Over four years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, some of the Russians imprisoned in its early days are still in jail. Even people with no previous political activism have been landed with long prison sentences in order to crush dissent.
Yevgeny Zateyev and Anna Arkhipova attend a court hearing in the case against the Vesna movement, one of the leading voices of antiwar protest in Russia. A court in St Petersburg sentenced six defendants in the case to prison terms of up to 12 years. (Andrei Bok/ SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Russia’s political prisoners are “outcasts in their own land,” Sergei Dudchenko, a biker tortured and framed by the security services, told his trial judges this month before being handed a seven-year prison sentence.
Those arrested for opposing the war in Ukraine had “fewer rights than a stray dog, and on top of that they bear the humiliating brand of ‘terrorist’ — and all this for their active civic stance.”
Dudchenko and his friend Nikolai Murnev, who received the same sentence, were arrested with others in October 2022 in Stavropol, in southern Russia.
While in detention on minor charges (petty hooliganism and drug possession), they were brutally tortured. A case was put together that they were preparing a “terrorist act” — setting fire to a military recruitment office. Another of the group died in pretrial detention, one fled the country, and one turned state’s witness.
The invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, “split life into before and after, it divided the world into black and white,” Dudchenko told the court.
Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Jews, and others had “paid an unimaginable price” to resist Nazism in World War II. How, decades later, could “so much hatred and anger” be directed against Ukraine?
Within days of the invasion, Dudchenko made a solo protest — a motorbike ride with the Ukrainian flag. In court, four years later, he said: “When I sped along, with the banner of the oppressed streaming behind me, past an astonished crowd of militarists, I felt the human in me come into bloom.”
Dudchenko is one of dozens of wartime protesters who have exercised one of the few constitutional rights that remains accessible: to say a “final word” before sentencing.
Some who exercise this right, like Dudchenko, are citizens whose antiwar protest was their first political action. Some, like the powerlifting champion Yulia Lemeshchenko, are Russians who joined the Ukrainian armed forces. She told her trial, in November of last year: “I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but for me, Ukraine is home.”
Some are political activists, like Anna Arkhipova, one of six members of the Vesna protest network sentenced at a show trial in St Petersburg last month. “When the war began, it was my conscience that would not let me stand idly by,” she stated.
On Sunday May 17, Try Me For Treason: anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, an English-language film featuring readings of speeches, will be released on YouTube.
The title comes from a speech by Andrei Trofimov, who is serving ten years for pro-Ukrainian statements on social media — plus three for ending his “final word” to a closed court by saying: “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a d–khead.”
At the second trial, before getting the three extra years, Trofimov scorned the charges of “discrediting the armed forces” and “justifying terrorism,” and invited prosecutors to charge him for deserting to Ukraine’s side. “Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state,” he told the judges.
The fifty-minute documentary was put together on a zero budget by a group of actors in Britain, to make the Russian antiwar movement more visible internationally.
Maya Willcocks, the actor-producer who reads a speech by Darya Kozyreva, said: “These are not well-known political leaders, they are people who have taken a stand against the state. I felt it was very important to have their words translated into English and out there for people to hear — to send the message that occupation is a crime, whether in Palestine or in Ukraine.”
Anthony Aldis, the videographer, said: “What I found compelling about these stories is that the beginning of any fightback is very often when people stand up against an apparently unassailable power.
“These people are not organized. It’s a raw push against something that they don’t believe they can beat, but they think they have to take a stand anyway, in solidarity with someone else who is being attacked and murdered.
“That idea is very important to us in the West, given what we face here in the UK, and in the USA, with the rise of the far right.”
As one of a small group of translators that helped prisoner support groups, I worked on the script, and on the book Voices Against Putin’s Warfrom which it derived.
Having traveled to Russia and Ukraine since Soviet times, I was struck by the political depth and heterogeneity of antiwar protest, even as it is constrained by state terror to individual acts of defiance. Those punished with long sentences range from pacifists who quote Leo Tolstoy to Soviet-era dissidents who ooze contempt for the judges, and Russians who go out of their way to justify Ukraine’s defensive military action.
It would be easy — and stupid — to dismiss the “final words” as atomized cries into a dark, authoritarian night. Rarely are they pleas to judges or government; more often, they are consciously crafted appeals to society.
The “last words” often try to situate those who say them historically. Sergei Dudchenko, born in 1987, said in court that “people like us will always keep emerging, to pick up the fallen banner of good and reason” . . . and recalled the seven protesters arrested on Red Square in 1968 for opposing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Noteworthy, too, is the infrastructure of support for political prisoners, comprising established human rights organizations such as Memorial: Support Political Prisoners, OVD-Info, and Mediazona; newly formed groups such as Fires of Freedom and Solidarity Zone, a website featuring “last words” going back to the 1950s; and Telegram groups caring for individual prisoners.
From California to the Caucasus, dozens of informal groups of Russians in exile gather and write letters to prisoners.
All these organizations support lawyers and activists in Russia who visit prisoners, send parcels, and support relatives — themselves now risky activities.
Bohdan Ziza, who features in our film, has family and friends who know where he is. (He is serving fifteen years for throwing blue and yellow paint, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, as well as a petrol bomb that was quickly extinguished by a security guard, at a municipal council’s office in Crimea.) So do many Crimean Tatar activists victimized by Russia’s racist, Islamophobic crackdown in the peninsula in 2017–19.
But hundreds, possibly thousands of Ukrainians are at unknown locations in Russia’s twenty-first-century gulag.
The Ukrainian government today counts ninety thousand people as “missing”: many are soldiers, imprisoned or killed, but at least sixteen thousand are civilians, according to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Many are victims of abductions, widespread in the territories occupied by Russia. Ukrainian lawyers and human rights activists have compiled a register of more than five thousand “enforced disappearances,” in addition to the widely publicized cases of kidnapped children.
Long prison sentences, imposed with little or no pretense of legal procedure, and savage torture — especially of those suspected of sympathizing with Ukrainian resistance — are ubiquitous in the occupied territories. The indefatigable Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group’s website reports a stream of life-destroying sentences for peaceful activities deemed dissident.
Doing all we can to provide practical support for political prisoners and engaging with their compelling articulations of their motives is central to international solidarity.
Try Me For Treason premieres on Sunday, May 17. You can sign up to watch it here.
TRY ME FOR TREASON is a 50-minute film, in English, featuring speeches made by anti-war protesters in Russian courts. It has been made by a group of actors to draw English-speaking audiences’ attention to the stand taken by Ukrainians, and Russians, against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The YouTube premiere of the film will be broadcast on Sunday 17 May at 20.00 UK time. To participate, go to this link and hit “Notify me”:
□ Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, thousands of people have been arrested for protesting against the war. Many appear in court, facing years of imprisonment. What do they say to the judges? What would any of us say? This 50-minute film, in English, features some of their speeches in court.
□ The speeches are from the book Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts (Resistance books, 2025). You can buy a copy, or download a free PDF, via this page.
□ Readings by John Graham Davies, Leila Mimmack, Gareth Brierley, Maya Willcox and Nick Evans. Script by Simon Pirani and John Graham Davies. Videography by Anthony Aldis
□ From Sunday 17 May the film will be free to view, or download, on YouTube, under a Creative Commons licence.
And here is a trailer to share:
There will be an in-person film premiere in London at 6.30pm on Sunday 17 May, just before the YouTube premiere – all welcome! – details below.
Source: Ukraine Information Group. Thanks to Simon Pirani for the heads-up and all the invaluable hard work. ||||| TRR
Ukrainian political prisoner faces new ‘trial’ and life sentence for opposing Russia’s occupation of Crimea (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 11th)
Occupiers are blackmailing the families of prisoners of war by demanding they register Starlink terminals in their names (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 10th)
10-year sentence for love of Ukraine against 71-year-old pensioner under Russian occupation (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 10th)
Crimean Tatar political prisoner with a malignant brain tumour forced to sign a fake ‘clean bill of health’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 9th)
“Change is inevitable” and Free Iryna Danylovych: the ZMINA team joined the Women’s March to become the voice of women prisoners held by the Kremlin (Zmina, March 8th)
‘We work to gather coal’: Ukraine’s mines are war’s second frontline (Sianushka writes, March 7th)
Wednesday 15 April, 6.0-7:30 pm. Try Me for Treason: Voices Against Putin’s War – Part of the Think Human Festival 2026 Actors will perform extracts from speeches made from the dock by Russian oppositionists who have been tried for sabotage for actions taken against the Russo-Ukrainian war Clerici Building, Clerici Learning Studio, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Campus, Oxford.
This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. To receive it by email each Monday, email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com. More information at https://ukraine-solidarity.org/. We are also on Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook and Substack, and the bulletin is stored online here.
In the labour movement and civil society organisations in the UK, support for Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism is countered by those who argued that Ukraine is only a proxy of western powers.
The underlying idea, that the only “real” imperialism is western – and that resistance to Russian or Chinese imperialism, or their puppets in e.g. Syria or Iran, is therefore illegitimate – has its roots in twentieth-century Stalinism. But it retains its hold, in part, because the western empire’s crimes are so horrific. It is Gaza, and climate change, that angers young people in the UK above all.
This “campism” (division of the world into a US-centred “camp” and other, not-so-bad camps) transmits itself, in part, through activists who seek simple principles on which to build social movements.
It has reared its ugly head again during the US-Israeli war on Iran this month, treating the theocratic, authoritarian regime as the victim rather than the Iranian people caught between that regime and the murderous US-Israeli onslaught.
This article is a plea to avoid such simplicity. It has grown out of an email, written last year to one such activist, who told me I was wrong to support the provision of arms to Ukrainians resisting Russian aggression. I asked him these five questions, and I still hope he will reply.
1. What is the character of Russian imperialism, and what is its relationship to Ukraine?
We often hear, or read, on the “left” that the war in Ukraine is an “inter-imperialist war”. I don’t agree. There’s certainly an inter-imperialist conflict that forms the context, but the actual war is between Russia (an essentially imperialist country) and Ukraine (clearly not an imperialist country). I’ll come back to the character of the war below (question 2). But I think we agree that Russia is essentially imperialist. What sort of imperialism?
For all socialists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Russia was the most fearsome empire and Ukraine was its oldest, and largest, colony. Throughout the Soviet period, as far as I know, none of the versions of socialism or communism, however exotic, argued that Ukraine and the other 13 non-Russian republics had somehow disappeared or lost their right to self-determination.
As far as extreme Stalinists were concerned, that right was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution and all was fine. There were plenty of arguments about the extent to which the speaking of Ukrainian in Ukraine, Kazakh in Kazakhstan, Azeri in Azerbaijan etc should be implemented. But as far as I’m aware, not even when Stalinist nationalities policy zig-zagged into extreme insanities, did anyone suggest that these were not nations with their own language and culture.
Russia emerged from the Soviet period as a severely weakened empire, or a would-be empire, but still an empire. The large stock of nukes and gigantic army made up for what Russia lacked in terms of its economy.
A large part of Putin’s project is to strengthen the Russian empire. That was what the incredibly brutal wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s were about, and a large part of what the Russian intervention in Syria was about. In my view, this is essentially what the war in Ukraine is about too.
What about Ukraine? The friend I was arguing with wrote to me: “we’re not talking about an ‘oppressed people’ in the sense we may talk of resistance in Palestine, we’re talking about an advanced capitalist state’s army, which is supported by NATO powers and in a war with another state’s army, with all the consequences that brings”.
Let’s unpack this. Of course there’s no comparison, in Ukraine or anywhere else, to the long-running history of violent ethnic cleansing in Palestine, let alone the genocide now being carried out. It would be analytically meaningless, and I’d say morally dubious, to try to make a comparison. So let’s not try.
I would not compare Ireland’s situation to Palestine either, but I would say that Ireland – which also has an “advanced capitalist state”, right? – and Ukraine are both examples of countries that have historically been subject, by Britain and Russia respectively, to long-term forms of imperial domination.
Some people think that in the post-Soviet period, Russian domination of Ukraine has been fading away. I myself thought that in the early 2000s, and how wrong I turned out to be.
Certainly the Ukrainian bourgeoisie tried to carve out for itself an independent economic path (or rather, a path towards closer economic integration with Europe), with some success. Other republics took distance, economically, from Russia: Azerbaijan towards Turkey, some of the central Asian states towards China. But Ukraine’s aspirations took a crushing blow from the 2008-09 financial crisis. Russia attempted to reassert control through local politicians, but found itself in a cul-de-sac in 2014. The Kremlin then opted for military subversion.
2. What caused the war (which is relevant to how it might be stopped)?
The standard explanation of the 2014 invasion by campists and “realists” is that Putin’s hand was forced by NATO. To my mind (i) that’s a heap of happy horse manure, and (ii) while there was strand of thinking (albeit not consistent or dominant) in the NATO powers that Putin should be more tightly controlled, it is just deceptive to present this as the cause of the invasion. Actually, Yanukovich was forced out by a popular movement – extremely politically heterogenous, but a movement all the same – and Putin felt forced to act.
I remember going to Kyiv literally the day after Yanukovich left. I met a friend. She said: “the Russians are going to invade”. I said: “no they won’t. That would be madness, it would ruin all they have been trying to do with the economy for years”. It was madness, it did ruin Russia’s economic strategy, but they did it anyway.
Why? I was then working at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, in which context I had to interact with Russian business people and researchers. I spent several years asking them: why did they think the Kremlin did it? The best answer I got was: “Because they could, given the confusion in Ukraine at that moment. And because if they had not taken the opportunity, they would have had to answer to the military, and to the nationalists, as to why they had not done it.” (A forthcoming book by Alexandra Prokopenko answers a slightly different question, i.e. why didn’t the Russian elite, most of whom saw the war as a disaster, do more in 2022 to stop it.)
What was the social reality of the initial invasion in 2014? What were Russian troops and the Russian-supported forces in Donetsk and Luhansk up to in 2014-21? The “campists” and “realists” have little or nothing to say about this. The answer is that they were terrorising people who disputed their right to set up tinpot dictatorships, jailing trade unionists, putting in place an arbitrary, dictatorial legal system, attempting to stop people speaking or teaching kids the Ukrainian language, and so on.
It’s estimated that as well as wrecking the economy, these bastards managed to reduce the population by half between 2014 and 2018 or so. Many people who were young and able to leave, left.
Surely this was not an inter-imperialist war? And without understanding this, it’s impossible to claim seriously that the conflict post-2022 is an inter-imperialist war. Militarily, it’s a war between Russia and Ukraine, and grew out of the 2014-21 war. No matter how much support is being given to Ukraine by the western powers – and it’s actually pretty small scale by historical standards – this is not a conflict between two imperialist armies.
3. Are there circumstances in which, against a background of inter-imperialist conflict, socialists would take the side of one state against another?
Of course there are – which is another hole, or a crater, more like – in “campist” and “realist” arguments.
Sure, there’s an inter-imperialist conflict going on. But I would say socialists are justified in supporting Ukraine because we stand for nations’ right to self-determination, free of imperialist bullying.
An example of this is Iran, which is surely as much an “advanced capitalist state” as Ukraine, and also surely close geopolitically to Russia and China. Does that mean that as socialists we are indifferent to the attack on Iran by the US and Israel? Of course not. Neither were we indifferent to the attack on Iraq in 2003.
In fact I can think of examples of socialists actually supporting a capitalist, perhaps would-be imperialist, power invading another country. One such is the Indian invasion of Bangladesh in 1971, when Pakistan was threatening to crush the Bangladeshi independence movement militarily. I wrote to an Indian socialist friend to ask about this, and she replied:
I am not sure if it’s correct to refer to India at that time as a “would-be imperialist power”, although it certainly was the dominant power in South Asia. But you are right in thinking that Indian socialists, including the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), with the exception of the Maoists, supported the Indian intervention to halt what I would subsequently call a genocidal assault on East Bengal, with an especially horrifying number of rapes. No doubt [the Indian prime minister] Indira Gandhi was being opportunistic, and, as I found later when I visited Bangladesh, workers there had no illusions in her or in India. But the rapes and killings had to be stopped, and she did it.
If we go back to the 1930s and 40s there are numerous examples of socialists supporting the supply of weapons to states, and quasi-state formations, by imperialist countries. Socialists in the UK and across Europe supported the supply of weapons by British and American imperialism to the French resistance, which was led by a bunch of reactionary bourgeois politicians, who after the war led reactionary bourgeois governments. I do not know what Irish socialists thought of the supply of weapons to the IRA by Nazi Germany, but certainly they made no vocal demands that the arms be sent back.
Of course there are political reasons to be cautious about focusing on the supply of weapons, to do with our larger attitude to militarism and our attitude to the state. (I have mentioned these in this related article.)
But let’s again consider Ukraine specifically. In his email, my friend contrasted Palestinians (an “oppressed people”) to Ukrainians (who have “an advanced capitalist state’s army”). What difference does this make?
In my view, the absence of a Palestinian capitalist state with weapons is a key factor that has allowed the genocide to proceed in Gaza. It’s no accident that the Israeli right has spent the last quarter of a century making sure that no steps are taken in the direction of the formation of such a state (the “two state solution”).
If only Palestinians had had that advanced state with an army, that Ukrainians have!
To see what happens to people attacked by Russia without a fully-fledged state and army to protect them, we have only to look to Chechnya, which was subject to a war of mass extermination as a result.
4. Is there a difference between the manner of social control in Russia on one side, and Ukraine, Poland and other eastern European countries on the other? And does this make any difference?
Last year, I picked a polemical argument with people who talk about the war in Ukraine being a confrontation between authoritarianism and democracy, because I think that that folds too easily into the western imperialist powers’ narratives. But the issue of bourgeois democracy is not irrelevant.
In Ukraine, however dire the situation, it is still possible – as we saw, dramatically, with the “anti-corruption” demonstrations last summer – for people to demonstrate, to criticise the government in the media, etc, in other words to exercise the rights of free speech and assembly – with a risk of repression that I suppose is comparable to the UK, i.e. low.
In Russia, this is obviously not the case. We have seen no movements involving street demos since 2022, and the standard punishment for criticising the war on social media is seven or eight years in prison. Numerous people have been killed for opposing the government. Our socialist and anarchist friends and comrades are either in jail, or have left the country, or, if they can not do so, have stopped doing any public political activity or organising.
Does this difference matter? Does it mean that some of the considerations that were discussed in the 1940s – that the axis powers, i.e. not only Germany which was fully Nazi but also fascist Italy and fascist Spain – represented a threat to democracy that was qualitatively different from the threat posed by the British, French and American bourgeoisies? I think it matters, and I think that again has implications for whether socialists favour the Ukrainian side in the war.
5. Can we make clear that we favour the use of weapons by the capitalist state for one thing (defending Ukrainian people) but not another (general rearmament)?
In his email, my friend said he would find it difficult to justifying arms deliveries to working-class Brits who are faced with monstrous spending cuts. We need to discuss this seriously, analytically.
I think it’s obvious that there are some uses of force by the state that we favour, and some we don’t. If we were on a counter-demo against a bunch of fascists outside a hotel being used to house migrants, and were significantly outnumbered, and all that was protecting the hotel was a line of cops, we would not be urging the cops to go away, would we? We would not lambast their defence of the hotel in the same terms that we lambast many other things that police officers do, would we?
Obviously we would hope not to be in that situation, and we would put all the emphasis on mobilising to ensure that the counter-demos were bigger.
But working-class Ukrainians never hoped to be in the situation they are in either.
This argument can easily be extended to examples of military force. I asked some Argentine comrades about the Malvinas war of 1982. Many in the largely-underground labour movement urged the military dictatorship, which had killed, tortured and imprisoned many thousands of their friends and comrades, to divert its resources to fight the armed forces sent by Margaret Thatcher to the islands. One comrade wrote to me that the Argentine Trotskyist organisations
held a critical position, differentiating the Malvinas cause (which they supported) from the military leadership of the military junta, which they considered a genocidal dictatorship that used the war to remain in power.
Sections of the left proposed the nationalisation of British-owned properties, the confiscation of British assets, and the non-payment of the external debt to Great Britain, seeking to make the war “popular” and not directed by the military junta.
The Argentine left maintained a position of national sovereignty over the islands, denouncing the British occupation since 1833. It criticised the dictatorship’s handling of the war, viewing the conflict as a way in which the military junta sought to perpetuate its power. The general approach is sovereigntist and anti-imperialist, differentiating it from the positions of the center-right or liberal sectors.
Were the Argentine socialists right to support the war, and to call for it to be “made popular”, even in the face of a brutal, inhuman dictatorship?
Why, now, should we not put demands on the racist, anti-working-class, genocide-supporting Starmer government to step up UK arms shipments to Ukraine?
My friend said in his email that he “simply could not face [working class people in dire circumstances], or the people I work with around [climate impacts] and defend the absurd amount of money which has gone to continuing this bloody stalemate”.
I would suggest to him that he could say to his comrades: the state can fund this stuff if it has the will to do so. The state can tax the rich, or whatever. It’s not an either/or. It’s a matter of principle.
Conclusion
The damage done by western “leftists”’ cynical attempts to delegitimise Ukrainian resistance has already been done. At least since 2014, and rising to a crescendo in 2022. Always wrapped up in earnest-sounding, empty words about “anti imperialism”. The damage is not to Ukrainian people – that is done by Russian bombs, and by the gangsters and torturers that the Kremlin has put in charge of Donbas – but rather damage to socialism, damage to its development as a movement.
“Try me for treason. I betrayed your deranged state”, the Russian anti-war protester Andrei Trofimov told the Second Western District Military Court in May.
In 2023, Trofimov was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, for opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine in social media posts, and trying to join the Free Russia Legion that fights on Ukraine’s side. At that hearing, Trofimov said he hoped for Ukraine’s victory, and called president Putin “a dickhead”.
On the basis of that statement alone, he was further accused of “justifying terrorism” and defaming the Russian army. For those “crimes”, the judge at the hearing in May this year, Vadim Krasnov, added three years to Trofimov’s sentence.
Before sentencing, Trofimov told the court that he had not justified terrorism, but supported the Ukrainian armed forces’ legitimate military actions against aggression, and had not defamed the Russian army whose actions were unconstitutional and illegal. He told the court that he considered himself guilty of a much more serious crime: treason – taking the enemy’s side in war.
And there will be another chance to hear these powerful readings in London – on Thursday 5 February 2026, 6:30 p.m., at Birkbeck College. Here are the details.
You can order copies of Voices Against Putin’s War, or download a free pdf, here.
We published the book against the background of repeated claims that a peace agreement is about to be signed between Russia and Ukraine. These are louder than ever after this week’s talks in Berlin. At the time of writing this, it is not clear to me that the Kremlin is really interested in stopping the war, or what the “security guarantees” being offered to Ukraine actually mean.
I would recommend following the excellent arguments made about the peace process by Oleksandr Kyselov (most recently here, also here and here), Hanna Perekhoda (who writes on Facebook here), and other Ukrainian socialist writers.
If you want to know why the 20% of Donbas that Ukraine still controls matters so much, this comment by the Institute for the Study of War is worth reading. This speech by Valery Zaluzhny helps us understand what the Ukrainian political elite thinks.
Whatever the outcome of the talks now in progress, if any, the defence of victims of Russia’s military occupation of Ukrainian territory, and domestic political repression, will remain a central issue for our movement, right across Europe.
Thursday 20 November, 7:00 p.m. UK time: TRY ME FOR TREASON – Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War.
You are welcome to attend in person at Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, London E1. Or watch the livestream here on Facebook, or on Youtube.
What can courtroom speeches by imprisoned protesters tell us about the breadth of anti-war resistance in Russia? British historian Simon Pirani discusses his new book Voices Against Putin’s War with independent Russian journalist Ivan Rechnoy.
Simon Pirani is a British researcher and author who has written about energy and ecology, the history of the Russian Revolution, the labor movement, and post-Soviet Russia. His recent book Voices Against Putin’s War: Protesters’ Defiant Speeches in Russian Courts compiles and analyzes the courtroom speeches of twelve prisoners who were sentenced for resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine.
— Today in Russia, hundreds of people are serving prison sentences for criticizing the invasion of Ukraine. Twelve of those people are the subjects of your book. How did you select them?
— We wanted to show that opposition to Putin’s war is widespread. What is striking about these people is their diversity. They come from different generations, have different life experiences, and hold different political views. This diversity demonstrates that, despite the absence of public demonstrations and the lack of any real possibility of organizing an open anti-war movement in Russia, an anti-war movement does exist there. It encompasses a very broad spectrum of Russian society as well as people from the occupied territories. For example, the book features the courtroom speech of Bohdan Ziza from Crimea.
We decided not to include some of the most well-known opponents of the war in the book — people who made brave and principled speeches in court, like Ilya Yashin, for example. Their statements had already been widely publicized in the media here. Instead our goal was to draw the attention of English-speaking readers to lesser-known figures.
On the one hand, there are those who simply said something or posted statements on social media. For example, Darya Kozyreva, the youngest person featured in the book, was arrested for laying flowers at the Taras Shevchenko monument in Saint Petersburg. On the other hand, these are those who did something, such as throwing firebombs — not with the intention of hurting anyone, but to draw attention to the injustice of the war. Igor Paskar and Alexei Rozhkov are among them. These are people who live in smaller towns far from Moscow or Saint Petersburg, where young men are much more likely to receive draft notices from the conscription service.
We also included the statement by Ruslan Siddiqi, who sabotaged a railway line to stop munitions from reaching Ukraine.
The texts for the book were put together by a group of friends who, since the February 2022 invasion, had been translating the courtroom statements and some of the posts from the media or social networks. When we were already well into that process, a lot of new material appeared on the website Poslednee Slovo [author’s note: the project’s name translates as “the final statement”]. It’s a terrific project that does an excellent job of collecting and publishing a much broader range of cases than we could cover.
We limited ourselves to people who have made explicit anti-war statements about the war in Ukraine. However, as you know, there are many other political prisoners who have appeared in court since the 2022 invasion, as well as many more from before that, especially among the Crimean Tatar political prisoners. They are all represented on the Poslednee Slovo website. Another remarkable thing about the website is that it goes back all the way to the Soviet period. They’ve included the 1966 speeches by Andrei Sinyavsky and Yulii Daniel, perhaps the first examples since Stalin’s time of people using the right for a final statement in court as a form of propaganda.
Our book includes a chapter that lists seventeen additional cases of people who delivered anti-war speeches, beyond the twelve protagonists whose complete statements we published. We hope that either I or my colleagues will eventually translate all of those speeches as well.
Unfortunately, the final courtroom speech has become something like a literary genre in its own right. This tells us a lot about the difficult and fearful times we are living through.
— How do you envision the audience for this book? Are they people in the West and elsewhere who already have some understanding of the situation in Russia and want to learn more? Or are they readers to whom you want to convey a political message — perhaps even to persuade them of something?
— The book is in English and is therefore intended for English-speaking readers rather than Russian-speaking readers. Only a small percentage of people in the UK, the US, and Europe can read Russian. Since 2022, many of us have been aware of the fate of the anti-war movement in Russia. As you know, it began with large demonstrations, but protesting soon became difficult and then almost impossible. Next came the firebomb attacks on military recruitment centers — actions not meant to harm people, but to draw attention to the anti-war cause. We then started reading, in Russia’s opposition media, the final statements of opposition figures — the courtroom having become, in effect, the last public forum in Russia where protest is still possible.
However, I think that many people in English-speaking countries remain unaware of all this.
So, to answer your question, our aim is to reach a wider audience in Western societies: not only those who have closely followed Russia’s attack on Ukraine and its consequences, but also those whose understanding of it comes only from what they have picked up incidentally through the media.
— One of the central figures in your book is Alexander Skobov. One might say he bridges two eras. He was a dissident in the Soviet Union and is once again among the persecuted today. There is another similar example that is not included in the book: Boris Kagarlitsky. How do people in the West perceive the difference between current repressions and the dissident movement during the Cold War? Also, how do they see the difference between the Russian and Western situations now?
— First, I would like to say a few words about Skobov. As someone who regularly travelled to Russia between 1990 and 2019, I was deeply affected by these courtroom speeches. The first one I came across was by Igor Paskar. I thought, “My God, these are such young people — not the youngest, but still much younger than me — who have entered this fight.” Alexander Skobov’s speech also affected me emotionally, perhaps because he is about my age — a year or two younger — and, as you said, he bridges two eras.
I was particularly touched by the letter that he wrote to his partner, Olga Shcheglova. It was published in Novaya Gazeta Europe, and we also included it in the book. In the letter, Skobov explains that some of his friends and comrades urged him to leave Russia, but he refused. This made it inevitable that he would eventually face trial and imprisonment. In the letter, he explains that he wanted to communicate to the younger generation that the small group of dissidents he once belonged to — the socialist wing of the Soviet dissident movement — stands in solidarity with them in these difficult times. He wanted this message to be recorded in history.
I think that is a very important statement, and we all owe Alexander Skobov gratitude for linking these two historical periods through his sacrifice. I hope that including his statements in our book will help people in the West understand this continuity more clearly.
I will try to answer your question about how these movements are perceived. During the Soviet era, people in the West generally considered the dissident movement to be very small and marginal. Given how communication worked back then, it was very difficult for information to break through. Of course, there were large revolts against Soviet power, beginning with the Novocherkassk uprising in the 1960s and other violent revolts in the 1970s and 1980s. I have a friend in Ukraine who studied the major revolt that took place in Dniprodzerzhynsk. These movements were very short-lived, and we hardly knew about them in the West, even those of us who were interested in what was going on in the Soviet Union.
Today, Russians — and Ukrainians, of course — have a much greater opportunity to have real conversations with people in Western Europe. I think the powers of that time really succeeded in dividing Europe; there really was an iron curtain. But that’s gone now. Millions of Ukrainians and Russians live in Western Europe, the UK, and the US. People are learning to communicate with each other and work together in new ways.
We can already see examples of this in Germany, in the UK, and elsewhere. I think this conversation must continue — and our book, I think, is part of that ongoing dialogue.
Of course, it’s not easy to communicate with someone who is literally in a Russian prison. However, through the friends, comrades, and families of the central figures in our book, I hope this conversation will begin and continue over a long period of time.
— I wanted to ask specifically about the possibility of connecting the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian agendas. We are, of course, impressed by the huge mobilization in support of Palestine. At the same time, many on the left are frustrated that active support for Ukraine — a country in a situation in some ways similar to that of Palestine — is far less widespread in Europe and the West. Have there been any positive developments in this regard recently?
— Since October 2023, we have all watched with horror as Israel’s assault on Gaza has unfolded. It has been widely recognized as a genocide, and we now see a larger and more enduring anti-war movement in Western countries than we have seen in decades — comparable perhaps only to the protests against the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, or even the movement against the Vietnam War in the 1970s.
One of the reasons I felt it was important to translate these texts into English was to show Western audiences how much the Russian anti-war movement has in common with movements here. Of course, their enemies are different, standing on opposite sides of the geopolitical divide, and there are many other differences as well. Yet the similarities are striking — and deeply significant. The motivations of some of those who gave these courtroom speeches — whose statements we have translated — are very similar to those of activists in the UK who have been arrested for supporting Palestine Action, or of those who joined the flotilla recently stopped by Israeli forces as it attempted to reach Gaza.
I spent much of last year attending the large British demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. Together with friends, we carried a banner stating: “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” Our group wanted to show our fellow demonstrators that Ukraine’s struggle for national self-determination and the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation share something essential — the right to decide their futures, free from foreign interference and military threats.
We received a very interesting response from other marchers. Those familiar with the politics of the so-called left and socialist movements will recognize the reaction we encountered from a small minority, mostly older people, who said things like: “Why are you siding with Ukraine? Ukraine is just a plaything of the Western powers, a puppet of NATO. Why even talk about this issue?” Yet the overwhelming majority — more than ninety percent — of those who approached us said, “Ah, yes, we hadn’t thought about it that way before, but there really is something in common between these struggles.”
Another major obstacle to unity comes not only from the “campism” of certain leftists — those who focus exclusively on American and British imperialism while downplaying or excusing Russian imperialism — but also from the state, the mainstream press, and government propaganda. The official narrative is consistently supportive of Ukraine and entirely condemnatory of Palestinian resistance. Ordinary people sense this imbalance — the racism and discrimination directed at the Palestinian cause, alongside the establishment’s favoritism toward Ukraine. There is some truth in that: the propaganda machinery of our ruling class here is largely sympathetic to Ukraine. Working-class people in the UK and across Europe notice this and grow suspicious. However, I believe that is a suspicion we can overcome — and that has been our experience.
All of this is my personal opinion. The purpose of the book, however, is to bring to English-speaking readers the voices of our friends and comrades in Russia — those brave people who have found themselves in court and who, in some cases at the risk of additional years in prison, have chosen to exercise their constitutional right (though not always respected by judges) to deliver a final statement before the court. It is a remarkably courageous and difficult decision.
— I wanted to thank you for the book, and I also wanted to ask you, since you have been interested in this topic for a long time: how did your interest in it arise, and why has Russia become so important to you?
— My connection with Russia began through the labour movement. I first went to Russia in 1990 — to Prokopyevsk, in western Siberia, where the miners’ strikes of 1989 had first broken out. At that time, I was working as a journalist for the mineworkers’ trade union here in the UK. We saw an opportunity to develop links of solidarity between Soviet miners and British miners. And we had some success. Our friends in the British miners’ union established a very close relationship with the Independent Miners’ Union of Western Donbas, based in Pavlograd. This friendship continues even today.
In those days, I was a member of a Trotskyist organisation, and in August 1990, we organised a meeting in Moscow to mark the 40th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination. This, too, was part of a conversation between Western socialists and people in Russia and Ukraine that had been practically impossible during the “Cold War.”
I continued to follow what’s going on in Russia and Ukraine, and to write about it, and between 2007 and 2021, I worked at a research institute, writing about the energy sectors of those countries.
Since the pandemic, I haven’t been back to Russia. On February 24th, 2022, when the invasion began, I was at home and was shocked. We were all shocked. The invasion has changed everything, both in Ukraine and Russia, for many years to come. Together with friends, we began translating these courtroom speeches and posting them online. Gradually, that work grew into the idea of making a book.
I hope your readers will read it. Later this year, we’re going to make the book freely available as a PDF, so that everyone can access it.
If we do make any money — and I should say it is a very cheap book — all proceeds will go to Memorial and political prisoners. Nobody is making a profit from this project. The whole point is to share these voices with a much wider audience.
VOICES AGAINST PUTIN’S WAR Protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts
Speeches by Alexei Gorinov, Igor Paskar, Bohdan Ziza, Mikhail Kriger, Andrei Trofimov, Sasha Skochilenko, Aleksandr Skobov, Darya Kozyreva, Alexei Rozhkov, Ruslan Siddiqi, Kirill Butylin and Savelii Morozov.
Foreword by John McDonnell, Member of UK Parliament
The E-book can be purchased at the usual online retailers Any profits will be donated to Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners https://memohrc.org/en
At the heart of Voices Against Putin’s War are ten speeches made in court by people who opposed Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and were arrested and tried for doing so. Most of them are now serving long jail sentences, for “crimes” fabricated by Vladimir Putin’s repressive machine.
Along with the speeches, we include other public declarations – social media posts, letters and interviews – in which the protagonists made their case; statements by two more persecuted activists, made outside court; and a summary of 17 other anti-war speeches in court. We hope that, by publishing these translations in English, these resisters’ motivations will become known to a wider audience.
Chapters 1-10 are each devoted to one protester, arranged chronologically by the date of the protester’s first conviction. United in their opposition to the Kremlin’s war, they divide roughly into four groups.
First is Bohdan Ziza (chapter 3), who lived not in Russia but in Ukraine – in Crimea, which has been occupied by Russian forces since 2014. In 2022 Ziza filmed himself splashing paint in the colours of the Ukrainian flag on to a municipal administration building. He was tried in a Russian military court and is serving a 15-year sentence.
Second are two young women from St Petersburg, Sasha Skochilenko (chapter 6) and Darya Kozyreva (chapter 8), prosecuted for the most peaceful imaginable protests against the war. Skochilenko, who posted anti-war messages on labels in a supermarket, was freed after more than two years behind bars, in August 2024, as part of a prisoner swap between Russia, Belarus and several Western countries. Kozyreva is serving a two-and-a-half year sentence, essentially for quoting Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, in public.
Third are three young men who deliberately damaged property, but not persons, to draw their fellow Russians’ attention to the anti-war cause. Igor Paskar (chapter 2) firebombed an office of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Alexei Rozhkov (chapter 9) firebombed a military recruitment centre – a form of protest used dozens of times across Russia in 2022. He fled to Kyrgyzstan, was kidnapped, presumably by the Russian security forces, and returned to Russia for trial. Ruslan Siddiqi (chapter 10), a Russian and Italian citizen, derailed a train carrying munitions to the Ukrainian front. He has been sentenced to 29 years, and has said that he can be seen as a “partisan”, and “classified as a prisoner of war”, rather than a political prisoner.
The fourth group of protagonists, jailed for what they said rather than anything they did, have records of activism for social justice and democratic rights stretching back decades: Alexei Gorinov (chapter 1), a municipal councillor in Moscow who dared to refer to Russia’s war as a “war” in public; Mikhail Kriger, an outspoken opponent of Russia’s war on Ukraine since 2014 (chapter 4); Andrei Trofimov (chapter 5); and Aleksandr Skobov (chapter 7), who was first jailed for political dissent in 1978, in the Soviet Union, and who 47 years later in 2025 told the court: “Death to the Russian fascist invaders! Glory to Ukraine!”
Two activists prosecuted for anti-war action, who made their statements outside court, are featured in chapters 11 and 12. Kirill Butylin (chapter 11) was the first person arrested for firebombing a military recruitment office, in March 2022. No record of his court appearance is available, but his defiant message on social media is: “I will not go to kill my brothers!” Savelii Morozov (chapter 12) was fined for denouncing the war to a military recruitment commission in Stavropol, when applying to do alternative (non-military) service.
The ten anti-war speeches in court recorded in this book are by no means the only ones. Another 17 are summarised in chapter 13. These speeches, along with others by defendants who railed against the annihilation of free speech, or protested against grotesque frame-ups, have been collected and published by the “Poslednee Slovo” (“Last Word”) website.
High-profile Russian politicians jailed for standing up to the Kremlin also made anti-war speeches in court, including Ilya Yashin of the People’s Freedom Party, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in December 2022 for denouncing the massacres of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha and Irpin, and Vladimir Kara-Murza, sentenced in April 2023 to 25 years for treason. Both of them were freed, along with Sasha Skochilenko, in the prisoner exchange of August 2024. Other prominent political figures remain in detention for opposing the war, including Boris Kagarlitsky, a sociologist and Marxist writer, sentenced in February 2024 to five years for “justifying terrorism”, and Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the Golos election monitoring group, sentenced in May 2025 to five years for working with an “undesirable organisation”. Dozens of journalists and bloggers are behind bars too.
These better-known, politically motivated people are only a fraction of the thousands persecuted by the Kremlin.
The cases recorded by human rights organisations include thousands of Ukrainians detained in the occupied territories. In many cases their fate, and whereabouts, is unknown: they may be dead or imprisoned.
Thousands more Russians who have spoken out against the war, or been caught in the merciless dragnet by accident, are behind bars. So are “railway partisans” who sabotaged military supply trains, and others who denounced their regime’s support for Putin’s war, in Belarus.
In Chapter 14, we outline the resistance to the Kremlin’s war, the repression mobilised in response to it, and the scale of the twenty-first-century gulag that has been brought into being. Notes, giving sources for all the material in the book, are at the end.
People resisting injustice have for centuries, in many countries, made use of the courts as a public platform. Irish rebels against British colonial violence began doing so at the end of the eighteenth century. In Russia, the tradition goes back at least to the 1870s, when Narodniki (Populists), speaking to judges trying them for violent protests, denounced the autocratic dictatorship. The workers’ movements that culminated in the 1917 revolutions used courtroom propaganda widely. When Stalinist repression reached its peak in the 1930s, the major purge trials were designed to eliminate it: their format was prearranged, with abject, false confessions. The practice reappeared after the post-Stalinist “thaw”, in the 1965 trial of the dissident writers Andrei Siniavsky and Yulii Daniel.[1]
Courtroom speeches have again become a powerful weapon under Putin – and the Kremlin dictatorship is finding ways to get its revenge.[2] It added three years to Andrei Trofimov’s sentence (chapter 5) – for the fantastical, false “offences” of disseminating false information about the army and “condoning terrorism” – based solely on what he said at his first trial. Other anti-war prisoners, including Alexei Gorinov (chapter 1) have had years added on to their sentences, on the basis of false “evidence” provided by prison officers, or prisoners terrorised by those officers.
Why did they do it? Why did our protagonists make protests that carried the risk of many years in the hell of the Russian prison system? Why, when brought to court, did they choose to make these statements that carried further risk? They have weighed their words and spoken for themselves; no attempt will be made here to summarise. However it is noteworthy that all of them addressed their speeches to their fellow citizens, not to the government.
Andrei Trofimov told the court in his second trial that “Ukraine is my audience”, because “Russian society is dead and it is useless to try to talk to it” – but nevertheless went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that his short, sharp message from his first trial, ending “Putin is a dickhead”, was widely circulated in Russian media.
The others had greater hopes in Russian society, including the Ukrainian Bohdan Ziza, who, in the video for which he was jailed, underlined that: “I address myself, above all, to Crimeans and Russians.” In court he said his action was “a cry from the heart” to “those who were and are afraid – just as I was afraid” to speak out, but who did not want the war.
Alexei Rozhkov had no doubt that “millions of my fellow citizens, women and men, young and old, take an anti-war position”, but were deprived of any means to express it. Kirill Butylin appealed to others to make similar protests so that “Ukrainians will know, that people in Russia are fighting for them – that not everyone is scared and not everyone is indifferent.” As for the government, “let those fuckers know that their own people hate them”.
Aleksandr Skobov, now 67 and in failing health, explicitly addressed younger generations. In an open letter from jail, he recalled how as a socialist he had been a “black sheep” among Soviet-era dissidents, most of whom had now passed away. “The blows are falling on other people, most of them much younger.” While “sceptical about ‘pompous declarations about the passing-on of traditions and experience’”, nevertheless, “I want the young people who are taking the blows now to know: those few remaining Soviet dissidents stood side-by-side with them, have stayed with them and shared their journey.”
Given this unity of purpose, of seeking however unsuccessfully to connect with the population at large, we might see the protagonists as practising the “propaganda of the deed” – not in the sense that phrase was given in the early twentieth century by politicians and policemen, as acts of violence, but in its original, broader sense: as any action, violent or not, that stirred one’s fellow citizens to a just cause. For, while some of those whose words are in this book used violence against property, and some specifically justified Ukrainian military violence against Russian aggression, none used violence against people.
Here are two further observations. First: while all the anti-war resisters shared a common purpose, they started with a diverse range of world views. A profound moral sense of duty runs through some of their statements. “Do I regret what has happened?” Igor Paskar asked his judges. “Yes, perhaps I’d wanted my life to turn out differently – but I acted according to my conscience, and my conscience remains clear.” Or, as Alexei Rozhkov put it: “I have a conscience, and I preferred to hold on to it.”
Andrei Trofimov, in a similar vein, said at his second trial that “writ large, it is a matter of self-preservation” – not “the preservation of the body per se, of its physical health” but the preservation of conscience in this difficult situation, “my ability to tell black from white, and lies from truth, and, quite importantly, my ability to say out loud what I believe to be true”.
Ruslan Siddiqi voiced his motivation differently, in terms of political ideas about changing society. In letters to Mediazona, an opposition media outlet, he described his path towards anarchism. Expressing dislike for the “rigidity” of some anarchists and communists, he nevertheless envisaged a transition “from a totalitarian state to other forms of government with greater freedoms and further evolution into communities with self-government”.
The invasion of Ukraine changed things: anyone who opposed it was declared a traitor by the government. “In such a situation, it is not surprising that some would prefer to leave the country, whereas others would take up explosives. Realising that the war was going to be a long one, at the end of 2022 I decided to act militarily.”
By contrast, Alexei Gorinov founded his defence on pacifist principles, and quoted Lev Tolstoy on the “madness and criminality of war”. Being tried “for my opinion that we need to seek an end to the war”, he could “only say that violence and aggression breed nothing but reciprocal violence. This is the true cause of our troubles, our suffering, our senseless sacrifices, the destruction of civilian and industrial infrastructure and our homes.”
Sasha Skochilenko was still more explicit: “Yes, I am a pacifist” she told the court. Pacifists “believe life to be the highest value of all”; they “believe that every conflict can be resolved by peaceful means. I can’t kill even a spider – I am scared to imagine that it is possible to take someone’s life. […] Wars don’t end thanks to warriors – they end thanks to pacifists. And when you imprison pacifists, you move the long-awaited day of the peace further away.”
Savelii Morozov told the military recruitment commission that he would not refuse to fight in all wars, but in this particular, unjust war. A war in defence of one’s homeland could be justified, but not the “crime” being perpetrated in Ukraine.
For Darya Kozyreva, the central issue is Ukraine’s right to self-determination, asserted by force of arms. The war is a “criminal intrusion on Ukraine’s sovereignty”, she told the court. While identifying herself in an interview as a Russian patriot – “a patriot in the real sense, not in the sense that the propagandists give that word” – Kozyreva justified Ukrainian military resistance. Ukraine does not need a “big brother”; it will fight anyone who tries to invade, she said. In Russia, even some of Putin’s political opponents “do not always realise that Ukraine, having paid for its sovereignty in blood, will determine its own future”. She wants to believe in “a beautiful future where Russia lets go of all imperial ambition”.
Aleksandr Skobov expressed the hope that Russia will be defeated militarily in still more categorical terms. He spelled out in court three principles of his political organisation, the Free Russia Forum: the “unconditional return to Ukraine of all its internationally recognised territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea”; support for all those fighting for this goal, including Russian citizens who joined the Ukrainian armed forces; and support for “any form of war against Putin’s tyranny inside Russia, including armed resistance”, but excluding “disgusting” terrorist attacks on civilians.
Second: these anti-war speeches have much to tell us not only about Russia and Ukraine, but about the increasingly dangerous world we live in, in which Putin’s slide to authoritarianism has been succeeded by right-wing, authoritarian turns in the USA and some European countries. Russia’s imperial war of aggression has been followed by Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza, in which multiple war crimes – mass murder of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon, deliberate blocking of aid, and the targeting of journalists, aid workers and international agencies – have been facilitated by the same Western powers that offer lip service to Ukraine’s national rights.
The two aggressor nations, Israel and Russia, aligned with different geopolitical camps, are subject to analogous driving forces. Nationalist ideology supercedes rational economic management; expansionist violence supercedes democracy; the decline of Western neoliberal hegemony paves the way for militarist thuggery. Capital’s need for social control underpins near-fascist methods of rule. Readers may recognise, in the Russian state’s dystopian efforts of 2022-23 to punish its dissenting citizens as “terrorists” and “traitors”, patterns that are retraced in the unhinged witch-hunts of 2024-25 in the USA and western Europe, against opponents of the Gaza slaughter.
The powers on both sides of the geopolitical divide are frightened of similar things: the defiance and resilience of the opponents of Putin’s war, and the anger that has brought millions of people on to the streets of north American and European cities, in protest at the Gaza genocide. They are frightened of beliefs that are taking shape, in varying forms, that humanity can and should strive for a better, richer life than that offered by the warmongers and dictators. Some of these beliefs are expressed in the chapters of this book.
□ Thursday 20 November 2025, 7:00 pm. TRY ME FOR TREASON. Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War. Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E1 5QJ. Register free on Eventbrite here. Flyer attached.
[1] T.D. Sullivan, Speeches from the dock, or, Protests of Irish patriotism (P.J. Kennedy, New York, 1904); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: a history of the populist and socialist movements in 19th century Russia (Phoenix Press, 2001), Marshall Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1980).
On May 16, 2022, the Ukrainian artist Bohdan Ziza poured blue and yellow paint – the colours of his country’s flag – on to a municipal administration building in his home town, Yevpatoria, in Crimea.
Ziza posted a video of the action online, with a call to “adherents of graffiti culture, all the vandals of Crimea, Russia and Belarus” to protest against “the most horrific war” unleashed by “[Vladimir] Putin and the machine of state.” He was soon arrested and charged with “committing a terrorist act” and “incitement to terrorism”.
In June 2023, Ziza used his final statement to the Russian military court that sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment to denounce the war again: “My action was a cry from the heart, from my conscience, to those who were and are afraid — just as I was afraid — but who also did not want this war.”
Ziza is one of ten anti-war protesters whose speeches are published this month, in English translation, in Voices Against Putin’s War: protesters’ defiant speeches in Russian courts. The collection also includes two statements made outside court, related interviews and letters, a summary of seventeen other anti-war speeches in court, and a survey of the anti-war protest movement and the repression against it.
In Russia, dissenters since the Populist rebels of the 1870s have used their final statement in court to urge resistance to power. The tradition flourished in the workers’ movements that preceded the 1917 revolution, was broken by the 1930s Stalinist show trials with their formulaic confessions, and reborn after the 1950s “thaw”, with dissidents such as the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yulii Daniel.
In 2022, Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine was followed by a brutal crackdown on civil society in occupied territory, Crimea included, as well as repression of domestic dissent. Protest was driven off the streets. Individual non-violent direct actions like Ziza’s, or writing or speaking against the war, were punished with long jail sentences, such as those now being served by most of the protagonists in Voices Against Putin’s War.
Ruslan Siddiqi, the Russian-Italian anarchist, went further: he is serving twenty-nine years’ imprisonment for derailing a train that was carrying munitions to Russian army units in Ukraine.
In court, he declared himself a prisoner of war, rather than a political prisoner: “My targets were Russian military equipment and the logistical chains used to transport military hardware and fuel. I wanted to impede military operations against Ukraine.”
Acting according to one’s conscience, in a dystopian world of militarism and big lies, was a central consideration for many of the protagonists.
Alexei Rozhkov, who firebombed a military recruitment centre in Sverdlovsk region, fled to Kyrgyzstan while on bail, before he was kidnapped by Russian special forces and returned to be put on trial.
He told the court that sentenced him to sixteen years: “Although I have never been a politician or a statesman, I could not remain indifferent when the war began. I have a conscience, and I preferred to hold on to it.”
The book’s protagonists oppose the war from a wide range of political viewpoints. On one hand, there are pacifists such as Sasha Skochilenko, the artist jailed for seven years for replacing labels in a supermarket with handwritten anti-war messages (and later freed in a prisoner swap between Russia and Western countries), who told the court: “Wars don’t end thanks to warriors — they end thanks to pacifists.”
On the other hand, there are political activists who spoke of Ukraine’s right to resist Russia militarily. Aleksandr Skobov, 67, the oldest protagonist, first jailed for activity in the socialist wing of the Soviet dissident movement in 1978, refused to stand when the judge came into court.
Skobov wished death on the “murderer, tyrant and scoundrel Putin.” He said he would never stop calling on honest Russians to join the Ukrainian armed forces, and for air strikes on Russia’s military facilities.
No less adamant in support of Ukraine was the youngest protagonist, Darya Kozyreva, 19, sentenced to two years and eight months’ imprisonment for laying flowers and a poem at the statue of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, in St Petersburg.
In court, Bohdan Ziza denounced not only the 2022 invasion but also the frenzied assault on Crimean Tatar organisations that preceded it in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. “Those who so passionately seek ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine have not opened their eyes to the Nazism in Russia, with its ephemeral ‘Russian world’,” with which the armed forces have “tried to extirpate Ukrainian identity”.
(Last month Ziza, on his own demand, had the Russian citizenship that was imposed on him along with all Crimean residents revoked. He is today in Vladimir Central jail, where “politicals” have been incarcerated since the 19th century.)
Voices Against Putin’s War results from the work of a small volunteer group of translators supporting Russian anti-war organisations, of which I was part, and is supported by the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine. On top of the speeches published, we have summarised seventeen more from the wonderful “Poslednee Slovo” (“last word”) website.
The trials highlighted in the book also provide a snapshot of Russia’s wartime lurch towards a form of fascism. Against those who take non-violent direct action, charges under terrorism laws were standardised in 2022, with jail sentences of between ten and twenty years. Torture of detainees is routine.
Long sentences are designed to terrorise people into silence: Andrei Trofimov got ten years for social media posts justifying Ukrainian military actions against Russia.
For his two-minute speech in the military court, which ended “Glory to Ukraine! Putin is a dickhead” he was charged with “condoning terrorism” and “defaming the army”: a further three years were added to his sentence.
The monstrosity of Russia’s domestic repression may properly be understood in the context of the bloodbath it has visited on Ukraine, and especially on the occupied territories.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and wounded in action, and millions of Ukrainian civilians have been uprooted from their homes by bombing. Added to that, people in the occupied areas have faced enforced imposition of Russian citizenship, mass deportations including of children (the basis of a case against Putin in the International Criminal Court), legal nihilism, and an economic slump.
The primary instrument of social discipline in the occupied areas is enforced disappearances, including imprisonment. In September 2024, Ukraine’s register of persons “missing under special circumstances” counted some 48,324 names, of which 4,700 were confirmed by the Ukrainian government to be in captivity, although the true number may be far higher.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe estimated that 16,000 people on the register were adult civilians. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group identified 5,000 victims of enforced disappearances while preparing material for the International Criminal Court, and the Ukrainian ombudsman is working on 1,700 such cases. (All these numbers relate to civilians detained or missing, as distinct from Ukrainian prisoners of war, of which there are some 8,000–10,000.)
In short, Russia has taken many thousands of civilian prisoners in the occupied territories, whose fates often remain unknown. Many are political prisoners: 585 journalists, community leaders and activists from newly-occupied territories identified by human-rights organizations, 265 counted by the Crimean Human Rights Group, and others.
Furthermore, there are the thousands of civilian prisoners jailed by the so-called “People’s Republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk between 2014 and 2022, including for political offences, who have been transferred to prisons in Russia.
Alongside this orgy of violence, Russia’s machine of domestic repression has gone into overdrive.
A swathe of new censorious laws, for instance penalizing “disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian military” (which includes calling the war a war) have been added to the pre-existing laws on “foreign agents”, “undesirable organizations” and “extremism” from the last decade. Deranged police sweeps of people whose critical comments are harvested from social media have intensified.
The leading human-rights organisation Memorial: Political Prisoners Support, now based abroad, lists over 3,000 political detainees today, compared to just 50 in 2015 and 420 in 2021. After the post-Stalin “thaw”, historians reckon the number of political detainees in the Soviet Union fell to 5,000-10,000 in the 1970s (in the fifteen-republic union, with a population nearly twice that of Russia alone).
The trend reflected in these numbers justifies the term we have used in Voices Against Putin’s War: a “21st-century gulag.”
Amidst an international tide of rising right-wing authoritarianism and militarism, culminating in the genocide in Gaza, the speeches in the book are significant far beyond Russia. In his foreword, John McDonnell, a left-wing Labour MP in the UK, calls them “an inspiration to all those across the globe who see an injustice, and who refuse to passively comply”, from Israeli draft refuseniks and Palestine Action supporters in Britain to women demonstrating for life and liberty in Iran. That is where hope lies in our dark times.
□ Thursday 20 November, 7:00 p.m. TRY ME FOR TREASON. Readings from anti-war protesters’ speeches in Russian courts, and book launch for Voices Against Putin’s War. Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E1 5QJ. Register free on Eventbrite here.
How bad can it get? When we strip away US president Donald Trump’s insults and temper fits, what can he actually do?
First, he can withdraw US military aid to Ukraine – which he has been talking about doing since long before the US presidential election. If the European states got their act together, which is possible, the effects of this would be constrained.
At the “Russian troops out” march in London, 22 February 2025
US diplomats have reportedly threatened to block Ukraine’s access to the Starlink communication system on which its drones rely, potentially giving asymmetrical advantage to Russia.
Second, Trump can cancel sanctions. The latter would bring him into conflict with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, which was specifically designed to compel the president to lift sanctions only with Congress approval. Of course Trump could play fast and loose with the law, which he has done and is doing in other respects, and/or Congress could go along with him.
The cancellation of sanctions would be bad. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the sanctions were never very effective, in large part because previous US governments, under both Trump and Biden, sought to limit their effect on the oil market and the world economy.
Third, Trump can shift narratives. I broadly agree with people who say we should judge Trump and his cohorts by their actions, not by the constant stream of often incoherent words. Yes, but. Nazi salutes normalise Nazism; speculation about expelling the Palestinian population from Gaza normalises ethnic cleansing; and slandering the Ukrainian president as a “dictator” who started the war in his country reinforces Russian propaganda.
On the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion – and the eleventh year of its military attack on Ukraine, and the long chains of suffering it has caused – these are real dangers. It’s not clear how they will play out.
A Russian and Italian citizen, an electrician from [the Russian city of] Ryazan, an industrial tourist, a bike traveller, an anarchist and a partisan — all this can be said about 36-year-old Ruslan Siddiqi. In the summer of 2023, he dispatched four drones with explosives to attack the Diaghilev military airfield near Ryazan, and in the autumn, he decided to act “from the ground” — damaging railway lines with two bombs and derailing 19 freight train wagons. Siddiqi is currently awaiting trial in a Moscow pretrial detention centre, with the prospect of a life sentence hanging over him. In these letters to Mediazona, he explained why he decided to “take up explosives”, how a fox spoiled his first sabotage, and how torture by field telephones (known as “tapiki” in slang) differs from torture by tasers. (The security forces used both against him.)
Attacking a military airfield: “I took four drones with explosives to the field on a bicycle”
The hum of the Tupolev Tu-22 and Tu-95 aircraft outside my window coincided with the strikes on Ukraine, and this determined my choice of target: Diaghilev military airfield, just ten kilometres from home. I lived with my 80-year-old grandmother and understood how hard it was for the elderly and sick without heat and light in winter. As I filled a tub with hot water, I thought about those deprived of basic amenities a thousand kilometres away, because of someone’s geopolitical ambitions. Yet at the same time they talk about “fraternal nations” and say that “Russia is not at war with civilians”.
The Russian army’s meagre successes in Ukraine – such as taking the ruined town of Avdiivka, at horrendous human cost – have produced a new round of western politicians’ statements and commentators’ articles about possible peace negotiations.
Hopes are not high, because the Kremlin shows no appetite for such talks. Its actions, such as nightly bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, speak louder than political and diplomatic words on all sides.
The desire and hope for peace is widely shared, and I share it too. How can it be achieved?
Among “left” writers, the “campists” and one-sided “anti-imperialists”, who deny Ukraine’s right to resist Russian aggression, say that peace talks could start now … if only the western powers did not stand in the way. (By “campism”, I mean the view that the world is divided simplistically between a western imperialist camp dominated by the US, and another camp comprising China, Russia and other countries, in which some progressive potential resides.)
Mariupol, after the siege. Photo: ADifferentMan / Creative Commons
The “campist” case is made by literally ignoring what is actually going on in Ukraine, and Russia, and focusing – often exclusively – on the political and diplomatic shenanigans in western countries.
In this blog post I will look at seven recent articles by “campist” writers. All of them call for peace talks; and all claim that the main obstacle is the western powers.
I will cover (1) the selection of subject matter by these authors; (2) what little they actually say about peace negotiations; and (3) why the claim that the western powers sabotaged peace talks in April 2022 is less convincing than they believe it to be.
None of the seven articles says one word about Russia’s political system, its politicians’ nationalist rhetoric or its war economy, which are among the central causes of the war. Not a word. Only one of the articles (Alexander Hill’s) attempts to assess Russian war aims; one more (Andrew Murray’s) makes glancing reference to these.
Only one of the articles (Hill’s, again) touches on what Ukrainian people are thinking or doing. None of the other six articles says a word about this, despite Ukrainian popular resistance being, by any measure, a key factor in the war.
Only one of the articles (Hill’s, again) says much about what has happened on the battlefield. One more (Branko Marcetic in Jacobin) has one paragraph on Ukrainian battlefield losses, but no mention of Russian losses. Two more (Murray’s, and Wojcik and Atkins’s) have very brief references to this.
While saying almost nothing about what is going on in Ukraine, or Russia, all seven articles discuss statements bywestern politicians, diplomats and/or military leaders. At length.
Five of the articles (by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, by Hill, by Wojcik and Atkins, and two by Marcetic) focus on a peace deal that was supposedly on the table in April 2022, and claim that western politicians, who twisted president Zelensky’s arm, wrecked it (see last section). On the other hand, only two of the articles (Hill and Murray) make any suggestion about what peace talks might look like (see next section).
Dear readers, I can hear you say: but you have just picked seven articles at random. No. It’s a fair sample. I searched the largest-circulation English language “left” web sites; these were the most visible articles by don’t-support-Ukrainian-resistance writers.
The key point is that none of these writers mention how the Kremlin works. No reference to Vladimir Putin’s attitude to the world, or whether it has changed. No assessment of the deranged nationalist, even genocidal, rants about Ukraine by him, his close colleagues and high-profile Russian TV personalities. No mention of whether Russia can be considered an imperialist power or not. Not a word about the way that its invasion of Ukraine not only breached international agreements and laws, but also offends the principle of nations’ right to self-determination that socialists have held dear since the 19th century.
It is telling, too, that these “campist” writers have no interest in what Ukrainian people say or do. Nor Russian people. They don’t pretend to look at the interaction of social, political and economic forces. They are concerned largely – some of them, exclusively – with the western elite. They see themselves as its opposite and its nemesis. Russian or Ukrainian soldiers, Russian anti-war protesters, Ukrainian trade unionists on the front line, Ukrainian refugees – these are bit part players in a drama played out in Washington, London and Berlin.
The result is a fantasy world that bears only indirect relation to reality.
When I say “campists”, I mean a very narrow group among “left” writers, who embrace a fake “anti-imperialism”, historically descended from 20th century Stalinism.
They do not speak for the labour movement more broadly, or for the millions of people in western countries who think of themselves as “left wing”, or who vote for Social Democratic parties. These are powerful forces for change. But the “campist” influence is dangerous and divisive.
Of course many journalists in the mainstream press also focus exclusively on this elite world of diplomats and politicians. But they usually see themselves as part of it. The “campists” sees themselves in opposition – but only to the western powers, the US above all. For them, the American empire is the only empire worth fighting.
Whether Russia might have traits of empire, whether China might seek to construct some sort of empire, whether bloodthirsty dictators like Bashar al-Assad are tied to imperial interests – all this is excluded from the conversation. Real struggles that confront the American empire, such as the Palestinians’, are welcomed; those that face other enemies, such as Ukrainians resisting Putin, or Syrians and Palestinians resisting Assad, are shunned.
What could peace negotiations look like
Andrew Murray writes:
Moving from ceasefire to a permanent peace will of course be challenging. Russia will need to accept a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state, and Ukraine will have to accept remaining outside NATO and self-determination for minorities within its borders.
The Stop the War coalition, in which Murray is a leading voice, sets out its policies in the form of calls for UK government action. So it’s fair to assume that this, too, is a call for the UK government to take a particular stance – in this case, the most pro-Russian stance possible. Going through the points in turn:
1. “Russia will need to accept a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state” is meaningless. It did so, in the Belovezha accords that dissolved the Soviet Union (1991), and the Budapest memorandum under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (1994). Since 2014 Russia has been pounding Ukraine militarily, in breach of those agreements. Any attempts to stop the fighting in Ukraine diplomatically would have to start by recognising that reality – which is why a peace treaty, as opposed to a ceasefire or simply “freezing” the conflict, is extremely unlikely.
2. “Ukraine will have to accept remaining outside NATO” is essentially a demand for NATO to allow Russia to decide which states join (why no objection to Finland and Sweden?!). The UK government may indeed be cynical enough to take such a position, but why should the labour movement encourage it to do so? What sort of solidarity is that with the Ukrainian population – which before 2014 was in its vast majority opposed to NATO membership, but has largely come to see it as the only security arrangement that can prevent their country being invaded again and again?
President Zelensky in Bucha, April 2022
3. “Self-determination for minorities within its [Ukraine’s] borders.” This is a distortion of the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, historically embraced by socialists. Self-determination includes the right to secession. (It is relevant that Russia killed tens of thousands of people in Chechnya in the early 2000s, to help ensure that this right would not be exercised.)
From 2014, the extreme right in Russia called for the establishment of a new state, “Novorossiya”, in south-eastern Ukraine, effectively a demand for “self-determination” of Russian people there – but the Kremlin refused to support this. Moscow was aware that the vast majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians neither wanted “self-determination” nor regarded themselves as Russian. The exception was Crimea, where a referendum on annexation by Russia (a strange type of “self-determination”) was held under military occupation.
Long before 2014, there had been support in eastern Ukraine for greater autonomy within the Ukrainian state, and distrust of Ukrainian nationalist politicians in Kyiv. The Kremlin did its best to whip up divisions among Ukrainians on this basis. It engaged in a long campaign of disinformation, claiming to support the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine. (I wrote about this e.g. here.) But on a diplomatic level, until 2022, the Kremlin pretended that the Russian army was not present in Ukraine, although it was, and left the status of the Luhansk and Donetsk “republics” vague. All this changed in 2022, when the Kremlin recognised the “republics” and invaded Ukraine.
In 2022, people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhyia voted – sometimes literally looking down the barrel of a soldier’s gun, and always under the shadow of the biggest military operation in mainland Europe since world war two – on accession to the Russian federation. This is the Kremlin’s version of “self-determination for minorities within Ukraine’s borders”. The Stop the War coalition has been conspicuous in its failure to denounce this violent abomination.
Why, then, demand that the UK government raise the issue of “self-determination for minorities” in peace talks? Andrew Murray can not believe there is the least chance of them doing so. The point is to preserve the fantasy world in which “campism” lives, in which Russian imperialism, Russian assaults on democratic rights and the Kremlin’s distortion of democratic principles for its political ends do not exist.
Alexander Hill writes:
The key outcome [of peace talks] will be the separation of the Russian-dominated Donbass and Crimea from the remainder of Ukraine – something that will hopefully be the cornerstone of a lasting peace in the region.
Although Hill clearly favours a ceasefire, and the Stop the War coalition opposed the Russian invasion in 2022, that is not what is under discussion here. Hill is envisaging the outcome of peace negotiations. Why endorse the imperial power’s demands in this way? Where is the evidence that, if these demands are met, “lasting peace” will ensue? How is this in the labour movement’s interests or the interests of international solidarity?
What happened in April 2022
The idea that peace talks have been blocked solely by the western powers – rather than by Russia’s war strategy – has been repeated over and over again by the “campists” over the past two years. They claim, in particular, that a deal was on the table in Istanbul in April 2022, that Ukraine was ready to sign, but that Boris Johnson, then UK premier, visited Kyiv and persuaded president Zelensky not to do so.
This version of events was demolished by Volodymyr Artiukh and Taras Fedirko in October 2022. They showed that the single source for the claim, a report in Ukrainska Pravda, had been misinterpreted, and that a mass of evidence suggested that the talks failed due to Ukrainian and Russian political factors, and the dynamics of military operations. Commentators who focus on “a magic turning point when everything could have gone otherwise” ignore that “in Russia’s repertoire, diplomacy has consistently been subordinated to the use of force”, they wrote. I urge readers to read this thoughtful, rounded argument.
Recently, accounts of the Istanbul talks have surfaced from people who were involved: the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, and the Ukrainian politicians Davyd Arakhamia and Oleksiy Arestovich. The “campists” have cherry-picked lines from these sources to revive their narrative.
Branko Marcetic of Jacobin claimed that an interview given in July last year by Bennett, who had been in touch with the Russian and Ukrainian governments, was a “bombshell”. Bennett said that in April 2022 there had been “a good chance of reaching a ceasefire”, and when asked “had they [who?] not curbed it”, “he replied with a nod”.
While it is unclear what that nod meant, and who “they” referred to, Bennett’s statement that the April deal was killed off by the revelation of the Russian army’s massacre of civilians at Bucha, outside Kyiv, is unequivocal. In Marcetic’s own words:
“Once that [Bucha] happened, I [Bennett] said, ‘It’s over,’” he recounts. Bennett pointed to the potential for such an atrocity to emerge and derail the political prospects for peace in Ukraine as proof of the importance of making haste on negotiations at the time. The Pravda report likewise pointed to Johnson’s visit as only one “obstacle” to peace, with the discovery of the Bucha killings the other.
Marcetic, writing in early August last year, chose not to look more widely at the circumstances in which Bennett gave his interview. Shortly beforehand, in June, the leaders of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa and other African nations had met with both Zelensky and Putin to propose peace talks. Putin had told them that one of their proposed starting-points for talks – accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders – was unacceptable. (During this meeting, Putin held up what he claimed was the draft of the April agreement, although this has not been published before or since.)
A proper account of the failure of peace initiatives would mention not only the western powers, who of course influence decision-making in Kyiv (in recent months increasingly to constrain the war effort), but also Russia’s real intentions. Marcetic ignores that.
In November last year, Wojcik and Atkins sculpted another piece of evidence that Boris Johnson, and the western powers, were the obstacle to peace, from an interview with Davyd Arakhamia, one of the leaders of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. They quoted Arakhamia reflecting on the Istanbul talks as follows:
“[The Russians] were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality like Finland once did. And we were ready to make a commitment that we would not join NATO. When we returned from Istanbul, [then-British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said: ‘Do not sign anything with them at all; just go to war,’” Arakhamia said.
Now let’s look at what Arakhamia actually said, as reported by the Russian opposition web site, Meduza. Wojcik and Atkins have cut out a key passage, after the words “would not join NATO”. I have put it back, in bold type.
“They actually hoped until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality. That was their biggest priority. They were willing to end the war if we took on neutrality, like Finland once did, and gave assurances that we wouldn’t join NATO. That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification’, the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah,” Arakhamia said.
When asked why Ukraine didn’t agree to Russia’s terms, Arakhamia was resolute:
First of all, to agree to this point, we would have to change the [Ukrainian] Constitution. Our path to NATO is written into the Constitution. Second of all, we did not and still do not trust the Russians to keep their word. This would only have been possible if we had security guarantees. We couldn’t sign something, walk away, everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and then [Russia] would invade, only more prepared this time — because the first time they invaded, they were actually unprepared for us to resist so much. So we could only work [with them] if we were 100 percent confident that this wouldn’t happen a second time. And we don’t have that confidence.
Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we wouldn’t sign anything with them at all, and that we should just fight.
Oh dear! The really important part – that Ukraine needed guarantees that Russia would not once again break its word and invade – went missing!!
This reminds me of Soviet censors who, when a Communist party leader fell out of favour, would cut the unhappy has-been out of official photos. Snip snip snip.
Arakhamia’s statement, in full, suggests that, with Russia’s brutal invasion at its height, the Ukrainian side needed a more substantial security guarantee than Putin’s piece of paper.
Of course, what Arakhamia said should be treated with scepticism, as should all statements from all politicians. But it shouldn’t have vital parts surgically removed, to make it say the opposite. All the more care is needed, given the efforts by Russian state propagandists to distort Arakhamia’s meaning.
In March this year, Benjamin and Davies cited a third source – Oleksiy Arestovich, Zelensky’s former spokesman – in support of the claim that Putin’s Istanbul deal had been negotiated and “already had the champagne corks popping in Kyiv”. Again a politician, and one whose words need to be treated with special care. Readers should read his interview themselves.
But to pretend that Arestovich’s account shows that the western powers wrecked the peace talks is deceitful. Asked if Johnson twisted Zelensky’s arm, Arestovich says:
I don’t know exactly if that is true or false. He came to Kiev but nobody knows what they spoke about except, I think, Zelensky and Boris Johnson himself. I think it was the second of April, and I was in Bucha the next day. The president got in [to Bucha] one day later. […]
Arestovich here underlined his point that: “The president was shocked about Bucha. All of us were shocked about Bucha. […] Zelensky completely changed face when he came into Bucha and saw what happened.”
My conclusion is not that news of the Bucha massacre alone changed Zelensky’s mind. My best guess is that Bucha, combined with the other brutal Russian offensive operations in progress – especially the attack on Mariupol – focused the minds of Zelensky and others on the issue of security guarantees outside of NATO. And they could not see clearly what these were.
Despite the importance attached to Bucha by Bennett, Arakhamia and Arestovich, none of the “campists” mention it – except for that one dismissive reference by Marcetic (see above). They live in a fantasy world where Russian imperialism is absent, and its crimes of no consequence.
And that is not really a problem about Ukraine, but about the deep political malaise of a section of the western “left”. There is no path to real international solidarity and effective anti-imperialism through this fantasy world. And no path to peace either. SP, 8 April 2024.
