DIVISIONS over Ukraine were visible over the weekend’s Munich Security Conference — inside and outside the venue.
Ten thousand rallied for peace talks and against Nato in the Bavarian capital’s Konigsplatz; in the same city’s Odeon Plaza, another big demo called for more arms to Ukraine.
Inside, no Nato country called for peace talks.
That role was left to China’s Wang Yi, who called on Europe to assert its “strategic autonomy” and build a framework for “lasting peace” despite the efforts of “those... who might have strategic goals larger than Ukraine ... [who] don’t care about the life and death of Ukrainians or the harms to Europe.” Those who paint Beijing as a cheerleader for Moscow should note that Wang proposed talks based on the UN Charter and respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
But there are clear distinctions between the attitudes of Nato states.
Ukraine’s latest wish list, with demands for cluster bombs and phosphorus munitions, had even Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock refer to the need to abide by international law, while French President Emmanuel Macron warned against trying to push the war onto Russian soil.
That contrasts with Britain, whose Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pushed for delivery of fighter aircraft despite German and even US misgivings, and Poland, which also wants to ramp up the flow of arms.
Justifications for this policy are based on opposite assessments of the situation on the ground: Boris Johnson says Kiev is winning and needs help for a final push; in Warsaw President Andrzej Duda says without more weapons it will soon have to capitulate.
This alone indicates how unserious is their commitment to peace. Either peace talks are inappropriate because Ukraine is winning or because it is losing.
A similar indifference to detail applies to the push for indiscriminate weapons supplies to Ukraine backed by all main parties in Parliament and some in the labour movement.
Last year, the US cautioned against sending tanks and aircraft to Ukraine both for fear of escalation and because the amount of training required to operate them would delay their effectiveness: it said Russian-made weaponry held by former eastern bloc states was more helpful because Ukrainian soldiers were already trained to use it.
The clamour for Western weaponry now tells us that Nato is bedding in for an indefinitely prolonged conflict — and that the supply of weapons is as driven by the production interests of the arms industry as by concerns around battlefield effectiveness.
Both should be wake-up calls. It is no surprise that Ukraine has escalated from demanding tanks to aircraft and now to internationally banned weaponry. As German Green MP Anton Hofreiter notes, if you do not put up a “stop sign” at some point there will always be demands for the next step up, in a conflict where Russia and its de facto adversary Nato are both nuclear-armed.
That existential risk is one reason we need to mobilise a movement for peace.
What Britain does matters: the United States is still sitting on the fence on fighter jets. Britain is at the most reckless extreme of the entire Nato alliance. It’s a big problem that not just our government but our opposition are to the right of the White House on this.
Another is that pressing the case for arms to Ukraine is to line up behind our arms industry. To back higher military spending at a time of public service collapse, and to neuter opposition to the same firms producing the same products for use by Saudi Arabia on Yemeni schoolchildren. Britain is not a benign actor in the world, and we have a responsibility to challenge that.
The big peace demonstration in Munich is welcome. We must now mobilise for next Saturday’s Stop the War Coalition march in London for peace talks now, to show that Westminster’s groupthink will not go unchallenged on the streets of Britain.
