The Peacenik and the Anti-Imperialist: How the Western Left Misreads Ukraine
This essay examines two characteristic responses of the Western left to the war in Ukraine—responses that, while often justified by moral concern, cause deep moral and intellectual confusion with real political consequences: the peacenik and the anti-imperialist. Rather than interrogating intentions, I analyse the internal logic of these positions and the contradictions they generate.
The Peacenik
No one desires the end of this war more than Ukrainians—certainly more than left-wing pacifists in the West. The central problem, however, is this: the Russian side is not interested in negotiations at all. Russia has clearly stated its objectives from the very beginning of this conflict, and what it seeks is the total subjugation of Ukraine—that is, keeping it within its sphere of influence as a dependent state (I will explain shortly what this entails). What surprises me is why so many otherwise reliable and sober-minded left-wing commentators fail to notice this fundamental fact: it is Russia that wants the war to continue, and the only talks it is willing to engage in concern the terms of capitulation.
Yet this elementary reality—the fact that Russia has no interest in peace—fails to persuade the peaceniks, the first position I want to examine. Who are they? They are left-wing idealists who genuinely believe that a stable peace can be achieved through dialogue and compromise. This stance rests on two false assumptions: that Russia is willing to negotiate and that it would honor any agreement it signs.
Yet the history of the past three decades—from the Budapest Memorandum onward—suggests precisely the opposite.
Many of these peaceniks are deeply moved by the humanitarian catastrophe and the daily loss of life. But this concern is often accompanied by the belief that responsibility for the war does not lie with Russia alone, but also with the West and Ukraine itself. In their view, Russia is not ready for peace because of NATO’s confrontational posture; if only the rhetoric were softened, if one were to sit down with Putin and normalize Russia as a partner, business as usual could resume and Ukraine would be saved. Ukrainians, for their part, would be expected to forgive past wrongs and symbolically restore the 'brotherhood' of the two nations—effectively re-legitimiding Russian influence. This position overlooks the obvious structural asymmetry between Russia and Ukraine, and with it, Russian imperialism as such.
What, then, is meant by the endlessly repeated slogan of 'diplomacy instead of arms'? What concessions should Ukraine make in practice—give up territory, disarm, enshrine neutrality in its constitution, legalise a pro-Russian opposition? Even if Ukraine were to comply, it would either become a de facto Russian colony, as Moscow regained full political and economic leverage, or a de jure one, since occupying a truncated, defenseless state would pose no serious challenge.
The core illusion shared by all advocates of 'reaching an agreement' is trust in Russia—a trust repeatedly disproven over the past thirty years, from the Budapest Memorandum to the Minsk agreements. Critics of the West immediately respond that Russia merely reacts to Western distrust and provocation. This leads to an epistemic dead end: any action can always be reinterpreted as a provocation of the other side. Israel blaming Palestinians for Oslo, Russia blaming Ukraine for Minsk—while the stronger party accuses the weaker of non-compliance and enforces its claims by force.
At this point, some anti-imperialists will immediately object to my comparison of Israel and Russia: 'How can Russia be the stronger party? Ukraine is merely a puppet of the United States and the collective West—so it is Russia that occupies the weaker position.' But such claims admit no reality check whatsoever: Russia could march all the way to the Elbe, and there would still be those who blamed NATO’s expansionist logic for it. Framing Russian aggression as a mere reaction is no different from portraying Hitler as a statesman concerned only with revising the Treaty of Versailles.
One final point. Even if—absurd as this seems in light of actual events, but let us conduct a thought experiment—Russia’s militarisation were indeed a response to its encirclement by NATO countries and Europe’s rearmament, the price one would have to pay to say 'let’s see' is simply too high. Should we disarm, dismantle NATO, and wait for Russia’s reaction? In this gamble, you stake everything to find out whether a player who has deceived you many times before is bluffing or not. By 'we,' I do not mean the West as a whole, but Central and Eastern Europe, because it is this region that—time and again throughout history—has most often become the victim of Western experiments.
These photos were taken in 2022–2023 by Mykola Hlibovych — INDEX Veteran Fellow 2026, photographer, and comic book artist — during his service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, specifically in the Zaporizhzhia region (Southern Ukraine), and near Slovyansk (Donetsk region, Eastern Ukraine).
The Anti-Imperialist
The second group—more dogmatic and more dangerous, and particularly influential on the American left—consists of anti-imperialist 'realists' for whom there exists only one imperialism: the imperialism of the US dollar. Within this framework, every enemy of the United States automatically becomes their more or less explicit ally: 'enemy of my enemy is my friend'. This 'campist' logic is straightforward: if the war in Ukraine is a US–Russia proxy war, then Russia represents an axis of resistance against American imperialism. According to this view, the United States is the sole imperial power responsible for global militarization and ongoing wars, and therefore its principal adversaries—Russia, China, and Iran—constitute the vanguard of anti-imperialism. This position remains deeply shaped by Cold War thinking and nostalgia for the USSR, which leads to viewing Russia and Ukraine 'the Russian way'—as a single people. From this perspective, the Ukrainian nation itself is dismissed as an invention of Ukrainian nationalism, a product of the UPA, while the independent Ukrainian state is reduced to a CIA-sponsored cartel of oligarchs—effectively erasing Ukraine as a political subject altogether.
Let us pause on this attitude toward the USSR, because—alongside anti-Americanism—it plays a decisive role in shaping contemporary pro-Russian sentiments. What is at stake here is the revaluation, against Western doxa, of the Soviet Union as an anti-imperialist force and the broader rehabilitation of state socialism as a historical alternative to capitalism. This position has been articulated most forcefully in recent years by Domenico Losurdo (and his American protégé Gabriel Rockhill), whose critique of Western Marxism places the blame for the intellectual and political failure of the anti-capitalist left on its anti-Soviet orientation.
According to this line of reasoning, it was precisely the tradition running from Trotsky through Western Marxism—later echoed by the Frankfurt School and its successors—that delegitimized state socialism and thereby paved the way for Marxism’s submission to late capitalism. The core assumption underlying this argument is simple: there once existed a real alternative to capitalism, embodied by the socialist countries, and today that alternative survives in the form of China, Cuba, and Venezuela. From this perspective, China’s allies are treated as de facto anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist forces, regardless of their internal social relations.
That Russia operates a clientelist, oligarchic form of capitalism does not, within this framework, fundamentally alter its status as a force resisting the imperialism of the dollar.
Slavoj Žižek has aptly described this current as the 'moderately radical left.' Moderate, because it no longer engages in the exalted, quasi-religious apologetics of Stalinism characteristic of some Western intellectuals in the 1930s, for whom the mounting death toll only sanctified the revolutionary cause. Instead, today’s moderate apologists adopt the language of realism and pragmatism. They do not openly glorify Stalinism; they normalize it.
The Stalinist period is thus presented by them as one stage in a complex historical process: brutal and violent, to be sure, but also productive, and ultimately 'understandable' as a response to international isolation and external pressure. This apologetic logic unfolds step by step: the great famine (without collectivisation and the confiscation of grain for export, industrialisation—and with it the buildup of the arms industry—would not have been possible); the Stalinist trials and the gulags (the state had to eliminate agents and internal conspiracies, time was short, and therefore 'innocent victims were unavoidable'); and finally the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, allegedly necessary to buy Stalin time to prepare for Hitler’s invasion. My concern is that this mode of explanation retrospectively normalizes extreme violence by translating political terror into a functional necessity of modernization.
This logic has returned almost unchanged in contemporary narratives about Russia. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is presented as a defensive reaction—to NATO expansion, to American imperialism, to CIA-orchestrated 'color revolutions.' Once again, violence is explained away by external necessity, historical compulsion, and the pressure of circumstances. Within this pseudo-Hegelian framework, every crime becomes a stage of development, every cruelty becomes 'understandable,' and every act of aggression becomes rational. As in the scapegoat logic, all evil is ultimately blamed on some external enemy. This is a form of realism that eliminates the very possibility of critique by dissolving it into a narrative of historical necessity. It is not dialectics—it is the normalisation of catastrophe.
Rather than focusing on classes, exploitation, or material relations of power, this anti-imperialist outlook ultimately slips into a state-centric geopolitics—one that treats regimes as theatrical avatars of 'resistance.' This is not anti-imperialism. It is a form of nationalist fetishism that not only excuses state violence but openly embraces it. States, not classes, become the primary subjects of history.
Within this framework, the central question is framed as a stark alternative: can the BRICS countries, in their attempt to break US hegemony, transform the global system in a genuinely socialist direction, or will they merely reproduce new forms of bourgeois oligarchy? Anti-imperialists invariably choose the former. Once this choice is made, the narrative of the war in Ukraine falls neatly into place—Russia ceases to appear as an imperial aggressor and is recast as part of a counter-hegemonic project.
The difficulty is that this assumption rests on a profoundly mythologized image of the BRICS states. What unites their core members—China, Russia, Iran, and India—is not a shared socialist horizon, but a common model of authoritarian capitalism. These regimes combine intensified state control with the consolidation of local bourgeois oligarchies, legitimized through reactionary fantasies of national unity. In this sense, what is often celebrated as an 'axis of resistance' is better understood as a global convergence of authoritarian-capitalist regimes, bordering on neo-fascism. Seen from this angle, the appeal of the BRICS as a progressive alternative quickly collapses. Their opposition to US dominance does not amount to a challenge to capitalism as such, but merely to a redistribution of power within it. What is at stake is not emancipation, but the replacement of one imperial hierarchy with another.
It is telling that this configuration no longer remains confined to the so-called Global South. Today, even Trump’s United States increasingly gravitates toward the same political logic: nationalist mobilization, authoritarian governance, and the open fusion of state power with oligarchic interests. This only underscores how illusory the 'campist' idea of an 'axis of resistance' really is.
So what, then, do these left-wing anti-imperialist realists actually have to say about the war in Ukraine? Let us examine a few of their standard arguments.
Photos: Mykola Hlibovych
One frequently hears the claim that it is the United States and NATO—above all, the immensely powerful arms industry lobby—that are “pushing” Ukraine into war and sabotaging peace. Even if we were to assume that militarists and strongly anti-Russian European states (such as Poland or the Baltic countries) play such a role—although their leverage over Ukraine is far more limited than is often suggested—one crucial fact cannot be ignored: what 'pushes' Ukraine into war above all is the presence of Russian troops on its territory following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Whether or not the West benefits from this war, it will last for as long as the aggressor allows it to. For the attacked party, there is only one way to end the war: total capitulation. This is precisely the scenario Russia is counting on. In this configuration, Western military support does not prolong the war; it enables Ukraine to resist and remain independent.
This immediately leads to another familiar objection: is Ukraine truly independent at all? What does independence even mean—after all, is Poland independent, or merely an American colony? Formally sovereign under international law, Ukraine—like all non-hegemonic states—faces structural limitations on the material exercise of that sovereignty. But the issue at stake is not some mythical notion of absolute independence; it is the democratic choice of which form of dependency Ukraine accepts. Since 2014, that choice has been unambiguous. In the absence of Europe as an autonomous geopolitical actor, alignment with the American order has become—for Ukraine, as for Poland—the only viable means of protection against Russian imperial domination, even as that very order is being actively dismantled before our eyes under Trump.
This brings us to the core of the dispute. The Western anti-imperialist left is right to insist that US imperialism of the dollar poses the greatest global threat to world peace, given its planetary reach. But this abstract, global perspective obscures a crucial fact. There are regions—largely invisible from the vantage point of an American university campus—where the US empire functions as a shield against another empire: Russia. This regional power maintains its status through a tightly controlled sphere of influence, and Ukraine lies at its very center. As Zbigniew Brzezinski and many other analysts have long emphasized, there is no Russian empire—or even Russian great-power status—without Ukraine.
This leads to an unavoidable question: Is alignment with the American-led order preferable to the risk of becoming, in effect, a Russian colony?
The answer depends on geography and history. For Cuba or Venezuela, alignment with Russia may appear 'natural,' since it is not Russian aircraft carriers stationed off their coasts. For Poland and Ukraine, the logic points in the opposite direction. Ukrainians, moreover—something many anti-imperialists seem to forget—know very well what Russian domination entails. One need not travel to Bucha to grasp this; it is enough to look at Donbas or Crimea. What fate befell the Crimean Tatars, or those labeled 'Ukrainian nationalists' by the Kremlin—that is, all supporters of Ukrainian independence? Have places like Izolyatsia entered Western political consciousness at all?
A 'neutral' Ukraine, as demanded by peaceniks and anti-imperialists alike, would in practice mean a Ukraine controlled—by one mechanism or another—by Russia. And one can only imagine—indeed, it is precisely this imagination that must be forced upon anti-war idealists—what Putin’s regime would do to Ukrainians who fought against it. The wealthy would leave or buy their way out; it would be the poor, the working class, who would pay the highest price. What ultimately unites both positions—the peaceniks and the anti-imperialists—is not their motives, but the structure of their reasoning. The tragedy of the Western left lies not in bad faith, but in its persistent confusion of abstraction with analysis. By reducing the war in Ukraine either to a moral appeal for peace or to a geopolitical chessboard, it empties the conflict of history, agency, and responsibility. In doing so, it does not challenge imperialism—it reproduces it in theory while acquiescing to it in practice.