RUSSIA’S invasion of Ukraine is shocking. But it is not surprising. If any war has been telegraphed for years in advance it is this one.

Your columnist published a book in 1997 predicting that if a third world war were to break out, it would be in and over Ukraine. Such warnings were not taken seriously, since the world was then basking in the triumph of capitalism and its fraudulent promise of a new world order of peace.

Russia was in a position similar to Germany after the 1919 Versailles peace — diminished, in economic turmoil and treated with scorn by the US.

It was easy to see that Russia’s prostration would not last forever and that leaders of the imperialist West might come to regret their casual breaking of promises not to expand their military power eastwards as the USSR collapsed.

But that was the peak of the unipolar moment. The US could apparently do as it pleased. The Project for a New American Century — the people who promoted and eventually organised the 2003 Iraq invasion — set about ensuring there was no reintegration of the former “Soviet space” as one of the key objectives of US policy, lest Russia regain great power status.

The global hegemony of the US aided by its faithful British satrap was many things but it was not a “rules-based order,” to use the phrase continually invoked today. Ask the people of Serbia, of Iraq or Libya.

The injustices of Versailles did not excuse Hitler. Nor do the excesses of US power justify Putin’s war today (although comparisons to the Nazi dictator are an infantile if inevitable trope of war propaganda).

The invasion of Ukraine has led to the usual horrors of war — civilian deaths, ruined cities, shattered infrastructure, huge columns of refugees. It has been justified by arguments that are brazenly imperialistic, including threats to terminate Ukrainian statehood on the grounds that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, living in large part on traditional Russian lands. This may not be the imperialism of the US-led world bloc, but it is the logic of empire.

There is certainly an issue concerning the rights, including the right to self-determination, of Russians caught in a Ukraine which after the 2014 Maidan coup has increasingly denied their culture and identity and celebrated Nazi collaborators and Holocaust-mongers instead. But as Russian socialist Boris Kagarlitsky sagely noted, many people in Kharkiv may be happy to be governed by Russians, but not to be bombed by them.

For those seeking more conclusive clues to Putin’s motivation, his extended attack on Bolshevism and Lenin for enshrining the principle of self-determination in the Soviet constitution ought to be sufficient.

The demand for Ukrainian neutrality is a firmer one. Nato has proved over the last quarter century that it is not only an instrument of US power, but that it can be deployed in aggressive and illegal wars, from Yugoslavia in 1999 onwards. No Russian government, however democratic, could be indifferent to Nato’s expansion to its borders. But this conflict is only likely to strengthen Nato politically across Europe.

The Ukrainian government, under pressure from the US and hostage to neo-fascist nationalists, failed to take the simple steps that could have averted war, by embracing some form of secure neutrality and permitting autonomy in the country’s east. That is no good reason for solving the problems by war, however.

Unlike the conflict in Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin’s actions today can hardly be seen as reactive. The former war began with Georgia assaulting the South Ossetians and the latter with the overthrow of the elected president in Kiev.  

Today, Putin appears to have simply become exasperated by faltering diplomacy and turned to violence instead.  

His objectives certainly do not include restoring the Soviet Union. If the Russian president wanted to do that, he could start by nationalising oligarchic property in Russia. That seems about as likely as Boris Johnson’s rancid government making Britain either inhospitable to the global super-wealthy or hospitable to refugees.

The tens of thousands of brave Russians demonstrating against war probably don’t want to restore the USSR either. But they are campaigning for peace against the depredations of the oligarchic regime “at home” and that is a start. They deserve our solidarity.

Our enemy too remains at home. British diplomacy has contributed much to this demarche and nothing to its resolution, even compared to the governments of France or Germany. Today, when Johnson or Liz Truss say that Putin “must lose” they are making clear that they are ready to fight to the last drop of Ukrainian blood in pursuit of their own imperialist agenda. They are skilled only in their manufacture of a war psychosis, worse today than at the time of the Iraq invasion.

We contribute to peace by challenging that policy and its bipartisan proponents. The anti-war movement demands an end to Nato expansion and a military-political de-escalation, alongside the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops.  

Peace is not Labour’s agenda, however. Keir Starmer has also found an enemy at home — it is the anti-war movement which correctly exposed the lies and illusions of British social democracy over Afghanistan and Iraq. There will be a further vindication over the authoritarian imperialist leading Labour.

This is a war which stands on the ruins of working-class defeat. Tory war hawk Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the Commons defence committee, penned an article attributing today’s aggression to the “Red Army” as if 1991 had never happened.

When the Red Army had to fight its way into Ukraine in 1944, it numbered hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in its ranks, from private soldiers to generals. It was hailed as a liberator. It had on its banners the image of the Lenin who Putin despises.

You can’t cross the same river twice. It seems utopian to urge a revival of working-class internationalism and socialist power as the best answer to the present crisis. But there is not an obviously better one.