The Solidarity With Ukraine That Doesn’t Touch the Ground
Morenism, schema, & the limits of formal anti-imperialism
TL;DR
• The RSD’s April 2022 demand for non-NATO peacekeepers in Ukraine's war zone was coherent: scoped to civilian protection, anchored to Russian withdrawal, one instrument among several.
• The International Socialist League rejected it categorically, citing the UN’s structural domination by Western imperialism. But the ISL’s rejection was schematic, not analytical: it refuted an earlier, less precise formulation and never engaged with the specific humanitarian scoping.
• Two vulnerabilities, not one. First: the ISL’s categorical rejection of the peacekeeping demand was schematic on that specific question, even where its broader Ukraine analysis is sound. Second: the L5I tradition entered the ISL through the December 2025 convergence carrying a decade of unexamined campist-adjacent positions. Workers Power was approached for comment before Red Mole published its account; no response came.
• The demand was phase-specific. Sotsialnyi Rukh retired it when conditions changed, maintaining the withdrawal-first framework. By February 2024, Kyselov’s analysis, drawn on by Catherine Samary in International Viewpoint, stated it plainly: ‘if Russia withdraws, there will be no more war.’ The ISL’s categorical rejection required no such updating. Schemas never do.
• Formal solidarity without concrete programmatic engagement is a shell. Campism colonises shells.
There is a photograph that circulated widely in the spring of 2022. Not a combat photograph. A photograph of a queue: civilians, mostly women and children, waiting at a checkpoint near Mariupol to use a humanitarian corridor that had just been shelled for the third time that week. The corridor existed on paper. Russian forces were targeting it. And the organised international left, by and large, was debating whether the correct position was ‘neither Washington nor Moscow.’
That gap — between the abstraction of the formula and the reality of the queue — is what this article is about.
Two socialist organisations engaged seriously with Ukraine in the first months of the 2022 invasion. The Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) and Sotsialnyi Rukh, writing jointly from the Russian section of the Fourth International and the Ukrainian Social Movement, published a statement in April of that year that named Russian imperialism as the immediate aggressor, demanded weapons for Ukraine, demanded Russian withdrawal, and included among its demands the introduction of UN peacekeepers from non-NATO countries to protect civilian corridors and nuclear facilities. The International Socialist League, a Trotskyist international in the Morenist tradition whose Ukrainian section is led by Oleg Vernyk, rejected the peacekeeping demand as ‘shameful’ and ‘a total capitulation’ to Western imperialism. Both organisations formally support Ukrainian self-determination. Their methods of arriving at political conclusions could not be more different.
What the RSD actually proposed
The April 2022 statement is worth reading with care, because it has since been misrepresented by those who want to use it and those who want to refute it. The peacekeeping demand appears in a list of five. The first demand is the immediate withdrawal of all Russian armed forces from Ukraine. The others include targeted sanctions against Russian oligarchs, military support including air defence systems, and cancellation of Ukrainian foreign debt. The peacekeeping demand is specifically scoped: protection of green corridors, protection of civilians, safeguarding of nuclear power plants.
This is not a ceasefire proposal. It is not a mechanism to stabilise territorial lines. It is not an invitation to Western imperialism to manage the conflict on its own terms. The statement explicitly refuses the ‘inter-imperialist proxy war’ framing; it names Russian imperialism as the active aggressor; it argues, directly, that Russian military defeat is necessary for democratisation inside Russia itself. That is a Fourth International position. It is not a NATO position, and it is not a Stop the War position.
The demand for non-NATO peacekeepers, read in that context, does specific work. It addresses the situation of people dying in corridors between cities. It addresses the threat to Zaporizhzhia, a nuclear catastrophe that would not respect the front lines of any subsequent ceasefire. It proposes a scoped, time-limited, multilateral mechanism as a supplement to Ukrainian resistance, not a substitute for it. Whether it was practically achievable is a separate question. As a programmatic matter, it was coherent.
What the ISL actually rejected
Pablo Vasco, writing for the ISL on the same website that hosted the Vernyk interview, described the ‘USFI’ peacekeeping demand as ‘shameful’ and ‘a total capitulation.’ The UN, he argued, is an international body where the US and its allies still call the shots. Any demand for UN armed forces benefits Western imperialism and leaves the conflict in its hands. He cited the record of existing UN missions: of fourteen current missions, eight do nothing to stop the oppressors, the other six face serious allegations of violence and abuse.
That record is real. The argument from the record is not wrong as a general observation about UN peacekeeping. What it does not do is engage with the specific humanitarian scoping of the April 2022 demand. Writing in his introduction to the 9 February 2022 interview with Vernyk, Vasco described the ISL as being in ‘a strong debate’ with what he called the ‘USFI’, the name the Fourth International’s leading body carried between 1963 and 2003, abandoned nineteen years before he was writing. The document he was responding to was not a Fourth International bureau statement; it was a Sotsialnyi Rukh statement, ‘Time for International Anti-War Solidarity,’ published in International Viewpoint on 10 January 2022 under the byline ‘Ukrainian Socialists.’ IV’s own editorial note states that signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Vasco attributed a conjunctural national statement by some Ukrainian comrades (not a section of the Fourth International) to the international organisation as a whole, then refuted the International on the basis of it. lis-isl.org/en/2022/02/ucrania-entrevista-a-oleg-vernyk-l… The April statement, with its corridor and nuclear plant framing, appears in the available primary sources to have gone unanswered by the ISL.
This matters because the ISL’s argument is structural, not contextual. The UN is constitutively an instrument of Western imperialism; therefore any demand invoking it is categorically compromised; therefore the specific framing is irrelevant. That is a principle, not an analysis. Principles are useful. They are also capable of producing bad politics in specific situations where the concrete reality does not fit the schema.
The Morenist method
The ISL’s theoretical heritage is Morenoism, the current within Latin American Trotskyism associated with Nahuel Moreno, which split from the Fourth International in the 1980s. Morenism has genuine strengths: it is rooted in the labour movement, it has serious organisational experience in Argentina and beyond, and it produced genuine revolutionary cadres. It also has a characteristic weakness, one that the FI tradition identified with precision at the time of the split and that the Ukraine debate illustrates again forty years later.
Ernest Mandel named it in his 1977 polemic against Moreno, now available in English translation for the first time. The charge was ‘metaphysical scholasticism.’ Where historical materialism ‘starts from social reality and not from the Word,’ Moreno’s method starts from the classification of concepts. The schema is fixed in advance; the concrete situation is then sorted into its pre-existing categories. Mandel wrote that Moreno’s approach was ‘vitiated at its base’ because it asked not ‘what are the real levels of activity and consciousness within the working class, and how do we engage with them?’ but rather ‘which of our existing categories does this phenomenon fit?’
The transitional demands passage is the most directly relevant. Mandel charged that Moreno ‘places on the same footing immediate demands, democratic demands, and transitional demands, without understanding the particular function of transitional demands.’ Quoting Trotsky directly against him: the transitional programme ‘issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism.’ The point is not the label on the demand. It is the specific work the demand does in a specific configuration of forces. Moreno’s method cannot ask that question because the answer has already been supplied by the schema.
Mandel also identified what he called the ‘Manichaean schema’: ‘Comrade Moreno knows only two categories: “the masses” and “the party.”’ Everything outside the revolutionary party — reformist leaderships, popular organisations, intermediate formations — is worth no more than the class enemy. The ISL’s categorical rejection of the UN peacekeeping demand exhibits the same binary structure: the UN or Ukrainian self-determination, imperialism or resistance, with no intermediate terrain where a scoped transitional demand might operate as a supplement rather than a substitute. The binary forecloses the analysis before it begins.
A minor detail illuminates the major point. In his February 2022 polemic, Vasco referred throughout to the ‘USFI’, the name the Fourth International’s leading body used between 1963 and 2003, nineteen years before he was writing. The FI abandoned that name at its 2003 World Congress. Using it in 2022 is not a neutral stylistic choice; it is the usage of someone engaging with a fixed schema of the opponent rather than with the opponent as it actually exists. The schema does not require updating. That is its function.
Applied to Ukraine in 2022, the method works as follows. Western imperialism is the structural enemy. The UN is a tool of Western imperialism. Therefore any demand invoking the UN benefits Western imperialism, regardless of which countries provide the troops, regardless of what specific function is proposed, regardless of whether Russian withdrawal is a stated precondition. The conclusion is reached without examining whether the specific demand, in this specific configuration of forces, serves or undermines Ukrainian self-determination. The schema supplies the answer. The concrete situation is not consulted.
This is not the same as campism. The ISL is not campist. Vernyk and the Ukrainian Socialist League have consistently condemned Russian aggression, supported Ukrainian resistance, and refused the ‘proxy war’ framing that has corrupted so much of the Western left. That record matters and should not be minimised. But formal solidarity without concrete programmatic engagement is a different kind of problem. It is possible to be right about the big question — Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine has the right to resist — and wrong about the smaller question in ways that have real consequences for people in queues at checkpoints.
Two vulnerabilities, not one
The ISL’s position on Ukraine, as Vernyk stated it in February 2026, is analytically serious. lis-isl.org/en/2026/02/ukraine-4-years-of-war-4-years-of-… The campism charge is named correctly. The dual-process argument, national liberation struggle running in parallel with inter-imperialist escalation, is precisely the formulation that distinguishes principled anti-imperialism from both campism and liberal internationalism. The L5I/ISL/ITO convergence is described not as a congress resolution but as the product of three years of political engagement across Milan and Paris, grounded in methodological common ground. That account deserves to be taken seriously.
But the ISL carries two distinct vulnerabilities, and they should not be conflated.
The first is methodological and applies to the ISL’s treatment of the peacekeeping question specifically. In his introduction to the February 2022 Vernyk interview, Vasco’s critique was categorical where it needed to be analytical. He engaged with a conjunctural Sotsialnyi Rukh statement published in IV in January 2022, attributed it to the FI as a whole, and never engaged with the April 2022 RSD/Sotsialnyi Rukh formulation’s specific humanitarian scoping. The conclusion was reached by applying a structural schema to the UN rather than by examining what the specific demand did in its specific programmatic context. That the January document was a signed article by the Ukrainian section, not an FI bureau resolution, and that IV’s own editorial note distinguishes signed articles from official positions, did not enter the analysis. Schemas do not require that level of care. Vernyk’s February 2026 statement demonstrates the ISL can perform concrete analysis on the big questions. Vasco’s peacekeeping argument demonstrates the same organisation applying a schema on a smaller one. Both are ISL primary sources. The tension between them is not resolved by pointing to one and ignoring the other.
The second vulnerability is structural and concerns how the convergence with the L5I was organised. Workers Power’s Ukraine line from 2014 is documented in detail elsewhere in this Substack: redmole.substack.com/p/the-disgrace-of-the-maidan-leftists The supplement that accused the Fourth International of a second August 1914 for refusing to read Maidan as a fascist coup; the SOAS launch meeting with Counterfire, the CPB, and Socialist Appeal; the Yalta conference in Russian-annexed Crimea; the decade of defending the line against primary-source refutation. The L5I’s June 2023 congress resolution made one formal correction: it acknowledged that withholding support for arms supplies to Ukraine was an error and corrected it. That correction is real and should be recognised as such. What the same resolution did not correct is equally significant. Paragraph ten still describes ‘a coup which overthrew Yanukovych.’ The Borotba reliance is not named. The August 1914 charge against the FI is not retracted. The Maidan framing, softened but structurally intact, survived into the highest-level document the L5I produced on Ukraine before the convergence. fifthInternational.org/2023/07/09/the-war-in-ukraine/
The most striking evidence is the most recent. In August 2025, four months before Istanbul, the German L5I section, Arbeiter:innenmacht, published a lengthy theoretical elaboration of the five-level analysis that still frames unconditional support for Ukrainian victory as impermissible because of NATO’s proxy-war involvement, still opposes arms deliveries in Western parliaments while not physically blocking them, and still defends the inter-imperialist schema against charges of logical inconsistency through an extended philosophical excursus via Hegel and Kant. arbeiterinnenmacht.de/2025/09/16/systematisches-zum-ukrai… The document is sophisticated and internally coherent. It is also, since four months before convergence with an organisation whose position it substantially contradicts, still published as the ISL German section’s theoretical framework without apparent tension.
The convergence resolved a specific practical question: arms supply to Ukraine. That question was sharp, immediate, and politically necessary to agree on before joint work was possible. Agreeing on it did not require, and apparently did not produce, agreement on the underlying analytical framework. The arms error was corrected. The framework that generated the original campist position in 2014 was not examined. It was simply accommodated: the practical conclusion changed, and the schema was reworked minimally around it. The German section can run on autopilot, producing sophisticated theoretical elaborations of the old position, because the convergence happened at the level of the conclusion rather than at the level of the method.
This is the point about factional positions and theoretical presentation. A position adopted under factional pressure does not present itself as factional; it presents itself as principled Marxism, elaborated in theoretical terms, defended with the full vocabulary of the tradition. Dave Stockton’s June 2022 article in Workers Power 394 is the clearest demonstration: written after the full-scale invasion had begun, it named Russian atrocities and called for Russian withdrawal, while still describing the Maidan as ‘a coup’ carried out by ‘an alliance of Ukrainian neoliberals, far right nationalists and fascists, with the aid of US diplomats and NGOs.’ The analytical framework of the 2014 supplement survived intact into the second year of the full-scale invasion in the writing of the man who wrote the supplement. fifthInternational.org/2022/06/04/the-wests-war-aims-in-u… The schema provides both the conclusion and the apparatus for defending the conclusion against evidence. An organisation that has not examined how its schema produced wrong conclusions for a decade has not developed the tools to prevent the schema from producing wrong conclusions again.
These are different arguments with different evidence bases. The first concerns a methodological habit that produces schematic conclusions on specific questions even within an organisation capable of concrete analysis on larger ones. The second concerns a convergence structured around agreement on a practical conclusion rather than examination of the analytical method that produced a decade of error. The first creates a vulnerability to getting specific programmatic questions wrong. The second creates a vulnerability to campist pressure finding purchase through a layer that has not been required to account for why it was wrong before, and whose theoretical framework remains substantially intact beneath the corrected conclusion.
The campist pressure does not announce itself as campism. It arrives as common sense: ‘surely any mechanism that stops civilians dying is worth considering.’ An organisation with a concrete analytical method can answer that question by examining what specific mechanism is proposed, what preconditions are attached, whose interests it serves in this specific configuration of forces. An organisation with an algebraic method cannot answer it that way; it can only repeat the schema. And repeated schemas, under sustained political pressure, wear down. Not because the cadres are unprincipled but because the method does not equip them to hold the distinction that matters.
Consider what happens when a categorical anti-UN position meets the current ceasefire pressure. Stop the War’s AGM resolutions in 2023 and 2025 call for a ceasefire without preconditions. No Russian withdrawal requirement. No humanitarian scoping. The political function of that demand is to stabilise the current territorial situation behind a peace vocabulary. The ISL, with its categorical rejection of any UN mechanism, arrives at a formally different position: no ceasefire stabilisation, maximum Ukrainian sovereignty. But both positions share the same incapacity: neither can engage with the specific question of what a scoped, conditional, phase-appropriate instrument might do in a particular configuration of forces, because one has foreclosed the question by schema and the other by refusing any international mechanism at all.
What happened to the demand
Neither the RSD nor Sotsialnyi Rukh has repeated the peacekeeping demand in any traceable primary source after April 2022. Neither has explicitly withdrawn it. It simply stopped appearing. This is not silence in the pejorative sense; it is a response to changed material conditions.
The April 2022 demand was answering a specific situation: mass civilian displacement, active shelling of humanitarian corridors, the Zaporizhzhia threat in its acute phase, a population still largely present in the conflict zone. By 2023 those conditions had substantially changed. The corridor problem had been partially resolved or rendered moot by population flight. The nuclear facility threat had settled into a different, lower-grade register. The demand had been phase-specific, and when the phase ended, the organisations that generated it moved on without ceremony.
What they did not abandon was the programmatic framework that had made the demand coherent. Writing in February 2024 on International Viewpoint, Catherine Samary, drawing on Sotsialnyi Rukh member Oleksandr Kyselov’s December 2023 analysis in Commons, stated the withdrawal-first principle with the clarity it had always deserved: ‘if Russia withdraws, there will be no more war.’ The specific instrument was gone. The politics remained. internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8423
This is the methodological contrast in miniature. Sotsialnyi Rukh and the RSD moved with the material situation. They had proposed an instrument in response to specific conditions; when the conditions changed, the instrument was retired and new analytical work took its place. The ISL’s categorical rejection of the peacekeeping demand, meanwhile, required no updating when conditions changed, because categorical rejections are not conditioned on material reality in the first place. That is precisely the problem.
The campist formations, for their part, did not adopt the specific RSD peacekeeping language at all. Stop the War’s position, confirmed in its 2023 and 2025 AGM resolutions, is a ceasefire demand without preconditions. The Morning Star material on peacekeeping consists of news reports of Russian objections to peacekeeper proposals, not organisational advocacy. The demand was not stolen and corrupted. It was simply phase-specific, and the phase that generated it has passed.
The general problem remains. Transitional demands are not self-interpreting. Their meaning is determined by the programmatic context they inhabit. ‘UN peacekeepers from non-NATO countries’ meant one thing in April 2022, between ‘Russian withdrawal’ and ‘military support to Ukraine,’ in the first weeks of a full-scale invasion with civilians dying in corridors. It would mean something entirely different today, between ‘territorial concessions are inevitable’ and ‘Ukraine should not join NATO.’ The words would be identical. The politics would be opposed. The RSD understood this without needing to say it. The ISL’s method cannot make the distinction at all.
What the RSD got right
The RSD’s method in April 2022 was the opposite of algebraic. It started from the concrete situation: active bombardment, nuclear facilities under threat, civilians dying in corridors, a Ukrainian left that was simultaneously resisting and demanding international solidarity. It asked what specific demands would serve that situation. It proposed instruments, not principles. And it embedded those instruments in a programmatic framework that specified their conditions and their limits.
That method does not guarantee correct conclusions. The General Assembly route for overcoming Russia’s Security Council veto is procedurally unclear and the ISL’s suspicion that ‘non-NATO’ does not mean ‘without imperialist interests’ is well-founded; China’s interest in a precedent that territorial conquest can be legitimised through peacekeeping is not a minor consideration. The RSD statement did not fully address those vulnerabilities. A stronger version of the ISL objection could have engaged with them directly. Instead, the ISL rejected the demand at the level of the institution rather than the specific function, and the debate that needed to happen never quite did.
What remains is a record of two socialist organisations, both formally committed to Ukrainian self-determination, one of which produced a concrete programmatic response to a concrete situation and one of which applied a schema. The schema reached its conclusions faster. It required less work. It was also less useful to the people in the queue.
The campist pressure on the European left has not eased since 2022. It has intensified, shifted register, and found new vehicles. Whether organisations in the Morenist tradition have developed the analytical tools to resist it — rather than merely the formal positions — is a question the available evidence does not yet answer.
About this series
'With Washington and Moscow' examines how sections of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documented the settlement terms (Part 1), traced the organisational trajectory (Part 2), amplified Ukrainian and Russian socialist voices (Part 3), excavated the foundational Odesa myth (Part 4), uncovered the 2014 Workers Power origins of British campism's revolutionary alibi (Part 5), analysed how schematic method produces accommodation even within organisations formally committed to Ukrainian self-determination (Part 8), and identified the theoretical framework choice that determined everything that followed (Part 9).
All parts of the series will be posted at “With Washington and Moscow”.