“We didn’t learn anything new from this war...”

Russian anarchists are divided into those who oppose the war and those who directly support Ukraine. The Belarusian movement of anarchists and anti-fascists all support Ukraine, and a significant number of them are fighting in the Ukrainian defense forces. Polish and Czech anarchists from the federation also support us, but we did not feel any support from anarcho-syndicalists, namely support for Ukrainians who are fighting the occupiers. Instead, we hear from them about their dislike of NATO, and about how Ukraine is a NATO puppet. I was upset by the French, Spanish, Italian, and Greek anarchist movements. As it turned out, many of them got their information from Russia Today.

We didn’t learn anything new from this war, but we saw that anarchists today are not as ready to clearly take sides as they were during the First and Second World Wars, and the civil war in Spain between them. Bakunin and Kropotkin easily took sides, Polish anarcho-syndicalists took part in the Warsaw Uprising, the interbrigades fought in Spain... But now anarchists were not unanimous in their support even for Rojava in Syria (Syrian Kurdistan).

The war did not in the least change the point of view of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian anarchists. We have all known that Russia is an imperialist and fascist empire, that Lukashenko’s pro-Kremlin dictatorship in Belarus is fascist, and that Ukraine is an island of freedom among the countries of the former USSR. In the 30 years since the collapse of the USSR, Russian imperialists have pursued aggressive policies in Ichkeria, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, African countries, etc. If the global anarchist movement does not understand that bad democracies are better than fascist dictatorships, there will be a line of division between those who defend freedom and those who are intoxicated by dogmas, because their ideological uncertainty is infantilism, as are their calls for Ukrainians to lay down arms to end the war. I never thought I would see the day when the international left would sing in unison with the far right in favor of Putin’s dictatorship and the Kremlin’s savage imperialism.