I was frustrated before I had even finished reading Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s warm publicized response letter to Benjamin Netanyahu this week. Partly because the message itself was disgusting, and partly because I knew exactly what everyone was going to do with it.
Netanyahu had sent Ukraine an Independence Day letter talking about the two countries’ shared history and their common enemy in Iran. Zelenskyy thanked him for the “warm congratulations,” wrote that Ukraine and Israel have “deep bonds”, and said he looked forward to strengthening those ties and working together toward “more security.”
To be entirely fair, Ukraine has a real reason to care about Iranian weapons. Russia has spent years firing Iranian-designed Shahed drones into Ukrainian cities. In March 2026 alone, it launched about 6,500 Shaheds and other long-range drones at Ukraine, more than 1,000 of which got through air defenses, according to Ukrainian Air Force data reported by Reuters. I’m not going to pretend that context is irrelevant. I’m also not going to pretend it makes publicly fawning over Netanyahu necessary, nor does it make ignoring the real victims of the war against Iran acceptable (the Iranian people forced to live through it, for those who aren’t clear on where I stand).
Netanyahu is facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is an absolute monster. As of August 2026, most people in Gaza were still displaced, Israeli strikes were continuing to murder both adults and children, and 90% of the population was experiencing moderate-to-high water insecurity. Zelenskyy describing stronger relations with this government as a path toward “more security” is grotesque. I don’t particularly care how many diplomatic euphemisms anyone piles around it.
And yet I knew that within minutes a group of people would appear to explain why it was fine. “It was boilerplate diplomatic messaging. Ukraine needs allies. Israel understands air defense. Iran supplies Russia. Netanyahu congratulated the Ukrainian people, so what else was Zelenskyy supposed to do?” Quite often, these desperate statements aren’t even coming from Ukrainians. They come from westerners whose relationship to Ukraine began with blue-and-yellow social media graphics and hardened into a heroic fairy tale in which every decision by the Ukrainian government must be either noble or tragically necessary. Apparently admitting that Zelenskyy said something gross would cause the entire good-versus-evil franchise to collapse. So every ugly statement arrives with an unpaid legal team already assembling around it, and I’m 99% sure this same voluntary defense brigade would not be working nearly as hard if the flags were different.
Then the campist accounts would post the same screenshot as proof that Ukraine and Israel are one giant fascist project, Ukrainians are collectively implicated in Gaza, and Russia has once again landed on the correct side of history through the miraculous process of being opposed to the United States. One president’s bad foreign-policy statement would become the moral biography of an entire population and would erase their ongoing suffering to insignificance.
It’s worth noting that Zelenskyy had posted another thank-you message at almost the same time, this one to Xi Jinping. He praised 35 years of relations with China based on “mutual respect and full recognition of the values of our peoples,” called for further cooperation, and said China could play a strong diplomatic role in ending the war. Peace, he added, could be their “shared achievement.”
Strangely, nobody announced that Ukraine had joined a Chinese-led geopolitical bloc. I didn’t see the people circulating the Netanyahu screenshot explain that Zelenskyy now wanted Ukraine to become the China of Europe. They understood perfectly well that heads of state send each other congratulations and reply in inflated ceremonial language. This knowledge simply abandoned them when the other message offered a chance to make Ukraine look uniquely evil.
The actual reality of the Ukraine-Palestine relationship also gets lost in the hysterics surrounding the Netanyahu screenshot. In July 2024, Ukraine sent 1,000 tons of wheat flour to Palestine through the Grain from Ukraine program, enough to provide bread for 101,000 Palestinians for a month. Ukraine recognizes the State of Palestine, and a Palestinian embassy has operated in Kyiv since 2001. Even UN Watch’s explicitly pro-Israel voting tracker classifies Ukraine’s General Assembly record since 2015 as zero resolutions “for Israel,” 132 “against Israel” and 44 abstentions. If one X post establishes that Ukraine is little different from Israel, what exactly do these facts establish? Apparently nothing, because they’re inconvenient.
I honestly do understand some of the knee-jerk reactions on the pro-Ukraine side of all this, though. Russia has spent years taking any trace of Ukrainian far-right politics, any ugly nationalist symbolism and any historical dispute involving World War II and feeding it into the claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state. After all, Putin used “denazification” in the speech announcing the full-scale invasion. Once that lie has been used to justify bombing your cities and destroying your life, conceding anything adjacent to it can feel like helping the person who invented it.
But if the plan for fighting propaganda is to insist that people can’t see what they can plainly see, the plan is terrible.
Russian propaganda doesn’t always begin by inventing something from nothing. Quite often it finds a kernel of truth or a separate fact and and bends it into supporting a conclusion it can’t actually support. The Ukrainian state memory policy honors nationalist organizations with histories of fascism, antisemitism and ethnic violence, so Ukraine becomes a state full of Nazis. Zelenskyy praises Netanyahu, so Ukrainians become willing participants in the destruction of Gaza and default Zionists. There’s a real thing at the beginning and an enormous lie at the end. And the lie works significantly better when everyone else is frantically denying the real thing.
Take Ukrainian state memory policy, for example. Russia keeps returning to Bandera because the history is ugly enough to be useful, while defenders act as though admitting any of it will make Putin somehow right. The OUN was authoritarian, ethnonationalist and deeply antisemitic. OUN-B activists and Ukrainian militia members helped carry out violence during the Lviv pogrom, and the UPA carried out ethnic cleansing against Polish (and even other Ukrainian) civilians in Volhynia. Bandera’s imprisonment by the Nazis and the UPA’s later fighting against German forces complicate that history, but they don’t erase it, and Ukraine’s right to exist doesn’t depend on any of these men being good.
And yet, the Ukrainian state has still handed Russia real material to exploit. In 2015 it legally recognized the OUN and UPA as “fighters for Ukraine’s independence,” despite warnings from historians. In May 2026, Zelenskyy personally attended the state reburial of OUN-M leader Andriy Melnyk, placed him among Ukraine’s “heroes” and announced plans for a broader national pantheon. Members of Melnyk’s movement collaborated with Nazi Germany and participated in the persecution and murder of Jews. Zelenskyy inherited the larger policy, but attending that ceremony and giving that speech were his decisions. It happened, and it was fucked up. I wrote about it here:
The Cost of Selective Memory and Who Benefits From It
None of this turns Ukraine into Nazi Germany or gives Russia the right to flatten Mariupol or destroy a dam and create an ecocide emergency in Kherson. The same is true of Zelenskyy’s position on Israel. You can say that praising Netanyahu while Israel destroys Gaza is grotesque without deciding that Ukrainians have somehow forfeited the right not to be bombed. Russia takes a real and problematic state policy and strongarms it into supporting a much larger lie. Denial only helps by making the Kremlin look like the one source willing to mention the embarrassing fact. The response should be obvious: yes, the memory policy is dishonest and exclusionary, and yes, Zelenskyy’s position on Israel deserves condemnation; no, Ukrainians are not a fake nation who may be invaded at will. You can say all of that. The Comintern won’t come for you. I promise.
Then, after exhausting myself watching people lie to defend anything that Zelenskyy does, I get to watch another group of people turn everything ugly about the Ukrainian state into a verdict on Ukrainians and lie to defend Russia. The online information space truly is a cesspit.
Campists usually have no trouble hyper-focusing when the Ukrainian state does something ugly. They simply treat it as a final verdict on Ukraine and everyone living there. Carlos L. Garrido, the American Communist Party’s secretary of education (I’m laughing too, don’t worry), made the whole argument explicit for his roughly 65,000 Instagram followers:
“President Zelensky congratulates warmly President of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. How much more evidence do you need to see that you cannot be pro-Palestine and also be pro-Ukraine?”
If you don’t want to watch his insufferable video, he goes on to say that Ukraine is “little different from Israel,” that both are “proxies of the same common system,” and finally that “there is no Russian imperialism.” He called Russia’s invasion a war against imperialism that had come to Russia’s borders, rather than a war Russia sought out. Yeah. I know.
Campists use the phrase “material conditions” constantly, yet Ukraine is where the concept suddenly disappears from their vocabulary. Zelenskyy’s positive X post about Israel tells us something ugly about Zelenskyy’s politics and the position of at least part of the Ukrainian government. It doesn’t change the material conditions of Ukrainians living under Russian missiles, occupation, forced displacement or the constant possibility that their livelihood, family members, electricity, water or home will disappear overnight. It doesn’t make Russian rule less coercive or turn NATO into the army that crossed their border. The post deserves condemnation, but treating it as a singular document that transfers Netanyahu’s crimes to the people of Ukraine is idiotic.
One popular authoritarian-left content creator from Switzlerland of course couldn’t resist the opportunity to weigh in on Zelenskyy’s letter to Netanyahu and wasted no time in making it explicitly clear how paternalistic the authoritarian left truly is:
Aside from pointing to the X post as some proverbial smoking gun of Ukraine’s secret Zionist aspirations, she described the war as “literally a NATO-Russia war,” accused the West of “using those bodies to be killed,” and announced that “supporting Ukraine today means supporting Western imperialism. There’s no other way to see it.” The certainty is both startling and embarrassing. Ukrainians appear only as bodies manipulated by NATO, never as people capable of looking at Bucha, Mariupol or life under Russian occupation and deciding for themselves what it is they’re resisting. Clearly they need a woman in Switzerland who has never even spoken to a Ukrainian to speak for them.
And it’s kind of funny. If Eastern Europeans looked at Bush, Blair and Trump, at Iraq, Europe’s colonial record and Western support for Israel, and decided that this settled what every American and Western European thinks, believes, wants and deserves, many of these same people would be furious. They would suddenly remember class, disenfranchisement, propaganda and domestic opposition, and they would be right to do so. Ukrainians are entitled to the same distinction instead of being represented solely by Zelenskyy’s X account.
The double standard becomes even clearer once Russia’s own relationships enter the discussion. Ukraine’s diplomatic ties are treated as proof of its permanent ideological character. Russia’s are always pragmatic, complicated, multipolar and somehow none of our business.
I have written about Russia and Israel at greater length because the pretense that they occupy opposite civilizational camps is laughably wrong and falls apart when you look at what the two states actually do.
Putin and Netanyahu stayed in direct contact throughout the destruction of Gaza. The Kremlin recorded multiple calls between them in 2025 and another in January 2026. Their governments maintained a formal military deconfliction mechanism in Syria that Russian officials described as involving daily practical coordination, allowing Israel to keep striking Iranian and Hezbollah-linked targets in a country full of Russian personnel and air defenses without the two states stumbling into direct conflict.
The relationship kept functioning while Gaza was being destroyed. Russia supplied roughly 28% of Israel’s imported crude oil in 2025, making it Israel’s second-largest source. Another analysis of 323 shipments between November 2023 and October 2025 found that Russia was Israel’s largest supplier of refined fuels, accounting for nearly half of the refined products tracked. In February 2025, Israel joined the United States and Russia in voting against a UN resolution affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity. That same month, Israel was reportedly lobbying Washington to keep Russian military bases in Syria.
How much of a relationship has to exist before Russia gets the same critical treatment as Ukraine?
And, because I apparently have impeccable timing, while I was finishing this article the Russian Embassy in Serbia offered “sincere condolences” after the death of Ratko Mladić.
Mladić was serving a life sentence after his convictions for genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war, including the genocide at Srebrenica and the campaign of terror against civilians in Sarajevo. If Zelenskyy thanking Netanyahu disqualifies anyone from supporting Ukrainians, I assume an official Russian institution mourning a convicted architect of genocide will now disqualify Garrido from supporting Russia. But I won’t hold my breath.
Calling Russia and Israel secretly the same country would repeat the same ridiculous associative reasoning with the flags reversed and that doesn’t make either state less monstrous. Russia’s rhetoric about Palestine plainly coexists with military coordination, diplomatic contact and material support that helps keep Israel running. Campists understand this kind of contradiction when they want to. They simply refuse to understand it when the contradiction belongs to Russia.
They do the same thing with the United States. A photograph of Zelenskyy with an American official can sustain three weeks of analysis about Ukraine’s total absorption into the empire. Then August 2025 arrives and Trump welcomes Putin to Alaska with a red carpet, a military flyover and fighter jets framing a platform labeled “ALASKA 2025.” He applauds Putin on the tarmac and lets him climb into the presidential limousine like an old friend who just arrived for dinner. Putin leaves without agreeing to the ceasefire Trump had demanded and without receiving the new sanctions Trump had threatened. Reuters concluded that he had won concessions, avoided sanctions and broken through years of Western isolation.
Then in March 2025, the White House had already committed to helping restore Russia’s access to world agricultural and fertilizer markets, lower maritime insurance costs and improve access to ports and payment systems. By February 2026, American and Russian negotiators were reportedly discussing bilateral cooperation projects worth as much as $12 trillion. In June, Putin called Trump a “bright, remarkable person and politician” and praised the mutual understanding between them.
Nobody takes this record and assigns Donald Trump to every Russian citizen as a personal moral burden. Russia is graciously permitted to be a state with interests, contradictions and tactical relationships. Ukraine gets one screenshot and a collective sentence.
The same habit of making people disappear behind a supposedly anti-imperialist state showed up in the response to a recent letter about Iran. On August 20, the Guardian published an open letter to Iranian political prisoners signed by prominent leftists including Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. It condemned the US-backed coup of 1953, US-Israeli military attacks and sanctions, and the Iranian state’s torture, sham trials, executions and political imprisonment. It called on the United States and Israel to end their war and on Iran to free its political prisoners. And campists threw an entire temper tantrum over it.
The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective called it “ideological cover” for war, demoted repression inside Iran to a “secondary contradiction” and ended by reminding the signatories that “silence is always an option.” Carlos Martinez wrote on Press TV’s website that “matters concerning Iran’s domestic politics can be settled afterwards.” Afterwards is dismissive for the people who actually have to deal with the Iranian state. An execution date is a material condition. A prisoner’s cell is a material condition. A woman imprisoned by the Iranian state doesn’t forget who holds the key because American bombs are falling outside.
In the letter, Political prisoners were described as trapped “between two blades of a scissors,” and critics accused Western academics of manufacturing a false equivalence between Iran and the powers attacking it. But Iranian-American scholar Farah Mokhtareizadeh traced the phrase to Iranian labor activist and former political prisoner Keyvan Mohtadi, who used it after Israel bombed Evin prison, where his wife was being held. Former Evin prisoner Siamak Namazi used the same image for people imprisoned and tortured by one power while another dropped bombs on them “in the name of freedom.” Campists missed this, likely intentionally.
And sure, there’s a real asymmetry here. The United States and Israel possess vastly greater military power and are waging an imperial war against Iran. The letter itself says so. Iranian sovereignty matters. None of that requires pretending the Islamic Republic embodies the political will of Iranian workers, women, Kurds, Baloch people or political prisoners. Apparently Iranians may resist American imperialism, but only through the state that imprisons them. If they insist on resisting foreign domination and domestic repression in the same present tense, Westerners will explain that their timing is inconvenient.
This should be an embarrassingly easy position to hold. Online, it apparently requires the mental dexterity of a circus performer.
Maybe this is why solidarity with people is less exciting than solidarity with states for so much of the left. States provide leaders, aesthetics, flags and a single official voice that can be quoted or condemned. Actual people are a nuisance. They disagree with their governments, disagree with one another, inherit histories they did not choose and continue possessing rights after their president says something revolting.
No one is asking you to love Zelenskyy. I certainly don’t, and the Ukrainian government deserves criticism. But if “What about Hamas?” makes you furious when Palestinians are being killed, “What about Azov?” should sound familiar. So should “What about Bandera?” and “What about Zelenskyy?” It’s the same demand for a perfect victim where you take the ugliest faction, military unit, historical figure or politician you can attach to a population, make every civilian answer for it, and then decide whether their lives still count.
I once asked one of these people whether supporting Palestinian sovereignty meant agreeing with everything that Hamas stands for in hopes that they’d see the obvious parallel. They avoided the question by pointing to the PFLP and other socialist Palestinian groups. But Palestinian rights don’t depend on finding a Palestinian faction whose politics make Western leftists feel comfortable. You don’t need to imagine that your preferred socialists secretly represent the entire population before you can oppose occupation and mass killing.
The same recognition belongs to Ukrainians. Their homes are no less destroyed because NATO supplies weapons. Their dead do not come back because Zelenskyy reacted positively to Netanyahu’s offer of cooperation, the government honored the wrong people or Azov exists. They’re still the ones living under falling bombs while people safely abroad decide whether Ukraine has behaved well enough for them to care. People retain rights even when the forces with the most power around them are ones you’d never support. Any principle worth having has to reckon with that.
I don’t want a pro-Ukraine version of propaganda that treats every valid criticism as a Kremlin operation, and I have no use for campist solidarity that turns Palestinian suffering into a convoluted reason to stop caring about Ukrainians because of something Zelenskyy posted. His words were grotesque. But they don’t make it immoral, contradictory or somehow impossible to recognize the struggles of Palestinians and Ukrainians or any other occupied people at the same time. No president or government gets to be the determiner of which occupied people deserve our solidarity, and neither do dogmatic idiots with social media platforms. Russia’s invasion remains an imperial war, and Ukrainians retain the right to resist it. Nobody needs to be rehabilitated, and nobody needs to be sacrificed just to keep the argument clean and simple for campists.
radical dumpling: screaming into the void about anti-fascism and anti-imperial consistency, from somewhere between east and west.
This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.
More content from this blog
- The Crisis of Social Reproduction, Women’s Agency, and Feminism in China. Interview with Yige Dong – 18 November 2025
- Nissim Mannathukkaren on Autocratisation in India – 7 June 2026
- Bangladesh’s Stalled Feminist Movements and Present Politics. Interview with Samina Luthfa – 21 January 2026
- How Moroccan Jews Challenged Israel. Interview with Asaf Elia-Shalev – 7 June 2024
- Inside the Far-Right Network Targeting Europe’s Digital Rules, by Anne-Sophie Simpere – 9 February 2026
Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.