Simon Pirani: What’s Left of the Left When It Comes to Ukraine?

What, really, have socialists learned from the Russian war on Ukraine? Has it changed our understanding of the way that imperialism works? Tell us we were right all along?

Reflecting on the first four years since the invasion, Oleksandr Kyselov, a Ukrainian socialist based in Sweden, wrote in February that Ukrainians found themselves “trying to safeguard our future free from foreign dictates, and simultaneously sacrificing any chances to actually have one”.

Subjected to polarising propaganda, exposed to the attacks by Russian ‘liberators’ on our homes and core infrastructure, watching arrogant sticky-fingered moralising elites surprisingly exempt from ‘common duty’, learning about a striking dependence of our ability to fight back on the political expediencies abroad, we may find out that a fragile ‘least unjust peace’ is the best we can get.

And still, even seeing all of this, too many of the European left are busy stretching familiar old frameworks over a changed world. As if continuing to hope that, should they just deny, condemn, and denounce loudly enough, selectively pontificating about internationalism while reinforcing the borders of their national units, they will be spared the new reality of the world.

This reinforced my scepticism about “the left” as a category. Its historic failure to consider, or draw lessons from, the tragedy of the Syrian revolution, emptied the term of much meaning. That’s how I saw it nine years ago, anyway – and Ukraine has made things worse.

*Demonstrators outside a court in Moscow, where Lidia Moniava, founder of a children’s hospice, was on trial for social media posts about the war. Photo from Bereg*

This, in turn, raises another question. What about those sections of the “left” claiming to be Marxists? Can we seriously use the term “Marxist” to describe people who, during the largest military conflict of our lifetimes in Europe, have – as Kyselov puts it – kept denying, condemning and denouncing, in the hope of being “spared the new reality”?

I do not have a comprehensive answer to that. But here’s a contribution: comments on a lengthy article about “geopolitical fractures and the Marxist critique of imperialism” by Alex Callinicos, a well-known Marxist writer. I read it, hoping to find the theoretical underpinnings of the political stance of the Socialist Workers Party, of which Callinicos is a member, on the war. The SWP recognises Ukrainians’ right to resist the Russian invasion in words, but opposes it in practice (see Feature 5 below); since 2022, it has called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, but did not do so during the eight years (2014–22) that they propped up the tinpot Donbass dictatorships.

Callinicos deals with imperialism as a global phenomenon, referring as examples to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. My comments focus only on Ukraine, and what that tells us about imperialism generally. Five features of his analysis stood out for me.

Feature 1. Callinicos dissolves the particular into the general.

Callinicos writes:

February 2022 [i.e. the all-out invasion of Ukraine] marked another, more threatening step-change in this conflict [between the western powers on one side and China-Russia on the other], with the outbreak of a major war on the European continent and the polarisation of the state system resulting from the mobilisation of [‘liberal internationalist’ scholar G. John] Ikenberry’s ‘global West’ behind Ukraine and China’s support for Russia. Rather than treat this fracturing of the international system as a series of discrete events, it is better to understand it as a developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers. (My emphasis, SP.)

This is important, methodologically, in my view.

Surely the “global process of confrontation” is actually made up of “a series of discrete events”. Surely, our understanding of any global process has to be rooted in a convincing analysis of its parts. Instead of this, Callinicos proceeds from his understanding of the global process – a clash of imperialist camps – and, where the parts don’t fit, presents a flawed and inaccurate view of them.

Feature 2. Callinicos imagines an “expansion of Russian power” that does not accord with reality.

Callinicos sees Russia not as a declining empire, or as a subimperialist power with aspects of dependence on global capital, but as a would-be great power. He approvingly quotes Sergey Radchenko, who writes that “even though the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, its successor, Russia, still eyed a position of prominence in the global order”, and goes on to claim that Putin

[…] used Russia’s position in the global economy as one of the main energy producers to rebuild its military power and geopolitical influence externally.

Callinicos then surveys the activities of the Russian armed forces and the Wagner group in the Middle East and Africa, and asks, “What made possible this expansion of Russian power into MENA and beyond?” Answer: two “interconnected determinants”: (1) Russia exploited a gap left by the Obama administration’s efforts, after defeat in Iraq, to reduce US involvement in the Middle East; (2) regional powers based in the Middle East (Israel, Saudi Arabia and others) have become more self-assertive “with the emergence of new centres of capital accumulation in the region”; “global energy production adds a further dimension to these interstate manoeuvres”; and “Russia figures as an important partner to Saudi Arabia in the OPEC+ cartel”.

This creates the impression that over the past two decades Russian imperialism has become stronger. In reality, the opposite is true.

First: Russia’s position as a big energy producer is in many respects a source of weakness, not strength. In the early 2000s, Russia consolidated its position in the global economy as a highly dependent exporter of oil, gas and metals. Low oil prices in the 1990s exacerbated the post-Soviet economic crisis; in 2000-08, Russian capitalism strengthened as those prices rose, but the 2008 crash, and falling prices, exposed its extreme vulnerability.

Azerbaijan and its oil had been lost to Russia in the 1990s; in the 2000s it was replaced as the economically dominant power in central Asia by China and the western powers. And it was losing ground to the European powers in Belarus, the Baltic states, and of course Ukraine. The Russian elite was well aware of this and obsessed throughout the 2000s about the dangers of dependence on oil revenues and the need to diversify the economy. That did not happen.

It could be argued that Russia’s dependence on commodities revenues was a key factor that eroded its “great power” status. To suggest, as Callinicos does, that its status as an energy producer enhanced that status is mistaken.

Second: as for Russia’s military adventures in the Middle East and Africa, look how they ended. Bashar al-Assad’s regime was toppled in Syria, in large part because Russia was unable and/or unwilling to provide the military support needed to protect him.

Putin faced the Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014 as the leader not of a power gaining in economic or political strength, but of a weakening power that had to compensate for its subordinate position in the global economy, and the fragility of its social base at home, by ramping up nationalist rhetoric and shifting towards a more authoritarian method of rule.

It is noteworthy that Rob Ferguson, another writer in SWP publications, does not share Callinicos’s eccentric view of Russian power. In 2022, he concluded, in an analytical article – with a measure of understatement, but still – that “Russia’s energy and raw material base was still insufficient to overcome the vast disparity in economic and military power with NATO – as well as China”. This, Ferguson argued, “intensified the pressure on the Russian state to demarcate its regional hegemony, putting the question of the states along the Eurasian faultline at the fore of Russia’s concerns”.[1]

Feature 3. Callinicos imagines western military support for Ukraine as a cause, not an effect.

Proceeding from the general (“global process of confrontation”) to the particular (“a discrete series of events”), Callinicos presents a version of one aspect of these events – western military support for Ukraine – that does not bear serious scrutiny. Referring to the all-out invasion of 2022, he writes:

The war itself thus represented a radicalisation of the global struggle that was already developing between Washington, Beijing and Moscow.

He then qualifies that statement, in three sentences that I deal with below (Feature 4), where he acknowledges that “traditional Great Russian nationalism” may have played a part in causing the war, but hastily insisting that it is “no simple struggle for self-determination”. And then he writes:

The US and other Western powers were heavily involved in training and supporting the Ukrainian military from 2014-15 onwards.

Then he quotes newspaper articles detailing cooperation between the Ukrainian intelligence services and the CIA in gathering intelligence on Russia. And then:

The massive surge in weapons supplies to Ukraine by the NATO powers and closely aligned states such as Australia must be seen in this context. From the Western side, the Ukraine conflict has been a proxy war waged to weaken and drain a potential challenger, an inter-imperialist conflict in the kind of terms that Lenin and Luxemburg characterised in the first world war.

This is playing ducks and drakes with reality. Its inclusion in a theoretical article shows how shaky its foundations are.

For a start, the intelligence operations referred to are only one part of a larger picture. From 2014 Ukraine was fighting a war, the prosecution of which required not just intelligence but heavy weapons. It received utterly negligible supplies of these from the western powers until 2022. As the chart shows, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute registered US arms exports to Ukraine as zero until 2015. Note that the chart, sourced from SIPRI’s database, measures exports with the institute’s standard method, the trend-indicator value (TIV).[2] In 2015 US arms supplies to Ukraine were 4 TIVs, compared e.g. with 92 TIVs to Greece and 112 TIVs to Norway. In 2021, when all those CIA agents referred to were well aware of the Russian troop build-up on Ukraine’s border, US arms exports to Ukraine remained negligible: 20 TIVs compared with 39 TIVs to Canada and 139 TIVs to Singapore.

The graph shows US arms exports to Ukraine, with those to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Singapore included for comparison. The table shows the top 20 recipients of US arms exports in 1993–2025; even including three years of war (2022–25), Ukraine only gets to 16th place.

The negligible level of western arms supply to Ukraine between 2014 and 2021, when it was fighting a defensive war against a larger aggressor, was preceded by more than two decades during which (1) in 1994 the US helped to convince Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal, (2) NATO accepted eastern European countries into membership, and (3) NATO forces in Europe were substantially reduced from cold war levels (the number of US tanks in Germany fell from 5000 in 1990 to zero in 2013).

Callinicos says the US and UK are “training and supporting the Ukrainian military”, without saying that this “support” included starving Ukraine of weapons supplies. He refers to a “massive surge in weapons supplies”, but omits that this was a reaction to the 2022 invasion. Cause and effect are reversed. Such game-playing does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Feature 4. Callinicos refers only once, and in passing, to the social dynamics in Ukraine, and in Russia, during the period under discussion.

Having stated that the 2022 invasion was a “radicalisation of the global struggle”, the next three sentences read:

Pace the [“realist” scholars John] Mearsheimer and [Sebastian] Rosato, the Russian invasion seems [“seems”!] not to have been simply an instrumentally rational response to NATO expansion and Ukraine’s increasingly close alignment with the US, but arises also from an ideological investment, certainly on Putin’s part, in traditional Great Russian nationalism that denies Ukraine a distinct identity. The assertion of that identity informed the Ukrainian national mobilisation that helped to block and push back the initial advance on Kyiv. But this war is no simple struggle for self-determination.

This is the only reference to the Kremlin’s nationalism, and the only reference to Ukrainian society, in the entire article of 12,500+ words.

Callinicos does not even discuss the idea that the social turbulence reflected in the Maidan – from socially progressive, to pro-European, to outright reactionary – needs examining. Nor the social dynamics in Russia that have pushed the elite towards an authoritarian, near-fascist style of rule, and – in the view of many Marxist writers – towards all-out war.

Callinicos acknowledges that Ukraine’s assertion of “a distinct identity” “informed the national mobilisation”, but does not comment on what the significance of that might be, either historically or in the twenty-first century. He writes that the war is “no simple struggle for self-determination” (not many wars are “simple”), but only to return to his erroneous portrayal of the extent of western involvement.

This is where dissolving the particular into the general (see Feature 1 above) becomes a problem.

Would you look at Brexit as part of the “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers”, without also considering the social dynamics in the UK – the advance of neo-liberalism, the surge of right-wing populism, the travails of the labour movement, the effects of de-industrialisation and dependence on financial and service industries?

Would you look at the Malvinas war as part of the “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers”, without also considering the class struggles in Thatcher’s Britain and Galtieri’s Argentina?

What, then, is the credibility of an “analysis” of the Russian war on Ukraine that starts from a preconception about the “global process of confrontation”, and fails to mention the class struggle and other forms of social change in either Russia or Ukraine?

This approach says something about the development of Marxism, in my view. The stated aim of Callinicos’s article is to show how the Marxist critique of imperialism “can encompass empirically aspects of the present conjuncture that liberalism and realism are unable to account for”. He does not explain why the social forces at work in Ukraine, and in Russia, should not be treated as one of these aspects.

This not only holes his argument below the water-line in the ways I have mentioned. It also misses an important opportunity to engage with the body of serious Marxist scholarship – by Ilya Matveev (Russia), Daria Saburova (Ukraine), Yassin al-Haj Saleh (Syria), Kavita Krishnan and Rohini Hensman (India)[3] and many others – who see these social forces, and the Kremlin’s reaction to them, as central to the causes of the Russian war.

It would be a cheap shot to criticise Callinicos or anyone else for something they have not written, and that is not my point. Rather, that the reluctance to engage with other Marxists can only obstruct the development of Marxism as a living body of ideas.

Feature 5. Callinicos separates analysis from politics.

Of course many Marxists working in universities have in recent decades increasingly detached analysis of politically urgent issues from political commentary that might inform the labour movement and social movements. So this is a much wider problem than one for Callinicos alone. But in his article, published by a non-academic socialist journal, he takes this to an extreme.

The SWP, of which Callinicos is a member, (i) between 2014 and 2022, made no call for the withdrawal of Russian troops, and raised no challenge to those “lefts” who vigorously supported the Russian-backed tinpot dictatorships in the Donbas,[4] (ii) condemned the Russian invasion of 2022, but, along with post-Stalinists, portrayed NATO expansion as its primary cause, (iii) acknowledged the right of Ukrainians to defend themselves from invasion in words, but opposed it in practice, and (iv) supported calls in the UK labour movement to end arms supplies to Ukraine.

*A drone workshop. Photo from Solidarity Collectives*

It is worth considering what the SWP actually means by the Ukrainian people’s “right to resist the invasion”, as a statement by the international network they belong to put it, since this is combined with a demand on western governments for “no arms shipments to Ukraine!”

How are people to resist an invasion, without arms from western governments? Some people favour arms provided by civil society (inevitably a tiny supply compared to what the state provides). And so Ukrainians living abroad, and civil society groups, have raised millions of euros to support civil defence (drone factories, medical supplies, etc). Trade unionists and e.g. anarchist groups participate – but the SWP does not.[5]

For some SWP members, the “right to resist the invasion” does not even extend as far as the right to ask for weapons, let alone to receive them.

For example, SWP members worked hard but unsuccessfully to defeat a resolution passed by the National Education Union conference in April last year, supporting not the export of arms to Ukraine by the UK government but “the right of Ukraine to self-defence and to resist Putin’s occupation, including the right to seek arms to defend itself”.

Similarly, when the Universities and Colleges Union conference decided in 2024 to endorse an appeal by the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine to western governments to send military aid, SWP members sought through conference procedure to block that call from being heard.[6]

Of what does the “right to resist the invasion” consist, if not of the right to ask for weapons, be it from western governments, Ukrainians abroad, or anyone else? This is not just about politics, but about socialist morality.

Callinicos does not comment on this in his article. Its function, rather, is to provide these damaging, and I would say immoral, politics, with a “theoretical” justification: the fragile, general assertions about the “global process of confrontation”, the false picture of Russian imperialism, the reversal of cause and effect, and the blank spot where society should be.

In my view, the development of Marxism as a meaningful approach to the problems that capitalism is throwing at us in the twenty-first century will mean rejecting this kind of imposition of political dogma on to analysis – what Kyselov calls “stretching familiar old frameworks over a changed world”. 7 September 2026

□ Thanks to Links journal for reposting this article.

[1] Robert Ferguson, “Imperialism, war and the Eurasian faultline”, International Socialism 175, June 2022.

[2] SIPRI has over decades of research developed the TIV as a common unit, “based on the known unit production costs of a core set of weapons and intended to represent the transfer of military resources rather than the financial value of the transfer”. There is a full explanation here.

[3] See, for example, Ilya Matveev, “The War in Ukraine and Russian Capital: from military-economic to full military imperialism” (Alameda Institute, 2023) and “Between Political and Economic Imperialism: Russia’s Shifting Global Strategy” (Journal of Labour and Society, 2021); Daria Saburova, Travailleuses de la résistance. Les classes populaires ukrainiennes face à la guerre (Autonomies, 2024); Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “Why Ukraine is a Syrian Cause” (Dawn, 2022); Kavita Krishnan, “Our indifference to Ukraine did harm to our struggle in India”, Commons, 2023; Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Haymarket, 2018).

[4] In 2014, Eamonn McCann, for many years a leading figure in the SWP’s sister organisation in Ireland, argued that, with regard to Ukraine, “If we have to take sides […] Ireland should side with the Russians”. For the SWP’s newspaper, war crimes by Russia and its allies, e.g. the shooting down of the MH17 civilian aircraft, were to be blamed on “imperialist rivalry” (see also here and here).

[5] I expressed my own view of these difficult issues e.g. here.

[6] For those interested in trade unions’ arcane conference procedures, see motion 29 (moved by pro-Ukrainian activists) and amendment 29A (moved by SWP members) here.

Source: Simon Pirani, “Russian empire, social dynamics and where Marxism goes from here,” People and Nature, 7 September 2026

Laura Loomer vs. Lily Lynch

Laura Loomer (left) is an American far-right conspiracist and influencer from Arizona who has suddenly (supposedly) seen the light on Ukraine after actually visiting the country that has endured an unprovoked Russian invasion for the last four and a half years. Lily Lynch (right) is a leftyish American foreign affairs writer from California who, apparently, does not need to see a place with her own eyes to give her readers the all-knowing lowdown on what’s happening there. Whose account of the Ukraine-Russia war rings truer to you?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at NATO’s Defence Industry Forum in Ankara earlier this month was a hymn to drone warfare. Drones, the Ukrainian president proclaimed, had heralded ‘revolutionary changes in the very nature of war’ – as significant as the machine gun in the First World War, or as the modern tank in the Second. ‘Disruptive’ drone tech had allowed Ukraine to increase dramatically the number of Russian casualties, intercept Russia’s Shahed UAVs and hit targets as far away as Siberia. Recent attacks had succeeded in blackening the skies over Moscow and striking oil refineries 2,700 km away in Omsk. The country had transformed itself into a ‘drone superpower’, in the words of the Atlantic Council. Before 2022, there were just seven domestic drone manufacturers – today, there are over 500. And now, as restrictions on drone exports are being lifted, Ukraine will soon be selling them to the world.

The man most responsible for putting drones at the centre of Ukraine’s war effort has been the telegenic 35-year-old, now former Defence Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. This much-hyped tech wunderkind has acquired a following among both patriotic liberals at home and Atlanticists in the West. He has helped promote Ukraine as a kind of ‘start-up nation’ – a high-tech defence industrial powerhouse forged in war. When barely in his thirties, he was appointed Minister of Digital Transformation, where he was responsible for the ‘state in a smartphone’ initiative – which moved government services onto a USAID-funded app called Diiya. Though beloved by the liberal NGO set, Palantir-backed Fedorov has also learned to speak MAGA’s language; in January, he announced his ministry’s objective to kill 50,000 Russians per month, explaining it would ‘make the cost of war for Russia one it cannot sustain, thereby forcing peace through strength’.

In the weeks leading up to the NATO summit, Western media reports alleged that Ukraine had turned the tide in its favour. Russia was in trouble. The narrative was reminiscent of the ‘spring counteroffensive’ of 2023, much hyped in Western media – a supposedly transformational Ukrainian battlefield push that never quite materialized and cost tens of thousands of lives. In Ankara, the latest reversal of fortune was attributed to Ukraine’s drone tech capabilities, its thriving defence industry and its innovative young leadership, who apparently ran the country less like a post-Soviet state and more like a Silicon Valley start-up.

Just one week later, however, this optimistic story began to fall apart. Zelenskyy abruptly dismissed Fedorov, a move that left many feeling furious and betrayed. Fedorov’s loyalists responded by excoriating Zelenskyy on social media and assembling in Kiev, Lviv and Odessa, holding signs bearing messages like ‘Hands off Fedorov’ and ‘Stop Sabotaging Victory’. Ukraine’s supporters in the West did not hide their opposition to the decision either. ‘Firing Fedorov, one of the smartest, most competent and innovative ministers in all of Europe, is one of the dumbest things Zelenskyy has done’, Estonia’s former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves wrote on X. A consensus formed among the Atlanticist commentariat: Zelenskyy had sided with his sclerotic ‘Soviet’ generals – particularly Russian-born commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi – against an energetic young reformer. After several days of virulent backlash, Zelenskyy responded by dismissing Syrskyi too.

The decision to remove Fedorov forced a simmering Ukrainian political crisis into the public eye. In Ankara, NATO officials were intent on depicting Russia – and only Russia – as the country in dire political and economic straits. At one briefing, I listened to a senior NATO official speak of possible tensions within the Russian political elite. These days, he said, they look outside their windows and see oil refineries in flames from Ukrainian drone attacks. This, he asserted, must be having a psychological effect, and resentment towards Putin was likely mounting. A fracture could be coming any day now. The Russian economy, meanwhile, was ‘in the worst state it’s been in for decades’. He recited a litany of grim statistics: the federal deficit was now 2.3 times what it was during the same period last year, the economy was now 70 per cent security-related expenditures, which came at the expense of the regular economy and would be ‘very hard to reverse’. And despite rising oil prices due to the war on Iran, Russia would still have to cut non-military spending by 10 per cent this year.

Russia was also reportedly performing poorly on the battlefield and any progress it was making came at an enormous cost. According to the NATO official’s estimates, there had been between 1.3 and 1.5 million Russian casualties in the war, and between 30,000 and 35,000 Russians were now being killed each month. The military was now ‘increasingly relying on convicts, indebted citizens and foreigners’ to fill its ranks. Russia’s territorial gains had also been ‘far less steady’ in recent months: its forces were now purportedly advancing at just 3.79 sq km per day, down from a reported 16 sq km last year. Another morbid statistic touted at the summit was the alleged average life expectancy of a Russian soldier: thanks to Ukraine’s drones, I was told, the average Russian recruit only lived between 20 and 30 minutes at the front.

Listening to all this, I thought about what I’d heard [sic] about life in Russia. I was certainly aware of the mounting wartime pain. I knew there were now petrol shortages in parts of the country, though these are partly seasonal, and that this has meant long waits outside stations. Whereas the war had previously been experienced by most Russians as a distant conflict – only seen on social media or television – the drone attacks on Russian oil refineries had brought the war home. But the idea that this would inevitably provoke a major anti-government backlash didn’t quite follow. Videos have even surfaced on Russian social media showing people drinking and dancing as they waited in long queues for petrol. As one commentator put it, ‘coronavirus divided us, but petrol shortages brought us together’. The domestic problems were all very real and getting worse, but Russians appeared to be weathering them, at least for now. Prophesies of the Russian economy’s imminent collapse had been issued for years, but had all come to nothing.

Polls from inside Russia also hint at a more stable situation than that depicted at the NATO summit. Russia experts always caution readers to be sceptical of polls from inside the country, but even so, the results suggest that at least some of the graver prognostications might be exaggerated. According to a survey by the independent Levada Center, Putin’s popularity is indeed in decline, but as of May, as many as 79 per cent of Russians polled still said they approved of his performance. Only 15 per cent said they disapproved. In the same survey, 74 per cent of Russians said they supported their country’s actions in Ukraine. (Still, some 60 per cent of Russians reported that they favoured peace negotiations to end the war, and only 30 per cent said they wanted to continue fighting it.) Even adjusting for a degree of wartime self-censorship, these numbers do not exactly hint at a coming cataclysm.

But the question that most nagged at me throughout the summit was: what about Ukraine? The assessment of Russia’s position in the war included a host of criteria: a survey of the situation on the homefront, elite political fractures, the economy, the demography of its soldiers. Yet Ukraine’s position was portrayed according to a single hopeful indicator, its success in drone warfare.

According to a recent Gallup poll (one that was largely buried in the Western press), Ukrainians are even less enthusiastic about fighting this war than Russians are. Less than one in four adults (24 per cent) say Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war, while 66 per cent say Ukraine should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. And while NATO officials were eager to tout staggering casualty figures for Russia in Ankara, there was naturally far less said about Ukraine’s dead – unless they could be presented in terms of a favourable ‘kill ratio’ with Russia. According to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (which receives funding from the US government, Lockheed Martin and NATO among others) the Ukrainian military has suffered between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities. However, some believe the actual number is higher.

As NATO officials look for cracks in the Kremlin matrix, there are plenty to worry about in Ukraine. In addition to the rupture between Fedorov and the military brass, a ‘spectacular’ corruption scandal has implicated members of Zelenskyy’s inner circle, part of which involves corruption in drone procurement. Meanwhile, the ‘stable stagnation’ of the Ukrainian economy also rests on relatively fragile foundations – continued support from Western partners. Often missing from Western wartime reporting is the brutal economic reality of everyday life in Ukraine: the number of Ukrainians living below subsistence levels has increased dramatically in wartime; while Russians have been inconvenienced in this conflict, most haven’t faced the same material devastation.

The Ukrainian armed forces may be an even worse state than their Russian adversaries. A transition to a corps-based command structure last year may have aligned Ukraine with NATO standards, but no amount of restructuring can change the fundamentals. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is now 45. Mobilization remains a persistent problem. One of the reasons cited for Fedorov’s dismissal was his failure to fix this (ever the tech solutionist, Fedorov had reportedly pushed for a ‘digitalization’ of mobilization). The brutal practice of ‘busification’ – whereby military age men are snatched off the street – continues to inspire loathing. Reports regularly surface of forcibly conscripted men being beaten or killed. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine is suffering a desertion crisis. Though the exact figures were classified last year, in January, Fedorov said that 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers had gone AWOL.

The Russian armed forces may be filled with convicts and debtors, but they still haven’t had to resort to conscription [sic], while the Ukrainian side is partially composed of men who are middle-aged and don’t want to fight. Ukraine also increasingly relies on foreign fighters; while Russia has recruited hapless Africans to serve as cannon fodder, Ukraine now employs thousands of recruits from Colombia, Brazil and various European countries, designated as ‘volunteers’ to get around anti-mercenary laws. And there remains the fundamental problem of massive asymmetry: Russia still has Ukraine outmanned. Ukraine has attempted to make up for this difference with drones, but this has only succeeded in slowing the pace of Russian advances.

The image of a Ukraine filled with patriotic liberals eager to fight a high-tech war until total Russian collapse is a fiction. In reality, the majority of both Russians and Ukrainians want negotiations to end the war now. Only a minority want to continue fighting until their side’s most maximalist aims are met. Absent the propaganda of a youth-driven drone tech revolution in war, Ukraine looks in a remarkably similar situation to Russia: two countries hurtling toward demographic oblivion, in a conflict directed by a profiteering political elite and fought in part by the unwilling, the coerced, the foreign and the old. At the NATO summit, however, the alliance continued to promote its PR-manufactured image of Ukraine, through selective statistics and polite obfuscation.

This essay was supported by the Alameda Institute.

Source: Lily Lynch, “Costs of War,” Sidecar (New Left Review), 23 July 2026

Laura Loomer became infamous for spreading conspiracy theories online. Now, as she travels across Ukraine to see the damage inflicted by Russia in its years-long war, she wants to admit that she fell for some falsehoods of her own.

A close ally of President Donald Trump, Loomer has completely reversed her longtime criticism of Ukraine and is urging fellow conservatives to be wary of Moscow’s propaganda, which she blames for duping large swaths of the American right.

“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press in Kyiv shortly after returning from a trip close to the front line in Ukraine’s east. The interview was supposed to take place in Loomer’s hotel, but it had to be moved to the building’s underground bomb shelter as the city faced another ballistic missile attack.

Loomer has remained influential with Trump despite not having an official role, and she said they spoke over the phone after she sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She also said that she expects to meet with Trump after returning from her trip.

Loomer’s turnaround on Ukraine has been welcomed by the country’s leaders, whose relationships with Trump have been strained at times. But it has also stirred confusion, surprise and suspicion in the United States. She continues to insist that Ukraine is not paying for her travels.

As Trump and Zelenskyy prepare to meet on Tuesday in Washington, Loomer said it’s clear that her trip has already made a difference, refocusing attention on the war as Congress debates new sanctions intended to punish Russia.

“It’s looking good for Ukraine, right?” she said. “Going into this meeting next week at the Oval Office is looking pretty good.”

Loomer says she was ‘bamboozled’ to oppose Ukraine

Loomer had spent years minimizing the war and amplifying Russian propaganda until she made a dramatic reversal this week.

“I’ve come to realize I was bamboozled by Russian propaganda and I came to believe a lot of untrue things about Ukraine. I used to think that this was a country full of Nazis,” Loomer told Zelenskyy as she interviewed him for her show on Rumble, an online video platform.

Loomer blamed her indoctrination on getting banned by American social media platforms, leading her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared.

“The Russians,” she added, “are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry,” she said, recounting her feelings about the 2020 election, which she falsely maintains was stolen from Trump despite all evidence to the contrary.

She said her change in perspective had been gradual as she started to see podcasters like Tucker Carlson “turn on President Trump” while having their rhetoric amplified by Russian sources.

Loomer, who casts herself as an independent journalist, told the AP she believed her reversal was already changing minds within Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

“Oh, 100%,” she said. “I’ve received messages all day from different people and media and politics and people just who follow me online who said, ’Wow, I didn’t realize how much we’ve been lied to.’ ‘Wow you really opened my eyes.’”

Loomer was welcomed with open arms

Ukrainian officials seemed to recognize the opportunity of winning over an ardent Trump ally with a large online following. In addition to her interview with Zelenskyy, Loomer had audiences with top Ukrainian officials and the country’s chief rabbi.

“It takes courage to come to Ukraine and not be deterred by Russian propaganda or air raid sirens,” Zelenskyy’s office wrote on social media.

Loomer also got a tour of Dormition Cathedral of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a monastic complex that came under Russian attack last month.

“Laura is very powerful and she’s a very authoritative in the U.S., so I hope that everything she has seen by her own eyes will help her to spread the truth when she is back at the U.S.,” Tetyana Berezhna, the deputy prime minister and Ukrainian minister of culture told the AP. “I do really hope and I believe that her visit will have a huge impact on relations with the U.S. administration.”

While some have tried to downplay Loomer’s influence with the president, he has often followed her advice. She occasionally traveled with him during the 2024 campaign, and last year he purged his National Security Council staff after she raised concerns about their loyalty in an Oval Office meeting.

Trump appears to be tracking Loomer’s trip, sharing video of her conversation with Zelenskyy on social media.

“Very good!!!” he wrote on Thursday evening.

The conspiracist denounces conspiracy theories

Loomer has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories. She once shared a video that called 9/11 an “inside job” and amplified a lie about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio, which Trump went on to repeat during a presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged.

“One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here,” she posted on Saturday. “It’s so refreshing.”

But in the interview, she bemoaned how influential podcasters can spread misinformation.

“They have been able to warp people’s minds to the point where people aren’t even capable of analyzing a subject with common sense anymore because they want to depend on these personalities to give them the opinion that they think they should have,” she said, calling the situation “a major national security threat.”

She said she thinks that “information war” has “the potential to be more destructive than any kinetic war that our country may ever face” and called on the Trump administration to take the threat of Russian propaganda, foreign interference and influence operations more seriously.

“I think that some of our leaders are being influenced by propaganda,” she said.

The White House has routinely downplayed the role of Moscow’s influence, especially because Trump has long chaffed at investigations showing that Russia worked to boost his 2016 candidacy.

Loomer has said repeatedly that Ukraine did not finance her trip and insisted she had traveled in her own capacity.

“I can guarantee you I wasn’t paid by anybody. I certainly wasn’t paid by the government of Ukraine to come here,” she said.

“If it’s fake, why did I risk my life? I’m in a bomb shelter right now. I barely slept this week,” she said.

Source: Illia Novikov, Volodymr Yurchuk and Jill Colvin, “Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains shift on Russia’s war,” Associated Press, 26 July 2026

Crimea and Gays Be Damned (For the Record)

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This morning, I came across a flat-out lie (or an honest mistake), penned by a professor at one of the most august universities in the United States. But you would only know it was a lie or a mistake if you had been here in Petersburg to see what actually happened at Manifesta 10, and had some basic street smarts when it comes to the art scene and real grassroots politics here.

This partly explains why, for example, there is virtually no anti-war movement in Russia: because too many people whose avowed politics should make them natural leaders and organizers of a Russian anti-war movement (i.e., a movement against Russian imperialist military aggression, not a choir of angels hovering above all frays everywhere and quietly chiding “all parties to the conflict” on social media) have been more concerned to make the right impression on the right people in the big white world.

This is not to mention that virtually no one in the so-called Russian leftist art/activist community, especially in Petersburg, made even so much as a peep when the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and, later, the State Duma passed the infamous homophobic laws, which are still safely and shamefully on the books in Russia.

I really don’t understand how, thirty or forty years from now, scholars and merely curious people will be able to get to the bottom of anything that happened in our time with so much abject propaganda camouflaged as journalism and “research” lying around everywhere.

“After the annexation of Crimea and the passing of a number of restrictive laws in Russia (not least the banning of so-called ‘homosexual propaganda’), it seemed macabre to many that the avowedly progressive European Biennale should take place in the State Hermitage museum as planned. The collective Chto Delat?, who were slated to participate in the biennale, wrote an open letter to star curator Kasper König, demanding that Manifesta 10 issue a public statement against the recent action of the Russian government. When their calls went unmet (aside from prompting critique of direct politicization in contemporary art) Chto Delat? and a number of Russian and Polish artists withdrew from the show.”

No Russian artists withdrew from the show whatsoever. That is a fact. Some local artists loudly withdrew from one part of Manifesta only to pop up quite prominently in another part of Manifesta. These same people mocked any “Polish artists” (?) who might have actually withdrawn from the show. They definitely attacked anyone outside Russia who called for an international boycott of the show. For literally all the Petersburg artists and curators involved, the show absolutely had to go on, Crimea and gays be damned. {TRR}

Photo by the Russian Reader

‘Ere, or, Applied Culanthics

‘Ere, 2018. Graffiti found in Central Petersburg. Photo by the Russian Reader

This is a soundbite of champagne leftist culanthical research at its worst.

Monstrations are a symptom of a deep crisis of the pro-state nationalist and anti-state liberal discourses that reduce Russia’s complex political reality to two formulaic camps, obliterating space for democratic debate. Could there be an American monstration? One that resists Trump, but also refuses to explain away the phenomenon of Trump by referring to bigots and Russian agents? One that neither demonizes Russia nor justifies the actions of Putin’s regime?

Is Russia’s political reality really all that complex?

Why, if the US is filled with teenagers who can take the stage at a massive rally on the Mall in DC and make inspiring, cogent, coherent speeches, do we need the incoherent, politically feckless, thrift-store surrealism of the Novosibirsk Monstrations?

If we can either impeach Trump, pin him down with a crippling special investigation or, finally, simply fail to renominate or reelect him, why do we need to explain him away or even explain him at all?

What is the difference between Trump and “the phenomenon of Trump”?

If, nevertheless, well-paid, tenured academics force us to explain this “phenomenon,” why can’t we refer to bigots and Russian agents? Are they mere figments of our imagination?

Who does a better job of “demonizing” Russia?

People trying to explain away the phenomenon of Trump?

(By the way, why isn’t it “the Trump phenomenon”? Is “the phenomenon of Trump” more culanthically correct?)

Or are the true demonizers the Putin regime itself, a regime that has been quite demonstrably engaged in setting a new land speed record in sheer gangster nastiness at home and abroad at least since 2014, although we know they started much, much earlier (i.e., when Putin was deputy mayor of Petersburg in the early and mid nineties, and served as Mayor Anatoly Sobchak’s bag man and liaison with dicey “foreign investors” and local gangsters)? // TRR

P.S. The culanthics only go downhill from there.

The banners you see at monstrations state their theme obliquely. In the spring of 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea, the slogan “Crimea is ours!” dominated pro-government media channels and billboards. The liberal opposition, conversely, stressed that the Crimea was illegally stolen. Meanwhile, monstrations sided with neither of these accounts. On May 1, 2014, the Novosibirsk monstration walked behind the banner “Hell is ours!”, a statement that iconically and ironically challenged the official slogan, but also refused the simplified version of the political events advanced by the liberal opposition. The march united young people with different political opinions, from those who saw the annexation as an isolated unlawful act to those who refused the liberal oppositional story and instead saw the Crimea in connection with other events, including the attempts of the extreme right and ultranationalist movements in Ukraine to hijack the popular Maidan revolution.

Such is the secret of the trendy “third position” in Russian and Russophile “anti-authoritarian leftism”: to side with nobody but other third positionists, to hover high above Moscow, Peterburg, Crimea, Donetsk, Aleppo, Eastern Ghouta or, in this case, the Berkley Hills like angels of history. God forbid the third positionists should ever do something so rash as actually organize a real anti-war movement explicitly and loudly opposed to the Kremlin’s predations in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere.

One, it would involve a lot of needless work.

Two, it could get the third positionists, otherwise accustomed to a heavy schedule of jetsetting from academic conference to art residency to speaking engagement, into a lot of hot water. They definitely do not want to go to prison for any reason, unlike those careless antifascists from Penza and Petersburg, about whom the third positionists mostly have nothing to say, unsurprisingly.

(Russian and Russophilic third positionism requires its adepts to refrain from criticizing Russia’s foreign and domestic policy catastrophes and crimes as much as humanly possible. People who, on the contrary, criticize the current Russian regime’s actions loudly and often are labeled “liberals” and “Russophobes,” the worst words imaginable in the third positionist vocabulary.)

Three, it would mean the third positioniks would have to give up their firmly held conviction, which they share with Vladimir Putin, Alexander Dugin, and Vyacheslav Surkov et al., that all the evil in the world originates solely in the United States and that, however ham-fisted and controversial its actions, Russia has only been reacting to the miseries deliberately visited on it by American unilateral imperialism and neoliberalism.

Russophile leftists lap this spiked rhetorical gravy up like hound dogs who have not been fed for a week, so the invitations to appear at conferences and contemporary art hootenannies, and contribute essays to “politicized” art mags and cutting-edge scholarly journals keep pouring in. After all, it is what really matters in life, not Syrian children, blasted to smithereens by Russian bombs, or hapless Crimean Tatars, rotting in Russian prisons because they are too stupid to know what is good for them. // TRR