Russo-Ukraine War: An Anarchist View

Donald Trump has repeatedly failed to get the magic deal he wants between Russia and Ukraine enlarging the disturbing prospect that this one, as John Mearsheimer says, will be decided on the battlefield. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and over a million displaced by the invasion of Ukraine launched by Russia in 2022. The terms of Russian leader Vladimir Putin for any cessation of hostilities are in direct conflict with those acceptable to Ukraine. Putin desires to make Ukrainian territorial losses to Russia since 2014 permanent while eliminating security guarantees for Ukraine from the west and any prospect of Ukraine's future NATO membership.

All of this is unacceptable to Ukraine. Unsurprisingly the narrative of the war's how and why is completely different between Russia and the west. The former says that the war is a special military operation to dismantle the nazified Ukrainian regime which seeks to threaten Russia's security through NATO. The latter says that Russia is simply fighting a war of aggression designed to rebuild its past imperial might and prevent Ukraine from becoming a free and independent democracy. Neither narrative is very close to the truth.

The Ukrainian state was never nazified. Any neofascist organizations in Ukrainian politics are completely marginal and/or have abandoned neofascism. While Russia is indeed trying to curb NATO influence it is doing so by attempting to violently subject a nation which only achieved independence from Russia at the tail end of the last century. Russia is thus not merely trying to defend itself against NATO aggression but is in fact competing with NATO for regional power by carrying out an act of bloody repression against Ukraine.

The west does bear responsibility for the war by extending itself up to Russia's border and excluding Russia from western geopolitical and geo-economic institutions and arrangements. While nobody is forcing former Soviet states to join NATO the west has historically refused to allow Russia to get its foot in the western door even after the end of the cold war. Further, the west has done Ukraine no favors by using EU and international financial institutions to pilfer Ukraine's economy, essentially bringing it toward the west through economic imperialism with promises of European democracy. Despite Zelensky's reputation as a war hero president who refused to flee Ukraine in its darkest hour, he has used the war as an opportunity to trample on workers' rights including implementing zero hours standards for workers. His party was elected partly on an anti-corruption platform, but just recently moved to compromise the independence of the country's corruption monitoring institutions before having to back down in the face of mass protests.

The war has essentially allowed Zelensky to turn his parliament into a transmission belt for measures he finds desirable. While the autocratic Putin wagging the finger at Zelensky for not holding elections since the war began is laughable, it seems there is a real danger that the war could make corruption and democratic backsliding a real problem for the country especially since these phenomena have marred Ukraine's post-Soviet existence. The Ukrainian public, despite the fact that the regime is willing to fight to the last man, is now war weary. While Putin knows he can't bring Ukraine back under Russian sovereignty he is certainly trying to neutralize Ukraine by force and is willing to use seemingly as much force he needs to do so.

Ukrainians and Russians are trapped in deadly competition between their governments. Nobody in power cares about the millions displaced, or the hundreds of thousands killed because it is their job to turn a blind eye to the causalities of war. The structures of the capitalist world-system are built around militaristic competition between states as hierarchical and coercive institutions. Every state in the world-system has to grow its geopolitical power and wealth through competitive accumulation of capital within the world-economy or face literal collapse.

On this basis Anarchists make the argument that the only way to put an end to bloodshed and displacement on large scales is to go beyond capitalism and the state. Anarchists believe that the capitalist world-system should be replaced by a voluntarily and horizontally organized cooperative world-system where social production is geared to directly meeting human needs, rather than return on investment. In such a world-system competitive, hierarchical, and coercive institutions such as nation-states, militaries, police, courts, prisons, and multi-nationals would be replaced by free associations of producers based on reciprocal relations designed to allow all parties to pursue their own free development as individuals. In such a world Anarchists propose that producers convene voluntary regional assemblies which freely network together to administer social life and social production on a world scale without the market.

Anarchists also demand that since centralized political structures are embedded in the capitalist order and reproduce the relations of command and obedience that make capitalism inhumane in the first place, that the transition from capitalism to Anarchism is carried out by a self-organized, voluntarily mobilized movement of oppressed people themselves. Anarcho-Syndicalists advocate the organization of such a movement by workers, the exploited class of capitalist society, organizing labor unions open to all workers, controlled by the workers' themselves, and possessing a revolutionary core of Anarcho-Syndicalist activists who push the union in a militant direction. In this way oppressed people can build an international, self-organized, revolutionary movement against the militaristic structures of the capitalist world-system and all forms of oppression and exploitation.

Sources
Anarchism Key Concepts, Honeywell
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-maidan-and-beyond-ukraines-radical-right/
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/why-azov-should-not-be-designated-a-foreign-terrorist-organization/
Ukraine and The Empire of Capital, Yurchenko
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0q964851po
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9w19vxjr44o
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-labour-law-wrecks-workers-rights/
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-corruption-law-trust-zelenskyy-66bd83681bb6df4ac9fe8335ede9385a
https://redandblackanarchists.com.au/the-basics-of-anarcho-syndicalism/
Post-Socialist Regions in the World-System, Lane