The idea that Russia could take the whole of Ukraine is absurd, or, at least, to try to do so would destroy it. It did not even take the whole of Georgia in 2008, when it could easily have done so, when it responded to genocidal attacks by the Georgian state on the ethnic Russians in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Doing the same thing with majority Russian areas, elsewhere, is the most that Russia could hope to achieve. Statements by the Ukrainian regime, and others, that Russia would move on to Poland and other European states are ridiculous. This is the same Russian state that, only a few months ago, these same people were saying was going to be rolled up, and sent packing even from Eastern Ukraine. Now they want us to believe that this same Russia is capable of rolling over the whole of Europe, which even the much more powerful USSR never attempted! It is just silly imperialist war-mongering.
In terms of the actual Marxist objection to supporting a position of “defence of the fatherland”, in respect of Ukraine, the USC throw up the Aunt Sallies ready to be knocked down, though the social pacifist arguments of Murray and the StW, facilitate them in that venture. The USC write,
“All of this ought to be obvious to socialists and internationalists. Yet the character of the Zelenskiy government, the influence of the far right, the role of the US and NATO and a range of other issues are frequently raised as reasons to reject assistance to Ukraine’s need to resist its invasive imperialist neighbour.”
What should be obvious to socialists and internationalists is that we do not promote the idea of bourgeois defencism, of defence of the fatherland, but the position of revolutionary defeatism, of “The Main Enemy Is At Home”. Instead, the USC present bourgeois-democratic demands for national self-determination as being socialist demands, and they avoid discussion of the Marxist position by, instead, focusing on these ephemeral and superficial issues of the political complexion of the Ukrainian government and so on.
The USC, are keen to present the glowing liberal and democratic credentials of Zelensky's government and to defend it against charges that it has banned political parties, and attacked workers rights and trades unions. In other words, they are left acting as apologists for a right-wing, reactionary government whose actions, were it not involved in this war, any decent socialist would be condemning! Indeed, before the war many liberals, even, did condemn!
What the USC are doing is identical to the role of Stalinists in the 1920's who sought to deny the true nature of the Kuomintang to whom they were subordinating Chinese Communists, and which Stalin even allowed into the Comintern, at the same time that the Left were being expelled from it, and who were attacking the disastrous line of the Stalinists. Within weeks, the KMT were slaughtering Chinese communists in their thousands in Shanghai. (See: Trotsky - Lessons of The Chinese Revolution)
It is the same attitude that the Stalinists adopted towards the liberals in the Spanish Popular Front - despite the fact that the bourgeoisie those liberals were supposed to represent had all gone over to Franco - and, in turn that the centrists of the CNT and POUM adopted towards the role of the Popular Front, and the Stalinists within it. The result was the same, the Popular Front Republican government soon turned on those centrist and revolutionary forces, and acted as the hangman of the revolution, allowing the victory of Franco. (See: Trotsky - The Spanish Revolution and also Trotsky - The Third International After Lenin, and Trotsky - Challenge of The Left Opposition, Writings 1923-29).
Their apologia amounts to saying only that its not as anti-working class as some of its detractors, in StW, present it as being, but not absolutely terrible is not the same as still not being terrible, let alone, being progressive, and even less being “truly revolutionary”, as described by the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, as the condition for socialists offering support. It doesn't even amount to the equivalent of saying that Starmer's Labour is a lesser-evil than Boris Johnson's Tories, but more like Nigel Farage is not as bad as Nick Griffin! This is the kind of lesser-evilist nonsense that these politics of apologia, and popular-frontism, based on the idea that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", lead you into. It is the epitome of idiot anti-imperialism.
And, indeed, its not just socialists that have attacked the policies of Zelensky's government. Ukrainian trades unionists themselves have pointed to its anti-working class policies, as have EU based liberals and reformists, and for the USC to try to claim that, at least those unions are free to vent that opposition, itself, also, now limited, is rather like defending the Tories anti working-class politics by noting that unions in Britain are free to protest about them! But, as set out above, the whole argument is specious, because the Marxist opposition to bourgeois-defencism is based not upon the degree to which any given government is reactionary, conservative or progressive, but on the fact that the state itself is a capitalist state! That the USC cannot deny, and their apologia, here, amounts only to quibbling over just how reactionary and anti-working class Zelensky's government is.
We've seen it before, when many of the same elements tried to pretty up the clerical-fascists and jihadists allied to US imperialism in Libya. Indeed, large sections of the Left made the same mistake in relation to the Khomeiniites role during the 1979, Iranian Revolution against the Shah.
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