate per capita in Russia’s wars falls systematically on the Muslim and non-ethnic-Russian parts of the Kremlin’s own territory, in Chechnya, in the disproportionate conscription of Buryats and Dagestanis into the Ukraine war. Russia is a franchise of the Western Mass Murder Alliance, operating under a different flag.
The third route
The Aontacht piece takes none of those roads, which is why it is worth pausing on. Its author writes as an anti-colonial Ukrainian nationalist, originally from the east, a member of People Before Profit in Dublin. No third camp, no symmetry, no multipolar preference. The framework is national liberation, and the country to be liberated is Ukraine, from Brussels and Washington.
And it arrives at defunding Ukraine and ratifying the annexations, which is where the multipolarists arrive, and where Donald Trump arrives.
Three incompatible frameworks, one destination. That is worth more than any individual claim, because it tells you the destination is not being reached by the frameworks. It is being reached first and furnished afterwards, and the furniture is whatever the shop has in: 1914 for the Trotskyists, the global south for the campists, Fanon for the nationalists.
Who Is Actually Saying This?
Now apply the test.
Tucker Carlson travelled to Moscow in February 2024 and sat for two hours while Vladimir Putin recited Russian imperial mythology, including the claim that Russia had never started a war. Carlson did not press him on this. He nodded. He had spent the preceding two years on his television programme and podcast telling American audiences that NATO expansion had provoked Russia, that the United States had no business supporting Ukraine, that the war could end if Washington forced Kyiv to negotiate. These are the campist left’s talking points, minus the Marxist vocabulary.
J.D. Vance argued in the US Senate that Ukraine should cede territory and cut a deal with Putin. Trump called Zelensky ‘maybe the greatest salesman in history’, meaning a con artist extracting money from gullible Americans, while suggesting Ukraine should simply accept the loss of its territory. Elon Musk ran his own unsolicited peace plan on the platform he owns, which coincided with Russian territorial demands so precisely that the Ukrainian foreign minister published a response.
The specific claims in circulation are not abstract. The ‘Boris Johnson killed the Istanbul peace deal’ narrative, addressed at length in Part 9, was amplified by Tucker Carlson, by MAGA-aligned media, and by campist publications simultaneously, citing the same truncated quotation from the same Arakhamia interview. The Aontacht version this month shows what happens to a quotation after enough of that handling: it is no longer truncated, it has been rebuilt. The ‘NATO promised not to expand’ claim circulates through Euronews fact-checks of the Putin interview, because Putin made it at length, with Carlson’s encouragement, to the largest English-language audience these claims have ever reached. The 2014 coup narrative has been a staple of Russian state media since 2014 and of Tucker Carlson’s programme since approximately 2019.
This is not a conspiracy. The convergence does not require coordination. It requires only that a set of claims which serve Russian foreign policy objectives circulates through Russian state media, gets picked up by the American right that shares Russia’s interest in ending Western support for Ukraine, and then appears in left spaces where it wears the costume of anti-imperialism. The costume is convincing because the underlying grievances, about NATO expansion, about Western hypocrisy, about the genuine disasters of American foreign policy, are real. The argument is not that Washington is blameless. The argument is that none of this explains, excuses, or justifies a colonial war of conquest, and that the left which cannot see the difference between criticising American imperialism and running Kremlin talking points has lost the thread of its own politics.
The Fourth International’s February 2025 World Congress resolution, from the organisation that calls for the dissolution of NATO and whose framework has informed this entire series, is unambiguous: support Ukrainian self-determination and oppose NATO. These are not contradictory positions. The campist argument collapses them into one because that is the only way to avoid the harder question.
The Check
There is one more thing to establish: where are the Russian working-class organisations making the inter-imperialist war argument? Where are the independent Ukrainian socialist voices agreeing that this conflict is a plague on both their houses?
Kagarlitsky is in prison. The Russian Socialist Movement has members in exile. Anti-war activists in Russia face ten-year sentences under laws passed specifically to criminalise opposition to the invasion. The Russian voices that circulate freely, that appear on RT, that get promoted by campist outlets and by MAGA-adjacent media simultaneously, are the voices the Kremlin permits to circulate. That is not a sample. It is a selection.
Sotsialnyi Rukh and the journal Commons, Ukrainian socialist organisations and neither of them NATO institutions, have argued consistently that Ukrainian workers fighting the invasion are not fighting Washington’s war. The Finnish Left Alliance, which held principled non-alignment for decades, looked at the invasion and admitted it had ‘basically failed to provide any credible alternatives’ to NATO membership for a country facing Russian aggression. These organisations, the ones with most reason to know and the ones who bear the cost of the analysis, have not concluded that this is a symmetrical inter-imperialist war in which Marxists support neither side. They have concluded that Russia invaded and must be defeated, and that supporting that defeat is not the same as supporting NATO.
The Ukrainian unions say it more plainly than any of us. At the International Labour Conference in June, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine asked the world’s trade unionists for exactly what Aontacht wants stopped: «Україна повинна бути забезпечена засобами оборони і нам потрібна військова допомога.» Ukraine must be supplied with the means of defence, and we need military assistance.
There is a third version of this position, more sophisticated than campism and more honest than the multipolar argument, and it deserves attention precisely because it gets the premises right. The Camp Internationaliste, co-hosted by the NPA-Révolutionnaires, IZAR, OKDE-Spartakos, the RSO and SOL, identified Russian aggression and its resource imperatives accurately. It does not defend Putin. It does not pretend the war is symmetrical. Then it argues that Zelensky’s conduct of the war transforms the Ukrainian population into cannon fodder, and calls for working-class mobilisation to defend its own interests. That sounds like internationalism. Every word is available for scrutiny. What it cannot do, and what no version of that position has yet managed, is specify what Ukrainian workers should actually do differently. Mobilise for their interests: against what, towards what, on whose terms, with whose army? The question is not rhetorical. The Ukrainian left has an answer, the one Sotsialnyi Rukh and Commons have given, at some personal risk, from inside the situation. The internationalist left in France that will not give the same answer is not facing a harder question. It is avoiding it.
The third camp position, as deployed in these conversations, is not the position of the Russian or Ukrainian working class. It is not, in any honest reading, the position of the Fourth International or the International Socialist League, the international organisation which supports the NPA-Révolutionnaires. It is the position of people who have decided that their theoretical framework matters more than the people being killed, and who have arrived, by a different route, at the same practical conclusion as Tucker Carlson.
The question is not which route is purer. The question is what to do about a quotation that nobody wrote, which is now in circulation in three languages, and which will be repeated next month by somebody who read it in Dublin and has no idea that the sentence is fake.
For the full series: With Washington and Moscow