Let's take some of the statements Paul makes in relation to the Ukrainian government. He says that, in 2014, the people of Ukraine staged a “revolution” against “a pro-Russian puppet government”. Well, you don't have to take Putin's narrative on this as an alternative view. You can read what Wikipedia has to say.
Wikipedia is not some Putin mouthpiece, nor even some lefty, anti-US/anti-NATO website, but a liberal-bourgeois source of information. Anyone trying to claim that citing what it says is somehow acting as an agent of Putin, is clearly lying, and betraying their own position of acting as apologists for NATO. It sets out the history of how the pro-Russian Yanukovich was elected in 2004, in what was widely held to be a rigged election, and who was replaced by the heavily western backed and financed Yuschenko and Tymoschenko. It is Tymoschenko who a Washington Post article cites, from a leaked phone call, calling for all Russians to be killed and wiped out with nuclear weapons!
In the election of, 2010, Yanukovich won against Tymoshenko, in an election that was closely monitored by international observers from the OSCE, EU and other bodies and found to be a “fair and an accurate reflection of voters' intentions by all international agencies observing the election including the OSCE and PACE.” It was this freely elected government that Paul then describes as “a pro-Russian puppet government”.
The revolution that Paul talks about has many similarities with the January 6th coup that Paul opposed in the US. The difference is that the coup in Ukraine, was actually heavily backed by the US state, and was successful, whereas the fascists in the US were opposed by the US state, and failed. In recent weeks, the western media has had lots of reports of supposed Russian plans to install a puppet government in Kyiv. But, the plans of the US State Department, including its listing of names of Ukrainian politicians it wanted in different jobs, have been public knowledge since the 2014 coup was undertaken. Wikipedia cites the phone conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
“Nuland: "I don't think Klitsch (Klitschko) should go into the government. I don't think it's necessary, I don't think it's a good idea."
Pyatt: "Just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff."
Nuland: "I think Yats (Yatsenyuk) is the guy who's got the economic experience the governing experience. I just think Klitsch going in… he's going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it's just not going to work. We want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing."
Nuland was also recorded in the same conversation saying, "F... the EU". Dismissively referring to slow-moving European efforts to address political paralysis and a looming fiscal crisis in Ukraine.”
So much for the US and NATO respect for Ukraine's independence and self-determination, as they determined, to the smallest details, who should be ministers in their Ukrainian puppet government!
The fact is that, given his idealist and subjectivist analysis, Paul is led to side with Ukraine, in order to oppose the greater evil of Putin and Russia. Of course, its possible to oppose Putin and Russia, without siding with Ukraine. That was the point that Trotsky made in relation to the Balkan Wars. It was not necessary to deny the atrocities committed by the Ottomans, but opposing them, did not require socialists to then support the Russian liberal interventionists, or to deny the atrocities committed by those liberal interventionists, or by the Bulgars and others fighting against the Ottomans.
As socialists we do not have to choose sides in that way, we do not have to view the world in purely stylised black and white terms, making my enemy's enemy my friend, or choosing to side with a bunch of reactionaries only because, in the particular instance, they are not quite as reactionary as their opponents! In a war between bourgeois states, Marxists do not have to side with one bourgeois camp or the other, because we are opponents of both, and partisans of the independent, third camp of the proletariat.
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