So Ukraine has turned into a shit show with on the one hand Russia and on the other hand the US and EU. It is clear that Ukraine is merely a pawn in their chess game. This is clear to me.
I try to make it clear to my surroundings too but one question keeps coming back to me whenever it comes to peace talks: what about what Ukrainians want? Should they accept a split in their country with Russia seizing captured land?
I noticed that I do not have a clear answer to this and I wanted to see some input from you guys. Peace talks should imo be the goal as it would be the end to a bloody conflict and it would further (even if slightly) reduce risk for a bigger war. But it is also clear that Ukraine is just a pawn in those peace talks and everything will be decided between the US and Russia. Is it realistic to acknowledge Ukrainian interest in this? And if so, to what extent can leftist support said interests?
Thank you in advance for your answers. It might make it easier for me to go against the warmongering that has been going on lately, and to prevent people close to me from falling for it.
Another point that I don’t hear about is that even if Ukraine decided by their own will to join the “destroy Russia” club then Russia would be very much in their right to do something to avoid that from happening. Although, what really happened is that Ukraine was couped and made to do that, so from that point of view I would say that Russia not going directly against the ones responsible was not the “best” they could have done to put a stop to the situation but it was the easiest thing they could do so they are doing it.
To be clear, self-determination is not and never has been some fundamental principle of communism and as an absolute principle was something wholly rejected by Lenin.
The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement, but it would be ridiculous to delete the demand for a republic from the programme of international Social-Democracy on these grounds.
— Lenin, The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up
The point is that, while self-determination is generally a good slogan, we should actually oppose self-determination if this self-determination is not actually beneficial to the global anti-imperialist struggle and is just a tool by the ruling class of some nation to further their own interests. It’s sort of like how western countries keep trying to funnel underground money into religious extremists in Xinjiang and encourages them to promote secession. This tactic is used for the purpose of trying to break apart China to weaken it for western imperialist interests, and so it shouldn’t be supported.
Ukraine’s government underwent a US-backed coup that immediately banned left-wing parties like the communist party and began to promote Ukrainian fascism. When you talk about self-determination of Ukraine, what you are really talking about is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians being conscripted to the front-lines to die on behalf of the borders of this US-backed fascist proxy state. It is hardly even Ukrainian “self-determination” but just the right of the US bourgeoisie to dominate Ukrainian politics and determine their future for them.
Besides, it’s not like Russia has ever even stated their goal is to conquer all of Ukraine, anyways. They have stated since the beginning of their invasion that the goal was only to take control of the Donbas region which had seceded from Ukraine in a referendum. So if you want to talk about self-determination, what about the self-determination of LPR and DPR?
Nuland and PNAC robbed them of that long ago.
Should we uncritically support national self-determination? Even when the path to self-determination means following a reactionary path like Ukraine did? I don’t believe so.
Regardless, Ukraine self-determination was thrown out of the window after abandoning neutrality post-2014 coup, the people from ukraine didn’t fight for national self-determination and allowed their nation to be sliced by foreign powers.
Eh, I think it’s slightly disingenuous to say that Ukrainians didn’t fight for self-determination. But I’m not accusing you of being a liar or ignorant, I understand that you were very much generalizing and speaking hyperbolically, and I totally get the sentiment of what you mean.
I think it’s more accurate to say that any Ukrainians who did fight for actual self-determination were slandered and branded as public enemies, disappeared or murdered, bought off, or shunned and displaced. Which created a chilling effect and intensified conflict and suffering.
You’re right, i went a bit unhinged and dismissed the patriots that actually fought for Ukraine self-determination pre and post maidan coup.
It’s alright, comrade.
People are different. There is people on the west and on the east and there are also aggressive Nationalists. I always wondered why journalist and politics often say that if people support the West they must necessarily support joining NATO. And this is not always the case. It’s very complicated and opinions are not divided only into black and white.
And mostly ordinary people are tired of the war I think.
i would ask what about the self determination of the people of donbas? the minsk treaties have been made specifically to increase autonomy of the eastern regions of ukraine, but instead of doing that the kiev government just shelled them for almost a decade. they local governments of donetsk and lugansk have asked multiple times for russian aid, which putin dragged out to 2022.
also for the future, don’t view ukranians as one homogeneous group. “what are ukranian interests” is not a question that has one answer. first there is a class divide, then there is a east-west regional divide etc. its not good analysis to just lump everyone in one pot, especially as a west european.
then there is a east-west regional divide
It’s more like a three-way divide: West vs Centre&North vs East&South. Western Ukraine is firmly Banderist. East and South are firmly pro-Russian. The rest is somewhere in the middle, though they have been getting forcibly dragged into the Banderite camp through an enormous amount of indoctrination and propaganda over the past decades, much of it funded by the West and by corrupt oligarchs who stood to gain from this.
This is also reflected in the language. The reality is that there isn’t just Ukrainian on the one side vs Russian on the other. For most of Ukraine’s history much of “middle” Ukraine (Malorossiya) spoke a mixed dialect, closer to Russian than to the Ukrainian spoken in the West but distinct from the real Russian spoken in the east. Add to that a sizeable minority even in these middle parts that natively just spoke Russian and the fact that Russian was the lingua franca in which everyone understood each other, and you quickly see why the Ukrainian nationalist attempt to force western Ukrainian language on the entirety of Ukraine was inevitably going to lead to disaster.
Because this “Ukrainian nationalism” is actually the opposite of self-determination - it’s a project of cultural erasure that was forcibly imposed, an attempt by a small fanatical minority to artificially homogenize a diverse population and create a “national identity” on the basis of ethnic hatred. Sooner or later a project like this that is purely defined in terms of what it isn’t rather than what it is was bound to implode on itself.
I don’t agree at all that Ukrainian nationalism is the opposite of self-determination. The actual Ukrainian self-determination supporters begged for Russia’s help.
I totally understand that alot of Ukrainians are/were violent, dangerous, white supremacist NATO-bootlicking, evil nutjobs. But it’s important to remember that Ukraine has been systematically psychologically collectively been abused and gaslit by decades of Nazi-Aligned Terrorist Organization propaganda.
I don’t think (I’m not saying that you think this, I’m just elaborating) that you can blame Ukrainians completely for the crimes of their government, even though there is alot of truth in that.
And unlike Israel, Ukraine has millennia, or at least multiple centuries, of history before it was part of Russia. Even though yes, Ukraine was often considered to be Russian territory.
I think that Ukraine has a right to exist, unlike Isn’treal, and I don’t view Ukraine as an inherently settler-colonialist project, and there is a very real different, albeit similar in alot of aspects, than from Russian culture.
I won’t shed any particularly heavy tears of if Ukraine ceases altogether to exist, but I really don’t think that the high-jacking and colonialist appropriation of actual Ukrainian nationalism should justify the claim that Ukraine is inherently as artificial as Israel.
Just to clarify, i put “Ukrainian nationalism” in quotation marks because i don’t believe that it is that which it claims to be, not in the broader sense of the national interest and self-determination of the whole of Ukraine. It is a strictly Galician supremacist ideology that is rooted in ethnic hate not just for Russians, Poles, Jews, but also and nowadays mostly directed at other Ukrainians who are considered the “wrong kind” of Ukrainians.
It cannot possibly represent self-determination when it historically prostrated itself before Nazi Germany, the genociders of slavs, and now before the Western imperialists whose only interest in Ukraine is to plunder, subjugate it and use it as a battering ram against Russia. Ukraine itself is not artificial, but the ethnically and linguistically homogenous Ukraine whose sole national essence is being antithesis of Russia, which is how the Ukrainian project is envisioned by this “Ukrainian nationalism”, is artificial and ahistorical.
I am very much not blaming all Ukrainians for the crimes of this ideology and this regime, in fact as i have just stated, i think Ukrainians are the primary victims of this ideology and regime which in collusion with western imperialist powers has stolen their self-determination from them.
You have very fair points, and I’m 99 percent sure that you didn’t mean what you said literally, but more so the overall sentiment, and I figured this was moreso what you meant.
I mostly agree.
I would like to see the Ukrainian SSR come back, but alot of things would have to change first.
I just think of it as Greater Ruthenia
i completely agree. thanks for expanding on my comment
The people in the four Oblasts annexed by Russia have already expressed their self-determination: they held referendums and chose to join Russia. One can argue that people in some parts of those Oblasts did not have the opportunity to vote as they were (and are) still in Kiev controlled territory. That is true and after the war they should also be given the opportunity to make a choice.
The same applies for all parts of Ukraine. Get rid of the Nazi regime in Kiev and their murderous thugs who are terrorizing the population and let the people of Odessa (majority and historically Russian city) and Kharkov (same) have a referendum too, and every other region that wants one. The rest of Ukraine can then vote on whether it wants to maintain neutrality, join the EU, or join Russia’s EAEU.
That is what self-determination is, not living in a country turned prison camp where the fascist guards arrest you and beat you for speaking Russian, watching Russian media or saying you want to live in peace with Russia and Russian people, abduct you and force you to fight and die for Blackrock’s profits and Zelensky’s third Miami/Tel Aviv villa.
Until the Nazi regime in Kiev is gone there can be no talk of self-determination, because people are not free to express what they want, and they certainly don’t have the power to make any choices. All that power is now in the hands of the SBU, of heavily armed Neonazi groups, of a drugged up megalomaniacal dictator whose legal term has long since expired, and of a parliament that is stacked exclusively with Banderites and corrupt regime toadies.
But most of all you can’t have self-determination in a country that isn’t sovereign, that is a completely dependent proxy and resource colony of the US and EU.
Are we sure the referendums weren’t rigged?
Rigged how? If you mean in the sense of outright lying about the results or ballot stuffing, i very much doubt that. I remember people were posting videos at the time showing how the voting was being done and it was basically organized by the local government and staffed by local volunteers.
And they invited observers too if i remember correctly (though of course the “collective West” and its institutions refused to send anyone because they said the referendums were illegitimate). Also they wouldn’t really need to rig a vote in areas that are as heavily ethnically/culturally Russian identifying as those four Oblasts.
However if you mean rigged in the sense that the result was not 100% representative of the opinions of the entire population of those Oblasts then yes, that is true. One of the problems i mentioned already, which is that only people in Russian held territory could vote, and the four Oblasts were only partially held by Russia at that time.
The second problem is that many of those who were very pro-Ukrainian probably just boycotted the vote, so this skewed the end result toward the pro-Russian side. But this factor can be adjusted for by looking at the overall voter turnout numbers, and those were quite high, especially in the two easternmost Oblasts, Donetsk and Lugansk, which had been fighting a war against the Kiev regime for eight years.
And sure you can say that this still doesn’t prove that there wasn’t tampering, but how can you prove something like that? Ultimately the burden of proof is on those who allege fraud and rigging. And why doesn’t the West, which always accuses Russia of rigging, apply the same standard of skepticism to their own and their allies’ votes? Why is it only Russia’s votes that are always viewed with such suspicion and assumed a priori to be fraudulent?
There’s a split btwn the Donbass and Kiev. People in Kiev are not the ones getting gang pressed, so of course they want to keep the war going. I’m sorry but if Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting you wouldn’t have recruitment officers beating men up and then carrying them into vans to take to the front. Besides, what one wants and what one needs is not always the same thing.
Ultimately to answer their question if I was asked it directly I would say that sounds great, Donbass has self determination and joins Russia, the rest of Ukraine can keep getting shelled and destroyed, that will definitely improve the odds in their favor.
While I understand your tone and sentiment, I think you are being very unfair towards Ukrainians, even if alot of them brought it on themselves.
For almost as long as the war has been going on, but especially within the past 1-2 years, I’ve read reports that Ukrainian civilians will often fight back and attempt to rescue loved ones from being kidnapped by UkraNazi militias, and there have bene numerous cases of Ukrainians banding together to kill Ukrainian “recruiters” and conscriptors.
The ukrainian people chose, multiple times I must say, neutrality (which is the best case scenario for everyone except the US empire). The thing is their leadership has been coopted by literal nazis, so they ban russian language, genocide etnic russians and try to join NATO.
But I wouldn’t expect an end to this conflict where Ukraine simply ceases to exist. Even a maximalist view where Russia imposes whatever on Ukraine I’d expect them to take everything east of the Dniper + mykolaev + Odessa at most.
That said ukrainians’ right to self determination doesn’t trump other people’s that live there. And if they want to live peacefully, then maybe stop being a battering ram on Russia would go a long way.
This whole war happened because donbas demanded the right to self determination. They held referendums to break away from the nazi government in keiv and declared independence. That is when the civil war really kicked off before that it as just sparkling unrest. Russia didn’t “invade” ukraine they were invited into the donbas by LPR and DPR governments to uphold their right to self governance.
Is it really self determination if the entire political order that followed the coup in 2014 has brought Ukraine to this point?
I can’t speak for all Ukrainians, obviously, but what I and most of my friends and family want is simple: peace and open borders. I, personally, also want to see the current fascist government and the military hanging.
Ukrainians, en masse, always wanted peace. Zelensky was elected on the peaceful platform, since people were tired of Poroshenko’s attempts to trigger a war, but as soon as he was in the office, he did an immediate 180. The issue is, advocating for peace gets you jailed and tortured in Ukraine, so you won’t hear much of these voices. What you hear are the rabid dogs of the regime, who feed off the war in one way or the other.
Everyone here is insanely tired. I can’t leave my house, because I fear being kidnapped by the recruiter goons. I don’t know how much longer I can take, and I’m seriously contemplating suicide at times. I miss my fiancee, who’s abroad and can’t come here, and I can’t go to her. Just let this end, please.
For what it’s worth, if you need someone to talk to, I’m always here.
Thank you. I appreciate it. It’s just that… Every word of support has been worn thin over the past three years. At this point all I can do is turn my brain off and pretend that everything is fine, because thinking about it all makes me want to bash my head in.
Still, I appreciate it, comrade.
I understand that, too. Even words of support are just words.
Because at some point I feel like I lost a part of the plot
