BAR | As the Left in the US struggles to hold to a clear ideological line against the US empire in its proxy war using Ukraine against Russia, the understanding of how this conflict arose has been lost amid the discourse of needing to either present a “balanced” view of the conflict, or to accuse anti-imperialists who indicate US/EU/NATO’s complicity, as “Putin’s apologists.” This kind of mealy-mouthed, spineless analysis is expected from those who always support the empire and its bloody deeds. But these days, more and more of this criticism of anti-imperialists is coming from some of the so-called US left. This group is engaged in a bizarre public display of supporting Ukraine, a display that defies logic and the facts surrounding the conflict.
As an example, the Ukraine Solidarity Network was created by Howie Hawkins, one-time Green Party presidential candidate and alleged leftist, and has been signed onto by dozens of people who are prominent in some way in US progressive politics. Among the Network’s absurd positions are their demand for reparations for the people of Ukraine, their support for Ukraine’s right to receive as many arms as they can without question or strings attached, and their demand for the IMF to cancel Ukraine's debts.
Are these demands made on any basis of fact? No. When you consider that information about actual events that led up to this conflict are easily located with the most cursory search, there is no way that anyone can conclude that Ukraine is the victim of some terrible crime committed by Russia, let alone that they are owed reparations and deserve all the weapons they could want to fight them.
What’s more, the paper trail that documents the lead-up to this conflict includes sources that are the publications of the empire, so-called mainstream, sources that are neither left-leaning nor anti-war in any substantive way. This, I believe, lends a level of credibility to their documentation that some would easily dismiss as “biased” if it were provided in left-leaning sources.
For example, if members of the Ukraine Solidarity Networkhad bothered to look, they could have found this February 24, 2022 article from the Yale MacMillan Center, which details the scuttled negotiations to completely avoid the conflict in Ukraine.
The article pointedly notes that:
“More than anything else, it was the refusal of Ukraine to implement the provisions of Minsk 2 – especially the provision that would give the predominantly Russian-speaking regions a special constitutional status – that caused Russia to threaten military action against Ukraine. Time after time in recent weeks, Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov made it clear in meetings and press conferences that the key to resolving the situation in and around Ukraine was the full implementation of Minsk 2.”
An unprovoked attack on Ukraine? Even the empire admits that this is not true, and goes further to document that the conflict could have been avoided entirely had Ukraine simply adhered to the agreement they signed. Furthermore, the same article confirms that the civil war between Kiyv and those Russian-speaking regions in Ukraine - Donbas and Luhansk - that began in 2014 was also an important factor in this current conflict, as more than 700,000 of the people in those regions were granted Russian citizenship while they “...for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian) regime.”
If the Yale MacMillan Center can acknowledge the centrality of these issues to this currency conflict, how is that these Latte Leftists dismiss them as insignificant?
But why did Ukraine refuse to adhere to the agreements, one might ask? This is actually an important piece of information that also has a very clear answer if anyone is interested in knowing it. An article in Modern Diplomacy reveals that, at least according to the former Chancellor of Germany Angele Merkel, the leaders who signed onto the Minsk Accords who were not representing Russia (the leaders of Germany, France, and Ukraine) never had any intention of adhering to the agreements, as they were just a ploy to “...buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today,” Merkel said, “Ukraine in 2014-2015 and Ukraine today are not the same.”
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