Avi Lewis vs. Yves Engler: How NDP leadership contenders might have debated Ukraine's resistance to Putin's aggression

 Introduction

Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine, now approaching its fourth anniversary, is the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. Ukraine’s heroic resistance to its much larger aggressor has managed to limit Putin’s conquests to 20 percent of its territory, most of which Russia has occupied and illegally annexed in addition to its seizure of Crimea in 2014.

Ukraine’s defense has suffered from the reluctance of other European governments and the United States, the source of much of its armament, to confront a nuclear-armed Russia. But it is also weakened by the failure of much of the left – of pacifist, Social Democratic or Stalinist origin – to mobilize solidarity with the working people and oppressed of Ukraine. I have posted on this blog many critiques of the fallacious arguments invoked in defense of this outrageous default of the Western Left.

This conflict within the Left is reflected in the NDP leadership campaign, a focus of the major foreign policy debate in Canada at present. Hoping to put its international policy positions in the forefront, the party’s traditional left opposition tendency, the Socialist Caucus, was quick to present Yves Engler as its candidate for NDP leader. Engler is well-known as a trenchant critic of others in the Left – the NDP, trade-union leaders, and some NGOs – for their adaptation to and support of U.S. imperialism and its allies such as Canada. His book Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada, is a well-documented devastating critique of many of the dominant “progressive” forces generally identified with Canada’s Left.

However, Engler is not consistently anti-imperialist. I would define his approach as campist, not internationalist. That is, he tends to support or favour countries and their governments that for whatever reason are in conflict with the United States and its imperialist allies. In Left, Right, Engler says “an essential element of a left foreign policy analysis should be ‘first, do no harm’,” a liberal-pacifist concept that differs from solidarity with all those exploited and oppressed by foreign imperialist powers. This leads him to oppose any anti-imperialist struggle by a nation that has sought aid and weapons from other imperialist powers, Ukraine currently serving as his principal target. His Policy Platform 2026 accordingly states: “No more funds for the Ukraine regime…. The Ukraine regime functions as a belligerent in the U.S.-led Western proxy war aimed at exhausting a geopolitical rival. Halting all Canadian support (material, diplomatic, military) reduces the capacity of a conflict that sacrifices lives for NATO objectives.” His blog, similarly, is replete with misrepresentations of the geopolitical nature of the Russia-Ukraine conflict as an inter-imperialist war, notwithstanding the clear and mounting evidence that Trump is aligned with Putin in pressuring Ukraine to yield to Russia’s territorial conquests. Notably absent is any recognition of the democratic rights and struggles of the Ukrainian people in opposition to the Russian imperialist assault.

Engler and the Socialist Caucus mounted an independent campaign that managed to meet the rigorous financial and other requirements imposed by the party bureaucracy, before they applied for his authorization as a candidate. However, in the end he was undemocratically barred by the anonymous members of the party’s vetting committee, largely on political grounds, many quite spurious and disclosed only when Engler revealed his correspondence with the committee. Engler’s exclusion was a serious blow at those NDP members and supporters who would have welcomed an exchange over his views – and a challenge to some of them – that could have benefited the party and political discourse on the left in Canada.

Engler argues, however, that his exclusion has deprived the leadership campaign of any debate on international policy, and claims that he alone offers a progressive alternative. I will say more in a later post about the differences among the candidates, but Engler’s claim is refuted most clearly in the case of the Russia-Ukraine war. In start contrast to his opposition to Ukraine’s defense, as noted above, all five official leadership candidates have expressed support for Ukraine – and none more clearly than Avi Lewis, one of the major contenders.

Yves Engler is now touring Canada on the theme “The Failure of Social Democracy: NDP Support for Militarism & Imperialism.” His special target is Avi Lewis, the only leadership candidate offering a platform that would radically transform the NDP as a grass-roots membership-based party with a program that promotes public alternatives to private profit-based production and services. Engler slanders Lewis as a “war monger” for his support of Ukraine.

What follows, below, with thanks, is an excellent critique by Duncan Chapel, a Scottish supporter of the Fourth International, of the campist leftists opposed to support for Ukraine self-determination and resistance to Russia’s imperialist assault. It was published first on his Red Mole Substack as Part 3 of a series of posts entitled “With Washington and Moscow.” Chapel explains:

“With Washington and Moscow” examines how a section of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documents the settlement terms, traces the political trajectory of organisations that enabled this outcome, amplifies Ukrainian socialist voices, and argues for an internationalism that sides with the oppressed against all imperialisms.

I link to parts 1 and 2 of his series at the conclusion of this text.

 Richard Fidler

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You Handed Us Over: Ukrainian and Russian 

socialists judge the Western left

For three years, sections of the Western left debated Ukraine. They debated it in conference halls and on Zoom calls, in editorial meetings and on podcast circuits. They debated whether it was a proxy war or a real one, whether arms prolonged the slaughter or shortened it, whether NATO expansion provoked the invasion or merely preceded it. They debated with enormous confidence. They debated with almost no reference to what Ukrainians themselves were saying.

That era is finished. The Trump-Putin settlement documented in Parts 1 and 2 of this series has delivered the outcome the “anti-war” left demanded: negotiations, territorial concessions, the rehabilitation of Russian aggression as a fait accompli. And the people who were handed over in the process have something to say about it.

This instalment inverts the usual dynamic. It is not another Western commentary on Ukraine. It is the verdict of Ukrainian and Russian socialists on a Western left that claimed to speak in their name while functionally abandoning them to partition between empires. These are not victims pleading for sympathy. They are political actors, organisers and theorists fighting a war on two fronts simultaneously, and their judgement is devastating.

The second front

The first thing the Western “proxy war” left never understood, or never wanted to understand, is that Ukrainian socialists are not Zelensky cheerleaders. They never were. From the earliest weeks of the invasion, organisations like Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) articulated what they call the “two-front” struggle: against Russian military aggression and against the Zelensky government’s wartime assault on workers’ rights. This distinction matters enormously, because it demolishes the campist alibi. You cannot claim to reject “both sides” when the people you’re refusing to support are already fighting both sides.

The second front is real and it is vicious. In July 2022, while Ukrainian soldiers held the line east of Kharkiv, the Verkhovna Rada passed Law 5371. The legislation introduced “contractual labour relations” for enterprises with fewer than 250 employees, effectively gutting the Labour Code for roughly 70 per cent of the Ukrainian workforce. Employers can now bypass collective agreements entirely, negotiating individual contracts that strip standard protections. The Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine condemned it. The ITUC and ETUC characterised it as a “persistent attack on trade unions, motivated by oligarchs behind the ruling party.” A Ukrainian soldier’s social media post, circulated by Sotsialnyi Rukh, captured the fury: while miners, metallurgists, teachers and doctors defend Ukraine’s freedom at the front, “fattened rear rats in the Verkhovna Rada are stabbing us in the back.”

It gets worse. The proposed 2024-2025 Draft Labour Code aims to institutionalise wartime restrictions as permanent features of the economy. Vitalii Dudin, Sotsialnyi Rukh’s leader, calls it “the greatest attack on workers’ rights” in the country’s history. Since the full-scale invasion began, 2,747 workers have been injured and 677 killed on the job; many have not received state-promised compensation. Trade union organisers have been conscripted. Union properties used to shelter thousands of internal refugees face seizure. Organising a protest under martial law, Dudin reports, is “much more emotionally taxing” when activists must prove their right to stand on the street.

Then there is the debt trap. Ukraine’s public debt has exploded from 51 per cent of GDP before the invasion to over 104 per cent by late 2025. The IMF’s $15.6 billion Extended Fund Facility comes wrapped in 325 conditionalities: privatisation of state enterprises, pension cuts, further “flexibilisation” of the labour market. The 2024 privatisation of the United Mining and Chemical Company, a strategic titanium producer, was sold at barely above the starting bid to a single auction participant. Socialist critics call it “accumulation by dispossession” dressed up as modernisation. The US-Ukraine minerals deal grants American capital 50 per cent revenue sharing and first refusal rights over Ukrainian lithium and titanium reserves. Dudin describes this bluntly as “the desire of US capital for unrestricted access to Ukrainian mineral resources.”

And the conscription crisis exposes a class dimension the government would rather conceal. Proposals for “economic reservation,” allowing businesses to exempt employees from military service for a substantial fee, mean in practice that the wealthy buy their way out while the popular classes fight. Sotsialnyi Rukh frames this correctly: it is a “war for the poor.” Families of soldiers who have been fighting since February 2022 without rotation have protested in over eleven cities.

This is the reality the campist left could never accommodate. Ukrainian socialists demand weapons to fight Russia and they demand the repeal of Law 5371. They want arms for self-defence and they want debt cancellation. They fight the invasion and they fight the IMF. No comfortable “both sides” formula can contain this. It requires something the Stop the War Coalition and the DSA International Committee have never been willing to offer: solidarity with a struggle that refuses to fit their pre-existing geopolitical categories.

The verdict

Ukrainian socialists have not been shy about naming names. Their critique of the Western left is specific, sourced, and furious.

Denys Pilash, political scientist and Sotsialnyi Rukh member, has been the sharpest voice. In his March 2025 interview with Federico Fuentes for Links, Pilash characterised the Trump-Zelensky meeting as an attempt to “humiliate not just Zelensky but Ukraine and its people,” with Trump and Vance acting as “bullies taking the side of another bully.” But Pilash reserves his most pointed criticism for the Western progressives who support such a deal out of a desire to end the slaughter. This thinking, he argues, represents a “clear break with leftist politics,” substituting class analysis with “cynical realpolitik.”

Then Pilash asks the question that silences the room: “If this is a proxy war, on whose behalf is Ukraine now waging it? The US is clearly not on Ukraine’s side; it is converging with Russia.” The “proxy war” framework didn’t just misread the conflict. It became obsolete the moment Washington and Moscow sat down together to carve up Ukraine between them. And the organisations that spent three years deploying that framework had no analytical tools left to understand what was happening.

Pilash connects Ukraine’s partition to a broader “global axis of extreme reaction” led by Trump, Putin and Netanyahu, defined by a “chauvinistic, exclusionary vision” that seeks to dismantle the social gains of the twentieth century. If the left is “OK” with this axis’s plans for Ukraine, he argues, they are implicitly endorsing similar plans for the Palestinian people, since both involve “imperialist powers unilaterally deciding the fate of smaller nations.” The selectivity of campist anti-imperialism, which claims to support Palestine while abandoning Ukraine, collapses under this analysis.

Taras Bilous, editor of Commons and a soldier in the Territorial Defence Forces, set the terms of this debate as early as February 2022 with his “Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv,” published in Dissent. By 2025, his frustration had deepened into something closer to contempt. Writing in Jacobin in November, Bilous observed that “Western promises of helping Ukraine fight until final victory increasingly ring hollow,” while much of the international left had retreated into “pacifist formulas” that blamed NATO and the “neo-Nazi oligarchic regime in Kyiv.” He and his colleagues at Commons frame the Trump-Putin negotiations as nothing less than a “partition of Ukraine over the heads of Ukrainians.”

Bilous’s position is grounded in something the Western left often forgets: physical reality. “If we didn’t join the armed forces,” he told International Viewpoint, “the left in Ukraine would cease to exist.” This is not theoretical. Russian occupation means the liquidation of independent trade unions, socialist organisations, feminist groups, and every democratic space that Ukrainian workers have built since independence. When the SWP or the Morning Star call for a “negotiated peace,” they are calling for the physical destruction of the very movements they claim to stand alongside.

Hanna Perekhoda, academic and activist, has contributed the theoretical architecture for understanding why the Western left got it wrong. She identifies “Westsplaining” as a form of intellectual colonialism, an “epistemic injustice” that silences those directly affected by Russian aggression. Abstract pacifism, she argues, leads to “irresponsible solutions in practice.” Perekhoda directly addresses the DSA and other Western organisations: “Those who imagined ‘NATO aggression in Ukraine,’ and who could not see Russian aggression, only opposed Western interference, while ignoring, or even supporting, the engagement of Russia.”

And Oleksandr Kyselov, writing the most significant Ukrainian socialist document of 2025 in International Viewpoint, provides the strategic framework for what comes next. His concept of the “least unjust peace” acknowledges the unbearable military reality while refusing to surrender socialist principles. Kyselov directs particular criticism at the Left Group in the European Parliament, which with few exceptions abstained or voted against peace resolutions for Ukraine in late 2025, preferring to “denounce militarism” while an imperialist aggressor continued its assault. The Western left, he argues, focused on “blaming Europe for sabotaging diplomatic efforts” rather than recognising the existential threat posed by what he correctly identifies as the Kremlin’s “neo-fascist regime.”

Voices from the other side of the wire

The Russian anti-war left occupies a position that makes the campist “both sides” posture look not merely wrong but obscene. These are people who face years in prison for saying what Andrew Murray and Lindsey German are free to refuse to say from the comfort of London platforms. And the repression is not abstract. It is statistical, systematic, and escalating.

Consider the numbers. In 2021, the last pre-war year, approximately 40 per cent of convictions in politically motivated cases resulted in imprisonment. By the first half of 2025, that figure had surged to 67 per cent. The average sentence in political cases rose from six years to eight. OVD-Info reports over 20,000 detentions for anti-war stances. The state has shifted from policing protest to something qualitatively different: the permanent removal of dissenters from society. Sentences for anti-war activity now frequently exceed those for murder. Ruslan Sidiki, convicted of railway sabotage aimed at slowing weapons transport to the front, received twenty-nine years. Not a deterrent. A message.

The Russian Socialist Movement understood this trajectory. Forced to dissolve its formal structures in early 2025 after being designated a “foreign agent,” the RSM issued a landmark statement titled “Against Half-Solidarity and False Pacifism” before its suppression. The RSM condemned Western leftists who claim to oppose “both sides,” arguing that such a position effectively sides with the aggressor by denying the victim the means of self-defence. Their analysis is unequivocal: Putin’s invasion is a “war of colonisation” in which the former colony refuses to remain a colony. “The only way for Russians to end this war,” they argued, “is to convince soldiers to stop fighting.” Their seven strategic demands are worth listing because they represent the precise opposite of what the campist left offered: increased arms transfers to Ukraine, complete Russian withdrawal to 1991 borders, cancellation of Ukraine’s debt, asylum for deserters and dissidents, elite-targeted sanctions, and the abolition of secret diplomacy. Every demand places Russian socialists in direct confrontation with their own state. Every demand was ignored by the Western organisations that claimed to speak for peace.

Ilya Budraitskis, political theorist and key figure in the Russian anti-war left now writing from exile, has provided an influential anatomy of the division within Russian socialism. He distinguishes between “socialism from above,” the top-down statist politics of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that has enthusiastically backed the invasion, and “socialism from below,” which views emancipation as the self-activity of the masses. Budraitskis has directly challenged what he calls “American exceptionalism” on the left: the view that “anything the US does is bad” is simply too crude to grasp a reality in which “what we are actually seeing is Russian imperialism.” He describes the campist position as the “anti-imperialism of idiots”: a framework that ignores the agency of Eastern European peoples and the specific historical context of Russian expansionism.

The Feminist Anti-War Resistance represents something genuinely new. Founded on 25 February 2022, one day after the invasion, FAS rejected the hierarchical leadership models that the Russian state has historically been able to decapitate. Instead it operates as a horizontal, cell-based network, uniting over 45 separate feminist groups across Russia and abroad by late 2022. Decisions are made through collective voting. There is no central leader to arrest. This is not a design choice born of ideology alone; it is a survival strategy.

FAS’s tactical innovation deserves attention because it demonstrates what resistance looks like when every legal avenue has been closed. Their campaigns are designed around what they call “depersonalised and decentralised resistance.” Activists write anti-war slogans on banknotes that pass through thousands of hands and cannot be traced. The “Women in Black” campaign encourages women to wear mourning clothes in public spaces as a sign of grief for the war: try criminalising that. Zhenskaya Pravda (Women’s Truth), their samizdat newspaper, mimics the aesthetic of free neighbourhood tabloids to avoid suspicion while carrying radical anti-war content. These are the tactics of people who have absorbed the lesson that visible protest means prison and have adapted accordingly.

The ideological confrontation with the Western left came to a head early. In 2022, 151 international feminists signed a manifesto titled “Feminist Resistance Against War,” calling for “militaristic de-escalation” and an end to arms transfers. FAS and their Ukrainian counterparts rejected this immediately, viewing it as a demand for Ukrainian surrender. They signed a counter-manifesto: “The Right to Resist.” The title alone is a rebuke. It insists on the legitimacy of armed self-defence for the oppressed, and it was signed by people who face arrest for saying so.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of exile has become its own form of resistance. “The Ark” (Kovcheg), founded by human rights lawyer Anastasia Burakova, is the largest initiative supporting Russians who left because of their anti-war stance. The project serves half a million people. It maintains 52 beds in hubs across Yerevan and Warsaw for activists who arrive with nothing. It has processed over 120,000 legal requests. It has provided psychological counselling to 5,000 emigrants dealing with the trauma of displacement. And it operates under the constant shadow of transnational repression: in countries with visa-free regimes like Georgia and Armenia, the risk of kidnapping or extrajudicial pressure remains real. The FSB uses informer networks to track high-profile activists. It uses the families of exiles inside Russia as hostages. Safety is relative. Exile is not freedom.

And then there is the radical underground. The “Stop the Wagons” movement has sabotaged railway lines in Russia and Belarus to slow the transport of ammunition to the front. The “Solidarity Zone” project, founded in 2022, provides legal and financial aid to those who have engaged in direct action against military infrastructure, currently supporting over 40 individuals. Unlike traditional human rights organisations that defend only “peaceful” protesters, Solidarity Zone recognises that when peaceful picketers face eight years in prison, the boundary between legal and illegal resistance becomes a luxury imposed by those who face no consequences for their inaction.

The moral asymmetry could not be starker. Russian anti-war socialists risk sentences that exceed those for murder. The “Foreign Agent” law, expanded in 2022 and tightened further in 2025, criminalises public activity that challenges the state, blocks designated individuals from accessing their earnings, and bans them from political office, university teaching, or working with young people. Russians are now prohibited from searching for “extremist” content online. The censorship agency Roskomnadzor has begun restricting VoIP calls on Telegram and WhatsApp. This is what Oleg Orlov of Memorial described in his closing statement: “It’s not just public criticism that’s banned, but any independent thought. There is no more private life.”

Western campists risk Twitter criticism. When Stop the War’s Andrew Murray refuses to demand Russian withdrawal from a London conference stage, he exercises a freedom that Russian socialists have been imprisoned for attempting to exercise. The least he could do is use that freedom honestly.

What solidarity actually requires

Ukrainian and Russian socialists have not merely criticised the Western left. They have articulated, with considerable precision, what genuine solidarity would look like. The Brussels 2025 Declaration, launched by activists from over twenty countries, provides the framework:

Unconditional debt cancellation. Not restructuring, not extended grace periods, not concessional lending: cancellation. Ukraine’s sovereign debt, now exceeding 100 per cent of GDP, must be written off entirely. As Dudin puts it, “the debt yoke should go in the dustbin of history, together with the army of Russian invaders.” Anything less condemns a generation of Ukrainian workers to paying for their own defence while Western creditors extract interest.

Arms for self-defence with democratic accountability. Ukrainian socialists demand weapons because military force must be met with military force until the invasion is defeated. This is not a demand for blank cheques to the Zelensky government. It is a demand rooted in the same principle that led socialists to support arms for Republican Spain: the right of a people to resist fascist conquest.

Opposition to IMF and EU structural adjustment. The 325 conditionalities attached to international lending must be challenged by Western trade unions and left parties. The repeal of Law 5371 and the withdrawal of the Draft Labour Code should be non-negotiable conditions of any solidarity worthy of the name.

Confiscation of frozen Russian state and oligarch assets for reconstruction under democratic control. Not channelled through BlackRock-designed investment vehicles. Not filtered through G7 coordination platforms that bypass Ukrainian civil society. Transferred directly for social reconstruction managed through democratic institutions and workers’ councils.

Sanctuary and material support for Russian anti-war exiles. The networks established in Tbilisi, Vilnius and Yerevan need funding. Conscientious objectors need protection. Political prisoners need advocacy. The Russian anti-war movement is not an abstraction; it is specific people in specific cities who need specific material help.

Support for Ukrainian labour movements against wartime attacks on workers’ rights. Direct solidarity with the Federation of Trade Unions, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions, feminist organisations like Bilkis and the Feminist Workshop, and the “Be Like Nina” health workers’ union. Solidarity from below, not government-to-government transactions.

None of this appeared in any Stop the War resolution. None of it featured in any DSA International Committee position paper. None of it was discussed on any CODEPINK webinar. The organisations that claimed to stand for peace had nothing to say about the class content of the peace they were demanding.

The accusation stands

The title of this article is not metaphorical. “You handed us over” is a factual description of what happened. The Western “anti-war” left spent three years opposing arms, demanding negotiations, and insisting that Ukraine’s resistance was merely a NATO proxy operation. The Trump-Putin settlement delivers precisely that programme: territorial concessions, demilitarisation, economic exploitation by both imperial powers, and the rehabilitation of annexation as an acceptable instrument of statecraft.

The campist left did not cause this outcome. It is not that powerful. But it provided ideological cover for it. It normalised the frameworks that made partition thinkable. It told a generation of Western activists that Ukrainian self-determination was less important than opposing NATO, that resisting Russian colonisation was secondary to resisting Western arms shipments, that the people being bombed were somehow less worthy of solidarity than the geopolitical abstractions being debated.

Ukrainian socialists fighting on two fronts, against Russian bombs and IMF conditionalities simultaneously, deserved better from the international left. Russian anti-war socialists facing prison and exile for opposing their own government’s imperialism deserved better. They got Stop the War press releases and DSA abstentions.

Part 4 of this series will examine the theoretical bankruptcy that produced this outcome: the analytical error that led organisations claiming the legacy of revolutionary internationalism to confuse Serbia 1914 with Ireland 1916. But the theoretical analysis matters only because of what it cost in practice. And the people who paid that cost have now delivered their verdict.

It is not a forgiving one. Nor should it be.

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Part I – The Robbers’ Peace in Ukraine, https://redmole.substack.com/p/the-robbers-peace

The concrete terms of the Trump-Putin settlement reveal what three years of ‘anti-war’ posturing has actually enabled: the territorial dismemberment of Ukraine, the extraction of its mineral wealth, and the rehabilitation of a war criminal. No theory required. The facts condemn themselves.

Part II - How a Section of the Left Accommodated the Partition of Ukraine, https://redmole.substack.com/p/how-a-section-of-the-left-accommodated

The robber’s peace documented in Part 1 did not emerge from a vacuum. For three years, a section of the international left demanded precisely what Trump and Putin delivered: an end to Western arms supplies, immediate negotiations regardless of terms, and the acceptance of territorial realities on the ground. Now that those “realities” have crystallised into the formal partition of Ukraine, the architects of this advocacy deserve scrutiny.