These are pictures of children killed by the almost daily Ukrainian Army shelling of Donetsk City since 2014 on display in the Arbat in Moscow. There are more than 300 of these children. They are not reported here. The GMB Motion writes them out of history. Photo: Dan Kovalik

When you think through what it says, it becomes clear that support for the GMB Motion to the TUC on the Ukraine war means support for two things that contradict everything the trade union movement stands for.

1. The ethnic cleansing of the Donbass and Crimea

2. An unlimited commitment to a war without end and/or an escalation which could lead to a nuclear confrontation that will kill all of us.

To be precise about it:

1 Ethnic Cleansing

The Motion’s point 1 calling for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014 is not compatible with point 3, calling for a peaceful end to the conflict that secures the territorial integrity of Ukraine and carries the support of the Ukrainian people. This is because it eliminates the people of the Donbass and Crimea from the narrative. As we can see from the image above, this is because there has not been one undivided “Ukrainian people” since 2014.

There has been a civil war.

The success of the Maidan movement in 2014 in overthrowing President Yanukovych, backed by the US, EU, finished off any chance of sustaining the binational state in Ukraine balanced between Russia and “the West” that had been viable until then. The people of the Donbass and Crimea rebelled against the overthrow of a President they had voted for. The decision by the new regime in Kyiv to repress them by force was prevented in Crimea by a popularly supported Russian annexation, but the bombing of Donetsk City by the Ukrainian Air Force in May 2014 began a civil war that had already cost 12,000 lives before the Russian intervention in February 2022.

This eye witness account of that day from the Donetsk Anti Fascist site is from EIena Hovhannisyan, a biology teacher:

“At that time we kept up with the news from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. We already knew how people had been martyred in Odessa, Mariupol and Krasnoarmeisk.

I had forebodings of near disaster. It was already hovering over us, but we did not think how tragic, long, brutal, hopeless the events would be. Sometimes it seemed that it was just a bad dream, that I would wake up and everything would be like before. But no. It is an illusion that the war will not touch you. It will touch everyone, sooner or later. We were simply the first to be in the epicentre.

And May 26th I will always remember. The warm, sunny weather and the roar of planes in the sky. From the balcony on the side of the airport black smoke could be seen, you could hear explosions constantly. The first shelling, deaths, destruction, grief and pain. Since that day, there would be no peace in Donetsk for another nine years. But we didn’t know it then.

And that day was endless, filled with horror and pain. The phones were literally ringing off the hook – everyone was trying to find out what happened to their loved ones, whether they were alive or not. In the evening my son arrived from work; his office was a couple of blocks from the station. He told about the horror in the city, about the dead woman vendor from the station market, about the very young guy who worked as a valet. He was killed by shrapnel from a missile fired by a Ukrainian helicopter.

People were falling, screaming, crying, calling for help. Passers-by tried to save the wounded, car alarms howled. The railway station area in any city is the most crowded place. In Donetsk on Privokzalnoye there are markets, shops, banks, the area was teeming with life. They say helicopters flew so low that you could see the pilots in the cockpit. And these pilots also saw that they hit peaceful people.

This was not done by some Hitlerites, but by Ukrainians, with whom we lived in the same country. May 26 was the day that turned everything upside down. There is no and will not be our forgiveness for Ukraine. And there will be no return. (My emphasis).

Were Kyiv a regime that was a target for the US rather than an auxiliary, does anyone doubt that this action would have been universally condemned in our media as that of “a regime that bombs its own people”?

As a result, 50,000 people from Donetsk and Luhansk have been fighting the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Donbass militia since then. They see themselves as Russians, not Ukrainians. The demand of the Donbass Republics from 2014 onwards was to be incorporated into the Russian Federation, on the same lines as Crimea was in 2014. And that has now happened.

So, for the people who live there, the Russian troops are not occupiers, they are their army. The restoration of the 2014 borders would be over their dead bodies, or see them made refugees. Delegates should note that a third of the people who have fled the fighting have fled to Russia (the largest single destination of any country).

The threat of ethnic cleansing in Crimea and Donbass is not a claim by RT or a “Putin talking point”. It is what the Ukrainian leadership say themselves.

In this interview with Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of military Intelligence, is quite clear about what would happen if Ukraine’s war aims were achieved (starting 36:57 minutes in). He is quite blunt that “victory” in the sense of military reoccupation would only be the start of a “difficult” “multi year process” of “reintegrating” territories with a population that is actually hostile and does not want to be reoccupied. Three million people with, as he puts it “a completely different view of the world”.

Budanov states that people with an “altered psyche” who can be “re educated” should be; without specifying what should be done with those that can’t, though “physical elimination” is a phrase he uses “for people with blood on their hands”; so, anyone who fought in the militia. He says that this will have to be done with a carrot and a stick, as the two only work together; and with a “firm hand”. This will be “hard work”.

Many words can be used to describe this scenario. “Liberation” for those 3 million people is not one of them. If you believe in self determination, you can’t support this.

If the people who live in the Crimea and Donbass are to be counted as part of “the Ukrainian people”, their wishes have to be taken into account in any settlement. The imposition of the 2014 territorial borders on them, as this motion advocates, is incompatible with a “peaceful end to the conflict” capable of carrying the support of ALL of the people of pre 2014 Ukraine.

So, the Motion should be rejected on this basis alone.

2. War without end – or to an end for all of us?

Even if you discount those people and their rights, committing to continue or escalate the war until they are crushed, if it is to be taken as meaning what it says, also has to take into account the costs of doing so. There are two levels to this.

1 Crimea

Actually trying to reconquer Crimea, as opposed to engaging in rhetoric about it, is seen by US military thinkers as being likely to cross Russia’s nuclear red lines.

So, support for this motion as it is written means being prepared to risk doing that .Supporters of the Motion should think through what that means.

The danger here is not simply what the Russians would do in this scenario, but what the Americans think they might do; and therefore what action they would take themselves.

If they suspect the Russians might launch nuclear weapons, there is no limit to how rapidly this could escalate. That’s the case even if the minimum gesture were initially deployed – like the sort of very high altitude explosion above the battlefield that NATO envisaged using as an initial warning shot above a conventional Warsaw Pact break through into central Europe during the Cold War. Even in that sort of case, is hard to imagine that NATO response would be to back off. Games of military chicken tend to escalate, especially with no time to find a mutually face saving climb down, and, with the only acceptable political leaders people who are “prepared to press that red button” we would all be standing on very thin ice indeed at that point.

And, if the the threshold were to be crossed, you have to recognise that US nuclear war fighting doctrine is based on an all out “first strike” to prevent retaliation. Which means acting fast, which makes anyone in its sights doubly nervous. As the Russians have over 3,000 nuclear missiles dispersed all across their territory, such a first strike would have to be huge, widespread and comprehensive. It would also have to smash cities, to knock out control and command centres. As long ago as the early 1960s, the Pentagon’s estimate of the impact of such a strike would be that it would immediately kill upwards of 600 million people, many of them “collateral damage” in nearby countries.

That’s bad enough, but studies done in the 1980s showed that a strike on that scale would cause a “nuclear winter”, as debris from city wide firestorms would be flung too high into the atmosphere to be rained out, thereby blocking sunlight and causing a catastrophic drop in global temperatures by up to 10C; devastating plant life and therefore harvests for years. It would therefore be suicidal for all of human civilisation; even if they got away with it and there were no direct retaliation. This is explored in depth here.

So, there are two reasons why Crimea should not be forced back into Ukraine and therefore the Motion should be rejected.

1 The people who live there don’t want it to happen.

2 The attempt to do so could lead to a nuclear war that will kill most, if not all, of us.

2 Donbass

The first reason also applies to the Donbass. The second may not. But, even if it doesn’t, the costs in men and material of trying to reconquer it are and will be appalling.

The current Ukrainian offensive is effectively stalled. Thousands of men have been killed to regain villages in no man’s land that barely approach the main Russian defences. A large proportion of the “game changing” NATO supplies of Leopard tanks and Bradley armoured vehicles have been destroyed in the attempt.

At the moment, the Kyiv government is launching a further mass conscription drive. Men from 18 to 60 have not been allowed to leave the country, and they can be called up at any time. Many are actively reluctant and are having to be effectively press ganged to fight. Kyiv has just banned 16 – 18 year olds form leaving the country too, indicating that they too may be called up. A truly horrific prospect.

Even with mass conscription on this scale, the prospect of “winning” is nil. The prospect of thousands and thousands more men dying is certain.

That is what supporting a continuation of the war amounts to.

Another reason for the Motion to be rejected.

We need a peace deal instead that will save lives and respect the people on both sides of the Ukrainian divide, allow them to put their shattered lives back together; and both sides of the European divide too, as there can be no “just and enduring peace” without a mutual security arrangement that allows everyone to live without feeling threatened, and that has to include the Russians.

Smaller points

The Motion tries to make an analogy with support for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s without noting

a) that the internationalists who went to fight with the Republican side in Spain were from the trade union movement and the Left. Whereas a significant proportion of the people who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine since 2014 have been from the far right.

They look like this. Photo taken in November 2014 in front of Azov Battalion HQ in Mariupol featuring Oleg Pyenya, a volunteer who posted it on his VK page, who can also be seen here in front of another Nazi flag.

A further difference with Spain in the 1930s is that at that time the British government maintained an arms embargo against the Republic, which mostly received support from the Soviet Union. Today, the British government is very keen to supply Kyiv with arms, with BAE systems opening an office in Kyiv as it has, as the Guardian puts it “benefited from increased defence spending as a result of the conflict”. The United States moreover is spending almost as much on this war as it did when fighting directly for itself in Vietnam – which makes it the major protagonist, just using the Ukrainians to do the fighting.

NATO is not explicitly mentioned in the Motion, but no Motion concerned about “imperialist aggression” deserves support if it actively encourages its intervention, as this one does.

NATO is the military core of global imperialism, responsible for 62% of global arms spending (outspending the Russians by 19 to 1) and the deaths of 4.5 million people in the last 20 years of “war on terror”. It is not a defensive human rights organisation. Its refusal to even negotiate about mutual security arrangements with Russia led directly to the war, perhaps because it has a strategic aim to partition Russia into controllable fragments at the end of it.

b) The Motion argues that trade unions in Russia are banned; whereas there are 23 million trade union members there. The main Federation was considered an acceptable affiliate of the ITUC until it suspended itself in February 2022. The Motion also, however, notes that trade unions in Ukraine do not have “full …labour rights”. In fact, since 2014, Ukraine’s labour standards have diverged from compliance with the norms that would be required for EU membership; as more and more of the economy has been privatised, laws have been passed under the tutelage of the IMF and land has been bought up by Western agribusinesses like Monsanto. The reconstruction Plan for post war Ukraine hands the task over to Blackrock, which will sell the country wholesale into a neo liberal dystopia.

For all these reasons the GMB Motion should be rejected.

A reconquest of Donetsk or Crimea by Kyiv backed by NATO, or NATO with Ukrainians doing the fighting, would require massive ethnic cleansing because the people who live there don’t want to be part of Ukraine.

Attempting to do it will cause hundreds of thousands more deaths or a risk of nuclear war.

The TUC should not cheer this on.