The European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU) has denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the very beginning and fully supports the Ukrainian right of self-defence.
The Ukrainian people’s armed resistance is just. It is not taking place as part of military aggression by NATO, the United States or any Western country, but as defence against the declared war aim of Russian president Vladimir Putin: to reconquer the fictitious “Russian world” supposedly lost with the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Since Ukraine’s armed resistance is legitimate, all states that regard themselves as democratic and upholders of law-governed international relations have the responsibility to help the Ukrainian people defeat the Russian invasion.
You’ve probably seen the call to join the big rally in Berlin on November 17.
November 20 will mark 1,000 days since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, cities have been bombed, and over a million civilians have been killed or injured, according to “The Wall Street Journal”.
Our message in Dublin is the same as in London and other cities around the world holding actions: stop the war in Ukraine, withdraw the troops, provide reparations, and free political prisoners!
There are currently around 5,000 political prisoners in Russia, according to OVD-Info, including minors, people with health issues, and those facing ethnic and religious persecution. In the past year alone, over five people have reportedly been killed in prison.
We are taking to the streets this November for an important reason — cold weather is setting in for Ukraine, and its infrastructure has been severely damaged. Together with the London-based Russian Democracy Society, we are raising funds for generators and informing the Irish public about what is happening in Ukraine and Russia and why we demand an end to the war.
On the M1 Podcast, Garrett does stories of interest to those who live up and down the M1. Santry resident Olga Popova who fled Russia in 2021. To her 50,000 tiktok followerers, she is an outspoken critic of the war against Ukraine https://m1.radio.ie
Episode 24- Santry resident fled Russia before the war against Ukraine
Olga Popova and her husband moved to Ireland in 2021 before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They settled in Santry on the northside of Dublin. Her husband was involved in activities protesting against the Russian government and they were prompted to flee after he spent a night in police custody. ‘I was at home with our child, because in Russia, if you go protests you need to be able to run fast’.
The resolution below was recently adopted by a left-wing organisation in Ukraine : Social Movement (Sotsialnyi Rukh).
Here is one of many important statements very relevant to the left in Ireland and elsewhere :
The growing contradictions between the centers of capital accumulation in the world capitalist system will not stop even after the complete destruction of Russian imperialist power. The left in Europe and around the world turned out to be helpless and disoriented when the Russian aggression in Ukraine occurred. Unless the international socialist movement realizes mistakes it has made and builds a new, truly internationalist cooperation and coordination, we simply have no chance of preventing the growth of inter-imperialist struggle in the future.
Resolution: The War and the Future of Ukraine and the Left Movement
The people of Ukraine have been facing hard challenges, yet they have proven their ability to fight for the right to decide on their own fate, and their determination to defend the country and to end the war as soon as possible. The authorities and representatives of market-fundamentalist ideology, together with big business, keep pushing through an economic model focused on benefiting a minority at the expense of the welfare of the absolute majority
The people of Ukraine have been facing hard challenges, yet they have proven their ability to fight for the right to decide on their own fate, and their determination to defend the country and to end the war as soon as possible. The authorities and representatives of market-fundamentalist ideology, together with big business, keep pushing through an economic model focused on benefiting a minority at the expense of the welfare of the absolute majority. In this model, workers are completely subservient to the will of their employers, while social and regulatory functions of the state are abolished for the sake of “business needs”, “competition” and “free market”.
Speculating about the identity of spies is a largely useless activity unless the secret operator has been unmasked. For example in Ireland, examining the profiles of a few high-profile unmaksed British spies – Freddie Scappaticci, Seán O’Callaghan and Denis Donaldson – the vast majority of the people who came across these informers never guessed anything was wrong until the unmasking.
Pavel Rubtsov/Pablo Gonzalez is an unmasked Russian spy. We do not yet know how much damage he did, how many lives he betrayed, how many people lost their lives, how many lives were ruined, because of the services he offered to Putin’s far-right racist régime.
An important sub-plot in this story concerns members of the international anti-Ukrainian left – including the former Irish members of the European Parliament Clare Daly and Mick Wallace – who associated themselves with campaigns for the release of Rubtsov/Gonzalez after he was detained by Polish state security forces who believed (correctly, it transpires) that their prisoner was a Putin spy.
After Rubtsov returned to Russia as part of a prisoner-exchange he was personally greeted by President Vladimir Putin. The case against the Russian spy had become overwhelming, but ex Irish MEP Clare Daly still peddled a false cover-story :
Far-rightists all over Europe (including Ireland) regularly back Putin’s Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some on the left identify with these awful politics. Here is a case study from Britain.
Nearly three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and a decade after the war began, a small band of so-called anti-fascists took to the streets of London and Glasgow to demand “no more British arms to Ukraine.”
We say “so-called”, because the “International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity” demo shared more in common with far-right disinformation merchants and conspiracy theorists than the left-wing workers’ movements that stand with Ukraine against Russian aggression.
The demo was advertised in the Morning Star newspaper, in an advert which demanded “Zelensky must go!”. The optics of a movement that declares itself to be anti-imperialist but calling for regime change in a sovereign state did not seem to matter. This is a group that is happy to parrot Russian disinformation while ignoring Ukrainian voices and lives.
BORIS KAGARLITSKY INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN
On February 13, 2024, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation sentenced prominent Russian socialist, anti-war activist and author Boris Kagarlitsky to five years jail for ‘justifying terrorism’.
This campaign exists to win his freedom and that of all other antiwar prisoners in Russia.
During the interview Cristina asks Ilya about Pablo Gonzalez (real name Pavel Rubtsov ) who was accused of espionage in Poland. See postscript about an Irish connection at the end of this fascinating interview.
Ilya Yashin—Interview with Cristina Mas, Ara, September 30, 2024
Ilya Yashin is a Russian opposition politician who was released from prison on August 1, in the prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States. Since his exile in Germany, he has been touring several European cities to reach out to the Russian diaspora, which has taken him to Barcelona. Yashin, now 41, was jailed in 2022 for criticizing the invasion of Ukraine on his YouTube show. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing the Butxa massacre. He is now free thanks to the largest prisoner exchange of the Cold War, in which sixteen Russian political prisoners and U.S. citizens Evan Gershkovitx and Paul Whelan were exchanged for prisoners in the West claimed by Russia, including Spain’s Pablo Gonzalez, accused of espionage, and Vadim Krasikov, who shot a man in the head to death in a Berlin park on Moscow’s orders.
Carola Rackete, a left-wing German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) with a high profile, supports Ukrainian resistance against Russian Imperialism.
Carola Rackete is a consistent anti-imperialist and is also an ecosocialist activist. Here is Carola’s Wikipedia entry :
Rackete participated in several research expeditions to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and is co-founder of the Antarctic Rights initiative. She also supported the Extinction Rebellion movement and took part in forest protests in Sweden, as well as the occupations of the Hambach Forest and the Dannenrod Forest in Germany. Between 2016 and 2019, she occasionally volunteered for non-governmental sea rescue organisations in the Mediterranean.[2] In June 2019, she was arrested for docking a migrant rescue vessel without authorization in the port of Lampedusa, Italy. The custodial judge considered Rackete’s actions as justified because she had a duty to save lives at sea and ruled that Rackete should not have been arrested. In 2021, the pending investigation was formally dismissed, since the state prosecutor didn‘t see reason to proceed to court.[3]
A newspaper acting as the mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Russian imperialism (Junge Welt) launched a vicious campaign against Carola Rackete, who, as a leftist member of the EU parliament, agreed to a resolution supporting the Ukrainian resistance.
When you listen to this June 25 car-crash interview with former Leicester South Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth, you would be forgiven for thinking he was a member of the far-right racist party, Reform.
Jonathan Ashworth's car crash interview on returning asylum seekers to their country of origin
Jonathan Ashworth, "Rather than sending flights to Rwanda, we're going to be sending flights to the countries these people came from"
Shockat Adam was not alone. Five pro-Gaza independent candidates (including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North) are members of the new Westminster parliament :
Tomás Ó Flatharta 