It’s been a minute since we last checked in on the tankies—that breed of humans who think imperialism is bad, but only the United States can be imperialist. As a result, everything that is bad in the world is the United States’ fault. No one else has agency or independence.
For example, they claim Russia had no choice but to launch its overtly imperialistic war against Ukraine, because it was simply responding to American efforts to surround Russia with its NATO puppets. They are big supporters of the concept of the “global south,” a supposed coalition of developing nations led by global-north nations Russian and China (despotic regimes—a feature, not a bug) as a counterweight to Western hegemony. This pretty much sums it up:
As such, they are quick to denounce imagined abuses by Ukraine, while ignoring Russian abuses. It’s quite a sight. I’ve written about them before here, here, here, here, here, and here. These days, they’re celebrating Ukraine’s slow counteroffensive advances, as they’ve given them the opportunity to detract from Russia’s war failures. Meanwhile, tankie voices have gotten a huge boost in domestic American politics with the promotion of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an effort by Steve Bannon and MAGA Republicans to create chaos in the Democratic presidential primary.
Medea Benjamin, founder of the supposedly anti-war Code Pink, has become one of the most reliable Putin apologists, excusing all manner of abuses in the name of “peace.” Yet here she is, extolling Henry Kissinger, someone who has actually performed war crimes, for his shadow diplomacy trip to a repressive, murderous regime.
Of course, it’s not President Joe Biden’s job to negotiate Ukrainian territory away, but that’s the essence of being a tankie: thinking an American president can call up anyone and make a thing happen.
So, no: Biden can’t bring peace to Ukraine. And if tankies and their MAGA allies had their way and Ukraine funding was cut, that still wouldn’t end the war. It would just make it go on, spreading misery and economic uncertainty for far longer. Ukraine has zero interest in ending the war until all its people are safe and the occupiers have been expelled. With sufficient aid, that might happen in the next year or two. Without it, Ukraine will still win, but it might be under the Afghanistan timeline—meaning it could be a decade or two before the foreign powers were expelled.
For someone wanting peace, you’d think the shorter timeline makes more sense, but Benjamin and her ilk don’t want peace. They want Russian and Chinese hegemony, rather than imagined American control over the world. And for all of America’s and the West’s faults, the side that fights for democratic self-determination vs. the one run by despots will almost always be the better choice.
That’s why Taiwan now grants same-sex couples the right to adopt children while China has banned it, along with depictions of gayness on television or the movies and gay rights groups fighting for inclusion.
Anyway, take a look at who is besties with Benjamin:
It’s no surprise that those two are so close, given that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is all-in on the tankie ideology:
Literally nothing in that quote is correct. First off, he starts with, “I would say that the real story starts in 2014 when the U.S. government, and particularly the neocons in the White House and elsewhere, participated in and supported the overthrow, violent overthrow – a coup d'état – against the democratically elected government of the Ukraine and put in a very, very anti-Russian government.”
So Kennedy would have you believe that “neocons”—we’re talking the Dick Cheney crew—were in the White House in 2014 during the Obama presidency. And like a good tankie, he doesn’t think Ukrainians themselves had any agency during their Maidan “revolution of dignity.” Yes, this orange revolution ousted a pro-Russian government, but it was because then-President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign a law passed 355-0 by the legislature creating closer economic ties with the European Union. Russia had lobbied heavily against it, demanding the country face eastward instead.
For all the talk of American imperialism, it was Russia that couldn’t stand the idea of its old colony moving toward European Union membership, and used its puppet president to stand in the way of that move in defiance of the country’s democratically elected legislature. It was that same legislature that ousted Yanukovych after massive popular protests that killed 80 people, with 328 out of 450 legislators voting to oust. Still, Yanukovych, Russia, and their tankies scream “coup,” justifying Russia’s subsequent invasion of Crimea and the Donbas later that year.
So no, there was no violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government by neocons in the Obama White House. That is literally straight out of the Russian propaganda handbook, which Kennedy is happy to regurgitate, as is the second part of that quote above: “The government that came into the Ukraine began enacting a series of laws that turned the Russian populations of the Donbas region into second-class citizens. They illegalized, essentially, their culture, their language, and they began ultimately killing them. They killed 14,000 of them. And it prompted a civil war in the country."
First of all, it isn’t “the Ukraine,” which is yet another tankie tell. Russia has promoted the use of the “the” as a way to diminutize the territory as a colony, not a nation. Like “the Donbas.”
Furthermore, there was no “civil war,” but an invasion by Russian forces. The military chief at the time was Igor Girkin, the war criminal we love-hated because of his vicious Telegram criticisms of the 2022 Russian invasion and criticisms of top Russian generals and political officials. That all came to an end last week as Putin finally grew tired of it all and had him arrested. Girkin wasn’t Ukrainian. He was a colonel in the Russian GRU—Russia’s external-facing intelligence organization (akin to our CIA). Kennedy claims the CIA spurred a civil war, when it was literally and openly a Russian GRU intelligence operation.
Meanwhile, one only has to listen to any video of Kyiv or any other Ukrainian-held city in the country to realize that people are free to speak all the Russian they want.
And no one killed anyone in Donbas until Russian forces came in and tried to take the territory by force. Then it became a hot war, and yes, people die in wars, even those sparked by hostile Russian intelligence officers.
This has been the tankie line ever since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive and failed to quickly win. It demands that the U.S. and NATO pull its support because only starving Ukraine of resources will bring about “peace.” This line of thinking makes several unfounded assumptions:
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A cease-fire is a good thing. A cease-fire would allow Russia to reset, rearm, and refocus for the next phase of its war. It has been pushing since 2014; what makes anyone think that Russia’s stated war aims—keeping Ukraine within its colonial sphere of influence—would change just because the guns went silent? And what makes anyone think that this is the agreement that Russia would suddenly honor? Its history of broken promises is too long to ever trust the country again.
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If Ukraine keeps fighting, where’s the cease-fire? This whole tweet is inherently contradictory. The idea of any cease-fire is that everyone stops fighting. If Ukraine can keep going at its own discretion, that is not a cease-fire. Of course, a tankie would counter with “well then, we don’t have to support that continued fighting.” And sure, that’s true. But if the goal is to end the war, then this stupid plan does nothing to end it.
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If this agreement does nothing to stop the fighting, how are millions of lives supposedly saved? No lives are saved by leaving Ukraine to fend for itself. It would just mean, at best, low-level conflict (like the one we’ve seen since 2014) continuing to decimate lives at the front. All the while, Russia would keep lobbing rockets and missiles into civilian areas, while economically blockading Odesa and other Ukrainian Black Sea ports. The only way to save lives, long-term, is to defeat Russia. Anything short just prolongs it indefinitely.
On the plus side, not all tankies are hopeless causes.
It sure would be nice if all of them experienced Russia firsthand. That might shatter a few illusions.
A Russian occupier laments the babushka who reported on their movements to Ukrainian intelligence after pretending to feed them.
He notes that she was “taken away.” Not all Ukrainian defenders wear camouflage.
At the very least, Russia should be booted from UNESCO.
Russian sources report real advances by Ukrainian forces north and south of Bakhmut. I’ll leave the details for Mark Sumner’s update tomorrow, but the areas around Bakhmut have proven the most fertile for Ukrainian gains. For one, Russian forces haven’t been able to create the multilayered defenses and deep mine fields we’ve seen elsewhere. And secondly, this area just isn’t that important, strategically, so it doesn’t actually matter much if Ukraine eventually liberates the ruins of Bakhmut. More here.