New Greens leader David Shoebridge has opposed Australia sending weapons to Ukraine.
His position has been attacked widely. Labor and some within the Greens have condemned it, while Ukraine’s Ambassador to Australia accused The Greens of seeking an outcome where “our entire nation is swallowed up by Russia”.
But Shoebridge is right to oppose further weapons shipments. The Ukraine war is a horrifying proxy war involving the world’s major imperialist powers. The US and Europe have backed and armed Ukraine in an effort to inflict a defeat on Russia and deliver a blow against Russia’s key ally, China.
This is why the US has funnelled in more than $270 billion in weapons, military advisors and training, sacrificing Ukrainian lives to bolster US global domination. Trump has reduced US direct assistance but the US’s European allies are making up the gap by paying the US and providing $200 billion in support across 2025 and 2026.
While Russia began the invasion, the US and the EU equally have blood on their hands, both for pushing Ukraine into the conflict and for massively escalating it once it started.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO has steadily advanced eastwards, ignoring Russia’s warnings that further NATO expansion into Ukraine would be crossing a “red line”. Alongside this the US and EU have sought to grab markets, resources and profits in Russia’s former empire. Trump has looted Ukraine by taking control of its rare earth metals and natural resources.
Between 2014 and the Russian invasion, the US spent over $2.5 billion arming Ukraine and training its troops.
Ukraine was upgraded by NATO to an “Enhanced Opportunity Partner” as part of a pathway into full NATO membership. Putin responded to NATO’s military advance by annexing Crimea and supporting pro-Russian militias in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
After Russia’s invasion, NATO threw itself into massively escalating the conflict, hoping that a rapid counter-offensive could massively weaken Russia.
In 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited Kyiv and, according to a member of Zelensky’s negotiating team, discouraged a possible peace deal and said “let’s just fight”.
But the war is now dragging on beyond what the US wants. Trump has been trying to wind the war up, pressuring both Zelensky and Putin to make concessions and negotiate a peace. Zelensky wants NATO to give a security guarantee to prevent Russia re-starting the war while Putin wants Ukraine to cede territory Russia has not been able to capture and repudiate its bid to join NATO.
Stalemate
After four years of fighting, the war is locked in a bloody, grinding stalemate.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and up to 600,000 troops have been slaughtered. Thousands of remote-controlled attack drones litter the skies above a “kill zone” stretching several kilometres either side of the front. The drones hunt soldiers dug in across trenches whose walls are lined with half-buried corpses.
Ukraine is running out of soldiers. Military trucks roam urban streets looking for eligible men, who are forced into their likely death at the front. Support in Ukraine for continuing the war has collapsed, with a recent Gallup poll reporting that around 70 per cent want a negotiated peace and just 24 per cent support extending the war.
Shipping more weapons into the meat-grinder is only going to mean more butchery.
The European powers are using Ukraine and the war against Russia to justify a huge wave of militarisation in Europe.
Since the start of the Ukraine war, military spending across the EU has doubled from $340 billion in 2021 to $700 billion in 2026. Albanese in Australia is using similar arguments to justify spending $368 billion on nuclear submarines to prepare Australia for war against China. This money could be used for desperately needed housing and healthcare.
The US and its NATO allies hypocritically frame the conflict as a fight between authoritarianism and democracy while they continue to arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza, violently repress protest movements in their own countries and do nothing to oppose US attacks on Venezuela and Cuba.
Shoebridge is right to oppose weapons shipments to Ukraine, following The Greens’ longstanding pacifist opposition to weapons exports to any country. And the left should support him. But his position is not consistently anti-imperialist. In other ways Shoebridge and the Greens willingly support NATO and the war; they support financial aid to Ukraine and support sanctions (economic war) against Russia.
To consistently oppose the war in Ukraine, opposition to weapons exports must be linked with opposition to every element of Australia’s militarism and its alliance with US imperialism.
By Maeve Larkins
