In giving a view from the Ukrainian labour movement, Yuliya Yurchenko asks what peace is.
On the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion, a political and trade union delegation from the UK visited Ukraine (UA). During that trip, all those we spoke to said one thing – “we will prevail if we get enough supplies, we will do the rest”. The world has failed UA on that, and they are rearming themselves now while being shelled and frozen to death.
What is the peace that we are being called to accept? And why? Russia is losing the fight, while Ukraine is drip-fed weapons but without permission to use much force against Russia.
Peace talks where the aggressor is appeased and keeps his spoils will not lead to peace but to more war. The sooner the world wakes up to this, the better. All these talks are a distraction designed to drag out time and create an illusion of peace being possible and thus delay weapons supply to UA, which could bring this war to its only possible peace-building outcome – Russia’s defeat, political recognition of this and subsequent real peace talks where Russia is made to pay, politically and otherwise, just like Germany was after WWII. That is the only way towards peace in Ukraine, the region, and the world. The only way to stop the armed part of the hybrid WWIII from spilling into more countries.
Peace means a lot of things to different people. The question is not as simple as the absence of war or a ceasefire or quiet suffering as long as the artillery is silent.
It is a question of power and its disparity. What is being proposed, what most people appeal for most of the time on social media, across trade unions’ exchanges and campaigns, in political discourse, is essentially capitulation.
In real life politics – or real-politics if you prefer – that is not how things work. Banners with white pigeons drawn on them do not intercept missiles, and those who came to kill you will only use them to strangle you and your children. One cannot avoid what is already happening, but one can make a set of steps and measures to stop it, not let it spread, and rectify the factors which brought on the conflict in the first place.
The world (geo)political situation has dramatically changed. We went for liberal international (dis)order underpinned by the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. They have been gradually and systematically diluted.
Those who couldn’t wait to see US hegemony fall will get a chance to see what happens when the hegemon refuses to exercise the authority space they themselves built for decades. And that apparition has a violent fascist face washed by the rising oceans and framed by the flames of the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe.
We are inside a Third World War of hybrid variety and in an era of multipolarity, moving into a tripolarity of coordinated fascisms and their plans. The US National Security Strategy (NSS) is a declaration of war on the world order that the US built to suit itself, and which no longer suits its oligarchy in the shape it exists today. US tariffs with yo-yo tantrums have little to do with Trump’s voters and all to do with his narcissism and his fascist cronies’ extractivist appetites. It is a class war with a militarised arm at home and abroad.
Russia’s vision of peace is what is in the 28-point plan – rejection of sovereignty, political and economic. Trump is securing access, through the NSS strategy, while removing the US from its international leadership obligations. Europe is threatened with loss of alliances and sanctions unless it follows the US, namely, turns to overt fascist politics across the region.
The US under Trump is much more interested in getting its hands on the natural resources of Ukraine and doing deals with Russia than in providing international leadership with long-standing allies, including NATO member countries. Europe and the ‘coalition of the willing’ must see Russia’s chat about “not attacking” as a threat. Equally so is Trump’s NSS.
Rearm and unify. Russia can be finished off and be forced to make an actual peace deal, not a phoney peace where it is the temporary absence of war. Justice and reparations must be served if a law-based order is to be possible in the foreseeable future.
Ukraine needs justice – freedom for PoWs and victims of aggression, including reparations and rights as social guarantees with appropriate budgetary provisions.