It is very important that the debate on European aid to Ukrainian military resistance against the Russian colonial invasion can be posed on the left in all its complexity. For too long, the war in the East has been a taboo, unthinkable for a large part of the "anti-imperialist" left. Unfortunately, it took the Trump administration reversing its alliance in favour of the Russian imperialist power for this debate to open up. Today, in Ukraine, concretely, anti-aircraft defence capability is profoundly weakened, with strong suspicions that Donald Trump's United States is providing Russia with intelligence information on the Kursk region: logistics, the location of depots and bastions, as well as movements of Ukrainian armed forces. This translates into more precise and massive Russian attacks both on critical infrastructure such as electricity and gas, but also on civilians. Any discussion that would jump over (saltatory) this very sensitive critical zone could rightly be judged as revisionist. It is always necessary to start from the concrete analysis of real situations.
The opinion piece in question sets itself three objectives: a) to resist the "militaristic frenzy", b) to prioritise diplomacy and c) to preserve social solidarity. From the perspective of political anti-imperialism, the first and last points of attention are commendable and can be shared, discussed and amended, while the second point is highly problematic. The equivalence of the three concerns is a sort of blackmail that can be easily dismantled. But let us take things in order.
First, on the question of rearmament, whether one is for, against or conditional, any discussion about "European defence" that would deny the reality of the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine, the occupation and imperialist tensions in Moldova/Transnistria, Russian interference in elections in Romania or Georgia, the vassalisation of Belarus, Russian-Israeli interference in Syria, etc. would produce a dangerous ethnocentric bias. Indeed, while we can obviously share with the authors of the opinion piece the concern about militaristic and essentially opportunistic discourses from European liberal leaders in the face of the Russian offensive, denying the reality of this war, that is, both the intentions and the Great Russian colonial actions of Putin, is to make little of the realities of a very large number of our Eastern European fellow citizens who do not have the luxury of such reveries, who do not have the privilege of such axiological neutrality. We may diverge on the type of political strategies to end this colonial war of aggression but not on its reality. Note the very euphemistic use of the police term "escalation" to avoid having to talk about the bombing of civilian populations, massacres, orchestrated famines, city sieges, tortures, rapes, looting, but also de-Ukrainianisation through the abduction and re-education of children and adolescents (which led the ICC to issue an international arrest warrant against Putin), etc., that is, to mask the properly colonial dimension of this war. Leopoldians for their part spoke of "controversial" elements related to the Congo Free State.
The analysis then presents a solid bias on the military reality of the war. The authors seem at no point to be able to raise the question of anti-aircraft coverage of Ukrainian territories subjected to Russian attacks. Yet, it is this coverage that is today durably weakened by the halt of American military aid, the terrible effects of which have already been felt for several days. The Russian exterminationist bombings on Mariupol, Vovchansk, Marinka, Bakhmut, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, etc. are, however, recent and particularly well documented. If for our authors, Ukraine is too "white" to allow a decolonial analysis, it will suffice to inventory what the Russian destructions in Syria will have given in terms of urbicide to understand what the ability to control the sky represents against the Russian army in terms of prevention of crimes against humanity. No one in Ukraine believes in "miracle solutions", especially in the context of a colonial war that has already lasted since 2014 (to speak only of the most recent imperialist phase). But as for the Vietnamese, for the Syrians, for the Palestinians and for all peoples who suffer a colonial war, their own survival depends on their ability to repel the aggressor. This may seem desperate and not sufficiently pragmatic to the liberal oeconomicus monads but it has been so since the first days of colonisation. One does not support an oppressed people against their invader because they would have calculable chances of winning in the short term (Macron's famous "dividends") but because, as Césaire so insisted, one feels existentially a shared humanity, because one knows from a historical truth that the peace of empires (the "prison of peoples" as Lenin called it) is synonymous with plunder and slavery.
It is not true that pacifist positions would be minority in Belgium. The massive demonstrations of the PTB (Belgian Workers' Party) against arming Ukraine are proof of this. The anti-Ukrainian sentiment (including among social workers in CPAS public welfare centres), the lack of solidarity due to inflation, denial and privileges mean that a very large majority of Belgians are against the war. It is not for nothing that the pro-Putin far-right (like the Vlaams Belang) is scoring so highly in Europe. The tradition of collaboration and liberal "neutralism" in the face of imperialist endeavours is moreover very important in Belgium (Leopold III or de Man, to cite two very well-known examples). The majority sentiment in Belgium is that Ukrainians are responsible, that because of them our gas bills have increased and that if to regulate inflation it is necessary to let Putin colonise Ukraine, well, it is not "our" war. "Eerst ONZE mensen" (Our people first) as they say at Vlaams Belang. This does not mean that antimilitarist arguments and concerns are not admissible and cannot be discussed, but the depopulated and caricatured scene that the authors of this opinion piece propose to us (on which there would only be militaristic European elites) is false and politically porous to fascism made in Belgium. Doubt is important, trouble allows us to think but denial of reality is criminal.
It is strange that the authors' "desire for peace" never takes into account the vital necessity of stopping Russian bombing for Ukrainians. One wonders then who is this "we" that expresses itself here and who is existentially excluded from it. Whose peace? With whom? And for whom? These are unavoidable questions.
The debate on austerity is vitiated here and in reality continues the ultra-liberal presupposition of European elites. The authors of the opinion piece indeed prolong, in hollow (do they realise it?), the blackmail exercised on us by the De Wevers and the Macrons. Without raising new taxes, it is the working classes and impoverished middle classes who will suffer the deflationary policies naturalised here. However, there is no mechanical link between increasing military budgets and budgetary austerity; these are political economy choices that are and must be the subject of intense struggles. The end of the German ordoliberal taboo (institutionalised in the Maastricht Treaty, cf. Hayek) opens a new sequence of struggle with an uncertain outcome. Nothing indicates in advance whether the left could or could not win this new battle, but refusing the immense plan under the pretext of pacifist idealism questions from the perspective of a proletarian policy. Why then would Bruno Colmant, the Public Investment Bank, the Arizona coalition, Charles Michel or Raphaël Glucksman be the only ones to exist politically in the sequence?
In neo-pacifist discourse, the metaphor of the First World War is often used to oppose an imaginary "sacred union". The problem is not the analogy but the black hole it creates. The war in Ukraine is not an inter-imperialist war like the First World War would be; it is much more a colonial war. First because the only imperialism at war here is Russian (even more so since the American withdrawal) but especially because the fragile nation under colonial domination is suffering an exterminationist invasion war. It is not because the Americans supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan that it made it an inter-imperialist war, no more than with the important American support to the Kurds of Rojava. Roosevelt and the Americans strongly supported the right to self-determination of peoples in the context of national independence wars in Africa and Asia (with the clear objective of weakening England and France), that does not mean that these wars were also inter-imperialist and that a petty-bourgeois neutralism had to be applied to them (Lenin is not Camus). Anti-imperialists of previous generations were not mistaken and also vigorously opposed the Stalinist campists of that time.
The text ends with the idea that all avenues should be left open to "contribute to reducing the risks of horizontal and vertical escalation". We find, again, a rhetoric that excessively euphemises the crimes against humanity committed by the Russian army in Ukraine so as to be able to make the "diplomatic" option acceptable. However, what poses for us, in our NATO security, in terms of "diplomacy", poses in terms of life and death for Ukrainians. The problem is that this option, which is dressed in the garb of bourgeois "common sense", does not want to see the elephant in the room since the second Chechen war (1999): Putin's Great Russian imperialism does not want peace, it is imperium and for this reason in permanent wars. As the master of the Kremlin has repeated an incalculable number of times, "Russia knows no borders". The champions of the diplomatic option are then in the same situation as the "friends of Israel" but this time on a completely different scale. They may well exert pressure on the aggressed people, even to disarm them, they are unable to present the slightest security guarantee in the name of the Empire. Like Netanyahu, Putin has never said and will never say where the borders he would be ready to recognise stop. It is precisely for this reason that any Empire is by nature expansionist. Its only policy being that of the accomplished fact of war. And from Israel to Russia, it is an understatement to say that there is a leap in scale. The reality is that the Ukrainian authorities, like the Palestinian authorities, have constantly negotiated, from Budapest to Minsk. At this very moment, that is, at the moment when the authors publish their opinion piece calling for "diplomacy", Zelensky is in Saudi Arabia for an nth peace negotiation. But on this, the authors of the opinion piece have strictly nothing to say (are they even aware?). One understands then that diplomacy here exists only on the Empire's terms.
These criticisms having been made, this absolutely does not mean that the concerns and very significant risks of militarisation of Europe should be dismissed. On the contrary. We are in fact in the same situation as Jean Jaurès when writing L'Armée Nouvelle. It is precisely because we have done everything for peace and it is our only objective that we must now manage to think about the contours of a defensive war. Not the fantasies of a Third World War (which is a paper tiger of Putinian propaganda) but a war in Ukraine that is already there. The question for Socialists is then not very different from that posed by the Spanish War. It is not about "entering into war" and even less about following the authoritarian liberal delusions à la Francken or à la Macron, it is not about "arming Europe" in an inter-imperialist competition with Russia, China and the United States. It is about putting Ukraine in a position that allows it to negotiate a lasting and global peace with Russia within the framework of international law. This means compensating for the American betrayal. But it also means vigorously opposing war austerity. In reality, it is only if Ukraine loses the war (which is not yet done, far from it) and the Russian army is then in a position to recompose itself and therefore to prolong the imperialist expansion in Moldova and towards the Baltic States, that the spectre of total war would spread and that there would then be a question of European enlistment. We are not there yet. The analogy here is much more that of the Spanish War and the Rif War that prepare the Second World War than the First World War. This is why the Ukrainian question is inseparable from the Syrian question.
A quite basic question can be posed here to initiate the discussion. Nearly 200 billion of Russian oligarchic assets are frozen in the form of securities and shares at Euroclear in Brussels. Belgium levies a tax on these assets but part of it is used for its own armament. For a socialist policy that aims to impose a lasting and global peace in Ukraine, this money could be seized to compensate for the American betrayal, not to arm Belgium but Ukraine. In France, LFI (La France Insoumise) positions itself as a protector of Russian oligarchic capital in the name of bourgeois international law. The Belgian left could, for its part, position itself here in a non-campist way and for strategic pacifism.
The pacifist positions we need to resist the Russian militaristic frenzy that is gradually dragging Europe in would benefit from taking more account of reality and emerging from ethnocentrism. This involves a work of mutual knowledge in order to fill the terrible void left by the post-Soviet era in the East in the consciousness of the Western European left. This implies putting an end to self-referential discourse and thus beginning to engage both with Ukrainian socialists (https://commons.com.ua/en/) but also with the Syrian left who have been thinking about these questions of popular resistance to contemporary imperialisms for more than a decade.