Ukraine

We are raising money to fund this speaker tour. Please donate here and share around. Tour dates Eventbrites to register for meetings here • 5 March: Reception from 5pm, London, Bread and Roses, 68a Clapham Manor Street, SW4 6DZ • 7 March: Workers' Liberty International Women’s Day meeting, London, 7.30pm, Marchmont Centre, 62 Marchmont St, WC1N 1AB • 8 March: Speaking at a fringe meeting at TUC Women's Conference • 9 March: Public meeting, Nottingham, 7pm, Mechanics Institute, 3 North Sherwood St, NG1 4EZ • 10 March: Public meeting, Sheffield, 7pm, Quaker Meeting House, 10 St James Street, S1...

"Victory to Ukraine!" — flyer to be distributed at Stop the War's demonstration, 25 February 2023. Download here Text of flyer below. Vladimir Putin’s imperialist Russian state is renewing its offensive against Ukraine, ramping up its war right across the Donbas front, using tens of thousands of newly-mobilised conscripts. Putin has no intention of stopping his war any time soon. Stop the War (StW) campaigns for the Western states to stop sending arms to Ukraine and for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations. The StW call to end arms shipments to Ukraine, if carried through by the West...

On Wednesday 7 February, two people made speeches about Ukraine: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Roger Waters. The Morning Star (editorial 10 February) had no doubt which it preferred. According to the paper, Zelenskyy’s visit to Britain was “to soften up public opinion for escalation of Nato’s proxy war with Russia over Ukraine” and was “carefully choreographed”. It suggested “Zelenskyy may have got some tips from Boris Johnson” about something or other, which the paper didn’t bother to specify. The editorial quoted the Russian embassy in London, warning that “bloodshed and the next round of...

Solidarity has long argued that sections of the left have fallen into particular form of antisemitism. Starting from ultra-hostility to Israel which goes beyond criticising the real misdeeds of its governments and into demonising it as the world’s hyper-imperialism and hyper-racism, they end up reflexively hostile to all “Zionists”, i.e. all Jews who have some default or instinctive affinity with Israel, however critical. Readers who wonder why should look at how the same sections of the left portray the war in Ukraine. In this portrayal of the conflict, Ukraine takes on many of the political...

As the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 approaches it is worth taking a balance sheet of the war, its human costs, political consequences and the left’s response. Ukraine was a poor country before the war began, but its GDP slumped by 45% in 2022. Well over 100,000 residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed. 8 million Ukrainian refugees are now registered across Europe, from a pre-invasion population of 44mn; a further 5mn, at least, are internally displaced. In October 2022 Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Schmyhal estimated the cost of re...

Everyone knows that the only way to end the war in Ukraine — to really end it — is to ensure a Ukrainian military victory over the Russian aggressor. A decisive victory by the Ukrainians would almost certainly lead to the toppling of the Putin regime. The result would be a de-fanged Russia, one that poses far less of a threat to its neighbours. Everyone also knows that Ukraine needs the latest tanks and aircraft to achieve that goal. The Russians have been hurling their best weaponry at Ukrainian cities. Ukraine has been fighting back with what they have on hand, mostly Soviet-era tanks and...

Olenka and Brie, two activists from the Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialniy Rukh (Social Movement, SR), are visiting Britain in March. Their visit is hosted by Workers’ Liberty. The comrades will meet activists, trade unionists, socialists and feminists as they briefly tour the country, speaking at conferences and public meetings. No one on the British left should understate the significance of what they have to say or misunderstand the urgency of their message. The comrades of SR have been active in countless campaigns against the Ukrainian capitalist class. And now they have the...

Etymologically, the Ukrainian word Holodomor is composed of holod, hunger, and demoryty, which has no direct equivalent in French and can be rendered as 'to let perish deliberately'. In this formulation, intentionality is decisive: to allow someone to perish is to murder.

“Not a single Labour politician”, complains Yuri Prasad in Socialist Worker of 3 February , “is today prepared to speak out openly against Nato’s flooding of Ukraine with hi-tech tanks and missiles. Whatever their private misgivings about the way arms shipments heighten the danger of nuclear conflict, none will join the platform of a meeting to say so.” Straight off the bat: the big issue of militarism in Ukraine, for SW , is not the armed-to-the-teeth Russian invasion, but the provision of (actually so far pretty limited) weaponry to help Ukraine resist. In an article calling for an anti-war...

German Leopard 2, American M1 Abrams and British Challenger tanks, together with highly effective armoured vehicles from the US and Sweden, have finally been promised to Ukraine. Lt. Col. Voloshin, a Ukrainian tank commander fighting in eastern Ukraine, says his unit is using Soviet T-64 and T-72 tanks dating back to the early 1980s. The Wall Street Journal quote him complaining: “For these heaps of metal, one day of fighting is followed by four days of repairs.” The Ukrainian army really needs modern tanks and has been asking for these weapons for many months. German and US objections to...