On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 10:31 PM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > Russia's aim was to take over the entire country. They were marching to > Kiev in 2022. If an army is occupying a country with the aim of > incorporating it into their empire, then this is obviously a violation of > national self determination.
The Russians invaded Ukraine not to " to take over the entire country...with the aim of incorporating it into their empire ” but to replace the hostile government in Kiev with a friendly one. This was not an historically unique action. When a country with the military means to do so feels threatened by a hostile power or alliance which establishes a forward base on its border, it will act preemptively when diplomacy breaks down. If a Canadian central government were to forcefully quash a pro-American separatist movement in Alberta with the improbable assistance of Russia and China which encouraged and provided it with massive economic, military, and intelligence assistance, it would provoke a US invasion and likely without any prior attempt to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. The US would proceed to depose the anti-American government in Ottawa and restore a friendly one much as Russia tried to do without success at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Moreover, it is not only capitalist states which can be expected to react in this way. Much has been said about how Lenin and the Bolsheviks promoted the right of national self-determination but they not treat it as an inviolate principle. The Red Army invaded Ukraine in 1918 to depose the government of the recently-elected Rada in Kiev which was repressing pro-Bolshevik forces in alliance with the Whites. The Rada was allied with the Central Powers who promptly intervened to expel the Red Army. Much to the chagrin of Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, the Rada delegates were seated alongside the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. When the German and Austro-Hungarian empires subsequently lost the war, the Red Army returned to Ukraine to defeat the counter-revolutionary forces headed by Petlura and then rolled on across the border into newly-independent Poland in an unsuccessful effort to replace Pilsudski’s bourgeois nationalist government. While I don’t take sides in wars between capitalist powers and instead call for an immediate cessation of the fighting in which the working class has no interest and suffers all of the costs, as it does today in Ukraine, I would have supported the Red Army invasion of Ukraine and Poland in the threatening circumstances which faced the Bolsheviks a little more than a century ago. Any reservations I might have had about the invasion then would not have arisen from abstract moral or legal principles but would have been strategic, relating to the invasion’s likely outcome and the wider interests of the international working class, which is precisely how the question was properly framed within the divided Bolshevik leadership. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40745): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40745 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117833155/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
