Stop Putin’s War

Vladimir Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine is the most important geopolitical development since the end of the Cold War. It is a turning point in world history that will shape all relations between states in the imperialist system as well as the class and social struggles within them.

We must condemn Putin’s horrific war, build solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and the Russian antiwar movement, and oppose the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers turning this conflagration into an inter-imperialist war between nuclear armed powers.

Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine with the expectation that they would be welcomed as liberators from a government he claimed was not popularly supported. He promised a quick victory. Clearly, his expectations were catastrophically wrong, and they led him to deploy an inadequate number of troops and insufficient weaponry to quickly conquer and subdue the country.

Ukraine has waged a heroic military and civilian resistance against Russia’s invasion. Forced to regroup by the resistance, Putin and his generals seem poised to turn to the scorched earth strategy they used in their previous wars in Chechnya and Syria, putting millions of people’s lives in jeopardy.

Already the Russian invasion has driven 2 million Ukrainians to flee their country in search of safe havens in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and beyond. The nearly 40 million who remain in the country face a humanitarian catastrophe. Russia is bombing civilian areas, putting in jeopardy access to water, food, medicine, and electricity.

The United States and NATO powers have responded with everything but direct military intervention. They have launched an economic war against Russia, imposing sanctions on trade and the country’s financial system. While the United States has placed an embargo on Russian oil and gas, the European Union (EU) has not, as it remains heavily dependent on Russia for its fuel.

The sanctions do not just target Putin, his state bureaucracy, and the country’s ruling class, but the entire economy. They will have a devastating impact on the country’s working class and oppressed, which already suffer from extreme inequality amid the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the oligarchs.

The United States and NATO powers have also rushed troop deployments to member countries that border Ukraine and Russia and increased shipments of military aid to Ukraine. State after state is preparing to increase their military budgets to equip themselves for great power rivalry, with Germany leading the way and promising to double its war spending next year.

The hope amid this horror is the emergence of international antiwar resistance from below. The most important component of it is, of course, the Ukrainian resistance in all its military and popular forms.

That resistance has inspired antiwar organizing throughout the world, most significantly in Russia itself. There, antiwar activists have defied government repression, protesting in the thousands throughout the country. Already more than 13,000 people have been arrested and subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of Putin’s political police. In the face of such intimidation, hundreds of thousands have signed a petition against the war, artists have risked their careers at government-funded institutions to speak out against Putin, professors at Moscow University have come out against the war, and members of the parliament have called for it to stop.

Such antiwar sentiment will be further inflamed as Russian conscripts lose their lives, limbs, and sanity in a war of imperial conquest. That will stoke antiwar action in the country and even among the troops.Faced with Ukraine’s military and civilian resistance, soldiers are seeing through Putin’s lie that the invaders would be welcomed as liberators. Already there are reports of troops refusing to fight, sabotaging their own equipment, and some defecting.

On top of the Ukrainian and Russian resistance, an international antiwar movement has begun to emerge against Putin’s war. They have varied in size and composition, but some have reached into the thousands, with one in Berlin topping 100,000.

This international resistance is politically heterogeneous, with all sorts of currents putting forth ideas both good and bad. The key question for socialists is what positions we should adopt to educate, orient, and build the movement.

Since, as Carl von Clausewitz famously argued, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” we must first understand the politics of this war and its different combatants.

Russia is conducting a war of imperial aggression. As Putin has made abundantly clear in speech after speech, he aims to rebuild his state’s former empire in Eastern Europe and sees Ukraine as a stepping-stone in that project. He intends to install a puppet regime over the entire country or partition it, retaining Russian control over Ukraine and the breakaway statelets of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Ukraine is engaged in a war of national self-determination and indeed national liberation against an invading, occupying imperial power. The struggle encompasses military and popular dimensions, which will continue as an ongoing insurgency even in the event of Russian victory.

The United States and other NATO powers aim to defend their sphere of influence, which they have expanded since the end of the Cold War deeper and deeper into Eastern Europe. Washington has made it clear that it is banding its allies together for great power rivalry with Russia—and behind it, and far more importantly, with China—to buttress its hegemony over the global capitalist system.

The third trap is adopting a position of pacifism, of opposition to all war and violence. While understandably attractive amid Putin’s invasion, it is a mistaken position that would lead to betrayal of solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance.

Pacifism elevates nonviolence to a principle for all circumstances. In reality, however, not all forms of violence and war are reactionary. They can be means of liberation from oppression.

The war has already rocked the world economy. It has sent stock markets around the globe into sharp contractions, dramatically increased inflation, especially in gas and food, and is forcing central banks in country after country to raise interest rates.

These will in turn compel governments to enact austerity measures on social programs and state employment, even as they increase their military budgets. They will sacrifice our butter to pay for their guns.

Their military preparations will exacerbate tensions in the world state system. Each state will attempt to protect their sphere of influence, tearing at the structures of global capitalism. And they will all double down on securing reliable stores of fossil fuels, leading to even greater global heating in the process.

These dynamics will intensify each and every country’s pre-existing political polarization. With the establishment presiding over crisis, cuts, and war preparations, the right and Left will both have the opportunity to offer alternative paths forward.

This will happen amid a likely rise in class and social struggle, inflamed by our rulers’ austerity measures. For example, in the United States, bosses will say in every contract negotiation with unions that inflation and raised interest rates make it impossible for them to grant increased wages and benefits and still ensure profitability, triggering potential strikes.

In this historic moment, the Left must grasp the opportunity, oppose both Moscow and Washington, build class and social struggles, and do our best to connect those to similar battles for social and economic justice throughout the world. More than ever before, we have to build and rebuild the politics of working-class internationalism and organize a fight for a world that puts people before empire and profit.