That's a strawman - it isn't that leftists "argue in favor of the capitalist oligarchs who rule Russia", but that they make excuses for Putin (blame Nato expansion for causing the crisis), and accuse Ukraine supporters of fomenting war. The anti-war left is a weird (albeit smaller) mirror of the Tucker Carlson right.
But we also acknowledge that the Russian government, oligarchic autocracy as it is, is right to say that endless NATO expansion, for which read extended US hegemony, is not the security structure Europe needs. The chance was missed to abolish NATO when the Warsaw Pact went out of business more than thirty years ago; instead we are left with the consequences of broken US promises not to extend the alliance eastwards.
So Stop the War aims to provide the opposition that the Labour front bench seemingly won’t. The Tories have taken the lead internationally in talking up the crisis, announcing imminent coups, false-flag incidents or invasions almost every day, to the point where even the government in Kiev has asked them to tone it down a bit.
More substantively, they have sent fresh arms to Ukraine and deployed more British forces into Eastern Europe—all the very things which Russia has said it finds most menacing. All this pointless provocation seems to speak of a government which would actually quite like a war to break out, for strategic and doubtless domestic political reasons, particularly since it will not involve any British forces fighting.
If you aren't seeing it you aren't looking. It is admittedly weird, you reflexively think they are right wingers, but dig a bit and you see they are pro-Palestine, pro-Venezuela leftists who see the same conspiracy to start a war as the fringe right:
No, not at all. This is a leftist group opposing support for Ukraine. The "analysis of history" is just the rationale. I don't care about the rationale, and that's not the point.
But we also acknowledge that the Russian government, oligarchic autocracy as it is, is right to say that endless NATO expansion, for which read extended US hegemony, is not the security structure Europe needs. The chance was missed to abolish NATO when the Warsaw Pact went out of business more than thirty years ago; instead we are left with the consequences of broken US promises not to extend the alliance eastwards.
So Stop the War aims to provide the opposition that the Labour front bench seemingly won’t. The Tories have taken the lead internationally in talking up the crisis, announcing imminent coups, false-flag incidents or invasions almost every day, to the point where even the government in Kiev has asked them to tone it down a bit.
More substantively, they have sent fresh arms to Ukraine and deployed more British forces into Eastern Europe—all the very things which Russia has said it finds most menacing. All this pointless provocation seems to speak of a government which would actually quite like a war to break out, for strategic and doubtless domestic political reasons, particularly since it will not involve any British forces fighting.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/02/keir-starmer-guardian-stop-...