Out of the impasse? The Avi Lewis campaign and left strategy

Introduction

The federal New Democratic Party will elect a new leader at the end of March. Five candidates are contesting the leadership, the principal ones being Heather McPherson, a sitting MP who offers essentially a continuation of the political orientation and policies the party has upheld in recent years, and Avi Lewis, who is offering a radical alternative that challenges many conventional party practices and policies.

The following article by two Toronto-based members of the party describes very well the opportunity open to the radical left to use the Lewis candidacy to engage with the NDP, and the challenges facing that left should Lewis become the party leader. It is republished, with permission, from The Midnight Sun.

-- Richard Fidler

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Out of the impasse? The Avi Lewis campaign and left strategy

By Marcel Nelson and Nathan Rao

With the near collapse of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP) in the 2025 federal election, the Canadian electoral terrain is today dominated by a tug of war between two forces: a centre-right technocratic and authoritarian pole around Mark Carney’s Liberals, and a MAGA-adjacent hard right around Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. This sometimes substantive, sometimes theatrical clash opens up space for far-right forces who draw inspiration from the advance of racist and fascist elements in the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the American president continues to threaten to subjugate and even annex Canada – threats we shouldn’t understate. 

This is also a time of opportunity. To see that potential, one need only look to the global movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and to Zohran Mamdani’s successful mayoral campaign in New York City, a political breakthrough for the left. It’s in this context that, in the Canadian state, journalist and activist Avi Lewis’s campaign for the leadership of the NDP has attracted much attention, dedication, and debate. 

Lewis has won the support of many left organizers in part because he’s taken bold and promising policy positions on important questions. For example, he has argued for steps towards public ownership and democratic control in vital areas of the economy such as housing, food, telecoms, and banking. He has also laid out an ambitious vision for transforming our economy through a green transition that includes employment guarantees for workers exiting the destructive oil and gas industry. He has made the fight for Indigenous rights a central theme of his campaign – as well as the struggle for a free Palestine – and has been vocal about confronting the far right wherever it rears its head.

Yet the deeper value of Lewis’s campaign, beyond its policy statements, is its drive to transform the NDP and the way we conduct left-wing politics in this country. Lewis has been clear that his campaign’s core project is to build a powerful united movement to defeat the threats we face: to organize solidarity with grassroots protests and strikes, as well as to unite and mobilize support for left candidates at election time. His campaign has also been helpful insofar as it has provided an opportunity for serious debate about left strategy and organization – discussions that have not taken place in Canada on anything approaching a mass, country-wide scale in a very long time.  

 

Policy and strategy

Small, independent organizations of the activist left in Canada have served as an important training ground for activists and thinkers. Some of today’s trade union and social movement leaders have emerged from those spaces. So have a range of campaigners, commentators, and intellectuals. 

Yet the independent organizations in Canada to the left of the NDP have been at a strategic impasse for many years. This impasse stems, in part, from a rigid organizational culture and outlook within many of these groups, which may tend to overestimate the political possibilities of a given historical period. These groups are also sometimes unable to root themselves in actually existing struggles without losing their core commitment to developing revolutionary thinking and strategy. Some of these groups race to recruit new members, while others slip into a kind of political quietism, cultivating a self-image as guardians of left orthodoxy while waiting for a popular mass upsurge that never comes – or that appears for a moment, only to bypass these organizations completely before eventually dissipating.

There is an important place for Marxists and revolutionary socialists in the current political landscape in Canada, to be sure. But functioning as a loose network of like-minded activists is an inadequate response to the dangers and opportunities of the present moment. The Lewis campaign seems to us to be an opening in which we might break, or at least shake up, this impasse: a moment when the country’s small revolutionary left may connect with far bigger and broader forces. 

The NDP has never been a neutral strategic terrain. If Avi Lewis wins the NDP leadership, he will find himself at the helm of a party reshaped by major internal reforms made during the era of previous leader Jack Layton, which aimed to “professionalize” the party and weaken its links to organized labour. The result has been greater powers concentrated in the hands of the party leader and their immediate circle, further marginalizing the role of riding associations, active members, labour organizers, and other layers. This has exacerbated the party’s tendency to focus on parliamentary manoeuvering at the expense of other political priorities such as building and maintaining its grassroots base.

The NDP’s mix of full-time staffers and consultants have decades of experience with manipulating party procedures to exclude radical resolutions at conventions, and to prevent individuals with political positions they find undesirable from obtaining nominations at election time. The Ontario NDP drove out former Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama for her Palestine solidarity, while the British Columbia NDP disqualified climate justice activist Anjali Appadurai’s leadership candidacy. The NDP’s history is littered with the cadavers of initiatives that sought to orient the party towards a more left-wing path, from the Waffle of the 1970s to the New Politics Initiative of the early 2000s, to the Leap Manifesto of the 2010s. 

Clearly the NDP is not an instrument that can be wielded with ease by Lewis or any left-wing project. Yet there is nothing metaphysical about the party’s tendency to disappoint or its success in crushing left-wing insurgencies within its ranks. Like any political party, the NDP is an institution riven by power struggles and beset by contradictions – a strategic terrain where opposing interests struggle for dominance, whether those interests find expression in provincial sections of the party, particular riding associations, or elements of the federal party bureaucracy. Some opponents of Lewis’s project might prefer to break up the party, and even join the Liberals, rather than cede ground. It is thus up to Lewis and allied forces to develop a strategy and a coalition capable of taking advantage of those contradictions. 

Contrary to the received wisdom one often encounters on the left, the marginalization of the left in the NDP is not entirely due to the party’s bureaucratic machinations. While those dynamics were, for example, certainly involved in delivering a severe blow to the socialist Waffle project at the federal party’s 1971 convention, the Waffle’s initiatives were defeated on the convention floor by votes cast by rank-and-file members. Backers of left-wing initiatives within the NDP cannot be satisfied with denouncing the party’s undemocratic practices, as these will inevitably arise. We must be able to anticipate and counter them.  

April’s devastating federal election result for the NDP dealt a severe blow to the consultants, pollsters, and strategists who have held the party’s reins for more than two decades. Not only did the near-complete collapse of the NDP’s vote undermine the legitimacy of the internal methods in place since Jack Layton was leader, but the resulting loss of official party status meant the leader’s office and the party’s research bureau also lost their funding. This situation has been compounded by the fact that the party is heavily indebted. Destabilized and in crisis, the federal NDP may today be more open to a socialist and democratic reorientation than it has been at any point in the last few decades, even if conservative forces within the party will certainly put up a fight.

Towards a strategy of engagement with the NDP 

In public forums and private conversations with organizers, Lewis has acknowledged all these realities. He appears to be alert to how his political project faces serious countervailing forces both within the NDP and beyond it, which will entice the project towards compromise and betrayal of the social movements with which it claims to stand. Accordingly, Lewis has mused about turning the NDP’s riding associations into activist hubs, with the aim of building the kind of popular mass networks that can both support his project and pressure it to stick to its declared agenda. He has speculated, alternatively, that building independent or quasi-independent organizations that operate both within and outside the NDP, like the Democratic Socialists of America in the US or Momentum in the UK, may be needed to create such networks and pressure. Lewis is well-versed in socialist political culture and likely keenly aware of the failures of past socialist initiatives in Canada and abroad: the lessons of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns, as well as the experience of the left-wing Syriza government in Greece or the so-called Pink Tide left governments in Latin America.

At the same time, although the Lewis campaign has spoken frequently about the desirability of building these hubs and independent organizations, laying the groundwork for them has not been a campaign priority so far. Not unreasonably, the campaign has focused on signing up new members and rallying current ones – focused, that is, on winning the NDP leadership contest. While loose local campaign chapters have sprung up across the country, they don’t appear to have been centrally involved in shaping campaign strategy. The campaign recently published a high-level position on party renewal that expresses an intention to transform riding associations into activist hubs, but it remains to be seen whether Lewis will prioritize such an initiative if elected leader.

Time will tell whether this has been the most appropriate organizing model for winning the leadership race. It’s hard to say whether a more participatory approach would have gained traction, given the sporadic and uneven state of left politics in the country today. It’s also difficult to predict the Lewis campaign team’s plans for navigating the choppy waters that lie ahead, whatever the outcome of the leadership race, and how the call to build activist hubs across the country will be received if Lewis wins. At a public meeting we recently helped host, about building a relationship between the activist left and a potential Lewis-led NDP, the conversation’s tenor was generally positive, suggesting Lewis and his campaign may have opened the door to a more constructive relationship between the grassroots left in Canada and the NDP. Still, we came away from that meeting with a renewed sense of the enormous work, imagination, and goodwill needed to build the mechanisms that would allow those left forces to both support and hold to account a Lewis NDP. 

At the same time, it can be simplistic to assume there exists a neat dichotomy between more radical social movements and more moderate entities such as political parties. This dichotomy is well-worn: past initiatives to move the NDP to the left, such as the 2001 New Politics Initiative, assumed the renewal of the NDP necessitated bringing the party to the country’s social movements – a fetishization of social movements as a reservoir of radical politics and grassroots democracy that remains strong today. In reality, “social movements” in Canada are largely composed of trade unions, student unions, environmental and other issue-based campaigns, NGOs, and other organizations that are aligned with NDP priorities and operating within the same institutional networks, with personnel whose individual career trajectories often span multiple corners of that ecosystem. This can sometimes even place these movements and their leaderships politically to the right of the NDP, especially when it is not in government. We should acknowledge that social movements, especially where organized labour is involved in them, are beset by internal contradictions, including debates over their strategic and ideological orientations.

The NDP and social movements should be seen as intersecting terrains on which different strategies compete, each presenting both challenges and opportunities. Defeating the centrist forces that operate there won’t be accomplished by staying on the sidelines. The goal should instead be to coordinate an alternative left political project within and across both arenas – a coordination that would necessarily involve those who hold elected office as representatives of the NDP.  

 

Some provisional principles for engagement with the NDP 

Left debate is full of binaries such as electoral politics versus social movements and labour bureaucracy versus rank and file, where one of the coordinates is assumed to be more radical or more authentically socialist than the other. Yet these debates too often remain abstract. The radical potential of any political force needs to be tested in the realm of real politics and struggle, not labelled in a way that decides its nature and potential in advance. 

Two guiding principles could help. The first is to avoid investing any one individual or organization with the responsibility of being the standard-bearer for a left political project of transformation. No one individual or organization – not even a federal political party – would independently have the leverage to sustain such a project in the face of reactionary headwinds. Nor would any single individual or organization alone be able to resolve the profound contradictions that beset Canada as a multinational settler-colonial state. There must always be room for autonomous Indigenous and Québécois initiatives that may advocate for distinct projects of self-determination.

A second guiding principle is that we shouldn’t be afraid of, and should even seek to encourage, generative tensions in our political projects. Such tensions include the need to hold left-wing office-holders to account and also buttress them with support when needed. That dynamic could help those office-holders resist the opposing forces that will inevitably seek to neutralize any left political project. More broadly, it would allow for the development of a left ecology in which the NDP, social movements, and labour work out our contradictions in the course of real struggle, with the goal of building the left’s power.

Struggling to reshape the NDP would require taking over existing institutional mechanisms or creating new ones – transforming riding associations into activist hubs, for example. It could entail building or growing grassroots organizations that intervene within the NDP while remaining autonomous from it. We are agnostic about whether a Lewis-led NDP would be the main driving force in this network of intersecting initiatives, each with its own structure and activities. 

Ultimately, the left in Canada must ask itself whether it can afford to wait for a better opportunity to come along to meet our moment’s escalating crises. Is there capacity and will in this country to build a left-wing alternative to the NDP that can operate on the scale needed to meet those challenges in a timely manner? And can the left afford to leave the electoral field to the pollsters and strategists that have dominated the NDP for the last few decades – or worse, to the eternal, suffocating showdown between the center-right Liberals and the hard-right Conservatives? 

In the short to medium term, it seems as though there is no popular basis in Canada for a mass left-wing, country-wide force entirely outside the NDP. The longstanding impasse and small-group character of organizations to the left of the NDP in this country illustrates this clearly. Engaging with the NDP through the Avi Lewis leadership campaign, in part to seed activist hubs and other fresh organizations, could be read as an attempt at a shortcut – a gamble that imperfect means can help us leap beyond the left’s impasse. But we believe the gamble is worthwhile, because of how much all our struggles, movements, and organizations stand to benefit from such a leap.

Marcel Nelson teaches politics in the Ontario college sector.

Nathan Rao is a Toronto-based interpreter and translator.

Russia’s full-scale onslaught of Ukraine enters its 5th year

 

Statements from the Ukraine Solidarity Network US and from Ukraine’s left-wing Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement)

Ukraine Still Stands

As Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine enters its fifth year on February 24, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls on progressive and peace-minded people to renew their moral, political, and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s invasion and their rights to self-defense and self-determination.

Ukraine Solidarity Network US
24/02/2026

We must remember Ukraine even as we struggle against so many other outrages that rightly demand our attention: the US-backed genocide in Gaza, US military strikes on Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and small civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants, health, the environment, and social and democratic rights.

Massive Casualties

Russia’s war of aggression has been as deadly as any war in the world over the last four years. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, battlefield casualties (killed, wounded, missing) reached an estimated 1.8 million by the end of 2025, including 1.2 million Russians and 600,000 Ukrainians. The battlefield death toll alone is estimated at around 460,000 combatants – 325,000 Russians and 140,000 Ukrainians.

In addition to battlefield casualties, civilian casualties in Ukraine have reached over 53,000, including over 14,500 killed. The civilian death rate in Ukraine rose 31% in 2025 as Russia escalated its terrorist tactics of targeting civilian homes and energy infrastructure far from frontline battlefields with missile and drone strikes.

Russia’s constant offensives on the frontlines have been sending Russian soldiers to their deaths at a rate of 1,000 or more a day for the last two years. At around 30,000 per month, twice as many Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine every month as the nearly 15,000 who died in all of Russia’s 10-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The horrors in Ukraine join the horrors of other wars and associated hunger and disease ravaging our planet over the last four years in Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. People struggling for peace and democracy in all of these countries deserve our active solidarity.

A Stalemated War

Contrary to the Kremlin narrative of inevitable Russian victory, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill. In the first year of the war in 2022, Ukraine recovered nearly half of the land that Russia occupied in its initial offensive, pushing Russia out of the northern regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and most of Kharkiv and much of Kherson in the south. Since then, the frontlines have been largely frozen. Despite enormous losses of personnel and materiel, Russia has gained only 1.5% of Ukrainian territory in the last three years. 

Russia’s rulers are afflicting their people with an endless war not of their own choosing. Russia has now been attacking Ukraine longer than it took the Soviet Union to push Hitler’s Nazi army back to Berlin in World War II. 

Russia’s war finances are in trouble. Oil and gas revenues, 30% to 50% of Russian state revenues over the last decade, dropped by nearly 50% in 2025 to a five-year low. Ukrainian “kinetic sanctions” have hit Russian oil refineries, ports, and tankers, and have combined with declining global oil prices and western sanctions to begin to defund Russia’s war machine. Russia’s 2025 military budget was 40% of its national budget, which means that stronger sanctions might cripple Russia’s military.

Unspeakable War Crimes

The war crimes committed by Russia are unspeakable. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova, for the war crime of abducting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia for Russified and militarized education. The ICC has issued further arrest warrants for four top Russian military commanders for the war crime of bombing civilians. Russian air strike terrorism on civilian homes and energy infrastructure in Ukraine has increased since these ICC arrest warrants were issued. 

In an ominous escalation, Russian has been striking substations that feed power into the cooling systems of nuclear power stations since November and most recently earlier this February, risking a deadly Chornobyl-scale meltdown and radiation release. 

Russia is training its drone operators on “human safaris” that target Ukrainian civilians in Kherson. One in twenty people remaining in the city of Kherson were a casualty of Russian drones in 2025.

In the occupied territories, Ukrainians are subjected to political repression and forced Russification. If they refuse to take Russian passports, they are denied access to public services and banking. Children are often taken from parents who want to remain Ukrainian and their homes and property are being confiscated. Many are subject to detention and interrogation, forced conscription into Russia’s army, torture, sexual violence, and/or summary execution.

The Trump-Putin Alliance

The Trump administration policy has allied with Russia against Ukraine in its actions and negotiation posture. Since the Trump administration came into office, military aid to Ukraine has been cut by 99%. It cut all humanitarian aid to Ukraine shortly after taking office for education, healthcare, shelter, heat and power, war-displaced persons, HIV drugs, mental health services for war-distressed children, families, and veterans, and other services. In December, the US restored a token $2 billion of the former $63 billion USAID budget for humanitarian aid programs that is now being spent through UN programs trying to aid Ukraine and other war-torn countries like Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Also immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration closed US Justice Department programs to monitor and enforce sanctions against Russian frozen assets, influence operations in the US, and other sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Trump defunded US programs to document Russian war crimes, including cooperation with the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine and the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which had identified and documented some 35,000 Ukrainian children forcibly abducted by Russia.

After repeatedly voting for UN General Assembly resolutions since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022 that affirmed Ukraine’s sovereignty and demanded that Russia halt its military operations and withdraw back to Russia, in February 2025, the US reversed course under the Trump administration on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. The US, and its satellites including Israel, voted with Russia against a similar resolution condemning Russia’s invasion and demanding that Russian troops withdraw.

While Trump still allows Europeans to buy weapons they can send on to Ukraine, US shipment delays have left crucial Ukrainian air defense missile launchers without missiles to fire against incoming Russian missiles in recent weeks.

Trump’s alliance with Putin is rooted in their far-right ideological affinity for a world of imperial spheres of influence, authoritarian rule, and racist, misogynistic, and homophobic “traditional values.” Grifters on both sides have been bargaining to partition Ukraine between them like a piece of real estate. The Russian side has been led by Kirill Dmitriev, a Stanford and Harvard trained veteran of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and 15 years ago scammed purchasers of apartments in a building development in Kyiv out of their investments. On the US side are Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, all long engaged in money laundering the real estate investments of Russian oligarchs and other Russia business ties. 

Russia is now pitching Trump’s team on a $14 trillion business deal that is contingent on the US forcing Ukraine to accept Russia’s negotiation demands. It would involve lifting Western sanctions on Russia, joint arctic oil and gas exploitation, Russia returning to the dollar-based payments system, preferential US access to the Russian market, compensation for US corporate assets lost in Russia during the war, US aid for Russian aircraft modernization, joint mining of lithium, copper, nickel, and platinum, and cooperation on nuclear power plants to power AI data centers. All of this scheming is being conducted behind the backs of the Ukrainians.

Negotiations on the DimWit Plan

In the Trump-sponsored negotiations, the US has pressured Ukraine to capitulate to Russia under what has been dubbed the DimWit Plan (after Russian negotiator Dmitriev and US negotiator Witkoff). Russia demands that Ukraine cede occupied land in Crimea, plus land Russia does not control in partially-occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces. Furthermore, Russia demands deep cuts in Ukraine’s military, no international security guarantees for Ukraine, and snap elections in hopes of seating a new Ukrainian government that will become a Russian vassal. 

President Zelensky has indicated a reluctant willingness to compromise on a ceasefire and freeze at the current frontlines and forgo joining NATO – but if and only if Ukraine receives credible international security guarantees against further Russian aggression. The Ukrainian public seems to agree. 

Despite Ukraine’s openness to compromise and Russia’s intransigence, President Trump repeatedly says Putin wants peace and Zelensky is the obstacle. Trump’s year of negotiations has been the deadliest year yet in the war for both Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s predominantly poor and ethnic minority soldiers.

Campist Contradictions

The Trump-Putin alliance puts to rest the false proxy war narrative of those campist geopoliticians and privileged pacifists on the Western left who are far away from the Russian assault troops, missiles, and drones raining down terror on Ukraine. 

The campists have claimed that Ukraine is merely a proxy force fighting Russia on behalf of Western imperialism as if the Ukrainians do not have their own reasons to fight for their right to exist. The proxy war claim was always a canard. With Trump now aligning the US with Putin, the narrative collapses on its own contractions. It is more absurd than ever. 

As Artem Chapeye, the Ukrainian writer, progressive activist, and now soldier explained to an American audience last August, “If this is a proxy war between Russia and US, why are the Ukrainians still fighting after the Trump-Putin alliance?” 

Ukrainian Self-Determination

The Ukraine Solidarity Network totally supports the Ukrainian struggle for self-defense, security, and self-determination – as do most American people by a strong two to one margin in recent polling. It is up to the Ukrainians to democratically decide what is an acceptable peace. We will not stand by while Russian and American oligarchs try to sell out Ukraine and divide it between them for their own profits and far-right ideological objectives.

We will continue our material aid and public education in coordination with trade unions and progressive organizations in Ukraine.

We will continue to work with progressive Ukrainians and Russians and support their demands:

·         Full and complete withdrawal of Russian troops from all of Ukraine.

·         International support for the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian invasion. 

·         International economic sanctions against Russia’s war machinery, including its political, military, and economic elite, its access to the international financial system, its imports of weapons-related technology, and its exports of fossil fuels that fund and fuel Russia’s war machine.* 

·         Return to Ukraine of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred to Russia and Belarus. 

·         Freedom for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territories incarcerated for opposition to the occupation and resistance to genocidal Russification.

·         Freedom for all Russians incarcerated for war resistance and political dissent.

·         Asylum in countries abroad for Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, and all people seeking refuge from political repression and war. 

·         No amnesty for Russian war criminals. 

·         Cancellation of Ukraine’s foreign debts. 

·         Confiscation of Russian assets abroad to be used to support Ukraine’s military self-defense, social services, and post-war reconstruction. 

·         Reparations from Russia to help fund a full post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.

·         An end to the Western imperialist policy of imposing a neoliberal program of privatization, deregulation, debt dependence, exploitative mineral extraction, and cuts to public services and labor rights on Ukraine today and for its post-war reconstruction.

* The question of sanctions is complicated and controversial among activists committed to Ukraine’s struggle. It’s especially important in the US that we do not accept the predatory politics of the imperialist US state. The Ukraine Solidarity Network will be discussing these issues with our Ukrainian comrades whose lives and national freedom are on the line.

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How can Ukraine survive, after leading a large-scale resistance for four years?

Sotsialnyi Rukh, February 24, 2026

For twelve years, Ukraine has been fighting for its independence against imperial aggression. For most of this period, the conflict has been in a hybrid form, and exactly four years ago it took on the appearance of an open war, unleashed by the Russian army shelling almost all Ukrainian border towns and launching hundreds of missiles at military and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine has chosen a difficult path to defend its freedom, which it is pursuing.

Over the years, it has become clear that this is neither a “conflict” nor a “misunderstanding,” but a targeted war of aggression aimed at destroying the Ukrainian state and establishing a puppet government. The Ukrainian army has been able to stop Putin’s blitzkrieg and prove its ability to resist the imperialist invasion. Behind this success lies the exploit of the working masses, who have often felt marginalized in their own countries, but who have in reality become the pillar of the army. At the same time, we owe our survival to the help of people from all over the world, who have made us aware of the extraordinary power of solidarity.

The present state of the war is determined by its prolonged and exhausting nature. Russia is waging a war of extermination, systematically committing war crimes: torture, deportations, abduction of children, targeted bombing of residential areas, hospitals, schools, energy infrastructure and transport. These are not side effects, but a deliberate strategy of terror, as the Russian army is unable to defeat the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the battlefield. Despite extreme fatigue and a lack of manpower, Ukrainian soldiers are repelling the occupiers’ offensive and, in places, counterattacking. But the invaders’ approach to cities like Zaporizhzhia can only be worrying. Unfortunately, the Kremlin still has far superior long-range strike capabilities, which it uses constantly.

At the same time, the war has profoundly affected the social sphere and civil society. The severe shortage of housing and decent jobs is accompanied by ineffective social protection. Millions of people, especially in frontline regions, suffer from inequality and social precariousness. Awareness of the profound shortcomings of the state’s social policy has sparked a surge of solidarity: solidarity initiatives have emerged, trade unions have mobilised and other social movements have taken on a significant part of the support for society. The energy of the mobilizations is focused not only on humanitarian aid, but also on conflicts with a strong social dimension that reveal the failures of the system.

In our quest for a quick victory for Ukraine, we take a critical look at the liberal market policies pursued by the ruling elite. The desire to immediately maximize corporate profits harms Ukraine’s strategic interests, which demand modernizing its industry, ensuring full employment and uniting society. Encouraging imports, deregulation and the free movement of capital will not build a sustainable economic system that can give an advantage over the occupiers.

The enemy has been and will be cruel, but the greatest risk for Ukraine is to renounce justice, as this will breed discord and despair. Peripheral capitalism, mired in corruption, produces injustice on a large scale. It allows selfishness to flourish and businesses to grow, but it does not create any common protection for all. Imposing controversial reforms like Ukraine’s new labor code will amplify the scale of social inequality, but will not bring stability.

We aspire to unity, but we refuse to condone the mistakes of the authorities. This is where our spirit of freedom and our difference with Russia are manifested. Ukrainian society has not disappeared in the face of the prevailing anxiety; It continues to act and defend democracy and its independence.

Ukraine is not only fighting for its territory, but also for the right to be a space of freedom, diversity and confrontation of ideas, and not an authoritarian dictatorship. People of diverse opinions, including representatives of the left-wing movement, participated in this fight. Among the dead are artist David Chychkan, anarchist Dmytro Petro, anarchist Lana “Sati” Chornohorska, Yevheniy Osievskyi, and many other heroes and heroines of the Ukrainian and international anti-authoritarian movement. The Sotsialnyi Rukh is also not indifferent to our history: some of us have been serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the first days of the invasion, and every year more and more of our activists join it. Being part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine means being close to the people, whose social liberation we are working for.

At the international level, this conflict has long since transcended national borders and does not concern us alone. Around the world, reactions to the events in Ukraine are distinguishing between progressive and internationalist movements and anti-democratic and isolationist movements. Because it is above all a question of protecting universal values, namely the right to individual freedom.

If Ukraine is forced to capitulate or is defeated, it will not mean peace, but the legitimization of a forced change of borders. This will pave the way for further aggression and bring the world closer to a world war that could claim billions of lives across the globe.

We have no confidence in individuals like Donald Trump, who flout international law. That is why we see his peace initiatives first and foremost as an attempt to abandon Ukraine to its fate. The time has come to restore the balance of power in Ukraine’s favour, by demanding that Western countries hand over their military arsenals and impose sanctions on Russia.

The Kremlin will not stop its violence against the Ukrainian people until it has suffered a significant defeat. It is the duty of humanists around the world to help Ukraine complete what it has started and defeat the invader.

Ukrainian workers have paid too high a price to return to the same social injustice in post-war Ukraine that prevailed before. It is not the oligarchs, nor their neoliberal politicians in their pay, nor the economic elites, but the workers who have taken up arms to defend Ukraine. For these people, the state must serve their interests!

Glory to the hard-working and steadfast Ukrainian people, to their defenders!

Glory to international solidarity against imperialism!

Eternal glory to our brothers and sisters who died at the hands of Russian forces!

 

 

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 stark 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.

Lewis vs. Engler on Ukraine

Avi Lewis

 The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a wanton, illegal act of aggression against a sovereign, democratic country by a brutal dictator. Putin’s dream of recreating the Russian Empire is Ukraine’s nightmare, resulting in a level of death and devastation that Europe has not seen since the Second World War.  

Over the last several years, the world has witnessed horror after horror. The forced transfer of Ukrainian children, the destruction of Mariupol, the bombing of schools and hospitals. These are heinous war crimes, for which Putin and his generals must be held accountable. At the same time, we have also seen the best of humanity. The dignity and bravery shown by Ukrainians has inspired the world and Canadians welcomed 300,000 Ukrainians seeking safe haven into their communities with generosity and compassion. 

Our approach to foreign policy must be morally consistent: occupation is always wrong, whether in Palestine or Ukraine. That’s why an Avi-led NDP will support the following policies: 

1. Help rebuild Ukraine. The Canadian government should provide funding and technical assistance to rebuild Ukraine’s infrastructure, institutions and public services. Notably, Canada should use its influence to oppose any attempts to sell off Ukrainian public assets or natural resources. Ukraine needs a Marshall Plan, not a Shock Doctrine. To help finance this rebuild, Canada should allocate any funds seized from Russian oligarchs and push for the cancellation of Ukraine’s debt. 

2. Support a just peace. Canada must advocate for a peace agreement that is not imposed on Ukraine unilaterally by Trump and Putin, but involves the participation of Ukraine and European nations. Ukraine should not have to give up an inch of its territory, and Canada should continue providing the defence assistance that Ukraine needs to protect its sovereignty.

3. Step up sanctions enforcement. Getting tougher on enforcing sanctions, including by closing the loophole that continues to allow banned Russian oil to flow into Canada. We should hit the Russian war machine where it hurts, in the oil barrel. 

4. Assist Ukrainian newcomers. Push for the reversal of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada job cuts and ensure that newcomers from Ukraine and around the world have access to the settlement services they need to thrive.

5. Build links with the Ukrainian labour movement. Work alongside Canadian unions to build solidarity with trade unions in Ukraine, to advance workers’ rights and strengthen Ukrainian democracy.

6. Invest in Ukrainian arts and culture. Promote cultural exchanges between Ukraine and Canada and support organizations that are telling the stories of Ukraine or the Ukrainian diaspora through the arts. 

 Yves Engler

 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.

* * *

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

* * *

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.

* * *

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.