The Current Situation in Ukraine from a Socialist Perspective

by David Finkel

The Metro Detroit DSA Political Education Committee invited longtime antiwar activist, socialist, and defender of Palestinian rights David Finkel to speak at the April General Meeting on the current situation in Ukraine from a socialist perspective. Finkel is an editor at Against the Current, published by the US socialist organization Solidarity, and active in Jewish Voice for Peace. The talk was based on an earlier article, “Ukraine’s Horror and Beyond: The New Imperialist Struggle,” published in the Solidarity webzine. The following transcript of his talk has been edited for length and clarity.

I was invited to come today to open up a discussion about the terribly tragic and complicated and really earth-shaking events that are happening in Ukraine, which I think may be the beginning of a whole reconfiguration of power relations. I was asked to say at the beginning a few basic things about terms that may be confusing to some, like “What is NATO?” and “What is Ukraine?”

I’ll start with Ukraine, which is a country in a region with a long and complicated history. It was part of the Soviet Union, from its formation in 1922 until 1991, when the Soviet Union decomposed, and Ukraine had a vote on whether to become independent. That vote passed by 90%, including a majority who voted for independence in the Russian-speaking areas of Eastern Ukraine.

Crimea, which is a strategically important peninsula, went back and forth over a long period of time. It was part of Russia, but under Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev it was turned over to Ukraine. That didn’t much matter to most people at a time when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, but it became a bone of contention later.

NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was formed in 1949 as an alliance of the United States and Western European countries to block the growing power of the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The Soviet Union’s alliance, known as the Warsaw Treaty Organization or the Warsaw Pact, wasn’t formed until 1955.

So, if NATO was formed to contain the expanding power of the Soviet Union, you well might ask: “In 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart and dissolved, what then was the point of the continuation of NATO?” And that’s a good question.

Furthermore, you could also ask: “What was the point of the expansion of NATO into Eastern European countries which had formerly been part of the Soviet Union and were now independent, as well as countries like Poland and Hungary, which were part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union and had been part of the tier of Eastern European states which the Soviet Union essentially controlled as satellite countries?” That question was raised at the time and it’s not necessary to be a revolutionary anti-imperialist to see that the expansion of NATO was dangerous and provocative, expanding to the borders of Russia itself.

[US Ambassador to the Soviet Union under Truman] George Kennan, a very famous strategic thinker, who had been the intellectual architect of the Western strategy of containment of the Soviet Union, said in the 1990s that the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders was dangerous, provocative, and a very bad idea, that nothing good would come of it. William Burns, who is today the head of the CIA, when he was the leading US diplomat in Russia under George W. Bush, said at the time that the expansion of NATO was dangerous, provocative, and a bad idea.

This is important for us in the United States, because we have a twofold problem: We need to be able to explain NATO’s behavior and its expansion. Countries in Eastern Europe that were formerly part of the Soviet Union were seen as important buffers between Russia and the West. That NATO’s expansion was always dangerous is part of the root of the present disaster.

At the same time within the Left, we have to recognize that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today is not only unjustified and catastrophic for all parties, but it was also not directly provoked by NATO. Although there had been very irresponsible noises made since about 2008 that Ukraine would be joining NATO as a NATO partner, that was not about to happen. NATO would have been severely divided over it. Germany would not have approved it. As a matter of fact, Ukraine isn’t even eligible to join NATO, because to join NATO a country must be in control of its territory. Ukraine is not now in control of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not in response to some direct provocation. Vladimir Putin — I call him Russia’s President for life because he’s rigged the system in such a way that it’s impossible to vote him out — as you may know from his speeches and writings, has always detested the idea of Ukraine as an independent country.

He says Ukraine was never a real country. It was created by the “evil” Bolsheviks. The Russian Communists under Lenin gave Ukraine and other constituent states of the Soviet Union the right to secede, which Putin says was a terrible, terrible thing to do. Ukraine, in his view, is rightfully part of Russia. Ukrainians and Russians are one people and there’s no justification for Ukraine to be a separate country.

In addition to that, [in 2013–14] there was a huge crisis and uprising in Ukraine when the President at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, switched from an orientation towards a partnership with the European Union to a deal with Putin in Russia. It led to a big uprising, a near civil war, and the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime and a whole series of complicated political crises and changes that I won’t get into right now. Suffice it to say that Putin finds the idea of an independent Ukraine very, very unacceptable, and especially any choice of Ukraine to orient away from Russia towards the European Union.

Now what was Putin seeing when he looked at what was going on in the West? He saw that the United States had suffered a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan; he saw that the Biden Presidency appeared to be sinking. He saw that Biden’s legislative agenda was stalled. He saw what had happened with the January 6th riot. He saw that NATO was divided over a number of things, including Germany, as well as other countries, but especially Germany, being heavily dependent on Russian oil and natural gas. He thought that he could make ultimatums against Ukraine and that there would be no serious response or backlash from the West.

This was an enormous miscalculation and a catastrophic blunder. Have a look at what’s happening in Ukraine today. When the Russian army moved in, Putin’s expectations were that there would be very little resistance and that Ukraine, or at least the eastern part of Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv, would fall very quickly, and I don’t know why Russian generals couldn’t tell him any different.

That did not happen. Russia’s battle plans were way out of date. They’re using the kind of tank convoys that were very effective in 1944. They have succeeded in taking very, very little territory, and so what the Russian military has now turned to is terror: bombing of civilian populations.

Now, when you see the catastrophic human damage that’s being inflicted on Ukrainian cities, we have to understand that this kind of thing has happened before in recent times. Putin did it before to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. He did it to Aleppo in Syria when he intervened to save the machine of Bashar al-Assad.

But it’s not only Putin in Russia that has done this. The United States has done this to Baghdad. The United States has done it to Eastern Mosul. Israel has done it to Beirut. Israel has done it to Gaza City multiple times. The United States also did it to Fallujah in Iraq, and to Raqqa in Syria. Hardly anybody even remembers anymore, but George H. W. Bush, the first Bush, bombed Panama City in order to capture Manuel Noriega, the head of Panama. How many civilian casualties were there when the United States bombed Panama City?

So it’s not like Russia is the only country that does this, but what has happened now is an earth-shaking disaster. The big losers here, of course, are the Ukrainian people.

No one can say how this war will end, whether it might end with the collapse of the Russian army, which is possible, though certainly not very likely, whether it will end with the bloody partition of Ukraine, or some other kind of who knows what. This, of course, is assuming that it doesn’t escalate to nuclear war, that the region isn’t devastated by the release of radioactivity from nuclear power plants.

But while Ukraine is being horribly devastated, Russia is also already a loser. The sanctions that have been placed on Russia will crater its economy, and I believe it’s going to be, if not permanent, very long-lasting. The very poor performance of Russia’s military in Ukraine indicates that Russia will be wanting to undergo military modernization, and I believe there’s going to be an economic war of the West against Russia to prevent that from happening. If you look at imperialist rivalry in the world, the United States obviously is the world’s number one imperial superpower and China is number 2, trying to catch up and ultimately surpass the United States. Russia was what I call a third-and-a-half-rate power. By the time this is over Russia will be fifth rate. Russia will become almost the economic dependency of China, because China is the only country that will bail it out.

I want to conclude by saying what I believe a socialist stance in this situation must be:

First of all, Ukraine’s war is a legitimate war of national self-defense. Any decent socialist has to support Ukraine’s right of self-defense and has to be for the defeat of the Russian invasion.

We also have to recognize that there is an anti-imperialist dimension: huge amounts of arms have been going into Ukraine for its legitimate defensive war. Arms are coming from the United States, from Germany, from other NATO countries, from Turkey, from Israel. These are weapons which are going to be battlefield-tested for effectiveness, and this is something that always happens in war.

We need to be clear that we oppose NATO’s expansion. NATO comes out of this as a big winner while Ukraine is a loser.

There was talk before the invasion began that a diplomatic solution would include Ukraine being a neutral country. We’re not going to see the “Findlandization” of Ukraine. We’re going to see the NATO-ization of Finland and possibly Sweden, countries which are not part of NATO, countries which have stayed out of that whole arrangement, but which are now going to be working much more closely with NATO if they don’t actually join.

I think that we must be against the expansion of NATO, to hold off danger of a Third World War. As anti-imperialists, we should be against NATO’s very existence. However, I recognize that’s not going to be popular with most Americans at this moment.

There is an enormous refugee crisis, there are two-and-a-half million people who have fled Ukraine, and by the time this is over it will be more like four or five million. We have to be for full support of the Ukrainian refugees and their right to return home.

We should also be demanding the same right for Palestinians who have been expelled from their homeland, the right of Central American, Haitian, and other refugees and asylum seekers to live in the United States after decades of US policies that have devastated their countries. It’s incredible at this moment that Ukrainian refugees turning up at the Mexican border are for the most part not being allowed in, which is an atrocity. But it also means that we need to take this moment to call for the safe entry of refugees from all the countries, including people that are being deported back to Haiti and so on.

In view of the global energy turmoil it’s also important to raise certain ecosocialist ideas right now, because of the danger of Russian gas and oil being cut off from global energy markets. There’s a huge amount of turmoil and the Biden Administration is doing exactly the wrong thing. It’s turning to Saudi Arabia to ramp up its oil production.

The Saudi regime is every bit as murderous and brutal as Putin’s. If you look at what Saudi Arabia has been doing to Yemen, it’s every bit as bad as what Putin is doing to Ukraine. Rather than turning to Saudi Arabia and other petro states to ramp up production, the emphasis should be on the most rapid transformation to renewable and sustainable energy, not only to help in terms of the current crisis, but to help save the planet from catastrophic climate change, in this very century. As a matter of fact, in the next couple of decades.

All these things are important. It is absolutely inevitable and democratic and legitimate for Ukraine to fight and defeat the Russian invasion, and I believe the Russian invasion must be defeated. But that’s only the beginning. Because of the likelihood of no wheat crop in Ukraine this year, and because Russia is one of the big sources of fertilizer for the global market, there is also a looming world food crisis, as well as other climate impacts on the world food supply.

So we have a global crisis and a whole new imperialist struggle in front of us.

The Ukrainian and Russian communities in Metro Detroit have mounted several demonstrations in support of Ukraine and against Russian aggression. For a report on these demonstrations and other actions those in solidarity with Ukraine may take, go to Ukrainian-Americans Mobilize in Metro-Detroit by Dianne Feeley.