[ The war in Ukraine has divided progressives like few other
foreign policy issues in recent years. A Foreign Policy in Focus
commentary by John Feffer posted on xxxxxx criticized CODEPINKs
position on the war in Ukraine. Here is our response.]
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THE SURPRISING PERVASIVENESS OF PRO-WAR PROPAGANDA  
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Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Marcy Winograd
June 15, 2023
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ The war in Ukraine has divided progressives like few other foreign
policy issues in recent years. A Foreign Policy in Focus commentary by
John Feffer posted on xxxxxx criticized CODEPINK's position on the
war in Ukraine. Here is our response. _

Antiwar protestors demonstrate against Russia's invasion of Ukraine
outside the Russian embassy in Warsaw, Poland, February 2022.,
Shutterstock photo // FPIF

 

_As a platform for progressive internationalism, FPIF has featured a
range of viewpoints on the subject. In that spirit, we present this
response from CODEPINK — a group that includes longtime
collaborators with FPIF and our parent institution, the Institute for
Policy Studies — to a recent critique by FPIF director John Feffer
entitled “The Surprising Pervasiveness of American Arrogance
[[link removed]].”_

In the _Foreign Policy In Focus _article “The Surprising
Pervasiveness of American Arrogance
[[link removed]],”
John Feffer belittles champions of the U.S. peace movement for their
support for a ceasefire and negotiated peace to end the suffering in
Ukraine and avert a nuclear catastrophe.

In a vitriolic swipe at advocates for a diplomatic solution, Feffer
performs rhetorical backflips to claim that people such as MIT
linguist Noam Chomsky, world renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, and
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and the Peace in Ukraine
Coalition [[link removed]], are guilty of U.S.
exceptionalism for demanding that the U.S., the primary arms supplier
to Ukraine, heed the voices of the Global South to push for a mutual
ceasefire.

Many of us in the peace movement have worked with John Feffer for
years, and appreciate his long history of supporting peace and
justice.

We certainly value the institution where he works, the Institute for
Policy Studies (IPS), which also employs the brilliant analyst Phyllis
Bennis, who shares our views and has long been calling for a ceasefire
and negotiations in Ukraine. Bennis says
[[link removed]] that
the United States, as the main arms supplier, has “not only the
right, but the obligation, to push Ukraine towards negotiations, at
the same time that the world is pushing the Russians towards
negotiations.”

Our positive history with Feffer and his institute is why we are so
shocked and dismayed by his distorted public denunciation and feel
obliged to respond.

OUR DISAGREEMENTS

Feffer’s main critique is that in calling for peace, we
“pundit-activists” have “not bothered to consult the Ukrainian
victims in this conflict” or even Russian anti-war activists. He
adds the demeaning accusation that “those Americans who support
‘peace now’ only consult themselves.” His second accusation is
that we put too much emphasis on the role and power of the United
States.

Regarding the first claim, we are constantly consulting with
Ukrainians and Russians.

Some of the women Feffer criticized have been part of a
Ukrainian/Russian/U.S. women’s dialogue for over a year. Many of us
participate in regular public and private webinars
[[link removed]] with
Ukrainians and Russians, and we hear
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from people who have just returned from the region.

CODEPINK and Peace in Ukraine are conveners of a June 10 conference in
Vienna, Austria, where Russians and Ukrainians are featured speakers,
including representatives from the Ukrainian Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom, the Partnership for Advancing Innovative
Sustainability, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, and the
peace-building institute PATRIR.

Feffer suggests we are tone deaf in not backing Ukrainians who want to
fight until Ukraine claws back every inch of the Donbas and Crimea.g
But Feffer fails to mention that such a long war could well mean:
hundreds of thousands more dead and wounded; millions more refugees
spilling across borders to destabilize Europe; further contamination
of land and water with chemical carcinogens; increased greenhouse gas
emissions during a climate crisis; disruption in grain exports causing
rising hunger throughout Africa; thousands more dolphins washing up
dead in the Black Sea; and increased risk of nuclear war and global
annihilation, either through miscalculation or intention on the part
of Russia or the United States, the two nations that possess 90
percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, yet refuse to rule out first
use.

Feffer asserts NATO expansion and a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 had
nothing to do with the current crisis, and he makes no mention of the
civil war triggered by that coup. He argues that the U.S. government,
which has spent $115 billion to fund the war and foot the bill for the
day-to-day functioning of the Ukrainian government, has little
influence to  push for a ceasefire and diplomatic settlement, and
that those who believe the U.S. has influence are guilty of U.S.
exceptionalism.

The human cost to Ukraine in military and civilian lives of a war to
fully recover Crimea and Donbas would be atrocious and “unacceptable
[[link removed]],”
as Ukraine’s military commander-in-chief told President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy in April 2021, even before those regions were defended, as
they are now, by hundreds of thousands of Russian forces.

The danger of further escalation leading to World War III and a
nuclear war makes the prospect of such a long and unlimited war even
more unthinkable and unacceptable.

UKRAINIANS HAVE A RANGE OF VIEWS ON THE WAR.

Feffer’s implication — that all Ukrainians think the same and that
Ukraine is homogeneous in ethnic origin and intellectual thought —
ignores the internal divide between nationalist Ukrainians in the west
and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east. There are millions of
pro-Russian Ukrainians in the Donbas and Crimea who do not want to be
part of Ukraine.

There are also Ukrainians who are outraged by the Russian invasion but
just want this war to end. There are thousands of Ukrainian men trying
to avoid conscription and a bribery
[[link removed]] system
in which recruiting offices charge up to $32,000 for safe passage out
of Ukraine. There are entire units of newly conscripted Ukrainian
soldiers who have deserted, and Ukrainian courts that impose a
five-year prison sentence for people convicted of desertion. There are
Ukrainian pacifists, conscientious objectors, and war resisters.

And when probing the views of “Ukrainians,” we must also ask: How
free are they to voice their opinions? In all wars there is government
censorship and Ukraine is no exception. We have talked to many
Ukrainians who say that it is now considered treasonous to advocate
compromise with Russia. The Ukrainian government, having declared
martial law, tells its populace that the return of Crimea and the
eastern Donbas is non-negotiable, an opinion reinforced by state
control of television.

Foreign policy analyst Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute recently
returned from a research trip to Ukraine, where he talked
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Ukrainians who believed, for various reasons, that the nation should
be prepared to give up Crimea, the location of Russia’s naval base
at Sevastopol, part of Russia for 200 years and home to ethnic
Russians who have voted twice to rejoin the Russian Federation. But
all were afraid to say so on the record.

Lieven wrote that state propaganda aimed at motivating the population
to fight has helped to create what one Ukrainian analyst called a
“Frankenstein’s monster” that is now out of control. Another
Ukrainian noted that “most sensible people know it is not possible
to reconquer Crimea,” but that it has become “almost impossible to
say this in public without losing your job or perhaps worse….Anyone
who advocates compromise with Russia is immediately branded a traitor
and targeted by the Ukrainian security service.”

Does Feffer want us to listen only to Ukrainians who toe the line on
the present government position of no territorial compromise?

Should we only listen to hard-line nationalists such as Zelensky’s
advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, who called pro-Russian Crimeans
“mankurts” (brain-dead slaves) and said that, after taking Crimea,
Ukraine would have to “eradicate everything Russian,” including
the Russian language?

Should we listen to the secretary of the National Security and Defense
Council (NSDC), Aleksej Danilov, who tweeted 
[[link removed]]that
people who think they have the right to speak Russian on Ukrainian
television have no place on television, politics, or even in Ukraine
itself?

THE U.S. DIDN’T START THE WAR, BUT IT’S HELPED CONTINUE IT.

Regarding the accusation that we exaggerate U.S. power, Feffer took a
single sentence from the Eisenhower Media Network’s full-page
statement in _The New York Times_, a sentence urging President Biden
and Congress to “use their full power to end the Russia-Ukraine War
speedily through diplomacy,” to paint a false picture of a peace
movement that views the United States as a superpower capable of
solving any global problem.

We have never believed that, even when the U.S. wielded a great deal
more global power than it does today.

But we do believe that the U.S. has used its power to _derail_ peace
talks and push Zelenskyy _not_ to make compromises that he was,
early on in the war, ready to make.

During talks in Turkey in March 2022, the Ukrainian government
accepted territorial compromises as part of its draft 15-point peace
and neutrality agreement
[[link removed]] with
Russia.

Zelenskyy
[[link removed]] himself
said, “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear state of our
state. We are prepared to go through with it.” He added that
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goal is obvious — peace and the restoration of normal life in our
native land as soon as possible.” He ruled out trying to recapture
all Russian-held territory by force, saying it would lead to World War
III. He wanted to reach a “compromise” over the eastern Donbas
region and was ready to put off the final status of Crimea for years
to come. In return, Russia agreed to withdraw all its occupation
forces.

Then the UK and the U.S. intervened and derailed the talks. The
Turkish Foreign Minister said after a failed NATO conference, “Some
NATO countries wanted the war in Ukraine to continue in order to
weaken Russia.” While Feffer denies that this is true, the fact that
British and American politicians intervened to block negotiations has
been confirmed by Zelenskyy’s aides
[[link removed]], Turkish
diplomats
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and Israel’s then prime minister Naftali Bennett
[[link removed]].
Feffer’s denial is just willful negation of well-documented
real-world events.

During those talks, what Ukraine asked of the U.S. and other NATO
countries was for them to provide collective security guarantees to
ensure it would not be invaded again. But instead of supporting
Ukraine in its negotiations, the U.S. and UK used Ukraine’s
dependence on Western support as leverage to undermine the peace talks
and turn what might have been a two-month war into a much longer one,
with corresponding increases in fatalities, casualties, and physical
and economic devastation for the people of Ukraine.

THE U.S. CAN PLAY A ROLE IN ENDING UKRAINE’S MURDEROUS STALEMATE.

We disagree with Feffer on other aspects of the U.S. role.

Feffer doesn’t believe NATO expansion was a significant factor in
this conflict, he doesn’t believe that the U.S. was a significant
player in the 2014 Maidan uprising that overthrew the pro-Russian
government of Viktor Yanukovych, and he doesn’t believe that U.S.
policy has turned this war from a valiant defense by the people of
Ukraine into a long war to sacrifice them for the U.S. geopolitical
goal of “weakening
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Russia.

These are obviously fundamental disagreements. Our insistence on U.S.
responsibility for a long series of diplomatic and policy errors
affecting Ukraine does not in any way justify the war, but it does
help in understanding possible solutions.

The result of the U.S. policies Feffer supports is the murderous
stalemate described in leaked Pentagon documents. Those documents
analyze possible gains from the much-touted upcoming Ukrainian
offensive and conclude
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“enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies
probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the
offensive,” so that the most likely outcome remains only modest
territorial gains.

A stalemate could mean a protracted years-long war, in which many,
many more Ukrainians and Russians will die, while Ukrainian towns like
Bakhmut are reduced to empty shells. Or it could mean something even
more devastating: World War III. As NATO Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg himself said
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in December, “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,”
referring to the possibility of the war spreading throughout Europe or
leading to nuclear war.

If a NATO country becomes directly involved, which could easily
happen, then the U.S. would be under pressure to send in U.S. troops,
over 100,000
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whom are already stationed in or deployed to Europe. The dreaded war
between Russia and the United States that we succeeded in avoiding
throughout the original Cold War would finally engulf us all, and it
would be the result of an entirely avoidable series of Russian and
American diplomatic and policy failures.

Feffer derides the former U.S. military and intelligence officers who
signed the recent full-page _New York Times_ ad 
[[link removed]]as
being singularly obsessed with American power, accusing them of
falsely believing that the U.S. has the power to force a ceasefire and
negotiate a peace deal.

They did not say that the U.S. has the power to do this
single-handedly, but we happen to be living in the U.S. and therefore
should be concerned about what positive role our government could
play. Right now, the U.S. is helping with economic and humanitarian
aid, which is commendable, but it is also pouring in massive amounts
of weapons to fuel this war.

There are certainly more positive positions the U.S. and its allies
could take to help support negotiations. The U.S. could offer to
remove its missiles from Romania and Poland and its nuclear weapons
from European countries, in exchange for Russia not deploying its own
nukes to Belarus. The U.S. could reopen the ABM (Anti-ballistic
missile) treaty and the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF)
treaty, both treaties that the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from. It
could offer to renegotiate the New START Treaty from which the
Russians pulled back. The Europeans could offer EU membership and a
Marshall Fund to rebuild Ukraine.

We are asking our government to adjust sensibly
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a world where it is no longer the global hegemon and to play a
constructive role in cooperation with other countries. On the crisis
in Ukraine, that means supporting Ukraine to make peace, instead of
obstructing peace negotiations and sending ever more dangerous weapons
into the mix — weapons that, despite U.S. prohibitions, are already
being used to expand the war into Russia itself.

THE U.S. MUST LISTEN TO UKRAINIANS — AND ALSO THE GLOBAL SOUTH.

Finally, we agree with Feffer that we must listen to Ukranians, but we
must also listen to the cries coming from the rest of the world, from
people and countries who do not want to see life on this planet
extinguished.

Let’s listen to the voices of the poor around the world, who are
also victims of this war. This is particularly true in the Global
South, where millions are threatened with hunger from rising food
prices or must decide whether to pay their rent or their energy bills.

Let’s listen to the voice of President Lula de Silva of Brazil who,
when asked by President Biden to send weapons to Ukraine, replied:
“We do not want to join this war; we want to end this war.”

Let’s listen to the voice of Pope Francis, who has already
facilitated prisoner exchanges and is trying to mediate a peace
agreement. “Let us not get used to conflict and violence,” he
cautioned. “Let us not get used to war.”

As an example of real solidarity, Feffer upholds the way that U.S.
activists listened to South Africans during the anti-apartheid
movement. But let’s also listen to South African leaders today who,
along with five other African nations, have created
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high-level peace mission to Moscow and Kyiv that is calling for a
ceasefire in Ukraine, to be followed by serious negotiations to arrive
at “a framework for lasting peace.”

We would like to close with the words of two dear colleagues. Andy
Shallal, a board member of the Institute for Policy Studies and an
Iraqi-American who knows the horror of war, wrote to Feffer after
reading his article:

_“John, I implore you to rethink your position on Ukraine. Peace
activists don’t want to end this war because we have a fondness for
Putin, but because we know from too many past experiences that wars
are nasty and benefit no one but despots, arms merchants and
oligarchs.”_

Yurii Sheliazhenko, the executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist
Movement and the recipient of the International Peace Bureau’s Sean
McBride Peace Prize for 2022, wrote these profound words after reading
Feffer’s article:

“_My advice to people in the U.S. who want peace is this: Do not
abandon your principles when listening to people. The whole point of
peace and justice is a commitment to simple, commonsense principles
such as ‘do no harm, peace by peaceful means, and refusal to
kill.’ These are not some abstract principles you can simply abandon
but they are the ultimate way to uphold the sacred value of human
life, to escape the vicious circle of violence, to abandon the naive
and barbaric belief that violence can resolve conflicts. _

_“War is never progressive; it is simply old-fashioned, shameful
mass murder. Weapons only kill, they never bring peace. We will only
achieve genuine peace when we learn and teach how to live, govern and
manage conflicts without violence. Listening to people who don’t
have enough common sense to recognize such simple truths means
listening to the wrong people, and no good will come of it.”_

_[Medea Benjamin [[link removed]], Nicolas
J.S. Davies [[link removed]], Marcy
Winograd [[link removed]]_

_MEDEA BENJAMIN and NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES are the authors of War in
Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict
[[link removed]], published by OR
Books in November 2022._

_MEDEA BENJAMIN is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace
[[link removed]], and the author of several books,
including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic
Republic of Iran
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_NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES is an independent journalist, a researcher with
CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion
and Destruction of Iraq
[[link removed]]._

_MARCY WINOGRAD is the Coordinator of CODEPINKCONGRESS
[[link removed]] and the co-founder of the
Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party.]_

* peace movement
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* Ukraine war
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* Ukraine
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* Russia
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* Left strategy
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* NATO
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* imperialism
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* anti-imperialism
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* U.S. foreign policy
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* Biden Administration
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* global policy
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* global politics
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* FPIF
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