In Ukraine, today, revolutionaries may find themselves in the same position they were in in WWI and II, and unable to avoid serving in the military of the Ukrainian state. But, that simply defines the nature of the war on Ukraine's part, as simply a war for defence of the capitalist fatherland, as were those previous wars, and so not a war that socialists support! And, writing in relation to the US, Trotsky wrote, in terms that could be used for a revolutionary programme, today, in Ukraine.
“We Bolsheviks also want to defend democracy, but not the kind that is run by the sixty uncrowned kings. First, let’s sweep our democracy clean of capitalist magnates, then we will defend it to the last drop of blood. Are you, who are not Bolsheviks, really ready to defend this democracy? But, you must at least, be able to the best of your ability to defend it so as not to be a blind instrument in the hands of the sixty families and the bourgeois officers devoted to them. The working class must learn military affairs in order to advance the largest possible number of officers from its own ranks.
We must demand that the state, which tomorrow will ask for the workers’ blood, today give the workers the opportunity to master military technique in the best possible way in order to achieve the military objectives with the minimum expenditure of human lives.
To accomplish that, a regular army and barracks by themselves are not enough. Workers must have the opportunity to get military training at their factories, plants and mines at specified times, while being paid by the Capitalists. If the workers are destined to give their lives, the bourgeois patriots can at least make a small material sacrifice.
The state must issue a rifle to every worker capable of bearing arms and set up rifle and artillery ranges for military training purposes in places accessible to the workers.
Our agitation in connection with the war must be as uncompromising in relation to the pacifists as to the imperialists.
This war is not our war, the responsibility for it lies squarely on the Capitalists. But, so long as we are still not strong enough to overthrow them and must fight in the ranks of their army, we are obliged to learn to use arms as well as possible….
Just as every worker, exploited by the Capitalists, seeks to learn as well as possible the production techniques, so every proletarian soldier in the imperialist army must learn as well as possible the art of war so as to be able, when the conditions change to apply it in the interests of the working class.
We are not pacifists. No we are revolutionaries. And we know what lies ahead for us.”
That is a strategy that revolutionaries can apply inside Ukraine, in a war they do not support, but in which they are forced to participate, but, of course, precisely, because it is a war we do not support that gives no reason for socialists outside Ukraine to support that war effort by the provision of arms or any other means, just as there was no reason for US socialists to advocate providing arms and so on, to France or Britain, or Germany or Italy, in WWI and II. And, just as the Bolsheviks continued to oppose the war of the Tsar, in which they had to fight, and from it built the revolutionary cadres in the military that broke from it, and established revolutionary units, turning their guns on the Tsar, and, then on the Provisional Government, so too that should be the stated aim of socialists in Ukraine, and not support for the current reactionary war in defence of the fatherland.
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