{"id":27179,"date":"2026-04-18T12:44:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T10:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=27179"},"modified":"2026-04-18T15:30:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T13:30:29","slug":"ukraine-imperialism-and-the-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/?p=27179","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine, imperialism and the left"},"content":{"rendered":"

Volodymyr Ishchenko, International Socialism<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As for the question of NATO, this is a question not so much of Ukraine\u2019s incorporation into NATO, but of Russia\u2019s exclusion\u2014a point Putin himself emphasises quite often.<\/p>\n

This is apparent, for example, from recently de-classified transcripts of conversations between Putin and George W Bush in the 2000s. In a recent article in the Washington Quarterly, political scientist Deborah Boucoyannis marshals evidence that NATO\u2019s eastward expansion was not driven by fear of a Russian military threat as Russia was widely seen as quite weak in the 1990s. Rather, she demonstrates that this expansion was about filling the \u201csecurity vacuum\u201d left in Eastern Europe after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In addition, local elites looked to anchor themselves within the Western civilisation, fearing that their own plebeian classes, hit hard by post-socialist transition, might become politically receptive to Russia.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

If Western corporations had been allowed to acquire ownership of Russian oil and gas in the 1990s, Russia would have been an earlier member of NATO than Poland. But this didn\u2019t happen. The integration of the Russian economy and political system into Euro-Atlantic structures would have required much more profound change than was the case in Eastern Europe, which took a different \u201ctransition\u201d path after 1989, including opening themselves to transnational capital.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m trying to point to the material interests lying behind this conflict, not just the interests of the Ukrainian oligarchs.<\/p>\n

If you think about the political dimension in the post-Soviet countries, we have to ask who organises the interests of the political capitalists. They\u2019re not organised in a liberal-democratic way. They are organised by figures such as Putin and Lukashenko. Ukraine had to choose between the EU or the Eurasian Union. This was about economic interests. The EU offered a free trade zone that disadvantages advanced Ukrainian industries as these are uncompetitive against the stronger European corporations.<\/p>\n

It was just those industries that Putin aimed to re-integrate into a Eurasian bloc of ex-Soviet states\u2014Belarus, Kazakhstan and, importantly, Ukraine\u2014in order to form a stronger sovereign centre of capital accumulation in the post-Soviet region. Ukraine was a vital part of the former Soviet economy, particularly in machine-building, aviation, munitions, missiles and armaments. These were the most advanced components of the remaining Soviet industry in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

So, an analysis of political capitalism is a way of identifying the central contradiction driving conflict on both the domestic and the international level.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Volodymyr Ishchenko, International Socialism: As for the question of NATO, this is a question not so much of Ukraine\u2019s incorporation into NATO, but of Russia\u2019s exclusion\u2014a point Putin himself emphasises quite often. This is apparent, for example, from recently de-classified … Weiterlesen →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27179"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27183,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27179\/revisions\/27183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wehle.ru\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}