• and that the phrase instead referred to "a system in which politics serves economic interests".

    

• Albanese also faced calls for resignations over the past week by the German and Italian foreign ministers over the same remarks. 

    

• Furthermore, Jurdi added that, under international law, UN special rapporteurs are required to exercise their functions independently and are protected for statements made in the course of their duties.

    
• she accused 63 states of enabling Israeli breaches of international law. 

• She said that despite overwhelming evidence of genocide and mass atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Europe's most powerful states, including Italy, Germany and France, continue to provide diplomatic, military and political cover for Israel.

    

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• This instalment inverts the usual dynamic. It is not another Western commentary on Ukraine. It is the verdict of Ukrainian and Russian socialists on a Western left that claimed to speak in their name while functionally abandoning them to partition between empires. These are not victims pleading for sympathy. They are political actors, organisers and theorists fighting a war on two fronts simultaneously, and their judgement is devastating.

    

• The first thing the Western “proxy war” left never understood, or never wanted to understand, is that Ukrainian socialists are not Zelensky cheerleaders. They never were. From the earliest weeks of the invasion, organisations like Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) articulated what they call the “two-front” struggle: against Russian military aggression and against the Zelensky government’s wartime assault on workers’ rights. This distinction matters enormously, because it demolishes the campist alibi. You cannot claim to reject “both sides” when the people you’re refusing to support are already fighting both sides.

    

• This is the reality the campist left could never accommodate. Ukrainian socialists demand weapons to fight Russia and they demand the repeal of Law 5371. They want arms for self-defence and they want debt cancellation. They fight the invasion and they fight the IMF. No comfortable “both sides” formula can contain this. It requires something the Stop the War Coalition and the DSA International Committee have never been willing to offer: solidarity with a struggle that refuses to fit their pre-existing geopolitical categories.

    

• Denys Pilash, political scientist and Sotsialnyi Rukh member, has been the sharpest voice. In his March 2025 interview with Federico Fuentes for Links, Pilash characterised the Trump-Zelensky meeting as an attempt to “humiliate not just Zelensky but Ukraine and its people,” with Trump and Vance acting as “bullies taking the side of another bully.” But Pilash reserves his most pointed criticism for the Western progressives who support such a deal out of a desire to end the slaughter. This thinking, he argues, represents a “clear break with leftist politics,” substituting class analysis with “cynical realpolitik.”

    

• Then Pilash asks the question that silences the room: “If this is a proxy war, on whose behalf is Ukraine now waging it? The US is clearly not on Ukraine’s side; it is converging with Russia.” The “proxy war” framework didn’t just misread the conflict. It became obsolete the moment Washington and Moscow sat down together to carve up Ukraine between them. And the organisations that spent three years deploying that framework had no analytical tools left to understand what was happening.

    

• Bilous’s position is grounded in something the Western left often forgets: physical reality. “If we didn’t join the armed forces,” he told International Viewpoint, “the left in Ukraine would cease to exist.” This is not theoretical. Russian occupation means the liquidation of independent trade unions, socialist organisations, feminist groups, and every democratic space that Ukrainian workers have built since independence. When the SWP or the Morning Star call for a “negotiated peace,” they are calling for the physical destruction of the very movements they claim to stand alongside.

    

• Hanna Perekhoda, academic and activist, has contributed the theoretical architecture for understanding why the Western left got it wrong. She identifies “Westsplaining” as a form of intellectual colonialism, an “epistemic injustice” that silences those directly affected by Russian aggression. Abstract pacifism, she argues, leads to “irresponsible solutions in practice.” Perekhoda directly addresses the DSA and other Western organisations: “Those who imagined ‘NATO aggression in Ukraine,’ and who could not see Russian aggression, only opposed Western interference, while ignoring, or even supporting, the engagement of Russia.”

    

• The Western left, he argues, focused on “blaming Europe for sabotaging diplomatic efforts” rather than recognising the existential threat posed by what he correctly identifies as the Kremlin’s “neo-fascist regime.”

    

• Consider the numbers. In 2021, the last pre-war year, approximately 40 per cent of convictions in politically motivated cases resulted in imprisonment. By the first half of 2025, that figure had surged to 67 per cent. The average sentence in political cases rose from six years to eight. OVD-Info reports over 20,000 detentions for anti-war stances. The state has shifted from policing protest to something qualitatively different: the permanent removal of dissenters from society. Sentences for anti-war activity now frequently exceed those for murder. Ruslan Sidiki, convicted of railway sabotage aimed at slowing weapons transport to the front, received twenty-nine years. Not a deterrent. A message.

    

• The Russian Socialist Movement understood this trajectory. Forced to dissolve its formal structures in early 2025 after being designated a “foreign agent,” the RSM issued a landmark statement titled “Against Half-Solidarity and False Pacifism” before its suppression. The RSM condemned Western leftists who claim to oppose “both sides,” arguing that such a position effectively sides with the aggressor by denying the victim the means of self-defence. Their analysis is unequivocal: Putin’s invasion is a “war of colonisation” in which the former colony refuses to remain a colony. “The only way for Russians to end this war,” they argued, “is to convince soldiers to stop fighting.” Their seven strategic demands are worth listing because they represent the precise opposite of what the campist left offered: increased arms transfers to Ukraine, complete Russian withdrawal to 1991 borders, cancellation of Ukraine’s debt, asylum for deserters and dissidents, elite-targeted sanctions, and the abolition of secret diplomacy. Every demand places Russian socialists in direct confrontation with their own state. Every demand was ignored by the Western organisations that claimed to speak for peace.

    

• He distinguishes between “socialism from above,” the top-down statist politics of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that has enthusiastically backed the invasion, and “socialism from below,” which views emancipation as the self-activity of the masses. Budraitskis has directly challenged what he calls “American exceptionalism” on the left: the view that “anything the US does is bad” is simply too crude to grasp a reality in which “what we are actually seeing is Russian imperialism.” He describes the campist position as the “anti-imperialism of idiots”: a framework that ignores the agency of Eastern European peoples and the specific historical context of Russian expansionism.

    

• The Feminist Anti-War Resistance represents something genuinely new. Founded on 25 February 2022, one day after the invasion, FAS rejected the hierarchical leadership models that the Russian state has historically been able to decapitate. Instead it operates as a horizontal, cell-based network, uniting over 45 separate feminist groups across Russia and abroad by late 2022. Decisions are made through collective voting. There is no central leader to arrest. This is not a design choice born of ideology alone; it is a survival strategy.

    

• The ideological confrontation with the Western left came to a head early. In 2022, 151 international feminists signed a manifesto titled “Feminist Resistance Against War,” calling for “militaristic de-escalation” and an end to arms transfers. FAS and their Ukrainian counterparts rejected this immediately, viewing it as a demand for Ukrainian surrender. They signed a counter-manifesto: “The Right to Resist.” The title alone is a rebuke. It insists on the legitimacy of armed self-defence for the oppressed, and it was signed by people who face arrest for saying so.

    

• And then there is the radical underground. The “Stop the Wagons” movement has sabotaged railway lines in Russia and Belarus to slow the transport of ammunition to the front. The “Solidarity Zone” project, founded in 2022, provides legal and financial aid to those who have engaged in direct action against military infrastructure, currently supporting over 40 individuals. Unlike traditional human rights organisations that defend only “peaceful” protesters, Solidarity Zone recognises that when peaceful picketers face eight years in prison, the boundary between legal and illegal resistance becomes a luxury imposed by those who face no consequences for their inaction.

    

• The moral asymmetry could not be starker. Russian anti-war socialists risk sentences that exceed those for murder. The “Foreign Agent” law, expanded in 2022 and tightened further in 2025, criminalises public activity that challenges the state, blocks designated individuals from accessing their earnings, and bans them from political office, university teaching, or working with young people. Russians are now prohibited from searching for “extremist” content online. The censorship agency Roskomnadzor has begun restricting VoIP calls on Telegram and WhatsApp. This is what Oleg Orlov of Memorial described in his closing statement: “It’s not just public criticism that’s banned, but any independent thought. There is no more private life.”

    

• Western campists risk Twitter criticism. When Stop the War’s Andrew Murray refuses to demand Russian withdrawal from a London conference stage, he exercises a freedom that Russian socialists have been imprisoned for attempting to exercise. The least he could do is use that freedom honestly.

    

• Unconditional debt cancellation. Not restructuring, not extended grace periods, not concessional lending: cancellation. Ukraine’s sovereign debt, now exceeding 100 per cent of GDP, must be written off entirely. As Dudin puts it, “the debt yoke should go in the dustbin of history, together with the army of Russian invaders.” Anything less condemns a generation of Ukrainian workers to paying for their own defence while Western creditors extract interest.

    

• Arms for self-defence with democratic accountability. Ukrainian socialists demand weapons because military force must be met with military force until the invasion is defeated. This is not a demand for blank cheques to the Zelensky government. It is a demand rooted in the same principle that led socialists to support arms for Republican Spain: the right of a people to resist fascist conquest.

    
• The organisations that claimed to stand for peace had nothing to say about the class content of the peace they were demanding.

• The title of this article is not metaphorical. “You handed us over” is a factual description of what happened. The Western “anti-war” left spent three years opposing arms, demanding negotiations, and insisting that Ukraine’s resistance was merely a NATO proxy operation. The Trump-Putin settlement delivers precisely that programme: territorial concessions, demilitarisation, economic exploitation by both imperial powers, and the rehabilitation of annexation as an acceptable instrument of statecraft.

    

• The campist left did not cause this outcome. It is not that powerful. But it provided ideological cover for it. It normalised the frameworks that made partition thinkable. It told a generation of Western activists that Ukrainian self-determination was less important than opposing NATO, that resisting Russian colonisation was secondary to resisting Western arms shipments, that the people being bombed were somehow less worthy of solidarity than the geopolitical abstractions being debated.

    

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