A decade of political and factual illiteracy
For the past ten years – ever since the country first registered on its political radar – the Stop the War Coalition’s coverage of Ukraine has been a succession of political and factual inaccuracies.
The Coalition dismissed the mass popular uprising of the Maidan as a fascist coup engineered by western imperialism. It excused and justified Russia’s subsequent seizure of Crimea. And then it denied the reality of direct Russian military intervention in the south-east of Ukraine.
In the run-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Coalition consistently substituted ‘anti-imperialist’ fantasies for an engagement with reality. The historical and contemporary role of Russian imperialism disappeared from view, overwhelmed by tedious historical excursions into the post-Cold-War expansion of NATO.
Since February 2022 the Coalition has distinguished itself by its failure to provide a platform for Ukrainian socialists, feminists and trade unionists, and by its failure to provide them with even a penny of financial or material support.
As a result, it has functioned as a recycling centre for Kremlin disinformation, combined more recently with its role as the British outpost of US foreign policy realism.
In an attempt to justify its reality-remote coverage of Ukraine, the Coalition has sought to take refuge behind the slogan of the early-twentieth-century German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht: “The main enemy is in the home camp.”
But Liebknecht’s slogan was not a licence to abandon criticism of the enemy in the other camp. Nor was it a licence to rewrite history in order to manufacture excuses for acts of imperialist aggression by the enemy in the other camp.
Liebknecht’s slogan was a call for international working-class mobilisation. In the hands of the Coalition it has been transformed into vacuous appeals for peace to be engineered by the governments of the imperialist powers – and a denial of class solidarity with Ukrainian workers.
This pamphlet puts the record straight – contrasting the reality of events in Ukraine over the past decade with the Stop the War Coalition’s shameless record of misrepresentation and falsification.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Maidan
Crimea
The Donbas
The Run-up to War
The War
Conclusion