[Continuing the debate over peace movement strategy and
principles, John Feffer addresses proposals for the U.S. to cut off
weapons to Ukraine, arms control with Russia, Ukraine membership in
the European Union, and the Wagner mutiny.]
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THE PEACE MOVEMENT AND UKRAINE: JOHN FEFFER REPLIES TO CRITICS  
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John Feffer
July 30, 2023
New Politics
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_ Continuing the debate over peace movement strategy and principles,
John Feffer addresses proposals for the U.S. to cut off weapons to
Ukraine, arms control with Russia, Ukraine membership in the European
Union, and the Wagner mutiny. _

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[John Feffer was interviewed by email by Stephen R. Shalom of
the _New _Politics editorial board.]

NEW POLITICS (NP): _You wrote an article for _Foreign Policy in
Focus_ entitled “__The Surprising Pervasiveness of American
Arrogance
[[link removed]]__,”
criticizing a view in the peace movement on the war in Ukraine. Medea
Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies, and Marcy Winograd (hereafter BDW)
wrote a response to you, also published _on Foreign Policy in Focus_,
“__The Surprising Pervasiveness Of Pro-War Propaganda
[[link removed]]__.”
I’d like to discuss your reaction to this critique._

_BDW argue that the United States, as Ukraine’s main arms supplier,
has an obligation to push Ukraine towards negotiations at the same
time that the world is pushing the Russians towards negotiations. BDW
have called for an end to U.S. weapons to Ukraine. Do you think
cutting off arms to Ukraine will hasten diplomacy?_

JOHN FEFFER (JF): In some cases, cutting off the supply of weapons to
a conflict will increase the likelihood of successful peace
negotiations. But that’s not the case with Ukraine. The Ukrainians
are not just fighting to oust Russian troops from occupied territory.
They’re fighting to stop Russian soldiers from seizing more land
and, indeed, the entire country. They’ve seen what kind of war
crimes the Russian soldiers have committed. They will fight with
whatever means they have to prevent those horrors from being visited
upon themselves, their families, their friends. This is, in effect, a
national liberation struggle, like the Vietnamese fight against the
French and then the United States. If the Ukrainians don’t have U.S.
weapons to fight the occupation forces, they will fight with weapons
imported from elsewhere, with guns unearthed from World War II-era
caches, with rocks if necessary.

Diplomacy will be advanced not primarily by the actions of the United
States but by those of Russia: stopping its aerial bombing, its
efforts to seize more territory, and its ultimate retreat from
occupied territory.

Of course, if the United States had never provided Ukraine with
weapons in the first place, Russia would have succeeded with its
invasion. The end of the war would have meant the end of Ukraine,
which remains a potential scenario should the United States cut off
arms shipments today.

NP: _BDW say that “The U.S. didn’t start the war, but it’s
helped continue it.” Do you think this is true? Specifically, BDW
claim that Washington has blocked peace agreements that Ukraine has
wanted to pursue and that your denial of this is a “__willful
negation of well-documented real-world events.” How do you respond?_

JF: According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
[[link removed]],
“It is well known that we supported the proposal of the Ukrainian
side to negotiate early in the special military operation and by the
end of March, the two delegations agreed on the principle to settle
this conflict. It is [also] well known and was published openly that
our American, British, and some European colleagues told Ukraine that
it is too early to deal, and the arrangement which was almost agreed
was never revisited by the Kyiv regime.”

This is one of the “well-documented real-world events” that BDW
are referring to, well-documented by the Russian government at least.
Let’s take a closer look at this claim.

By the end of March, Russia and Ukraine had come to some rough
agreement on a possible deal. The Russians said they would withdraw to
the pre-invasion line; the Ukrainians said that they would take NATO
membership off the table. There was still some disagreement over the
“security guarantees” that Washington would provide Kyiv. Maybe
the two sides could have reached an agreement. Naftali Bennett, the
Israel prime minister involved in the negotiations, rated its
prospects
[[link removed]] at
50/50.

But then came the revelations of Russian war crimes in Bucha in early
April. These weren’t the first revelations
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Russian atrocities, but they marked a turning point. The Ukrainians
became considerably more skeptical of Russian willingness to adhere to
any deal. And Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that a peace
deal was at a dead end because the Ukrainians had fabricated
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the news of war crimes in Bucha.

Then there’s UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to Kyiv on
April 9, 2022, when he supposedly scuttled the emerging deal. The
evidence of Johnson’s pressuring of Zelensky comes from an article
from _Ukrainska Pravda_. In fact, as this account
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clear, Johnson wasn’t telling Zelensky anything he didn’t already
know or believe, namely that Putin couldn’t be trusted to adhere to
the deal that was on the table.

Behind these claims of U.S. (or UK) intransigence is the notion that
the West is eager to use Ukrainians as cannon fodder for their larger
aim of weakening Russia and bringing down Putin’s government. This
claim ignores the evidence of a considerable difference of opinion
within the Biden administration over Ukraine, with some favoring a
more aggressive military response and others preferring a more
vigorous diplomatic approach.

Aside from this internal debate, the United States has good reasons to
want an earlier rather than later resolution to the war. Supplying the
Ukrainians is costly and draws down the U.S. arsenal. The war raises
the risk of the use of nuclear weapons as well as the prospect of
“loose nukes” if Russian domestic security breaks down (in the
case of another coup attempt, for instance). And the focus on Russia
distracts attention from what the U.S. foreign policy establishment
believes to be the principal foe, China. In comparison to a number of
other Ukrainian allies, the United States is actually quite
“soft.” The Biden administration has hesitated on the delivery of
certain weapon systems and been very lukewarm on the issue of NATO
membership for Ukraine.

NP: _BDW give a list of things that __the U.S. and its allies could
do to help support negotiations, such as reopen the ABM treaty, offer
to renegotiate the New START Treaty, and offer EU membership and a
Marshall Fund to rebuild Ukraine. What do you think of these things?_

JF: The United States should absolutely recommit to arms control
negotiations with Russia (and other countries). EU membership for
Ukraine is already on the table: it was granted candidate status in
June 2022. And Ukraine will need enormous resources to rebuild, which
its allies should provide.

So, these are critically important policies. Will they help in
advancing peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine? Probably not,
because they do not address the drivers of the conflict at this point.
Putin is committed to expanding the “Russian world,” and Ukraine
is determined to oust all occupiers from its country. Any peace
negotiation will ultimately have to focus on this territorial
question.

NP: _BDW respond to your criticism that they ignore Ukrainian voices
by citing their listening to __Yurii Sheliazhenko, the executive
secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, the Ukrainian Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, and others. They ask,
“Does Feffer want us to listen only to Ukrainians who toe the line
on the present government position of no territorial compromise?”
How do you answer this challenge?_

JF: Of course it is possible to find Ukrainians who (more or less)
support BDW’s position. It is a big country, after all. But there
are three points to make here.

The first is: what do the vast majority of Ukrainians support?
According to numerous public opinion polls, the overwhelming majority
of Ukrainians reject
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“peace now” approach.

The second is: what does the Ukrainian left support? The progressive
sector of Ukrainian society, which is generally skeptical of the
Zelensky government policies on politics and the economy, is united on
the issue of the war. This Ukraine Peace Appeal
[[link removed]], signed by a broad swath of
civil society organizations and addressed to Western peace movements,
strongly supports military assistance to Ukraine.

And the third is: are BDW really listening to the Ukrainian voices
that they have cited? As a pacifist, Yurii Sheliazhenko does indeed
oppose arms shipments to the Ukrainian government and supports war
resisters within the country. But he also supports resistance
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the Russian occupation.

And here is what Nina Potarska, the Ukraine coordinator for
WILPF, had to say
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an “international summit for peace in Ukraine” that was held in
Vienna in mid-June and that featured presentations by Noam Chomsky,
Jeffrey Sachs, and other “peace now” proponents:

“In the early afternoon, Nina Potarska, from the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, brought to the 300 or so
peace supporters a Ukrainian perspective, for the first time, what a
ceasefire really means at the present time. […] Families would
remain separated, the conflict itself would not be resolved, Russia
would probably once again illegally annex land. There would be no
guarantee that Russia would not try again. On the verge of tears, the
woman who had fled Ukraine said she probably wanted peace more than
anyone else in the room. “But what do you really mean when you want
peace,” she asked. We should be aware that singing songs while
living in peace is a privilege, she said.”

So, perhaps BDW do listen to voices from Ukraine. But do they actually
hear those voices?

NP: _Your exchange with BDW is now a few weeks old and we have
witnessed the beginning of the Ukrainian counter-offensive and the
Wagner mutiny in Russia. Do these events modify your views on how the
peace movement should deal with the Ukraine question?_

JF: The Ukrainian government hopes that the counteroffensive will
result in the expulsion of all Russian occupation forces – or, at
least, put the Ukrainians in a much stronger position at the
negotiating table. So far, that counteroffensive has been slow going.
At some point, if this effort bogs down, a new deal may be on the
table. But it should be the Ukrainians who make the decisions about
territorial compromises – not outside governments.

I have written about the implications
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mutiny on the future of Putin and Russia. Clearly the Russian war
effort is exacting a toll on Russian society that goes beyond just the
economic costs of the sanctions or the anger around the mobilization
of soldiers. Putin’s popularity is waning, and his grip on the upper
echelons of power may also be loosening. I sketch out three scenarios
in the article – Putin reestablishes control; the Ukrainians succeed
with their counter-offensive and Putin gets shunted aside in a palace
coup; or the war bogs down and Putin faces a putsch from the far
right. If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t put any money on Putin at
this point. And this would seem to be the best time for Ukraine to get
the assistance it needs to exploit Putin’s weakness at home to make
a military breakthrough.

The mutiny also reveals how uncomfortable the Biden administration is
with regime change in Moscow. It reached out directly to the Kremlin
to disavow any involvement with Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. And it
is clearly distressed at the scenario of a Russia in chaos with
“loose nukes” falling into the “wrong” hands. These
developments should put to rest all the fanciful notions of a “proxy
war.” But conspiracy theories, as we know, die hard.

_John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy in Focus
[[link removed]] at the Institute for Policy Studies
[[link removed]]. He has written many works of non-fiction --
most recently Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the
Far-Right and the Left Response -- and fiction, as well as producing
eleven plays, including seven one-man shows._

_NEW POLITICS (SUBSCRIBE HERE [[link removed]]),
published since 1986 as a semi-annual, follows in the tradition
established in its first series (1961-1978) as an independent
socialist forum for dialogue and debate on the left. It is committed
to the advancement of the peace and anti-intervention movements. It
stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is
uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action. In
our pages there is broad coverage of labor and social movements, the
international scene, as well as emphasis on cultural and intellectual
history._

_Above all, NEW POLITICS insists on the centrality of democracy to
socialism and on the need to rely on mass movements from below for
progressive social transformation._

* Ukraine
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* Russia
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* peace movement
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