Stop Pretending the Left is on Putin's Side
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is sickening. Vladimir Putin had this Monday claimed that the “Kiev regime” refused any resolution of the conflict in the Donbas except through “military means.” The Russian president now claims to resolve it with far more bloodshed, already spreading beyond the Donbas region and risking a wider conflagration.
Putin’s open disregard for Ukrainian independence expresses a reactionary civilizational politics, as expressed in his article scouring medieval myths for reasons to kill and maim in the present. True, he famously once claimed that the fall of the USSR was the last century’s “greatest geopolitical disaster.” Yet it was no accident that this week he cast Lenin as the “architect” of Ukraine, who had subverted an older and thus somehow more authentic tsarist imperial order.
Putin’s rule surely has drawn legitimacy from Russia’s post-Soviet malaise. His government’s credo of militarized stability built its support in an atmosphere of real popular despair following the destruction of the pre-1991 social order; a series of border conflicts have in turn radicalized its nationalist revanchism. But his insistence this week that he would “really decommunize” Ukraine, by dismantling it, showed his hatred even for the most formal Soviet rhetoric of “fraternity among peoples.”
Putin was not driven to invade by Western threat or by a small but militant far-right minority in Ukraine. Yet it should clearly be recognized that Western actions have helped prepare the way. This is not only because NATO’s post-1991 expansion has encircled Russia or empowered its militarists to claim that lands devastated during World War II are again under threat. More than that, Putin’s claim to stand up for minorities in the Donbas draws on a now well-worn playbook of “humanitarian” intervention.
To observe that those who destroyed Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia have no standing to condemn him is not an exercise in “both-sidesism.” The likes of Blair, Clinton, Trump, and Putin have often been on one same side, through material collaboration in the War on Terror and in their common undermining of the international law which they all claim to uphold. Time and again, Washington has allied with despots, come to see them as unreliable, then launched military offensives against them that succeeded only in spreading chaos. The Left has every duty to remember these disasters — and prevent them from being repeated in the present.