What Does “Solidarity with Ukraine” Mean?

On 17 March 1981, the German comic book artist Rötger Feldmann gave himself a birthday present by publishing the first volume of his Werner comics. The series chronicles the adventures of plumbers who work at a firm called Röhrich. The boss, Walter Röhrich (whose surname evokes the German word for “pipe”), has a catchphrase: “Eckart, can you go and check the cellar? I think the Russians are down there.”

Feldmann intended for his character Walter Röhrich to be a satire of a certain type of person, rather than a figure to identify with. He not only epitomizes the pedantic, mistrustful, and constantly irascible boss, whom the workers, Werner and Eckart, will do anything to get away from, but also obviously suffers from war trauma. At one point in the story, his trauma is triggered by an explosion on a construction site, leading him to wonder if “Ivan” has gotten into the building.

The Werner comics were published at the simultaneous height of the “Second Cold War” and the peace movement in both East and West Germany. On 10 October 1981, a crowd of around 300,000 people gathered in Bonn’s Hofgarten to demonstrate against the stationing of medium-range nuclear missiles in the West. The line-up of speakers included Social Democrats such as Erhard Eppler and Heinrich Albertz, founding Green Party members Petra Kelly and General Gert Bastian, as well as Free Democrats such as William Borm.

Back then, a large part of the population recognized the very real threat of nuclear escalation and a third world war between the US-led NATO and the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc countries. They also knew that missile deployments and the superpowers’ strategic plans would turn Central Europe into “ground zero” for first-strike and retaliatory nuclear bombardment in the event of such a war. By 1983, more than 4 million citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany had signed the “Krefeld Appeal”, opposing the stationing of nuclear missiles in Germany and the country’s participation in the nuclear arms race. But today, the coalition government of Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and Free Democrats (FDP) is using the summer break to rubber-stamp the presence of virtually the same US missiles, bypassing any wider public debate.

From Pacifism to New War Rhetoric

Since 24 February 2022, when Russia began waging its illegal war on Ukraine, nearly everyone in German politics and the media has had more than a touch of Walter Röhrich. An undeniable shift is underway in German politics. Not only conservatives and liberal democrats, but even the supporters of the Greens and, in most cases, more than half of the SPD have concluded — in the context of a starkly reduced spectrum of opinion, and out of a desire to show solidarity with a country under siege — that the imperative of the hour is to send weapons into a war zone. No matter that part of the Greens’ campaign platform in the Bundestag elections was ruling out “arms deliveries to war and crisis zones”. Some, such as Christian Democratic (CDU) opposition leader and likely candidate for chancellor in the 2025 federal elections, Friedrich Merz, went so far as to say that the direct deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine to deter nuclear-armed Russia should not be considered taboo — even if this would inevitably entail a direct war between nuclear powers.

Bourgeois liberals — from the CDU and FDP to the Greens — are convinced, or at least constantly proclaim, that “Ukraine” is defending Western freedom and “our values”. They are furthermore convinced that Russia — a country whose economic power is comparable to that of Italy, mind you, and whose military might amounts to one fifteenth of NATO’s — will soon attack NATO countries unless Western-supplied arms force it to withdraw from the Ukrainian territories and Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.

Liberals often compare Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian reign to Hitler’s regime. Putin is waging a genocidal “war of extermination” in Ukraine, wrote Berthold Kohler in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung during the war’s first days. He was thereby directly equating the current conflict with the Nazi “war of extermination” waged across Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the Baltics, and which gave rise to the Holocaust — a relativizing of history akin to the position espoused by the far-right National Democratic Party. Germany’s Staatsräson requires that the genocidal or at least criminal character of the Russian war must not be called into question. To this end, in the autumn of 2022 Germany’s “traffic light” coalition passed tougher laws against relativizing genocide.

Foreign policy experts in the ‘West’ are also increasingly being forced to accept the new reality of an ‘unwinnable war’. The question is: how many more Ukrainians and Russians will have to die before this reality is taken into account?

At the same time, it is taboo to discuss whether the far-right government of Israel is committing war crimes and possibly genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza — where in the course of just a few weeks the civilian death toll already significantly exceeded that from the two and a half years of war in Ukraine. Indeed, any criticism of the Israeli state’s actions is avenged with means that are strikingly similar to those deployed by authoritarian regimes — including restrictions of civil liberties, as well as the proposals from the SPD and from FDP Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann to deny German citizenship to people who do not explicitly affirm Israel’s right to exist, and to apply this up to ten years retroactively, i.e., to effectively expatriate them.

At the same time, the government and conservative opposition claim that Russia harbours further-reaching plans for conquest. Even Boris Pistorius, the Social Democrat defence minister, has endorsed arguments propounded by Christian Mölling, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, according to which NATO only has five years left to become “combat-ready” in the face of an impending Russian attack. The idea is that investing 100 or even up to 300 billion euro in military capability, as CDU foreign policy expert Roderich Kiesewetter and SPD defence commissioner Eva Högl are calling for, is needed to keep the Russians out of the cellar.

But if today “we” find ourselves at war with a new “Russian Hitler”, then those who call for negotiations must necessarily be suspected of “appeasement” — by analogy with the 1938 Munich Agreement, when the British government strove to prevent the outbreak of a new world war. Today, anyone who speaks out against arms deliveries is denounced as a “lumpen pacifist” (Sascha Lobo), a “second-hand war criminal” (Wolf Biermann), and — in yet another implicit Hitler comparison, by allusion to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s bestselling 1996 book on the Holocaust — one of “Putin’s willing helpers”. At the same time, in the fateful struggle of “democracies against autocracies” (as the New Cold War ideology so casually suggests in light of certain Western allies’ questionable reputations), sacrifices must also be made on the home front. During last spring’s collective bargaining round, Pistorius criticized high wage settlements in the public sector as jeopardizing Germany’s war capability.

What happens when Russia starts deploying more thermobaric weapons, or even chemical weapons, intensifies the destruction of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, or even starts using nuclear weapons?

The risk of a further escalation of the conflict with Russia, a nuclear power, is obviously one that the German government is willing to accept. Kiesewetter, who is likely to be appointed foreign minister after the 2025 elections, has called for the government to “take the war to Russia”, and to target not only military infrastructure, but “ministries” as well. More and more new weapons systems are being delivered to Ukraine without any red lines or a realistic exit strategy being outlined for NATO’s ever-increasing involvement. This is particularly problematic in view of the minimal war objective named in Ukrainian President Zelensky’s “peace formula”: the expulsion of Russian troops from Donbass and the Crimean Peninsula, which is highly unlikely in strategic terms.

Foreign policy experts in the “West” are also increasingly being forced to accept the new reality of an “unwinnable war”. The question is: how many more Ukrainians and Russians will have to die before this reality is taken into account? How far should the war escalate for the sake of a few square kilometres of destroyed land? And how to deal with the problem of Russia’s massive advantage in terms of troop numbers? As Ukraine runs out of troops to send to the front, this will surely mean NATO “mission creep” — regardless of how many more weapons the West supplies, Ukraine can only realistically achieve its war goals if NATO troops directly participate.

What is especially interesting is that as much as both those on the Left and on the Right describe Putin as a mad dictator, ready to realize his insane dreams of restoring the Russian Empire no matter the cost, in a fateful battle against a hated enemy, people seem to trust in Putin’s sanity and Russia’s instinct for self-preservation when it comes to the question of Russian escalation dominance and the further escalation of the war. What happens when Russia starts deploying more thermobaric weapons, or even chemical weapons, intensifies the destruction of Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, or even starts using nuclear weapons — which would be justified under Russia’s current nuclear doctrine once Western weapons systems and intelligence are used to destroy Russia’s early-warning radars?

Solidarity with Whom?

The West’s policy of sanctions, arms shipments, and support for the war is being carried out in the name of “solidarity with Ukraine”. Since the beginning of the war, people have wanted to show “solidarity with Ukraine”. But what exactly does this mean? Who or what is actually meant when people talk about “Ukraine”? And how is solidarity organized?

Solidarity with the people who fled to Germany and Europe after the war began in February 2022 was and is concretely related to people’s universal human rights. This includes the human right to asylum and the right to conscientious objection. However, “solidarity with Ukraine” that amounts to arms deliveries for “self-defence” specifically means that the German state, and other Western states, are supplying weapons to the Ukrainian state to support its war mobilization.

Socialists and Marxist thinkers differ from bourgeois conservatives in that society is at the centre of their thinking. They differ from the bulk of today’s liberals in that their thinking extends beyond the ambit of the state and its raison d’état. For them it is clear: just as there is no such unitary thing as France or Germany per se, or homogeneous group such as the Japanese or the Russians, there is no such thing as Ukraine.

Like every society under capitalism, this Eastern European country is divided into classes — capital and labour, haves and have-nots, rich and poor, those at the top and those at the bottom, and so on. Beyond that, even before the war, divisions within Ukraine ran along political, ideological, linguistic, and cultural lines. Above all, there was a stark economic division into an agrarian-capitalist oligarchy in the west of the country — with its sights set on EU membership and European markets — and a mining-industrial oligarchy in the east. The latter feared the demand for an exclusive association with the EU in the 2013 European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement, and justifiably so — being incapable of competing with Western corporations, it would have gone bankrupt, i.e. lost its basis for accumulation, just as happened in the wake of the trade liberalizations and shock privatizations in Eastern Europe after 1991.

Can we really call it solidarity to support prolonging the war when the Ukrainian state is running out of volunteers, which means it now has to rely on forced recruitment, sometimes on the streets, using increasingly brutal methods?

This is all part of the prehistory, which is never mentioned in the talk of “Russia’s criminal and unjustifiable war of aggression”. Nor is the question of how the Putin who applied for a Eurasian Economic Union and even NATO membership for Russia in the early 2000s was able to become the Putin who today defines his country as being outside of Europe and the West. Nor is anyone asking how Putin’s position was influenced by the eastward expansion of NATO, or by Russia’s being pushed out of the EU’s Eastern Partnership and the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, when the US under George W. Bush attempted to draw Ukraine into the anti-Russian Western military alliance — against the will of the majority of the population and against Ukrainian law at the time.

Ukraine is a young nation and it is only today, through the war with Russia, that the process of nation-building in the direction of a Western, anti-Russian state with its own historical myths is being solidified. Russia is forcibly assimilating the eastern part of Ukraine, but, as the Ukrainian social scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko recently argued in an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, the Ukrainian state is also “pursuing a policy of assimilating the Russian-speaking Ukrainians within the framework of so-called ‘decommunization’, ‘decolonization’, and ‘de-Stalinization’.”

The question of “solidarity with Ukraine” is now being asked again and again by people whose thinking is oriented around society. What does “solidarity with Ukraine” mean under the given conditions of war and in terms of the prospect of an end to the bloodshed?

Solidarity with the people at war must be linked to the war itself and the question of how it can end. War is generally subject to a dialectic. Wars begin while the perceived threat and moral outrage is high and propaganda promises a short, just war, in other words when there is great enthusiasm for war, especially among the middle classes and intellectuals. However, wars usually end with widespread war weariness, once the social majority has begun suffering the death of relatives, mutilation, post-traumatic stress disorder, inflation, impoverishment, or even hunger, and an to the war remains out of sight. It was knowledge of this process that led Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to promptly warn of “war fatigue” in the West.

Indeed, wars function like a magnifying glass for social contradictions, which is why history has shown a close connection between war, revolution, and revolt. Wars themselves cause the circle-the-wagons mentality and the civil peace between the classes to suddenly erupt into open class conflict. This was the case with the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, which ended in the Paris Commune. This was the case in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War, which ended in the Russian Revolution of 1905. This was the case in the wave of revolutions from Ireland to East Asia, which from 1916 onwards — and including the October Revolution of 1917 — gradually brought World War I to an end against the will of those in power. This was also how things panned out with processes of decolonization after World War II. Not to mention the fact that the ultra-jingoistic and militaristic atmosphere that had dominated the social climate in the United States until Hurricane Katrina in 2005 gave way to an anti-war sentiment which brought renewed attention to the country’s internal contradictions, resulting in the landslide victories of Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.

Today, the dialectic of war reveals the limits of sloganeering about “Ukraine” and “solidarity with Ukraine” that ultimately means supplying weapons for a proxy war. The talk of “solidarity with Ukraine” is becoming brittle. After all, how much solidarity is there in the fact that the upper classes in Russia and also in Ukraine are largely exempt from the duty of “national defence”? How much solidarity is there in prolonging a war with arms deliveries, while the portion of the population that understands “that parts of the Donbass or Crimea will probably remain Russian” and — assuming Putin is willing to negotiate — is in favour of exchanging territory for peace, has rapidly grown to a third?

Can we really call it solidarity to support prolonging the war when the Ukrainian state is running out of volunteers, which means it now has to rely on forced recruitment, sometimes on the streets, using increasingly brutal methods? With whom should we show solidarity? With the government, which lowered the military service age in April in order to draft more — increasingly poorly trained — recruits for the front? Or with the more than 100,000 conscientious objectors who have not reported back to their military service registration and have often gone into hiding, or the 200,000 who have organized themselves to warn each other about the military police, or the 650,000 men of “military age” who have defied the ban on leaving the country and have fled Ukraine illegally in the last two and a half years, usually at great cost and sometimes with fatal consequences?

The Ukraine war knows no victors, especially not among the lower classes.

Should we show solidarity with the Ukrainian government, which is putting pressure on the German government to hand over the 200,000 Ukrainians who are “fit for war” but have fled to Germany, or to persuade them to return using “incentives” — as per Kiesewetter’s proposal to revoke Ukrainians’ right to social benefits? Or with the more than 9,000 who have already been convicted of conscientious objection and are in Ukrainian prisons? Is there solidarity with the population, the majority of whom — according to recent polls — want peace negotiations with Russia given the largely hopeless prospects of the internecine war? Or with a government that has long ruled out those negotiations as long as Putin is in power, and instead insists upon its unrealistic maximalist demands — the reconquest of Crimea and Donbass?

Should we be showing solidarity with socialist opposition members whose parties have been banned, or with the Ukrainian state, which has banned them on the pretext that they are all Russian agents? Or with the Ukrainian working class, which now has to negotiate on an individual basis with capitalists in disputes over wages, job protection, and vacation arrangements under trade union law 5371, or with the Ukrainian state, which has enforced this measure?

The question arises: how much solidarity does the German government show when it forces people who have fled Ukraine to return to Ukraine to renew their (travel) passports, knowing full well that men of military age are immediately conscripted, all the while justifying this on the grounds that “fulfilling military service is reasonable”? How much solidarity is there with Ukraine when the German state refuses to grant asylum in Germany and the European Union to Russian soldiers who want to evade the so-called “special operation”, even though this signals to Russian conscientious objectors that they must continue to fight?

From a socialist perspective, how much solidarity is there when the working classes of both states, who lack the money to avoid military service, senselessly massacre each other in this bloody war of position and attrition, with more blood shed each time on the side of the attackers, be it in Kharkiv or Kursk? And is it a sign of solidarity that the West claims to be defending Ukraine’s sovereignty, while at the same time selling off the country’s state-owned property to Western corporations as part of the shock privatization orchestrated by the IMF and Blackrock, thereby depriving the country of the material basis of its sovereignty?

The Ukraine war today is less like World War II and more like World War I. But if 2022 was a 1914 for many, when people thought that they would be “home for Christmas”, then 2024 is a 1916. The dialectic of war is unfolding. The Ukraine war knows no victors, especially not among the lower classes. The demand for ceasefire negotiations followed by peace talks is growing ever stronger in Ukraine. They must be initiated at all costs. A willingness to negotiate must be established on both sides. The initiatives from the Global South have the right approach. In view of the destruction, the military stalemate, the toll in lives lost, and in view of the considerable risk of escalation, Western policy should be building on these.

Translated by Hunter Bolin and Samuel Langer for Gegensatz Translation Collective.