Authors’ Note: A shorter version of this article appeared in the May/June print edition of Capitol Hill Citizen.
As Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza was in full force, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a December 28, 2023 news conference that Israel’s goals in Gaza were the same as Russia’s goals in Ukraine.
Lavrov said, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Hamas must be destroyed as a whole and as a military force. It sounds like demilitarization. He also said that extremism must be eliminated in Gaza. It sounds like denazification.”
“Demilitarization” and “denazification” are what Russian leaders have declared are the goals of their “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The scale of death and destruction from Russia’s genocidal assault on Ukraine has been far greater than all other contemporary wars.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, battlefield casualties (killed, wounded, missing) reached an estimated 1.8 million by the end of 2025, including 1.2 million Russians and 600,000 Ukrainians, according to a January 27, 2026 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The CSIS report put the total battlefield death toll at 465,000 combatants. 325,000 were Russian and 140,000 were Ukrainian. By comparison, credible estimates of the combined death tolls for civilians and combatants in the three most destructive major wars over this same four years are around 150,000 in Sudan, 100,000 to 600,000 in Palestine, and 90,000 in Myanmar.
Genocidal Dehumanization of Ukrainians
The ideological predicate for Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine has been the decades-long denial that Ukrainians are a distinct nationality by Vladimir Putin and other Russia leaders. Putin detailed his view in a 7,000-word essay in July 2021 called “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Putin claimed that Ukraine was an artificial creation by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Seven months later Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s genocidal rhetoric has not stopped. On November 27, 2025, Putin said in a press conference following a summit of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization that if Ukraine did not surrender all the territory Russia claims to have annexed, Russia would fight Ukraine for that land “until the last Ukrainian dies.”
Great Russian chauvinism toward the Ukrainians goes back to Russia’s colonization and enserfment of Ukrainians in the 17th and 18th centuries. The “Great Russians” ruling from Moscow pejoratively called the Ukrainians “Little Russians.”
In Russia’s current invasion, top state officials, cultural leaders, and media celebrities have called Ukrainians “cockroaches,” “rats,” “rabid dogs,” “vermin,” and “tumors” that must be eliminated. Genocide scholars have criticized this dehumanizing rhetoric toward Ukrainians by Russian authorities as incitements to commit genocide.
On April 3, 2022, two days after photo and video evidence of the Bucha massacre of over 400 civilians by Russian military occupiers was first reported in global media, the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti published an editorial called “What Russia Should Do with Ukraine.” It equated “denazification” with “de-ukrainization” in calling for the full destruction of the Ukrainian state and national identity. It said the Ukrainian elite should be “liquidated” and the ordinary people should be Russified by forced labor in re-education camps until people “atoned” for being Ukrainian.
In July 2025, RIA Novosti published another genocidal editorial titled “There is no other option: no one should be left alive in Ukraine.” The journal Just Security at the New York University School of Law has been keeping a running compilation of hundreds of such examples of genocidal eliminationist rhetoric against Ukraine by Russian leaders.
War Crimes
Russia’s crime of aggression against Ukraine is what the Final Judgement of the Nuremberg Trials called “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Aggression as a war crime was written into international law with the UN Charter and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Russia has abducted tens of thousand of Ukrainian children to Russia for forced Russification in militarized re-education camps. Forcibly transferring children of one group to another group is a crime of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. One year into the war in March 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin for these war crimes. A year later, the ICC issued further arrest warrants for four top Russian military commanders for the war crime of bombing civilian power plants and infrastructure across Ukraine.
The mass slaughter of civilians in Bucha, Izium, and Mariupol in the early in the months of the war has been followed up by constant and growing drone and missile strikes on civilian residences, thousands of schools, hundreds of hospitals, buses and passenger trains, and every Ukrainian power plant and the grid, including substations that provide power to the cooling systems for Ukraine’s 19 nuclear reactors. (So far, Ukraine has been using diesel generators to keep the cooling systems powered until the substations can be repaired.)
Russian drone operators are being trained with FPV (First Person View) drones on “human safaris” in Kherson where the operators see on their control monitors the civilians they trying to kill who are walking, biking, and driving that city’s streets.
Compulsory Russification in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine is genocidal. Russian occupying forces have imprisoned tens of thousands of non-combatant Ukrainian citizens for refusing to swear loyalty to Russia. Assassinations and torture are used to compel obedience from the occupied population. Rape is systematically deployed as a weapon of war and intimidation to subdue Ukrainian resistance.
Ukrainians must accept Russian passports to access utilities, banks, social services, public schools, and to confirm legal tenancy in their homes or apartments. Abortion rights have been eliminated and feminist and LGBTQ rights advocacy are criminalized as “extremism” and “hate speech.”
The cultural heritage of Ukraine is being destroyed in the occupied territories. Russian authorities have systematically looted museums of Ukrainian cultural objects and burned Ukrainian books in libraries and schools. Statues of Ukrainian cultural and political figures have been torn down.
The Russian occupation authorities have particularly targeted monuments and books related to Taras Shevchenko as part of their efforts to erase Ukrainian national identity. Shevchenko is the foremost historical figure of the Ukrainian national movement. He was a mid-19th century Ukrainian poet, writer, painter, and ethnographer who was born a serf and became a tribune for the Ukrainian national and pan-Slavic movements against the national and social oppression of colonization and serfdom by imperial Tsarist Russia. He envisioned utopian socialist confederation of Slavic nations. For his political prose and poems, Shevchenko was imprisoned and exiled to military service in Central Asia for a decade. Shevchenko statues stand all over Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora around the world, but have been destroyed in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Religious institutions that are not Russian Orthodox Churches affiliated to the independent Moscow Patriarchate are persecuted, including Protestants, Ukrainian Greek Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine that is affiliated with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Progressive except for Ukraine
Many of us are critical of progressives who are progressive on all issues except for Palestine. We should be just as critical of those who are progressive except for Ukraine.
While polling shows that progressive-minded Americans overwhelmingly support the U.S. providing humanitarian, economic, and military aid to Ukraine for its resistance to Russia’s invasion, there are some corners of the American left that have been vocally opposed to such solidarity.
In one of these corners are the campists who divide the world between the West and the rest. The camp of U.S.-led Western imperialism is the only imperialism they acknowledge. They do not see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as imperialist, but rather anti-imperialist because the West has supported Ukraine.
It is perhaps understandable that some people hold this view. U.S. imperialism has been so vicious in the lifetimes of living generations, from Vietnam to Iraq to Palestine and now Trump’s many unprovoked attacks on sovereign nations.
But the simple formula of always opposing what the U.S. does may be correct for most conflicts, but not all. It should not substitute for a concrete analysis of each situation.
In the case of Ukraine, progressives in Ukraine who are the natural allies of the U.S. left – socialists, anarchists, feminists, environmentalists, trade unionists – are appealing for support of their national liberation struggle.
The campists have a geopolitical analysis of state interests, not a class analysis of popular interests. They support one bloc of capitalist states – states in conflict with the U.S. no matter how repressive, exploitative, and imperialist they may be – against the bloc of Western capitalist states led by the U.S.
Unlike the Western imperialist states that colonized peoples overseas, Russia is a settler-colonial empire that expanded by conquering adjacent peoples in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central and East Asia. Yet the campist “anti-imperialists” cannot see the Russian empire or its aggression toward Ukraine as imperialist.
Reflecting on this ignorance, or hypocrisy, from some Western “anti-imperialists,” the noted Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy has called out their Eurocentrism: “Even the anti-imperial revolt in what’s known today as the Global South is very much shaped through the prism of Western vocabulary and Western geographic imagination. So an empire can be only Western in that context. The very idea of anti-imperialism has to be de-Westernized.”
“You cannot fight fascism with flowers”
In another corner of vocal opponents of Ukraine solidarity are pacifists who oppose arms to Ukraine for its self-defense. They say the provision of arms to Ukraine only prolongs the war even though it is Russia that is constantly on the offensive against Ukraine. They call for negotiations and say Ukraine should give up the their lands under Russian occupation as the price of “peace.”
Russia’s occupation is not peace. It is violent oppression. In negotiations over the last year, Ukraine has been willing to compromise on a ceasefire at the current frontlines as long as it gets international security guarantees against further Russian invasions. But Russia has not offered any compromises. It demands that Ukraine withdraw from all of the territory that Russia claims to have annexed but does not occupy. It demands major cuts to Ukraine’s military. It rejects any foreign security guarantees for Ukraine. Russia demands an imperial “peace.”
These pacifists put their ideology before reality. On February 28, 2026, within hours of a deliberately televised display of the most mean-spirited imperialist bullying of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky by America’s Donald Trump and JD Vance, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink put out a video proclaiming “Trump is right.” She said Russia is winning the war and we should support Trump’s negotiations.
At that time, Trump had not brought Russia and Ukraine together for negotiations. Trump’s team had negotiated ten days earlier on February 18 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with Russia about Ukraine without Ukraine present. On February 24, the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. had voted with Russia and Israel against a UN General Assembly resolution demanding Russia stop military operations in Ukraine and withdraw back to Russia. The stated purpose of the February 28 meeting in the White House was to ratify Trump’s minerals deal shakedown for Ukraine’s resources, which Ukraine was not yet ready to accept without amendments.
Benjamin was saying “Trump is right” not only in the context of that Oval Office ambush with its ugly display of American exceptionalist conceit, but also against the backdrop of Trump’s ICE and DOGE unleashing violence and austerity on America and of Trump’s total support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Giving Trump any credibility does not help the cause of peace, in Ukraine, in Palestine, in America, or anywhere.
If these pacifists and the campists ever listened to, talked to, or visited progressives in Ukraine, they would know Ukrainian progressives have nothing but contempt for such pacifist apologists for Russian aggression. Ukrainian feminists issued a sharp rebuke to a statement by Western feminists and pacifists against military aid to Ukraine, saying they were denying the basic right of the oppressed to self-defense. As the Ukrainian socialist Oleksandr Kyselov put it in another statement, “You cannot fight fascism with open arms and flowers.”
Echoing Kremlin Propaganda
The campists and pacifists against Ukraine solidarity repeatedly echo Kremlin propaganda tropes that are easily debunked and have been refuted repeatedly.
One especially hateful trope is repeating the Russian regime’s claim that Ukraine is neo-Nazi and therefore undeserving of support. Do people who utter this nonsense realize how offensive that is to Ukrainians who lost over 10 million people fighting the Nazi invasion, including some 1.5 million Jews? Or how offensive it is to Ukrainians who elected a Jew, Volodymyr Zelensky, as their President in 2019 by a 73 percent vote? People who call Ukraine neo-Nazi have obviously never said it to the face of any Ukrainian in Ukraine or the diaspora.
A related myth is that the Euromaidan revolution of 2014 was a CIA-backed coup. A coup means seizure of power by a small cabal backed by armed force. The Revolution of Dignity was a popular revolution. About 4 million people participated in the street protests across the country and an additional 4 million donated funds to support it. That revolution drove the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from office for his submission to Russian interests, corrupt self-enrichment, and violent repression. When Yanukovych fled to Russia, the Ukrainian parliament voted 328-0 to remove him from office, to appoint a temporary president, and to hold new presidential elections in 3 months.
Proponents of the CIA-backed coup story like to cite as evidence a wiretapped recording tweeted out by the Kremlin in February 2014 of a conversation between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoff Pyatt. Nuland and Pyatt were not discussing who should replace Yanukovych, but who they should recommend to Yanukovych to appoint as the next Prime Minister. They wanted to recommend Arseniy Yatsenyuk and were unaware that Yanukovych had already made the offer to Yatsenyuk who had declined. The leaked recording shows active diplomacy, not a coup plot.
Another propaganda narrative is that NATO expansion provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. No state on Russia’s border had joined NATO since 2004. NATO expansion in no way justified an invasion of Ukraine, a non-NATO country, in 2022. What Russia’s war of aggression provoked was the expansion of NATO. Long-neutral Finland and Sweden joined and thereby doubled the length of Russia’s borders with NATO countries.
A common Kremlin talking point that tries to flip the script as to who is prolong the war repeats Putin’s claim that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with the support of Joe Biden and the “Collective West,” sabotaged a peace agreement that had been “preliminarily signed” with Ukraine in April 2023. Putin waived such a supposed agreement at a delegation of African leaders in January 2023, but never released the text. However, as shown in the draft settlement documents that have come to light since then, it is clear that Ukraine decided on its own it that it would not accept a settlement without international security guarantees, the same requirement that Ukraine still insists upon today in the Trump-mediated negotiations.
Russia and its campist and pacifist echo chambers have also claimed that Ukraine supports Israel’s war on Gaza. In fact, since its independence Ukraine has consistently supported UN resolutions against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Ukraine first recognized Palestine as a sovereign state in February 1992 just two months after its own independence was confirmed in a December 1991 referendum that received 92 percent support.
President Zelensky did support Israel’s right to self-defense in the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas. However, his message soon changed as the Israeli invasion of Gaza proceeded and the massive slaughter and infrastructure annihilation was clearly not self-defense. On June 2, 2024 Zelensky declared, “Ukraine recognizes two states, both Israel and Palestine, and will do everything it can to convince Israel to stop, to end this conflict and prevent the suffering of civilians.”
Israel, on the other hand, did not support Ukraine after Russia seized Crimea in 2014 or in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It never provided military aid to Ukraine, did not grant legal residency to Ukrainian war refugees, and voted with Russia and Trump’s USA against the February 24, 2026 UN General Assembly resolution against the Russian invasion.
One more Kremlin narrative repeated by those who oppose aid to Ukraine is that Russia will inevitably win the war, which means that U.S. aid is a waste and the U.S. should push Ukraine to accept Russia’s current demands before it gets worse. But the fact is that Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill.
According to a January 15, 2026 assessment of Russia’s offensive campaign by the Institute for the Study of War, in the first year of the war in 2022 Ukraine recovered 47 percent of the land that Russia occupied in its initial offensive. In the three years since then, the frontlines have been largely frozen. Despite enormous losses of personnel and matériel, Russia has gained only 1.5 percent of Ukrainian territory in the last three years.
Russia has now been attacking Ukraine longer than it took the Soviet Union to push the Hitler’s Nazi army back to Berlin in World War II. Russia’s rulers are afflicting their own people as well as Ukrainians with an endless war not of their own choosing.
The campists and pacifists who have spent four years calling for negotiations while opposing arms to Ukraine now find the Trump administration implementing their policies. Since Russia’s offensives continue unabated, it seems time for them to reconsider their progressive-except-for-Ukraine position. They have been vectors for same Kremlin-promoted neofascist and alt-right narratives dressed up in anti-imperialist and pacifist rhetoric. They are the same narratives repeated by the far-right parties that Russia supports, including Nigel Farage’s Reform in Britain, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, and Donald Trump’s MAGA Republicans.
How to be progressive on Ukraine
Calling peace without a program of solidarity with the working class and progressive movement in Ukraine is supporting an imperial peace. In repeated calls over the four-year course of this war, Ukrainian progressives have spelled out a program of solidarity for a people’s peace.
- Military aid to Ukraine sufficient to push Russia out of the temporarily occupied territories.
- Economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine’s pensions, health care, schools, green energy transition, and physical and mental rehabilitation for the war’s wounded.
- Full sanctions on the oil and gas exports that fund Russia’s war machine.
- Transfer Russia’s frozen foreign assets to Ukraine for its self-defense and post-war reconstruction.
- Cancel Ukraine’s foreign debt.
- Moral, political, and material support for Ukraine’s progressive labor and social movements.
- Return children abducted to Russia back to Ukraine.
- Freedom for Ukrainian civilians imprisoned for resisting Russification in the temporarily occupied territories.
- Freedom for Russian anti-war political prisoners.
- Asylum for Ukrainian and Russian war refugees.
- Reverse the neoliberal U.S. policy that promotes privatization, deregulation, debt dependence, exploitative minerals extraction, and cuts to labor rights and public services.
Some the points in this program are demands we make on the U.S. government and the international community. Others we can help realize with moral and material aid programs. The authors of this article participate in such programs conducted by the Ukrainian diaspora in Buffalo, New York and the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US).
Ukrainian churches and civic organizations in Greater Buffalo have helped Ukrainian war refugees get settled and adjusted to America, raised over $1 million for ambulances, prosthetics, and other medical and humanitarian supplies sent to Ukraine, and kept local media, politicians, and the public informed about Ukraine’s fight for freedom, sovereignty, and democracy.
The Ukraine Solidarity Network has mobilized union and individual contributions for material aid to Ukraine: generators distributed by miners and railway workers unions, a biochemical analyzer for a hospital in cooperation with a nurses union, and now a care center for the war wounded with the nurses.
The authors are also active in the Palestine solidarity movement. We believe progressives should be consistent anti-imperialists and peace activists who work in solidarity with both Ukrainians and Palestinians against the wars of aggression, occupation, and genocide against both of their countries.
