Søren Søndergaard
Speaker: Søren Søndergaard, MP in the Parliament of Denmark (Red-Green Aliance) Conference theme: ‘What peace?’
Prerequisite for a just peace – more support for Ukraine The latest developments, with Trump’s blatant betrayal, are putting enormous pressure on Ukraine. It will be forced to make very difficult choices with enormous consequences. But as friends of Ukraine, we must continue to insist that neither Trump, nor the EU leaders, nor indeed we, should decide the path forward for Ukraine.This choice can only be made by Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Because they are the ones who are under attack, who are losing lives and suffering every day in the war.
Our task is to do everything in our power to give Ukraine the best possible starting point for securing the fairest possible peace. This means putting pressure on our governments to give more aid to Ukraine. That is our main task.
We are not giving enough = ‘rearmament of the EU’? I have just returned from a security conference in Warsaw for representatives of the EU national parliaments and the European Parliament. Some speakers asked the following question: how is it that 500 [million] Europeans are begging 350 million Americans to stop 150 million Russians who are unable to win a war against 40 million Ukrainians?
I understand that some people are asking this question to argue in favour of a general militarisation of Europe. But the question itself contains an important point. If Putin’s Russia wins the war, it is not because Europe lacks the necessary resources. It is because of a lack of political will to support Ukraine.
Western countries have supported Ukraine sufficiently to enable it to continue the war, but not sufficiently to drive the invaders out of the occupied territories.
Instead, the war in Ukraine is now being used as an argument in favour of general rearmament throughout the EU. The European Commission’s grand plan – Rearm Europe – envisages spending 800 billion euros on strengthening military capabilities.
To sell it, the myth is being spread that the reason we have not been able to help Ukraine with the necessary military supplies is that the European arms industry is small and too weak.
But what is the reality? Let’s look at the top ten arms exporting countries. Half of these 10 countries are European and four of them are EU members: France is number 2, Germany number 5, Italy number 6, the United Kingdom number 7 and Spain number 9. In total, more than a quarter of global arms exports come from EU countries. If the UK is included, this represents almost a third of global arms exports. Europe has the capacity to produce and ship arms to Ukraine.
But the political will is lacking.
At one point, the EU promised to send a million artillery shells to Ukraine. Ukraine desperately needed them. When they came under attack on the front line from Russian artillery, they were not allowed to retaliate. But the EU did not keep its promise. By the agreed date, only half had been delivered. And the promise was only honoured after many months of delay. This situation cost the lives of many Ukrainian soldiers and resulted in the loss of Ukrainian territories.
The European arms industry prefers to sell its products to Israel, Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian regimes.
In words, European politicians promised to support Ukraine. But in practice, they refused to order the large European arms industry to produce to meet Ukraine’s needs.
The problem was not a lack of production capacity. The problem was that market forces were allowed to decide. The problem was the lack of planning and control.
Unfortunately, there are many examples of this kind.
It should be emphasised, for example, that EU countries buy gas from Russia for more money than they give in financial support to Ukraine.
When the war in Ukraine is used as an argument for gigantic investments in arms production and rearmament, there is something else at stake:
On the one hand, strengthening the military-industrial complex by giving big business a profit guaranteed by the state.
And on the other hand, finding arguments to explain why ordinary workers have to accept cuts and social degradation.
Instead, I will argue for increased aid to Ukraine by taking control of the financial and industrial resources used to produce weapons, developing state arms production and confiscating the above-normal profits of the private arms industry.
We also need to take a closer look at the EU’s demands of Ukraine.
It is not just the US that is using aid to Ukraine for its own benefit.
We have seen the US treating Ukraine as a business opportunity, trying to get its hands on Ukrainian minerals as a condition of its support.
While we should be highly critical of these opportunistic conditionalities, we should also be aware that the EU has presented its own conditionalities. These are less talked about than Trump’s demands, but they are nevertheless highly problematic. I am talking about the so-called ‘Plan for Ukraine 2024-2027’ that the EU has attached to the Facility for Ukraine.
The ‘Plan for Ukraine’ sets out the conditions that Ukraine must fulfil to benefit from EU grants and loans. It contains 69 reform proposals. Some of these push Ukraine towards increased commercialisation. History has shown that extensive neoliberal conditions for crisis financing prove detrimental to the recipient country. There is no reason for the EU to recycle elements of the Washington Consensus into a Brussels Consensus.
One of the 69 reform proposals is to ‘reduce state ownership in the banking sector’ and to take ‘measures towards privatisation’ (page 99). Assuming it is a brilliant idea, we should let Ukraine do what it wants. Moreover, the Ukrainian banking sector did in fact manage to maintain a relatively high level of basic services during the war, which makes the proposal look even worse. We should not be too reassured by the wording that privatisation will take place ‘in an orderly manner, avoiding a premature transfer of control on sub-optimal terms for the state’; although this sounds reassuring, privatising in the aftermath of a war is never a good deal for the state.
The Ukrainian plan also calls for the ‘liberalisation of the rail transport sector’ in order to create a ‘competitive market’ and to split ‘the infrastructure operator and the rail operators’ (page 229-230). Again, there is a policy there that we should leave to Ukraine to make its own decisions. Furthermore, the liberalisation of the railways has not proven to be a good idea. The UK is probably the most glaring example of this. The British liberalisations and privatisations, encouraged by EU rules in the 1990s, have left their railway system in a lamentable state.
If one takes the time to read the 300+ pages of the plan, one will find other examples from the neoliberal playbook. There is, for example, the implementation of a deregulation plan (page 162) and an effort to substantially privatise Ukraine’s public assets.
Finally, as you may know, Trump has announced that he is going to annex Greenland to the United States! Perhaps to gain free access to all of Greenland’s minerals. Perhaps to prevent other countries from using the new shipping routes that are appearing after the polar ice caps melt. Or maybe simply because if you add the territory of Canada and Greenland to that of the United States, the American territory will be larger than that of Russia and will constitute the largest country in the world. This gives a new meaning to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’: ‘Make America “Great” Again’.
But the small and proud Greenlandic people have a saying: ‘Nothing about Greenland without Greenland’.
That is what is at stake.
And it is the same message that we must send to Putin and Trump, but also to the EU leaders: Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. Even after the war is over.