Writing for The National , Findlay Young, convenor of the SNP Ukraine Solidarity Caucus, accused me and the Stop the War Coalition of appeasement of Vladimir Putin.
For the past four years, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has joined sections of the British establishment in portraying Stop the War as “pro-Putin”.
This is not original. From Iraq to Gaza, Stop the War has been a focal point for mass anti-war opposition, which is precisely why it has been smeared as “pro-Saddam” or “pro-Hamas”, as well as “pro-Putin”.
The smear serves to obscure the fact we opposed Russia’s invasion from the outset, support Russia’s anti-war movement and campaign for the release of anti-war activists such as the socialist Boris Kagarlitsky.
But we also warned that Nato involvement would prolong the war, intensify the costs and increase the risk of wider conflict. That is why we believed a negotiated settlement in April 2022 was preferable.
Young disagrees. He claims that the draft agreement reached between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators in April 2022 was akin to “Munich in 1938”, and that “when dealing with fascists, resistance is often the lesser evil to appeasement”.
Putin’s Russia is certainly a reactionary, authoritarian power waging a war of aggression against a weaker neighbour but it bears little resemblance to Nazi Germany.
It is weaker than either the Tsarist Empire or the Soviet Union at their height. Its economy is barely 2% of global GDP. Nazi Germany, by contrast, was a rapidly expanding industrial powerhouse committed to racial purification, territorial conquest and wars of extermination.
Young’s Munich analogy is therefore more moralism than analysis, serving to bolster his claim that continuing the war offered Ukraine a better prospect than negotiations.
To that end, Young presents a rather implausible scenario – that “a Russian withdrawal from Crimea now looks more likely than ever”, driven by Ukraine’s supposedly self-sufficient missile and drone industry.
Never mind that The Sunday Times revealed last week that UK drones are being used to strike targets deep inside Russia.
Writing for The Telegraph on July 8, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK and former commander-in-chief, warned against illusions that Russia was losing. He argued that Ukraine’s strikes were damaging to Moscow but also that they were “expensive, technologically demanding and ultimately reciprocal. Russia retains the ability to strike back with equal or greater force”.
According to Zaluzhnyi, the balance on the battlefield approximates to “equilibrium” but “Russia still possesses deeper reserves of manpower and industrial capacity in several critical sectors, including ballistic missile production”.
In the war’s current form, he concluded, air defence and Western support remained “decisive” for Ukraine, and he openly worried that that support was waning.
Ukraine’s dependence on the West extends beyond air defence. In December 2023, the then deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko told the Financial Times that civil servants, teachers and pensioners could experience payment delays if Western financial aid did not arrive.
In March 2025, The New York Times reported that Kyiv’s retreat from Kursk accelerated after Donald Trump paused military aid and intelligence sharing, underscoring Ukraine’s dependence on the US.
That helps explain Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s consistent efforts to align Ukrainian foreign policy with that of key Western backers.
He publicly backed Israel after October 7, 2023, and drew parallels between Hamas and Russia. Ukraine abstained on the UN General Assembly vote calling for a humanitarian pause in Gaza.
Its recent attack on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea was therefore hardly a break from previous policy. But dependence on the West comes at a cost and the war has deepened Kyiv’s reliance on its principal backers.
The clearest example was the minerals-for-peace deal that emerged after Trump took office in January 2025, exchanging security guarantees in any peace negotiations with Russia for access to Ukraine’s rare-earth deposits.
It is not only Ukrainians who are paying the price. The proxy war between Nato and Russia has accelerated European moves to transform welfare states into warfare states.
Last year, European Nato members and Canada increased their military spending by almost a fifth to £422 billion, a record rise. Germany and the UK have a combined military budget greater than Russia’s.
This is set to increase further, as Nato states chase their commitment to Trump to bring arms spending to 5% of GDP. During the Makerfield by-election, Andy Burnham declared he would not be squeamish about cutting social spending to fund rearmament. His Chancellor, John Healey, resigned from Keir Starmer’s Cabinet alleging lack of sufficient military spending.
The SNP have sought to put their own gloss on this agenda, but have ultimately lined up behind higher military spending.
While warning that increased military spending could take “vital” money away from schools and hospitals, Westminster leader Dave Doogan accused the Labour Government of “failing to take national security seriously enough following decades of Westminster cuts to our armed forces”. He has argued that the SNP have “consistently called for more investment in conventional defence capabilities, and more support for our forces.
One wonders whether the SNP Ukraine Solidarity Caucus opposes this militarist drive in its own party or in the collective West.
If a peace deal with Putin is tantamount to appeasement, there seems little choice but to keep increasing military budgets. The problem becomes defining an end game that does not ultimately involve direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia.
Supporting drone strikes on refineries and commercial warehouses in Russia, as Young does, risks provoking similar Russian strikes on European sites, as well as increasing public hostility to the West in Russia.
Supporting drone strikes on refineries and commercial warehouses in Russia, as Young does, risks provoking similar Russian strikes on European sites, as well as increasing public hostility to the West in Russia.
Instead of pursuing the path of endless escalation, Stop the War has a simple proposition – immediate peace negotiations involving all the belligerents.
Source: The National