CROCODILE TEARS

The Western imperialism at the heart of Russia’s war on Ukraine

On February 24 of this year, Vladmir Putin announced that he is executing a “special military operation” in what he claims to be an attempt to protect the recently Russian-controlled territories of Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine. What is globally acknowledged as a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine has since gained immense international media coverage. Ever since Putin’s international address rang out, news outlets have been tracking the atrocities that Russian military forces and officials are inflicting on Ukrainians. The same outlets have been showcasing the steadfast and violently hypocritical cries of western leaders against Putin’s actions, as well as panicked speculations about what the outbreak of such a war means for the rest of the world. In most of the western media coverage that the crisis has received, through all the government officials’ crocodile tears and performative outcries, there has not been enough reflection on the full extent to which these very governments helped create the conditions leading up to Putin’s declaration of war. The crisis in Ukraine did not develop spontaneously nor was it inevitable, it has been decades of US and European intervention in the making. The blatant hypocrisy exhibited in this international outcry becomes more understandable when we recognize what these nations have to gain from this humanitarian facade and what they have to gain from the war itself.

When attempting to contextualize the hostility and urgency behind Russia’s war on Ukraine, it’s important to understand two key points. One, Ukraine’s ethnic and political independence has been constantly and violently threatened ever since the area started developing its own nationalist sentiments. This is in large part due to Polish and Lithuanian imperialism in the 16th century and Stalin’s genocidal campaign against Ukrainians in the 1930s, both of which caused significant restructurings of population demographics. These changes have led to current tensions between eastern regions of the state (which have more Russian influence and are against strict independence from Russia) and western regions (which have more European influence and want recognition as an independent nation). Nationalists fighting for Ukrainian independence have been calling for Ukraine to be recognized as a European state; as is historically well-proven, one of the best ways to have Europe/the west respect your claim to independence is to be a European/western state. Being a western state tends to provide you with the protection of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), alliances in which western nations vow to protect each other’s rights to maintain their capitalist, imperialist systems by exploiting and destabilizing the Global South. The second point is that Russia’s main stake in the war

against Ukraine is to keep Europe from reaching its borders, according to historian Matt Lewis. Given the hostile relationship between the west and Russia, having the EU and NATO close in on its borders even more than they already have could be the end for Russian national security.

So very roughly, the root of the conflict boils down to Ukraine’s recognition that its acceptance as a western nation is the only way to ensure its independence and Russia’s understanding that NATO’s expansion is a direct threat to its national security, both of which are a result of western imperialist interventions in the region that have created this precedent. Of course, this is not to excuse or justify in any way the absolutely inhumane and irreversibly destructive decision that Putin made in declaring war on Ukrainians. As Jacobin writer Doug Henwood stated,“Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is a horrific, unconscionable act. NATO’s expansionist policy made such an invasion more likely. Both of these things are true.” The western imperialist agenda of expanding its economic, political, and militaristic control further east has created consequences to both not being seen as a western state and to being in close geographic proximity to western states. These consequences, implemented and maintained by the US and Europe, have been laying the groundwork for this war to erupt for decades. By declaring war, Putin chose to respond to this fear of western militarism by inflicting terrible violence on both Ukrainian citizens and Russians alike.

Given this context, it is especially appalling to then see the very imperial nations that played a direct hand in destabilizing both nations politically turn around and try to act as saviors and peacekeepers on a global scale. The US has been proven to have intervened multiple times over the past few decades to ensure that the dominant political ideology in Ukraine would be intensely anti-Russian, to the point of near genocide of Russians and Russian sympathizers in Ukraine. In order to set the stage for the success of a US-backed coup to get rid of the democratically-elected, neutral/pro-Russion government heading Ukraine in 2014, the Obama administration funded and supported a neo-nazi fascist group (who sought the complete eradication of anything and anyone Russian in Ukraine), the Azov Battalion. This group then enacted a genocidal reign of terror, during which they killed a significant number of southeast Ukrainians, who were the most sympathetic to Russian influence, and forced many others to flee. Any who remained were terrorized into not expressing their political leanings. In February 2014, this armed militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Viktor Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. The US-backed coup succeeded and an intensely anti-Russian regime was put in place in Ukraine, heavily abetted by these US-funded fascists. The memory of the 2014 genocide and coup, and all of the countless other ways the west has continued to try to destabalize Russia through destabalizing Ukraine, exists at the forefront of Russian political consciousness. This memory has fueled anti-western sentiment that is playing a key role in the war on Ukraine.

“The crisis in Ukraine did not develop spontaneously nor was it inevitable, it has been decades of US and European intervention in the making.”

The west’s interest in the conflict, specifically the explosion of news coverage of the war and the politicized sympathy for the Ukrainian cause

only goes so far as to further its own interests in the region. The only aid and attention western nations are willing to give Ukrainians are international political methods that have long been used to reinforce imperialist structures in the receiving countries. For example, much of the media outcry about the war has been tied to a call for governments (and individuals) to donate to and support international aid efforts, namely various NGOs and UN initiatives. While NGOs are often touted as the most effective means of providing direct aid to people who need it, both internationally and domestically, they have long served as weapons that fuel and maintain global capitalism and imperialism.

One way that international NGOs serve these means is by undermining autonomous mass organizing in the receiving country, diverting it into reformist dead ends, and supplanting it. Counterpunch writer Stephanie McMillan explains that “instead of building a mass movement, [NGOs] manage public outrage… Capital has no need to infiltrate these organizations because they fund them.” NGOs are also complicit in and actively reinforce imperialist aggression under the guise of humanitarian intervention. A prime example of this is the international NGO presence in Haiti. When the 2010 earthquake hit Haiti, there was a global rush to provide financial aid to help rebuild damaged infrastructure, feed people, house them, etc. This money was, as expected, not funneled directly into the hands of local organizers on the ground in Haiti, but instead through the 10,000+ international NGOs in the country before the earthquake hit. Haiti was left worse off than when it began the post-earthquake relief effort, as 99 percent of international and domestic earthquake relief aid was funneled through NGOs and other agencies, who “made out like bandits, pocketing most of the money that people around the world had donated in good faith with the expectation that it would actually help the communities devastated by the catastrophe,” according to McMillan. The mass theft that occurred (and continues to occur) in Haiti is not an uncommon event, and in many occupied countries, NGO directors have become a significant fraction of the nation’s bureaucratic bourgeoisie and political leadership, using the state as their source of primary capital accumulation. All of which is to say that global imperialism doesn’t just give NGOs a reason to exist, NGOs actively reinforce imperialist domination themselves. As such, governments and media outlets’ focus on donating to and expanding international humanitarian relief orgs that aim to provide aid to Ukrainians are not well-intentioned and are simply bolstering yet another weapon of western imperialism.

NGOs aren’t the west’s only weapon of global capitalist dominance that is currently at play in the Ukraine crisis. The instant that Russia declared war on Ukraine, leading political figures in the US and Europe started implementing “targeted” sanctions against the Russian financial system and, later, the fuel industry, supposedly in an attempt to strong-arm the Russian government into giving up the war effort. In reality, these sanctions are little more than an act of war on Russia’s working class, many of whom have been arrested and brutalized for protesting the government’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia utilizes a “fortress economy,” an economic system that stocks up on its own currency, as well as currency from its geopolitical allies, to make its capitalist economy resistant to economic aggression from its adversaries. It can afford to stock up by slashing social spending and allowing the mass privatization of services, essentially leaving the working class to fend for themselves. That being said, by the time the effects of these sanctions hit the most wealthy, most influential members of Russian society in a way that is detrimental enough to lead to calling off the war, the Russian working class will have been economically decimated. But this decimation of the Russian working class, along with its economy, is still entirely beneficial to the west, as it will lead to further social and economic destabilization and conflict that will leave Russia and Ukraine (similarly in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and other countries) pitted against each other and vulnerable to western interference.

Western media coverage has been instrumental in legitimizing this imperialist campaign. News channels have been covering the conflict religiously, painting Ukrainians in the typically patronizing and agency-stripping way that many refugees are painted in. This portrayal leaves little room for Ukrainians to speak to the events upending their lives, especially not in any way that is critical of the very agencies and governments that are monopolizing the resources that could help them survive this conflict. Media outlets only engage with the war and the lived realities of Ukrainians in so far as it helps garner popular support for imperialist countermeasures taken against Russia and (laughably) “for” Ukraine, like economic sanctions on Russia, UN peacekeeping initiatives to Ukraine, and NGOs providing humanitarian relief.

Additionally, many western news outlets have been portraying Ukrainians as the “good” refugees; they are being presented as white, European, and less impoverished than their majority-BIPOC, non-western counterparts. The way mainstream media has been making this comparison erases BIPOC Ukrainians from the narrative and reduces the entire population to a hegemonic demographic without considering very real ethnic, racial, and socio-economic distinctions. Many Ukrainian refugees’ experiences will certainly be different than the experiences of BIPOC refugees from countries of the global south. For example, western states receiving them will generally be more sympathetic to their displacement, they have more money to negotiate their movements elsewhere, and state borders were not created to limit their mobility and autonomy in the same way. That being said, Ukrainian refugees are survivors of imperialist terrorism and exploitation, and they are being forced to flee their homes and rely on international relief efforts to survive a war that the US has been setting up for decades. The dichotomy these news outlets are establishing between majority-white Ukrainian refugees as the “good” refugees and non-white, non-European refugees as the “bad” ones only serves to pit the two demographics against each other. This decenters the horrors that Ukrainians are living through, discourages solidarity between BIPOC, non-western refugees and Ukrainian refugees, and pushes the incredibly harmful, racist imperialist agenda that helped create the conflict in the first place.

HANNA ABOUEID ’24 wants to see justice in her lifetime.