Stopping Putin in Ukraine Should be a Core Battle for Justice by the Global Left

Putin is a White Nationalist Oligarch- and the Left Should Be Fighting to Stop Him Using the Economic Sanctions that Corporate Liberals will Be Reluctant to Champion

Feb 25

Vladimir Putin's long obsession with Ukraine | News | Al Jazeera

So much of the discussion around this invasion feels like a relic of the Cold War.

Putin and Russia are not the Soviet Union. Their existence has zero relevance to the interests of the working class globally. They are just a dictatorship run by petrostate oligarchs bleeding their fellow citizens of money and storing it overseas in money-laundered secret bank accounts. They are an abusive threat to their neighbors and any concessions to them are the concessions you give to a mobster who has nuclear weapons. While negotiations may be needed for that reason, all such concessions are a moral abomination sacrificing the rights of other human beings because we fear the immoral actions of a sociopath.

All Russia is proving is that Ukraine and many in Europe were correct in pushing for Ukraine to join NATO since it obviously needed the protection.

Ukraine wasn't allowed to join NATO because some countries gave in to threats made by Russia, but it didn't stop Russia from violating the commitments it had specifically made back in 1994 not to violate Ukraine's borders.

Ukraine had its own nuclear weapons coming out of the Soviet Union. It agreed to give them up based on promises by Russia to respect its borders as part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.

Russia first violated that agreement by invading Crimea in 2014 and now has violated it again.

There is no interpretation of international law where Russia is not the aggressor and in the wrong in every way possible. Most progressives, including myself, condemned the US invasions of Iraq - but the US had at least some figleaves of international law to point to in those wars, including working with the UN leading up to the conflict - but Russia has not even a shred of such an international claim of justice here.

In any case, whatever the past sins of the US government, those are irrelevant to whether the Ukrainian people have the right to live without the threat of murder and invasion. They are not just a proxy for the US so the history of the US actions are irrelevant to whether Russia's actions need to be condemned.

And here’s the hard reality: if the world does not help Ukraine, assume an invasion by China of Taiwan comes next since China and Russia have already negotiated mutual support for their planned military aggressions

Putin in Ukraine may not be Hitler invading the Sudetenland, but failure to respond strongly to an unprovoked invasion could inspire an avalanche of more invasions and wars in its wake.

Putin is a White Christian Nationalist- and the Enemy of Global Democratic Working Class

Beyond fighting for the principle of non-aggression, anyone on the left should see Putin as a singular hate figure that we want to defeat. It boggles my mind that anyone on the Left sees Putin as anything other than the arch-enemy of the global working class. This is a man who helped engineer the liquidation of all the wealth of the former Soviet Union and its transfer into the hands of the Russian oligarchs who support his dictatorial rule.

Aside from his own enrichment and those of his cronies in offshore banking accounts, he has used that money to fund fascist-white nationalism throughout Europe.

And beyond the evidence of the direct links with Trump, Putin has systematically built ties to the US rightwing, including using the National Rifle Association as what a bipartisan US Senate report deemed a “foreign asset” for his regime.

At home, Putin has supported authoritarian Christianity that has terrorized gays and anyone deviating from that Christian norm, one reason the Right loves his regime. Here is how the GOP candidate for a Senate seat in Delaware described Putin - rightly identifying him as an exemplar of "Christian nationalism." Unsurprisingly, she prefers undemocratic racist theocracy to Biden's America. But at least she understands Putin more than some on the left.

Right Wing Watch @RightWingWatch

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP's candidate for Senate in 2020, has nothing but praise for Putin and "his Christian nationalist nation": "I identify more with Putin's Christian values than I do with Joe Biden."

And here is Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who has been enmeshed in Putin’s global machinations for years, who complains of the “demonization” of Russia and his sympathy for Putin needing to deal with the “ethnic problems” in Ukraine.

Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn just issued a statement blaming Biden because he “ignored and laughed at Putin’s legitimate security concerns, and legitimate ethnic problems in the Ukraine,” … while we continuing “to demonize Russia.”

This is a Fight to Support the Ukrainian People and Anti-War Movement in Russia

Putin is a singular global enemy of all that progressives value in the world, so supporting his defeat should be something we approach with gusto. That doesn’t mean supporting direct military action by the US government, but it should mean supporting the Ukrainians to fight Russia themselves and doing everything we can to encourage a strong antiwar movement in Russia itself.

As Biden said at his press conference, the goal is not US military action in Ukraine but supporting the Ukrainian people to resist Russian occupation while sanctioning Russia to the point where these kinds of protests swell demanding Putin withdraw.

Matthew Luxmoore @mjluxmoore

People marching through central Moscow this evening chanting “No to War!”

The effectiveness of sanctions will depend on Russians continuing to defy oppression to force Putin to back down.

Ali Özkök @Ozkok_A

Anti-war protest in St. #Petersburg, Russia.

Alexie Navalny who opposed Putin during the last election - and now is on trial as part of Putin's repression - denounces the Ukraine war as a distraction to cover up the "theft from Russian citizens" by Putin and his oligarchic allies. “I consider those who unleashed this war to be bandits and thieves. I went into politics to fight this criminal regime of thieves.”

Biden has announced significant economic sanctions against Russian financial institutions who support Putin, but as economist Gabriel Zucman (who has worked with Piketty and Saez on their inequality studies) argues, too many past sanctions packages have ended up hurting average Russians more than the economic elite because they don't reach those offshore accounts.

Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman

Problem with sanctions is they often end up hurting the poor more than the rich (in part because the rich can avoid them through offshore centers) Targeting offshore assets partly addresses the problem But ideal solution is to create transparency on wealth & target the very top

Putin's opposition in Russia is well-aware of the mass thievery by the oligarchic elite. Exposes like the Panama and Pandora Papers produced by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have shown the network of Putin and his cronies hiding their wealth in secret offshore tax haven sites and assets around the world.

We can support the protesters and show our solidarity by targeting those thieves as directly as possible.

A left that took Russian oppression seriously and wanted to focus a response against the Russian elite could help force them to back off on the Ukraine war. That Left would demand that the US and European governments end the secrecy of offshore and real estate transactions where Russian offshore wealth is held. Pass emergency legislation that forces every bank to reveal owners of every account and expose LLC shell companies to show the real owners.

The kicker is that you would suddenly see a lot of anti-Russian corporate liberals and neoconservatives hesitate since they know that would also expose a lot of their corporate benefactors and THEIR thefts in money-laundered accounts.

So a left movement for such targeted sanctions against the Russian elite would be a three-fer - (1) it would be the most effective tool to pressure the Russian elite to end the war, (2) it would help expose the misdeeds of our own oligarchs, and (3) it would force those opposing Russia to put up or shut up -- abandon their corporate donors or admit they don't care about democracy and freedom in Ukraine.

Ultimately, the conflict in Ukraine is not about the US vs. Russia. What is needed is an alliance of democratic people in the West to help defend the people of Ukraine that in turn inspires the people of Russia to build their own anti-war movement to stop the war. All of these forces need to be allied against Putin and his corrupt regime.

The end goal here is not a territorial gain for NATO but a democratic Ukraine and, in the end, a democratic Russia, as well as a new framework for peace and justice.

Moving Towards a New Framework for Collective Security

Many on the Left seem eager to enshrine a status quo of Russia withdrawing, while the West promises not to ever invite Ukraine into NATO in the future.

Democracy Now! @democracynow

The best solution to potentially prevent the Ukraine crisis from escalating into a global war? The U.S. should promise Ukraine won't be invited into NATO in exchange for President Putin withdrawing troops from Ukraine, says Greek parliament member @yanisvaroufakis.

So what does Ukraine get in exchange in this scenario? How about the nuclear weapons they gave up in 1994 in exchange for Russia promising not to invade (a treaty promise Russia violated). With their nukes back, they won't need to be in NATO to deter Russian invasions in the future.

If Ukraine gets no real promise of future defense in the future, the message to every country will be to get their own nukes, by hook or by crook, since Russia will have proven that any country can extract what they want through brute military force.

Many on the left have a Cold War antipathy to NATO and prefer some “European” solution. But I’m unclear why a European collective security agreement is somehow better than one that also includes the United States. No one within NATO has invaded the other so it seems a relative success.

The imagination of many on the left seems horribly truncated at times, but what we should be demanding is expanding who is included in mutual collective security guarantees, not contracting that promise. The United Nations is itself largely a Cold War relic with its vetos for the US, Russia and China (and France and Britain to highlight its creaky historic irrelvance).

Possibly the better way forward is to call for more and more nations to join NATO as the real route to peace, given the complete failure of the United Nations to prevent war. Drop both "European" and "North Atlantic" and move towards a "Democratic Nations Treaty Organization" banning invasion against other members and promising collective security if any member is attacked by outside threats. Open it up to as many nations as possible who are willing to commit to the twin principles of internal democracy and collective security globally. In the ideal, this would include a newly democratic Russia after the people there toss Putin out for his abuses at home and abroad.

If nothing else, Ukraine should end the dead Cold War framework for global governance where relics like the United Nations stand in for a real debate on what institutions we need to move towards real global democracy, justice, and peace.