Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Vladimir Putin is a thug, an autocrat, a despot and a warmonger. His military aggression in Ukraine is completely unacceptable and he should get his troops out. There is no doubt about that and he should be roundly condemned. This is not new for Putin or the Russian state. It has a long history of treating its neighbouring countries as a prison house. In fact, famously, tsarist Russia was the prisonhouse of nations and denied independence and self-determination to those nations.

More recently we have seen the Russians commit horrors in Afghanistan, there was a horrendous war in Chechnya and we saw the Russian-dominated version of NATO sending troops into Kazakhstan to help the Kazakhstan Government put down a workers’ revolt against rising energy prices.

All or most of the people who are condemning what Putin is now doing never condemned what he did in Chechnya and Kazakhstan. They are condemning what he is doing in Ukraine but not those things. They are selective in their standards when it comes to Russian warmongering and, indeed, as many people have pointed out, many of the nations condemning him for what he is doing now are more than willing to launder Russian oligarch money in the IFSC or in the City of London.

We are, therefore, not going to go along with the one-sided double standards that have been deployed by many of the speakers in this debate because the people of Ukraine have the right to self-determination and territorial integrity. Putin should get out. To pretend that NATO has no responsibility for this and that they are somehow the good guys in all of this situation is to be utterly dishonest. NATO has relentlessly expanded eastwards since the end of the Cold War, recruiting and moving 800 km eastwards and doing military exercises on an annual basis on the Russian border. The Defender Europe exercises, which take place every year, involved 28,000 troops last year, including naval military exercises in the Black Sea. That is also militarism. That is military provocation. These are two big military political blocs vying for spheres of influence. My very strong advice to the people of Ukraine, from a country that is militarily neutral and that established itself as a State in opposition to the disaster of the First World War and to the oppression of empires, is not to align itself with NATO because it is a warmongering military alliance that is also headed up by military thugs.

Have we forgotten what the United States did in Iraq? We have the same justifications there. Saddam Hussein was a dictator, absolutely. He was a brutal murderer of his own population. He was somebody who was willing to attack neighbouring countries. All of this is true. That was used by the United States to launch a war which was a disaster with 1 million people killed. It was an utter disaster for the Middle East. Does the hypocrisy of the United States continue? It absolutely does. As we speak, it is arming the Saudi regime, a brutal dictatorship, to the teeth, as it conducts a war in Yemen where tens of thousands of people are being killed.

We raise as an alternative to the banner of warmongering, and as an alternative to siding either with the thug that is Putin or the military-aggressive alliance which is NATO, the banner of internationalism and of opposition to war. War or militarism will not solve the very dangerous conflict in Ukraine. We need to oppose war and to build a movement of international solidarity against warmongering, whether it is from the thug Putin or from the NATO-US-dominated military alliance.

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