THE UKRAINE SOLIDARITY NETWORK (USN) agrees with the majority of U.S. public opinion on two crucially important questions confronting the United States and the world.
We support Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia’s annexationist invasion launched by President-for-Life Vladimir Putin, and Ukraine’s right to obtain the weapons it needs for its very survival as an independent nation, for the protection of the Ukrainian people against Russian atrocities, and the liberation of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. We also demand the cancellation of Ukraine’s international debt in solidarity with its struggle for self-determination and in opposition to the imperialist economic designs of NATO.
We are horrified by the consequences of the six-month Israeli assault on Gaza and the Palestinian people. Along with the growing majority in the United States and the world, we demand an immediate permanent ceasefire along with unobstructed massive humanitarian aid — food, medical and housing — to Gaza.
In the United States our priority focus must be on the disastrous actions, or inaction, of the U.S. government. Critically needed aid for Ukraine is held hostage by the gridlock in Congress, instigated by the pro-Putin wing of the MAGA Republican Party. Since the full-scale invasion, the Biden Administration has failed to supply the range of weapons that Ukrainians have requested to defend themselves.
Ukraine is struggling to hold back major Russian advances in eastern Ukraine and brutal attacks on its civilian infrastructure.
We need to state the case bluntly: Without adequate military aid to Ukraine, Russia’s invasion will do to Ukraine what Israel has done to Gaza. The risk is that Ukrainian cities will look like Gaza City or Khan Yunis. It is not necessary to speculate: We only have to look at what Russia already did in Mariupol or Bucha at the beginning of the war, and what its foreign minister Sergei Lavrov explicitly said: “Russia is doing in Ukraine what Israel is doing in Gaza.”
While U.S. aid to Ukraine is stalled and was never adequate to begin with, the Biden administration has poured unlimited military aid into Israel, including F-35 aircraft and five-thousand-pound bombs (which even the U.S. military stopped using in Iraq when the indiscriminate civilian carnage they caused was revealed). Without Congressional approval, Biden has released military aid shipments to Israel. He has refused to do the same for Ukraine.
We absolutely oppose any linkage of aid for Ukraine, which is defending itself against Russia’s brutal invasion, with aid and military sales to Israel, which is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and against the Palestinian people.
After vetoing United Nations Security Council for ceasefire and humanitarian relief in Gaza, the United States cynically abstained and announced that the most recent cease fire resolution is non-binding.
The infamous murder of the World Food Kitchen workers in three well-marked aid convoy vehicles comes on top of Israel’s killing nearly 200 aid workers in Gaza, its deliberate destruction of medical facilities, and murderous targeting of journalists. Even the figure of 33,000 Gaza deaths is a vast undercount with thousands of bodies unrecovered and a mounting death toll from preventable disease and starvation.
Make no mistake: this is also the fate that Russia’s conquest would portend for Ukraine. The people of Ukraine and Palestine both have the right to survive and to national freedom and self-determination. Indeed, in our view they are inseparable.
Support aid for Ukraine’s survival! End all military aid and sales to Israel! Immediate permanent ceasefire in Gaza now!