Why does Britain’s Left Struggle to Support Ukraine?

When Diane Abbott was re-admitted into the Labour Party, social media was flooded with videos of her at a ‘peace conference’ in which she described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “The NATO campaign against Russia.” In the same speech, she decried ‘A coup in Syria,’  referencing Bashar Al-Assad losing the Syrian civil war and fleeing to Russia. One has to wonder if there isn’t a tyrant she won’t support, so long as they’re opposed to her idea of ‘The West.’ 

Abbott’s remarks represent a strange phenomenon on the British far-left. Organisations and individuals who claim to be humanitarian and anti-imperialist often come out in support of mass-murdering imperialists. You can see this in the likes of George Galloway, who travelled to Russia in 2025, the Stop the War Coalition and Eddie Dempsey, now the General Secretary of the RMT, one of Britain’s largest trade unions. Dempsey visited occupied Ukraine in 2015 and posed with Russian-backed separatists, joining chants of “The Donbas, the tomb of fascism.” The fact that he is now head of a prominent organisation on the British Left illustrates how common support for Russia is. 

These are the same people who rightly call out Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, Trump’s illegal war against Iran, and they stood against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More often than not, they cite humanitarianism and self-determination as their guiding lights. However, when it comes to Ukraine or Taiwan, they’re either silent, supportive or mealy-mouthed about the legion of crimes against humanity, international bullying and rank imperialism done. 

What is the root of their hypocrisy? I propose a triptych: the Cold War’s shadow, ideological divides, the Iraq War, and last but not least, people becoming convinced by the idea that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.

For figures such as Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and George Galloway, the Cold War was their raison d’etre. Lines were simpler and, although a cursory reading of history shows just how imperialistic the USSR and PRC were (and in the case of the latter, still are), they shared a common core ideology. Despite the Soviet Union’s collapse and China’s abandonment of Marxist economics, many of these Cold War warriors seem to remain stuck in their perception of the world as it was. Post-war NATO expansion is a key grievance for them; nations that were ruled through the systems they proposed couldn’t drop them fast enough and clamoured for NATO membership. So when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, citing NATO expansion, it was vindication. NATO and the West could remain the enemy, forcing Russia to intervene in Ukraine to protect itself from an aggressive West. 

Marxist activist Alex Callinicos, who writes for The Socialist Worker, shares many of those views. He frames the war in Ukraine as a proxy war, cites NATO expansion as a justifiable casus belli and opposes support for Ukraine. However, he at least shows some intellectual honesty when he criticises those on the Left who “look to Russia and China as counterweights to the US.” And warns against it: “If we assign a ‘progressive’ role to America’s rivals, we lose hold of the thread of class struggle.” Despite this, he still writes against Ukraine and frames a potential victory as negative, asking: “the US and its allies react by disarming and dissolving NATO? Of course they wouldn’t.”

Then, you have to revisit the U.S-led invasion of Iraq. Many younger people on the far Left had their political awakening in opposition to the war. The Stop the War coalition, which stands against all support for Ukraine, started in the lead-up to the Global War on Terror, mere weeks after 9/11. From opposing military action in Afghanistan and later Iraq, they have wheezed on, despite these wars ending, in opposing any action by the West. 

While STW condemns the war in Ukraine and calls for a withdrawal of Russian troops, they dedicate most of their energy not towards Russia but towards nations providing any support for Ukraine. Bizarrely, they also oppose non-military measures to support Ukraine such as sanctions on Russia. 

Nobody questions the illegality of the Iraq War; however, here it is used to excuse the illegality of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Both of these ideological fallacies combine into a flavour of campism whereby these individuals see the world as a dichotomy between the imperialist West and those who stand against it. Being locked into this, they see the enemy of their enemy as their friend and move to either defend them or criticise any Western action to stop them, even if that action is to stop imperialism, illegal war or an attempted genocide. 

This isn’t to say that the whole of the Left suffers this condition; the overwhelming majority on the British Left support Ukraine. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign is an example: a strong Labour movement that criticises the West where it deems appropriate, but opposes Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.

However, the headlines keep coming, and if the Left ever wants its foreign policy taken seriously in the UK, it needs to deal with the factions who are stuck replaying the Cold War or the protests against Iraq.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Adambro

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