By Patty Friend, Jason Sibert and Rick D’Loss
Editor’s Note: SDUSA condemned Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine on March 16. However, the resolution was not unanimously
approved.
While we agree with the text of our March 16th resolution per se, we oppose it as organizational policy because it failed to call on the United States to provide Ukraine with military aid – i.e., material and ammunition along with transport vehicles and armored ambulances, etc. Therefore, we voted to oppose the resolution passed at our March National Executive Committee meeting.
Russia’s war – a clear violation of the United
Nations’ Charter – is the most vicious ever perpetrated on a sovereign state
since World War II, as stated by Oona Hathaway in her article “International
Law Goes to War in Ukraine” (Foreign Affairs, March 15). The longer the war
goes on, the worse the crimes are, as we’ve seen the targeting of civilians.
The counterweight to this lawbreaking is the crushing sanctions by the United
States, European Union, the United Kingdom, and many other countries of the
world. Of course, those sanctions are a method of supporting the violation of
the UN Charter, although the UN is largely helpless because Russia has veto
power on the Security Council. The sanctions are an example of soft power
(non-military) being used to enforce the idea of international law. International law extends beyond the
sanctions, according to Hathaway: “contemporary
international law demands that states respond to violations not with war but
with what Scott Shapiro and I have termed “outcasting”—that is, sanctions that exclude a state
that has broken the law from the benefits of global cooperation. In this case,
outcasting involves not just economic sanctions but also barring Russian
athletes from participating in international sporting events, banning Russian
airplanes from European and U.S. airspace, and curtailing Russian media
outlets’ access to European audiences.”
Airstrikes
and shelling by Russia have devastated civilian infrastructure across large
swaths of the country, including schools and hospitals. The World Health
Organization said it had confirmed more than 64 attacks on health-care
facilities, patients, and medical workers during the nearly two-month-old war,
killing thousands of people and wounding countless others. “Health systems,
facilities and health workers are not — and should never be — a target,” WHO
Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference.
The Russians have destroyed theaters,
restaurants, food storage depots, and much, much more. They have made it
impossible for hundreds of thousands of civilians to escape, and for those who
have tried to escape the cities such as Mariupol, many have been kidnapped by
the Russians and forced to resettle in Russia, with many interned them in filtration camps, reminiscent of
concentration camps. Others are bombed and gunned down outright. For
those Ukrainians who have no other way to escape the dystopian nightmare
in which they are barely living, there is no heat, no food and no water.
Putin’s soldiers have laid
landmines all over cities and towns and villages and neighborhoods. They
have raped women and girls and left them to die in the streets. They
refuse to allow civilians “humanity zones” so they could bury their
dead; the dead fester and rot and carry diseases. They have stolen
Ukrainians’ food and medicine and have not allowed aid workers to get to the
people who need them. This sort of behavior shouldn’t surprise us: in Chechnya,
for instance, Putin had Grozny bombed into oblivion, terrorizing the civilian
population for almost nine years and establishing his puppet regime
there.
This war is not only
unnecessary, unprovoked, and illegal but its justification is based in
ethnicity. Putin’s propaganda promotes a set of ideas about the Ukrainians,
concluding that they must be exterminated, that they do not deserve to exist
unless they are part of Russia, or they are subsumed by Russia. Putin’s
propaganda is now attacking the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization as if
we are evil incarnate.
Putin analysts who are
completely familiar with his writings and his speeches tell us that he wants to
reestablish the Russian Empire, at least a Greater Russia with Belarus,
Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova as his first ring of satellites. (As an
additional motive, Putin covets the large oil deposit in southeast Ukraine,
second in size in Europe only to Norway, according to world-wide energy experts.
Putin cannot tolerate Ukraine as an economic or political competitor.) Many who
analyze him say that he will not stop at these countries and will need to go
after Poland and/or the Baltics and/or the Balkans. In other words, he
will ultimately go after one of the NATO countries that used to be part of the
Soviet bloc. All of this will cause a cold war and arms race which will
cost the West every penny that we would need to spend on climate change, peace
initiatives, affordable housing, refugee resettlement, education and training,
neighborhood revitalization, or fighting the next pandemic. We have
the chance to stop all that madness, and it won’t even cost one American boot
on the ground. We don’t have to do the fighting, but we must arm the
Ukrainians so that they can do the job for themselves, and their freedom, and
for us.
Congress passed a $13.6 billion defense spending package
that includes $800 million in military aid for Ukraine. The U.S. must continue
to stand behind Ukraine in its fight for freedom. It will strike a blow to Putin
if he loses his fight to take the country into his sphere of influence. A loss
could turn the tide of world politics. In addition to the need to halt Putin’s malicious ambitions, there are
other reasons why Ukraine must get arms. First, it produces approximately 20
percent of the world’s wheat supply and other food stuffs. If it cannot
harvest its crops, people all over the globe will go hungry (even more than
they already have) and more people will die. Second, from the standpoint
of ‘power and principle’ (to borrow a term from Jimmy Carter’s National
Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski), the Ukrainians have been our allies, as the county fought with our
country and NATO in Afghanistan. The
U.S. should not continue to abandon its allies, like it abandoned the Kurds in
Syria. Allies are a method we use to confront our adversaries, a way of
increasing our power.
Humanitarian aid is a
wonderful thing, but we need a military presence to secure that aid. We’ve already seen how the Russians agree
to allow humanitarian zones or corridors one minute, and then once the
civilians start moving in their cars, the Russians start bombing them or
shooting at them. So much so that the people of Mariupol refuse to take
the bait assuming that the Russians are simply lying to them and setting them up
for annihilation, abduction, or forced relocation in Russia.
The non-governmental
organizations and community-based organizations working in Ukraine (such
as Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UNICEF, the World Central
Kitchen and many more) need a great deal of help: thousands of armored
ambulances and/or thousands upon thousands of tons of food stuffs, hundreds of
thousands of blankets, pillows sheets, towels, millions of pounds of toilet
paper, bars of soap and detergent, sanitary supplies, not to mention band aids,
and garbage bags. Moving all these supplies takes convoys of trucks and
railroad cars, and all must be protected from the Russians.
Some of our comrades
are afraid that if we arm the Ukrainians as they need us to do, then we run the
risk of arms falling into “the wrong hands” e.g., the Ukrainian
neo-Nazis. Are we afraid that the neo-Nazis will get fighter jets?
Are we afraid that the neo-Nazis will get Abram tanks? What would they
get from the West (and be able to use in some future war) that they could not
buy off the black market? We have no clear count as to how many neo-Nazis are
fighting in Ukraine, and no one has determined that anything they may have done
(wear Nazi uniforms and SS insignias) are equal to the atrocious acts of the
Russians.
Many feel that given
all the horrendous mistakes that the US and NATO have made since World War II
from Viet Nam to Iraq and Afghanistan, and smaller wars or military adventures
such as Lebanon or Grenada, we should not and cannot provide arms and
munitions to the Ukrainians. But why should the Ukrainians lose their
freedom (and all that that implies) and their country because the US has been
such a bad actor on the world stage in the past? While we heartily
agree that the Dulles Brothers, George Shultz, the Bushes (father and son},
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremmer, Dick Cheney and others probably committed war
crimes or at least profited off our wars, that can not absolve Putin from his
war crimes and unspeakable acts, and it is no reason to assign the Ukrainian
people to live in Putin’s totalitarian wasteland for as long as he might live.
If Ukraine survives, it will obviously have to be
rebuilt from scratch. It will need a modern-day Marshall Plan and the US cannot
and should not bear the total cost of that, rather Putin and his oligarchs
should be made to pay along with the West. The motto of Social Democrats USA is
pro-labor and pro-democracy. For this reason, our organization should support
aid to Ukraine, both military and non-military. Perhaps a social-democratic
movement will emerge in the country much like the mixed economies of Europe
after 1945!
Patty Friend
is the National Chair of Social Democrats USA.
Jason Sibert
is the Executive Director of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis.
Rick D’Loss is an At-Large member of the
National Executive Committee.