“STOP the War” is a coalition of British left-wing groups established in 2001 to campaign against the Iraq War. The organisation has often been accused of being sympathetic towards (or at least, conspicuously quiet about) despotic foreign leaders with the good grace to be non-Western. Its

response to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis

, issued earlier today, does little to rebut that criticism. In it, Lindsey German, the group’s convenor, sets out ten things to remember about the current crisis. The list is reproduced below, with your correspondent’s comments.



1) Who is the aggressor? The obvious answer seems to be that it is Russia, but that is far from the whole picture. At the end of the Cold War, as agreed with the western powers, Russia disbanded the Warsaw Pact, its military alliance. But the United States and NATO broke their word to Russia, by adding most of Eastern Europe and the Balkan states to their own military alliance, and by building military bases along Russia's southern border. Ever since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the European Union (EU) and NATO have been intent on surrounding Russia with military bases and puppet regimes sympathetic to the West, often installed by 'colour revolutions'. In military expenditure, the US and its NATO allies outspend and outgun the Russian state many times over.



This expresses the Russian leadership’s victimhood complex at its most self-pitying. NATO’s decision not to disband after the Cold War was comprehensively explained in its 1991 Strategic Concept. Also, NATO membership, unlike that of the Warsaw Pact, was and is voluntary, and based on democratic consent. Members are free to move in and out of the alliance and its central command (as France has, for example). Compare that with Czechoslovakia, which on half-intimating that it might leave the Warsaw Pact in 1968 was promptly invaded by Soviet forces. Ultimately, the democratic and liberal principles of NATO led it to victory in the Cold War. Even Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin’s modernising predecessor as Russian premier, accepted that.



Ms German’s talk of “puppet regimes” is even more bizarre. Is she referring to the Eastern EU states that have democratically chosen to join the EU and NATO? Or is she referring to the post-“orange revolution”, post-Yanukovych Ukraine now being forged by liberal protesters on the streets of Kiev? Or is she referring to post-“rose revolution” Georgia, which briefly flirted with the possibility of NATO membership before being invaded by Russia?



As for the question of military expenditure, it is worth noting firstly that no US troops have been involved in the current crisis, and secondly that the US has been remarkably reticent in its reaction: wary about supporting the protesters and hesitant in its rhetoric. Quite why Ms German thought it important to “remind” us of its military strength in the Ukrainian context is not clear.



2) The war in Afghanistan, now in its thirteenth year, was fought after the West lost control of its erstwhile Taliban allies, who the US had supported in order to bring down a pro-Russian regime.



Again, it is not obvious how this relates to the Ukraine crisis. Here, again, Ms German parrots the Kremlin’s paranoia—suggesting that the US attacked the Taliban to undermine Moscow, not because the Taliban had harboured the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.



3) US secretary of state John Kerry has made strong statements condemning Russia, and British prime minister David Cameron has argued against intervention and for national sovereignty. No one should take lessons from people who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and bombed Libya. Last year, these war makers wanted to launch their fourth major military intervention in a decade, this time against Syria. They were only stopped from doing so by the unprecedented vote against military action in parliament, with MPs undoubtedly influenced by the widespread anti-war sentiment amongst the British public. Nor should we place any value on concerns for national sovereignty and international law expressed by people like Obama and Kerry, who launch illegal drone attacks against civilians in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and beyond.



First, neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Kerry “invaded” Afghanistan or Iraq. Mr Kerry actually opposed the war in Iraq. Second, the real “war makers” in Syria are neither the US nor Britain, but Bashar Assad. Third, the vast majority of MPs voted in favour of keeping military action against Mr Assad on the table. Fourth, many millions of anti-government protesters have marched on the streets of British and American cities—and mayors and the police have protected their rights to do so. Their counterparts in Moscow, Damascus and Kiev enjoy no such liberties. Fifth, that Ms German lambasts Mr Obama and Mr Kerry over drones while pardoning Mr Putin’s military belligerence suggests, at best, an odd order of priorities.



4) United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon's statement that Russia is threatening the peace and security of Europe ignores a number of questions, such as the role of western imperialism in the region -- including direct intervention in the formation of the latest Ukrainian government -- and the role of fascists and far right parties in Kiev and elsewhere in the country. As in all these situations, we need to look at the background to what is going on.



Ms German needs to expand on her definition of “western imperialism”—if that means “autonomous democratic decisions to align with the West”, she is right. But her tone suggests otherwise. It is also notable that (echoing the Kremlin) she highlights the role of far-right protesters in Ukraine’s revolution, without once noting the prominence of nationalist and authoritarian forces in contemporary Russia, or the overwhelmingly liberal attitudes of most Maidan protesters.



5) The European Union is not an impartial observer in this. It too has extended its membership among the east European states, expressly on the basis of a privatising, neoliberal agenda which is closely allied to NATO expansion. Its Member State foreign ministers, and its special representative Baroness Ashton, have directly intervened, seeking to tie Ukraine to the EU by an agreement of association. When this was abandoned by the former president Yanukovich, the EU backed his removal and helped put in place a new government which agreed to EU aims.



This fails to note several things: the efforts of Ukrainian protesters who (with good reason) see the EU as the antithesis of despotism, cronyism and economic stagnation, the aggressive interventions in Ukrainian affairs by Moscow and the grotesque irony of siding with Russia over the EU in debates about privatisation. Ms German also wrongly suggests that the democratic Eastern European nations that have chosen to join the EU and NATO are mindless dupes—a claim in no way borne out by reality.



6) The United States is centrally involved. It oversaw the removal of Yanukovich, and its neocons are desperately trying to develop an excuse for war with the Russians. Neocon former presidential candidate John McCain visited Ukraine and addressed the demonstrations in Kiev. As did Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the US state department. Nuland is most famous for her recently leaked phone conversation about micromanaging regime change in Ukraine, in which she declared 'fuck the EU.' Her husband is neocon Robert Kagan, who was co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, the ideological parent of the Bush/Blair war on Iraq.



Would that be the same John McCain who backed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty? Who wants to reduce the US nuclear arsenal? Who thinks the US should normalise relations with Cuba? Some neo-con. Ms German also chooses to cite an off-the-cuff conversation allegedly intercepted and leaked by Russian secret services—without quite explaining why it should “remind” us of anything in particular. In fact, Ms German cites a lot of things not obviously relevant to her chosen topic; the only unifying characteristic being that they show the West in a bad light.



7) The talk of democracy from the west hides support for far right and fascist forces in the Ukraine. They have a direct lineage from the collaborators with the Nazis from 1941 onwards who were responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Jewish sources in Ukraine today express fear at the far right gangs patrolling the streets attacking racial minorities. Yet the western media has remained all but silent about these curious EU allies.



Again, Ms German repeats the claim that the anti-Yanukovych protesters are “far-right and fascist”. In this recent letter, academic authorities on Ukrainian politics from the Ukraine, Poland, Canada, Germany and the United States declared themselves “disturbed” by the “misrepresentation” of “the role, salience and impact of Ukraine’s far right within the protest movement.” They go on to claim that this coverage is “unwarranted and misleading”, and that: “By fundamentally discrediting one of the most impressive mass actions of civil disobedience in the history of Europe, such reports help to provide a pretext for Moscow’s political involvement, or, perhaps, even for a Russian military intervention into Ukraine, like in Georgia in 2008.”

8)

The historical divisions within Ukraine are complex and difficult to overcome. But it is clear that many Russian speakers, there and in the Crimea, do not oppose Russia. These countries have the right to independence, but the nature of that independence is clearly highly contested. There is also the reality of potential civil war between east and west Ukraine. The very deep divisions will only be exacerbated by war.









This comment is perhaps the easiest to rebut: Ms German is mistaking the Ukrainian protest movement for the aggressors in the current crisis. The new government in no way threatens Russian-speakers in the Crimea. Moscow, not Kiev, is the preeminent belligerent thus far.





9)

Those who demand anti-war activity here in Britain against Russia are ignoring the history and the present reality in Ukraine and Crimea. The B52 liberals only oppose wars when their own rulers do so, and support the ones carried out by our governments. The job of any anti-war movement is to oppose its own government's role in these wars, and to explain what that government and its allies are up to.









Ms German does not enlighten us on how, precisely, the British government is guilty of “war” against Ukraine or Russia. She also fails to explain why the “job” of an “anti-war” movement is to attack its own passive government while parroting the arguments of a thuggish, illiberal power threatening its neighbour with invasion.





10)

The crisis in Ukraine has much to do with the situation in Syria, where major powers are intervening in the civil war. The defeat for intervention last year has infuriated the neocons. They are determined to start new wars. After the US failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the neocons are looking for a defeat of Russia over Ukraine, and by extension, China too. The situation is developing into a new cold war. The rivalry between the west and Russia threatens to explode into a much larger war than has been seen for many years.









Again, Ms German conveniently ignores interventions in Syria by those “major powers” that she finds more palatable than the US or Britain—Iran and Russia. That, and her comment about China, suggests a preference for illiberal non-Western powers over liberal Western ones. It is an oddly one-sided comparison: she delights in listing Western flaws (real and imagined) while unquestioningly accepting anti-Western dogma. For one who leads an organisation committed to “stopping the war”, it is a fatal error.