Against Putin
Following the government's previous tepid response, in the Commons this afternoon Boris Johnson announced a further round of sanctions that will exclude big Russian firms from the City. No word on sunk assets yet, which are still too close to the Tory bone. On this specific issue it was difficult to disagree with Keir Starmer when he said "For too long our country has been a safe haven for money Putin and his fellow bandits stole from the Russian people", echoing but not acknowledging words made by his predecessor during a less serious crisis four years previously. Johnson also announced that a similar sanctions regime is also now in force against Belarus, who has allowed its soil to be used as a firing post against targets in Ukraine. Presumably it's Lukashenko's payback for Putin's valued support during the uprising 18 months ago.
The violence unfolding on our screens is an open and shut case of big power bullying. Not content with lopping bits off Ukraine eight years ago, Russia is back for another bite. Putin has simultaneously described the country as an invention of Lenin and a nest of Nazi vipers, while his useful idiots - knowing or otherwise - wax lyrically about the self-determination of the peoples of the east, namely the Donetsk and Luhansk "peoples" republics. Putin cries foul over NATO's expansion, citing a non-existent agreement not to take on former Warsaw Pact nations and soviet republics as members at the end of the Cold War. But all of this is complete flim-flam. It is a straightforward case of land grabbing to stabilise the region under the hegemony of Europe's largest military power. Something that should be straightforward if we borrow the thinking of a certain Ukrainian Marxist well known to the British left: in the conflict between an imperialist power and a country it's trying to take into vassalage, the left have a duty to oppose that imperial power. Whether Putin aims to occupy Ukraine in its entirety, sling out its government and replace it with friendly faces, or carve out more territory for his puppet republics is immaterial: none are justifiable, all should be opposed.
"But", says those for whom Russia will never cease being the USSR, "the West have pushed Putin into it. They've expanded NATO and supported the so-called Orange revolution that overthrew a democratically elected president and replaced him with another congenial to their interests." And? Wasn't the whole point about the schism on the European left over a hundred years ago that inter-imperialist tensions and conflicts weren't a matter for taking sides, except our own? The encroachment of NATO to Russia's frontiers were a matter for the left in member countries to oppose the alliance and its expansion, but that does not mean governments joined NATO because fears of Russian revanchism were fake. And it certainly doesn't mean there is an "anti-imperialist duty" to side with Putin and provide his machinations left cover. The alternative to NATO membership in the east is the acceptance of Russian hegemony, neither of which carries forward the socialist struggle.
No doubt some small sections of the left will be favouring "military support" for Russia, imagining they have their own equipment and personnel they can parachute into the breakaway republics to strike a hammer blow against "imperialism" - or at least sell a few papers to the front line troops. But meanwhile, in real world politics the labour movement in this country finds itself confronted with a set of practical tasks. Building solidarity with the Ukrainian and Russian labour and civil society movements, mobilising the largest numbers possible against war - with this Saturday's demonstration a start, and opposing our own war hawks while continually worrying the Tory party over its Moscow Gold - and what influence this cash bought those who splashed it out. We have to be modest about our ability to direct the course of events, but these are good places to begin.
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