“Helping” Ukraine

(From May of 2025. Since I wrote this its come out that Ukraine has lost 40% of its pre-war workforce, and Russian hackers in August claim to have found Uraine has lost 1.7 million people, staggering losses all due to the ruinous proxy wwar the US/NATO has forced Ukraine into.)

I wrote this on Facebook a few months ago in response to a Scottish grad student, a “United Secretariat”/Fourth International (the largest Trotskyist international today) member, and a fervent Ukraine supporter. I’ve modified it slightly.

So the Third Campists talk about how we can ” aid Ukraine without helping NATO”. This makes no sense whatsoever to me. The Ukraine war was always a NATO war from the beginning. US politicians, from Lindsay Graham on, are openly calling the conflict a proxy war. Several months ago the Wall Street Journal, quoting high level US govt figures, said the US intention was never to help Ukraine but to hurt Russia. More recently the New York Times featured a bombshell article on how the Ukraine War was directed from a US base in Germany.

The war could have ended in March of 2022 when the Zelensky regime was close to reaching a peace deal in Istanbul. Boris Johnson met with Zelensky twice, told him not to negotiate, and promised him all the weapons he would need to beat Russia. So the war continued, with hundreds of thousands of people dead . Lindsay Graham famously said, ” the Ukrainians are brave people, they’ll fight to the last Ukrainian”. He’s been doing everything he can to make sure this happens and Graham, along with the US ruling class,have an ocean of blood on their hands.

The five regions, the vast majority of which are Russian speaking, voted by wide margins to join the Russian Federation. I followed the voting. Yes, Donetsk/ Lugansk voted 98% to join Russia, keep in mind Ukraine threatened ten years in jail for anyone who voted, they went through a bitter civil war in which 14,000 people, mostly Russian, died, and at the time Ukraine was shelling downtown Donetsk, killing dozens of civilians. Why the hell would they want to be part of Ukraine at that point? Independent journalists such as Patrick Lancaster and Alina Lipp covered the voting, it appears the chain of custody was observed and the elections were legitimate. CNN stories about people being forced to vote at gunpoint were nonsense , like almost everything else CNN says

The Third Campists talk about ” agency” and ” self determination”. Shouldn’t Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson have those rights as well or does ” agency” only matter when it aligns with the needs of US imperialism?

I’m a Trot myself, I do think the Old Man’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, his development of the law of combined and uneven development, his analysis of fascism and the Transitional Program have a lot to offer a revolutionary movement but the insane level of sectarianism in the movement, the endemic liberalism and the CIA//US State Dept aligned foreign policy, especially of the so called ” Fourth International” is beyond sickening.