rs21's Long Retreat: A Case Study in How the British Left Lost Ukraine

Eleven Years of Engagement, One Anniversary of Silence

TL;DR

rs21 published some of the sharpest Ukraine analysis on the British left between 2014 and 2024 — explicitly anti-campist, in solidarity with Ukrainian workers, and arguing against the proxy-war framing that dominated the rest of the revolutionary left. In September 2024, at an All Member Assembly, the organisation formally voted to treat the inter-imperialist dimension of the war as predominant, to condemn the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, and to instruct members to oppose USC motions in the trade unions. On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, rs21 published nothing. This article reconstructs how an organisation that knew better ended up here, and what it cost.

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February 24 was the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The start, to be precise, of the fifth year of the war. Across the British revolutionary left, the silence is near-total. The Socialist Worker last mentioned Ukraine on 9 January. The Socialist last published on it on 26 November 2025. Workers Power: 4 September 2025. The Scottish Socialist Voice has not written an article about Ukraine since 27 February 2015¹, one week after the first anniversary of the Maidan revolution, a silence that has now swallowed Crimea, Donbas, the full-scale invasion, Bucha, the liberation of Kherson, and somewhere between half a million and a million casualties.

Today, on the anniversary, only one of the larger organisations on the British revolutionary left has published. Anti-Capitalist Resistance, the Fourth International’s organization in England and Wales, carries a piece on British trade union solidarity with Ukraine: the National Union of Mineworkers, ASLEF and the GMB delivering vehicles and medical equipment to Ukrainian counterparts, the concrete labour movement internationalism that the Comintern once made its founding purpose. It is not a flashy piece. It does not need to be. The act of publishing it today, when almost everyone else has gone quiet², is itself a political statement.

Then there is rs21. Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century: founded in 2013 from the wreckage of the SWP crisis, self-consciously anti-campist, the organisation that published some of the sharpest Ukraine analysis on the British left from 2014 onwards. Today, nothing. But unlike the Scottish Socialist Voice’s decade of unreflective silence, unlike the SWP’s gradual drift back to its proxy-war comfort zone, rs21’s silence is not an absence. It is a conclusion. We know exactly when it was reached, and we know what it cost.

2014: The High-Water Mark

The early rs21 Ukraine writing is, by any standard, impressive. In February 2014, as Yanukovych’s snipers fired into the Maidan, rs21 published reporting that refused both the liberal ‘pro-EU revolution’ framing and the Kremlin-adjacent ‘fascist coup’ narrative that would shortly become dominant across much of the British left. The analysis was materialist: the uprising had deep roots in the Ukrainian working class’s experience of post-Soviet oligarchic capitalism, the far right was real but not hegemonic, and Putin’s intervention was not a response to NATO provocation but an expression of Russian imperial interest.

More significant still was what rs21 published in March 2014 in direct polemic against Counterfire’s position. The article was explicit, argued, and politically courageous. It named precisely what would later destroy the organisation’s coherence on this question: the tendency, always latent in the IST framework rs21 had inherited from the SWP, to treat ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’ as a formula for paralysis rather than independent working-class analysis. Russia’s imperialism matters, the article insisted. We recognise that Russia has been a capitalist and imperialist power under the Tsar, under Stalin, under Khrushchev, under Putin. We side with resistance movements from below against such powers. The article explicitly criticised the Stop the War-adjacent approach for writing off mass subjectivity in the Eastern bloc, argued for building solidarity with Ukrainian socialist and anarchist organisations, and pointed out that applying a 2004 analysis of American power to 2014 simply would not wash.

This was rs21 at its political best. It had escaped the SWP’s intellectual bunker. It was arguing on principle against its own inherited framework’s worst tendencies. It was, in short, doing what a revolutionary organisation should do.

2014–2022: The Years Between

The years between Maidan and the full-scale invasion are not years of sudden collapse. They are years of slow drift, punctuated by genuinely good work. The 2019 interview with political economist Yuliya Yurchenko engaged seriously with Ukrainian class dynamics as comedian-turned-presidential-candidate Volodymyr Zelensky won 73% of the vote on an anti-oligarchy protest wave. The analysis was characteristically sharp: Zelensky was a Trumpist phenomenon in a specific Ukrainian context, a crisis of representation rather than a resolution of it, and no guarantee of progressive change. rs21 was still doing the work of understanding Ukrainian society on its own terms rather than as a function of geopolitical competition.

The 2018 Syria resolution provides a useful comparison point. Like the 2014 Ukraine writing, it explicitly warned against a vulgarised understanding of anti-imperialism which operates on the assumption that imperialism is entirely coterminous with US foreign policy. The warning was still being articulated. But the resolution also contained the contradiction that would metastasise: the capacity to hold correct analytical positions without drawing their strategic consequences. rs21 could see the problem clearly. What it could not always do was act on what it saw.

February 2022: The Invasion and the Statement

rs21’s statement of 25 February 2022, published the day after the tanks crossed the border, is a document in transition. It condemned the Russian invasion. It called for Russian withdrawal. It sent solidarity to the Ukrainian working class. Then it framed the war primarily as driven by imperialist rivalry between NATO powers and the Russian state, opposed economic sanctions, and located the primary agency for stopping the war in mass resistance by ordinary Russians. The seed of what would come is clearly visible: the invasion is condemned, but the framing already positions NATO as co-responsible in ways that would, in subsequent months, provide the theoretical scaffolding for abandoning Ukrainian self-determination.

The response in the comments section was immediate. One reader wrote: “You stand back while Ukraine burns. You should support Ukraine’s fight to defend its right to self-determination.” The reply from an rs21 member explained that they had attended solidarity protests and produced solidarity leaflets. In March 2022 this was still, broadly, true. The organisation had not yet turned against Ukrainian solidarity work. But the theoretical framework of inter-imperialist conflict was already doing its political work, quietly, sentence by sentence.

October 2023: The Dissenting Voice

By October 2023, the political degeneration of rs21’s dominant line was visible enough to provoke an internal restatement of the dual-character analysis. Writing in the wake of the TUC conference debate over military aid to Ukraine, one rs21 member explicitly argued: “Any analysis that focuses too much on the proxy war aspect and does not say enough about the fight for national liberation is mistaken. In what other war for national liberation would we call for the occupied nation to give up its territorial claims to land occupied by the colonial power and to sue for immediate peace?”

The article directly named campism, a form of rooting for the opposite side to the US wherever they are involved in a war, as the error driving the peace-without-preconditions position. It argued that Ukrainian resistance had demonstrated the capacity for rapid territorial recovery, that emphasising the difficulty of liberation at that precise moment could only benefit Russia, and that peace on Russian terms was not peace. It was, in substance, defending positions rs21 had held since 2014. Its publication in October 2023 tells us that those positions were, by that point, no longer the organisation’s settled line. They were a minority view that required articulation against a dominant current. The article reads less like a statement of organisational policy than a rearguard action.

February 2024: The Last Gasp

In February 2024, on the second anniversary of the invasion, a further rs21 article continued to defend what the organisation characterised as its distinctive position: seeing both the struggle for national liberation and rivalry between imperialist powers as driving the war. It named the two dominant positions on the British left and argued for a third course, insisting that ignoring the class differentiation in Ukrainian society and denying the possibility of national self-determination cuts off any possibility of solidarity with Ukrainian workers.

It quoted Ukrainian workers directly. The farmers from Kherson tilling mine-laden soil. The train drivers delivering supplies on run-down trains. The Russian-speaking miners from Kryvyi Rih fighting to protect their hometown. The construction workers from Mykolaiv who clear dangerous rubble to build anew, but struggle to feed their families. This is activist texture, not abstract geopolitics. It is the kind of writing that keeps solidarity concrete and human, that insists the people being killed are not pawns in a great-power chess match but workers with names and trades and specific towns they are defending. Seven months after that article was published, the organisation’s formal position would instruct members to oppose solidarity campaigns in the trade unions.

September 2024: The Capitulation

The motion passed at rs21’s All Member Assembly on 15 September 2024 is a different kind of document from everything that preceded it. It is not analytical. It is declaratory. It announces positions rather than arguing for them. Its central theoretical move, clause 3f, asserting that the inter-imperialist aspect of the war has become predominant in relation to the struggle of Ukrainians against occupation, offers no evidence for the claimed predominance. The assertion simply displaces Ukrainian agency from the analysis. If the war is primarily inter-imperialist, solidarity with Ukrainian resistance becomes, by definition, alignment with one imperialist camp.

Clause 7 is the logical terminus: regardless of the political character of the enemies of British capitalism abroad, it is the duty of socialists in Britain to fight the infernal imperialists at home. This is Karl Liebknecht’s formula applied without Liebknecht’s analysis. Liebknecht wrote the main enemy is at home in 1915 as a challenge to German Social Democrats voting for war credits in a conflict where both sides represented their own ruling classes. He did not write it to justify abandoning oppressed nations to colonial occupation. The grammar is identical. The political content is reversed.

Clause 8 names the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign specifically and calls for its condemnation, for opposition to its motions within trade unions, and for members to cease participating in it. The USC is not a NATO front organisation. It is a campaign that has driven vehicles 2,000 miles to Kharkiv, that has connected British miners to Ukrainian miners, that has published the voices of Ukrainian workers who, as the NUM’s Wayne Thomas put it when he delivered a pickup truck to the Battalion of the Territorial Defence in Lviv, are largely staffed by miners just like ours. To instruct revolutionary socialists to actively oppose this work in the trade unions is not anti-imperialism. It is the opposite of labour internationalism dressed in its clothes.

March 2025: After the Turn

By March 2025, writing on Trump’s Ukraine policy, rs21 had settled into its new position without apparent discomfort. The article argued competently about the structural logic of the US pivot to China, the European defence crisis, Rubio’s Breitbart interview, the implications of American abandonment. It ended with the instruction that the left must side with neither imperialist camp. The Ukrainian working class, whose agency had been defended so clearly in 2014, 2019, and as recently as February 2024, was no longer the subject of the analysis. They had been subsumed into the geopolitical contest between great powers.

Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine is presented as evidence that US support was always instrumental. This is true. But the conclusion drawn, that Ukrainian resistance is therefore merely a function of US imperialism, does not follow. The Vietnamese resistance to American occupation was real even though the Soviet Union supplied weapons. The Algerian FLN’s struggle was real even though it served Soviet geopolitical interests. The instrumentalisation of a liberation struggle by one or another great power does not extinguish the struggle’s independent character. rs21 knew this in 2014. By 2025 it had forgotten it. No: worse than forgotten. It had remembered it clearly enough to restate it as recently as October 2023 and February 2024, and then formally voted to abandon it.

What Happened?

The organisational dynamics matter here. rs21 is a small group, a few hundred members at most, with concentrated weight in certain cities and trade union networks. The period 2022–2024 saw the Gaza solidarity movement become the dominant mobilising force on the British radical left. The political logic of that moment, Western imperialism as the central enemy, arms sales as the target, Stop the War as the organisational framework, created enormous pressure on small left organisations to align. Those that maintained positions distinguishing between Russian imperialism in Ukraine and American imperialism in Gaza found themselves politically isolated from the movement they were embedded in.

The SWP weathered similar pressure by the simple expedient of never having abandoned its campist analysis in the first place. rs21 faced a different problem: it had built its political identity partly on being better than the SWP on precisely these questions. Maintaining that distinction became increasingly costly as the Gaza moment intensified. The September 2024 motion is best read not as a theoretical conclusion but as a political alignment: rs21 choosing to remain inside the Stop the War political universe rather than outside it.

There is also an internal dynamic worth naming. The October 2023 article defending Ukrainian self-determination was written against a current that was already dominant within the organisation. The February 2024 article defending the dual-character analysis was published seven months before a motion that formally repudiated it. This timeline suggests not gradual conversion but organised political pressure, with a minority maintaining internationalist positions on national self-determination against a majority that had, by 2023, effectively already moved to the proxy-war framework. The September 2024 motion formalised what had already become the practical orientation.

The Road Not Taken

Today, on the fourth anniversary, Anti-Capitalist Resistance has published. The piece is on British trade union solidarity with Ukraine: miners delivering trucks to miners, the labour movement internationalism that rs21 once, in its best moments, also practised. ACR is part of the revolutionary socialist movement associated with Lenin, Luxemburg, Mandel, and Trotsky. So, in its theoretical lineage, is rs21. They faced the same pressures, the same Gaza solidarity moment, the same Stop the War gravitational field. They made different choices.

The rs21 trajectory does not end in open pro-Russian politics. The disclaimers are always present: Russia’s invasion is condemned, the Russian peace movement is supported, Ukrainian workers are acknowledged to have suffered. This formal balance is not hypocrisy; it reflects genuine anti-Stalinist instincts that survived the political turn. But a formal condemnation of Russian imperialism that is never translated into solidarity with Ukrainian resistance is not neutrality. It is a politics of verbal symmetry that has material asymmetry as its practical consequence: NATO arms shipments are to be opposed, Ukrainian solidarity campaigns are to be obstructed in the trade unions, and the occupying army is left to operate without the one thing an international socialist movement could actually provide: political delegitimisation among the working class of its own country.

The 2014 rs21 article on Ukraine asked, with analytical precision: what do you expect from a former Russian colony? It is still a good question. The answer, in the fifth year of the war, is that you expect its people to keep fighting. The miners of Kryvyi Rih, the train drivers of Kyiv, the construction workers of Mykolaiv: they are still there, doing what the February 2024 rs21 article correctly said they were doing, holding a front that is also a class front, resisting an occupation that is also a project of national annihilation.

On the fourth anniversary, one British revolutionary organisation published in solidarity with them. rs21, which knew better than almost anyone on the British left what that solidarity required and why it mattered, said nothing. The silence is not accidental. It is the September 2024 motion in practice. And the distance between that motion and the March 2014 polemic against Counterfire is not just a decade of political drift. It is, in miniature, the story of how the British left lost Ukraine.

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Red Mole is a Substack publication providing revolutionary intelligence for activists from a Fourth International perspective.

1. Many thanks to a reader in Canada who pointed out that while the last article in the SSV about the war in Ukraine was in 2015, there have been some fleeting mentions of Ukraine, mostly in articles about austerity in Britain.

2. Among the immense number of smaller groups and websites, there might be more. Ecosocialist Scotland, the Scottish organization in the Fourth International, also published a statement from the British unions. An AI search could not find more, although a reader pointed out the Weekly Worker.