Comparing Ukraine and Palestine on The 2nd Anniversary of The Ukraine War

Ollie Power shows how the double standard between how the West treats Ukraine compared to Palestine makes sense when you understand the global system of corporate control and war that underlies both conflicts.

The political and media classes in the west are, on the face of it*,* utter hypocrites. The difference between how they respond to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Zionist genocide taking place in Palestine is stark: Joe Biden is unequivocal in calling Putin a “butcher” and a “war criminal” while he pulls his punches when it comes to Netanyahu, merely referring to him in private as “this guy”.

EU President Ursula Von Der Leyen has set out to bring Putin to justice:

“We will leave no stone unturned to hold Putin and his henchmen accountable,” but has no such designs on Israel, on the contrary, on 14th October 2023 she went to Israel, stood next to Netanyahu, invoked the Holocaust and presumed to speak on behalf of 300 million people in the EU as follows:

“there is only one possible response: Europe stands with Israel. And Israel has a right to defend itself. In fact, it has the duty to defend its people… I know that how Israel responds will show that it is a democracy”.

At home, our own political and media classes are almost unanimous in their condemnation of Russia and in showing support for Israel’s “right to defend itself”. The extent of the genocide being carried out by the Zionists and the sheer force of the people power movement has forced the government parties and Sinn Féin to change rhetoric - If not policy.

At the time of writing, the Zionists have butchered 30,000 people but the Taoiseach and Sinn Féin are still intent on visiting the White House on St Patrick’s Day to pose for photographs with the enabler-in-chief of Zionist genocide, Joe Biden.

I say the Western governments, and ours, are hypocrites “on the face of it” because in truth, the contradiction - opposing Russian violence while backing Israeli violence – is no contradiction at all if you are signed up to the US-led imperialist project. And be in no doubt, the political and media classes of the West, including those in Ireland, are almost without exception signed up to that project.

The political and media classes of the west condemn Russia, not because they’re horrified by the atrocities carried out in Putin’s regional, imperialist invasion; they condemn Russia because Russia is on the other side in a multi-front developing inter-imperialist “great power” conflict.

The same conflict demands that Israel is given a blank cheque. Israel is the most important client state of the US in a region of critical importance to Western global capitalism. Every now and then someone like Micheal Martin may fret over Israeli excesses, but the bottom line is, with those stakes in play, Zionists can kill as many women and children as they like without any meaningful sanctions being taken against them.

On 24th February 2022 the armed forces of the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. It is often asserted the war actually started in 2014 when weeks of violence in the centre of Kiev led to coup d’état that removed the corrupt, albeit democratically elected President, oligarch and ex-con Victor Yanokovich. This led to the seizure of Crimea by Russia and an explosion of the violence and civil war in the Eastern regions of the country. This war carried on for eight years, resulting in 14,000 deaths and the deterioration of relations between the US and the EU on one side and Russia on the other - to the point when Russia finally invaded.

Class War and Imperialism

The influence of NATO expansion is essential for understanding how this state of affairs came to pass. I will examine this later; however, I believe it is essential first to understand this conflict as a continuation of a class war that had hitherto taken so many turns in that part of the world.

The Tsar of Russia ruled as an aristocratic dictator. That regime was a grinding, desperate sub-existence for most people in the Russian Empire. The working class Bolshevik revolution was a brief ray of light in this dark story but with the failure of the German revolution of 1918 to 1923, the revolution in Russia degenerated into the state capitalism of the various stages of the Soviet system until finally in 1991, the system collapsed.

What happened in the 1990s, both in Ukraine and Russia, was the wholesale robbery by an emerging billionaire class, of previously state-owned manufacturing, agriculture, metallurgical, petrochemical, and mining industries.

This post-Soviet “shock doctrine" also saw the emergence of privately owned services in banking and media and the downgrading of public services from schools to hospitals, to public transport. In the years 1988 – 2000 life expectancy in Ukraine fell from 70.5 to 67.7 years while the corresponding figure in Russia was a reduction from 69 to 65 years.

The period from 2000 up until 2014 was a period of divergence in how the class war developed in Ukraine and Russia. Putin’s Russia saw the subordination of the billionaire class to the state while the state was far weaker vis-à-vis the oligarchs in Ukraine. According to the Polish academic, Slawomir Matusiak, Ukraine until 2014 was an “oligarchic democracy” running massive budget deficits, taking on international loans at the same time as its billionaire class managed not only to pay very little tax but ended up as creditors to the state themselves, issuing loans from their privately owned banks.

There is another aspect to the expropriation by the billionaire classes of Russia and Ukraine: The big bang of financial deregulation in the City of London in 1986 saw the flourishing of the enormous offshore financial system where so many Russian oligarchs were wooed to hide their wealth.

The City of London and its satellite “secrecy jurisdictions”, including of course, the Irish ruling class’s pride and joy, the Irish Financial Services Centre, were essential to the success of the Russian and Ukrainian ruling class; in other words, the global financial system of the West had an essential role in the vicious attack on the working classes of both Russia and Ukraine.

Global Shift to The Right 

Putin’s Russia is therefore a hyper-capitalist economy overlain and regulated by a state with a secure monopoly over the use of force and inhabited by people who are relentlessly fed a diet of deeply conservative social values and increasingly dominant right-wing nationalism.

The increasing nationalism and militarism of Putin’s Russia is the counterpart to the expansion in Europe of NATO up to the borders of Russia. To deny, as many do, that NATO expansion up to 2022 was a clear provocation to Putin’s Russia is an absurdity that has no place in any serious analysis of the causes of this war. Western missiles on Russian borders is an act of extreme provocation.

This is not to exonerate Putin. His regime is cut from the same cloth as those based in Washington or London. It takes one to know one: before he died, the mass murdering imperialist Henry Kissinger consistently warned that Ukraine must never join NATO: “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country….wise Ukrainian leaders…[must]….opt for a policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country… Ukraine should not join NATO.”

US imperial aggression has been a constant fact of geopolitics since 1945. Recently that aggression has stepped up and become desperate as the US’s economic and political primacy is being overtaken by China. Even though the US military is still by far the most powerful chess piece on the board, the days of “unipolar” US hegemony are numbered.

The US retreated from Afghanistan and Iraq. More setbacks to US interests in Ukraine and Palestine would further speed the relative decline of US power. These considerations surely feed into the fanatical support expressed by western political and media classes for Ukraine and Israel. 

Life in Putin’s Russia is increasingly dominated by militarism, nationalism and homophobia. Leading public intellectual Alexander Dugin, a Russian supremacist with deeply conservative views is often platformed on Russian TV. The recently deceased demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who once won 9.5% of the national vote in the presidential elections, called for the expulsion of Asians from European Russia and openly asserted white supremacist views. And it is important to state that Alexei Navalny, too, a man lauded by the West in life and in death as a “democrat”, was in truth, a xenophobe and islamophobe. 

In Ukraine, the influence of right-wing traditions is well documented. Western Ukraine is unapologetic about, if not proud of, its nazi past. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) and the two volunteer Ukrainian units of the SS took leading roles in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the second world war. Leading figures of these movements, such as Bandera, Shukeyvich and Melnyk are commemorated and celebrated publicly.

In 2014 Neo nazi militias were a minority but they played a decisive vanguard role in driving the maidan protests towards the coup d’etat. In the present day, these values and beliefs are alive and well and can be seen in political parties such as Svoboda, paramilitary groups such as Praviy Sektor, divisions within the Ukrainian army such as Azov and Aidar, and in the diaspora, for example when in late 2023, the entire Canadian parliament gave a standing ovation to an actual Ukrainian nazi, 96-year-old Yaroslav Hunka.

Western domestic politics has also seen a shift to the right. Trump’s proto-fascist demagoguery is only a more overt form of the fanaticism behind the Biden administration’s support for Zionism. All these billionaire candidates represent the same system.

In Ireland, similar views find expression in both the lumpen, racist “nationalism” of the far right and the Russophobic, pro-Zionist utterances of the political and media class who are falling over themselves for Ireland to join NATO.  

In all cases, the spread of right-wing values tends to divide the working class. Under capitalism, workers’ lives are perpetually at risk due to the inevitability of cyclical economic crisis so there is plenty of desperation and suffering at large. This desperation and suffering is valuable currency for the ruling class and their political and media class servants.

Much better to point the finger at immigrants, at Russians, at gays, at anyone other than those whose interests are served by the continuation of neoliberal capitalism and imperialism. The ability to manipulate working class people to the point where they are willing - even reluctantly - to kill other working class people is the ultimate expression of ruling class power. 

In Ukraine and Russia, this stage was reached in 2014.

The 2014 coup d’état in Kiev marked the beginning of the current mass murder phase of the class war in Ukraine and Russia. To date, this inter-imperialist class war has claimed the lives of around 500,000 working class people. The vast majority of these are young men.

The death toll in this war is only going to rise. There are thousands of working-class people breathing at this moment who will be rotting in the mud of Eastern Ukraine by the time this article is published.

No Weapons to Ukraine

People Before Profit is right to refuse to take sides in this horrific inter-imperialist war. Certain elements of the social democratic centre-left call for arms to be sent to Ukraine. This must be resisted at all costs.

The argument goes that Ukrainian people must take back all of their territory. Whose territory? The Ukrainian ruling class, abetted by the political and media class they controlled, made sure that the vast majority of the working class had no stake in their country. Even before 2014 the population of Ukraine fell as emigration rose and the standard of living plummeted. The post-war political economy of Ukraine will be dominated by US and European investment capital. The Ukrainian state has an official policy - “Advantage Ukraine” - that invites such entities to stick their snouts in the enormous trough of post-war reconstruction.

This is not a regime that socialists can support. It is certainly not one that we can advocate sending weapons to. This war needs to end now before any more working-class men and women die to defend the interests of US or Russian imperialism. Socialists don’t look at wars in isolation but in the global context where Ukraine is a proxy of NATO and the West.

Zelensky’s Consistency

President Zelensky is feted in the west. Zelensky the politician is the product of a TV show funded by the billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, where he, Zelensky, went from being a teacher to being president. Kolomoisky was a serious player in the banking system that lent money to the impoverished state at the same time as it dodged taxes by using the west’s offshore financial system.

He also funded the neo-Nazi Azov group and was a beneficiary of an intra-ruling class turf war that saw his seizure of enormous oil refineries at the expense of Russian billionaires. Kolomoisky has recently been sidelined as the post-war balance of power in the state is starting to resemble that of Russia more and more; the Ukrainian state will finally exert Putin-like power over the billionaire class. The difference is that, this time, state power is really US imperialism. It’s hard to lose a battle like that if you have an $800 billion military budget backing you up.

Zelensky knows this. He has thrown his chips in with the US imperial project. He exemplifies the consistency that I mentioned in the introduction to this article.

What Zelensky says about Israel shows this. In 2022 he said that he saw Ukraine becoming a “big Israel” after the war. On 9th October 2023 he asserted his complete and utter support for Israel, equating Hamas and Russia as the “same evil, and the only difference is that there is a terrorist organisation that attacked Israel and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine”.

The world viewed through the lens of US imperialism is a world where Israel and Ukraine can do no wrong. Hamas and Putin are evil terrorists. Descriptions of Hamas and Putin as “evil terrorists” keep us at a level of analysis somewhere between Fox News and Ladybird books.  

For that reason, I think it is useful to contrast the two conflicts.

The death toll in Ukraine far outstrips that of Gaza. But civilian deaths in Gaza stand at more than 60% of the total. Civilian deaths in Ukraine comprise 0.02% of the total. There is simply no comparison between the two situations. The Russo-Ukrainian war is brutal but if the aim of either side is to kill civilians as a matter of course they seem to be 99.98% unsuccessful in achieving this.

Regardless, a 0.02% “success” rate in killing civilians has still resulted in over 10,000 civilian deaths in the Ukraine war. Is it possible that all 10,000 were accidental? That seems highly unlikely given the absolute devastation of cities like Mariupol and Bakhmut. However, most of Ukraine remains habitable and much of the country is untouched by actual destruction; conservative estimates are that at least 60% of Gaza has been obliterated. There really is no comparison.

The difference between a 60% and a 0.02% civilian death toll is Zionism. Zionism is a deeply racist ideology. The violence, dispossession, legal, employment and cultural discrimination enacted against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories have precedent and parallel only in regimes such as apartheid South Africa. Indeed in 2021 Amnesty International issued a report stating plainly that the Zionist state was an apartheid state:

“The organization has concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law wherever it imposes this system. It has assessed that almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasi governmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians across Israel and the OPT and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory.”

So, racism does not play a corresponding structural role in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Indeed, Putin himself offered the view that “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe”. Compare that to the assertion by the Israeli Minister Yoav Galant that the Palestinians were “human animals”.  Most public figures in the Israeli government are on record as having expressed similarly racist views.

This is not to say that there is no racism in Russia or Ukraine. Far from it: I have personally witnessed jaw-dropping examples of racism in both countries. Neither is it to say that Putin’s views on the common origins of Russians and Ukrainians are anything other than amateurish nationalist historiography. The point being made is that the Israeli-Palestine relationship is largely defined by the dehumanising racism inherent to Western backed Zionism; the Russian-Ukrainian one is not.

Settler Colonialism

The relationship between Ukraine and Russia is not a settler colonial one. The territories of Ukraine and Russia were both part of the same state until 1991; between the two poles of the western regions of Galicia and Volyn and the eastern Russophone East, for most people, culture, families, language are all, more or less, hybrid.

In this respect, the shifting lines that mark the border between the two countries are artificial compared to the lived experiences of people on the ground. Historically the territory of Ukraine is marked by shifting borders. The origin of the word “Ukraine” is literally, borderland. Western regions have a history marked by colonisation by Poles and Austrians, Southern regions by Ottomans and Eastern by Russians, Soviets and even British (the city of Donetsk, originally called “Yuzovka” was established by a Welsh mining capitalist, John Hughes).

It is easy in all of these crossing lines to miss out on the Ukrainians! But even that category is far from a homogeneous one. For example, the Cossacks of Zaporozhye are often presented as stereotypical figures of national identity – they feature in Ilya Repin’s famous painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks – but they were themselves semi-nomadic fugitives from the feudal Polish, Turkish or Russian empires who cared little for the construction of a stable national identity.

1991-2014 Ukraine was not at ease with itself. It is a huge country. The western Ukrainian version of what it meant to be Ukrainian was not the same as the Eastern Ukrainian version. Conflict arose, especially around the time of general elections, but most of the time, most people got on with their lives. In that part of the world, Ukrainians, Russians, Russo-Ukrainians and many others have histories going back for hundreds of years on overlapping, connected territories.

The 1897 census of the Russian empire put the percentage of Russians in the empire as 44% and the number of Ukrainians 11%. A century later showed very little proportional change: the 1989 census of the Soviet Union put the figures at 50% and 15.5% respectively, the increase in the proportion of Ukrainians may be accounted for by the “gift” of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1956.

The settler colonial project of the Zionists is very different.

The 1878 census of the Ottoman empire put the percentage of Muslims at 86-7% and the percentage of Jews at 3%. In 2019 the historical area of Palestine had corresponding figures of 52.1% and 47.9% with a 5 to 1 majority of Jews to non-Jews in the state of Israel.

The change in the demographic balance shown by these statistics marks two necessary conditions – ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and monoethnic Jewish immigration - for the success of the Zionist project, specified in the 1917 Balfour declaration and put into practice ever since: “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

The 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide refers to genocidal intent and genocidal actions. The intent to commit genocide is hard to prove but not in the case of Israel. The preponderance of civilian deaths in Gaza strongly suggests that the Zionists are engaged in a deliberate attempt to kill as many Palestinians as possible. The Law for Palestine group has compiled over 500 statements of genocidal intent made by Israeli politicians, lawmakers, military officials, and journalists since 7th October.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia is resulting in the annexation of territories and an enormous refugee problem. It is estimated that over 6 million Ukrainians have left the country in the past two years. It is likely that many of these people will never return to Ukraine. This situation may not be intentional ethnic cleansing but it’s arguable that the distinction is irrelevant.     

It is unclear whether Putin’s intentions were to annex territory at the outset of this military operation. It certainly seems to be the plan now. For much of the period 1991 – 2014 the main threat to the Ukrainian ruling class was not the Ukrainian working class – organised labour is weak and socialism is effectively illegal - it was the Russian ruling class. Now, as his armies slowly advance into Ukraine it is highly unlikely that the territories he annexes will be given back to the Ukrainian state.

The attempted coup d’état by Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023 should remind Putin that he needs to keep his billionaires happy. Post war, it is likely that annexed territories will be opened to native Russian or Chinese investment; the fate of the millions of displaced Ukrainians, or for that matter the hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians and Russians probably matter very little to him.

However, the comparison with Palestine tells us at least this: the Zionists see no place for Palestinians in the Israeli economy or Jewish state. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is clear and relentless; the intended endgame must surely be the ejection of 2 million people into the Sinai. If that happens they won’t be coming back to Gaza. Putin will hardly prevent the 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees currently in Russia or for that matter the four million elsewhere retuning to work as wage slaves in the post war territories he annexes.

Comparing these two situations – Ukraine and Palestine – challenges us as revolutionary socialists. Understanding the class antagonisms at work as well as the imperialist outgrowths of those class antagonisms helps to explain how the respective situations have come to pass. 

Finding ways out of the situations is more difficult. The enormous death toll of Ukrainian and Russian working-class people is an atrocity. The racist dehumanisation of Palestinian that has made it possible for Israelis to carry out the genocide and ethnic cleansing is not present in the Ukrainian war but that’s cold comfort to the millions who are grieving the loss of loved ones.  

In the final analysis, working people need to make connections and organise nationally and internationally. The ruling classes of the middle east and Europe, of North America have everything to gain by keeping workers at each other’s throats. The poisonous right wing staples of nationalism, racism and homophobia are gaining ground in Ireland and running riot on the battlefields of Donbass and the killing fields of Gaza.

We must keep our heads. We must stand in solidarity with the people who come to our country trying to get away from these horrors – and we must stand against the local right-wing mobs who seek to blame immigrants for the injustices caused by our own domestic ruling class and the legalised social robbery taking place in our global tax haven. 

We must say, loud and clear: socialists don’t make common cause with NATO or with Putin, we certainly don’t buy the imperialist propaganda spewed by the political class here in Ireland or anywhere else in the West.

Palestinian resistance must be supported because unlike the Ukrainian state, they have neither an imperial army or an endless supply of finance at their disposal. 1 out of every 100 Gazans has been murdered by the Israelis since October; they’re fighting for their survival.

The double standard of the West on Ukraine and Palestine makes sense when you understand the global system of corporate competition and war and how each conflict fits into the interests of the establishment in Washington, Brussels and Dublin. In all this we have to remember that the main enemy of the Irish working class is at home – it’s our government and the Western axis they want to pull us fully into by destroying neutrality.

Irish workers in challenging our establishment can take out one of the minor pillars of Western imperial power. That’s the task ahead.