In recent days we have been subjected to a series of attacks, accusations, attempts at delegitimization, and threats of violence against us and our events that we cannot ignore. In some cases, these have led to previously granted availability to host the initiatives we announced being called into question.
These are not simple political disagreements, but a campaign aimed at undermining the work we are carrying out, isolating those who build concrete solidarity, and discrediting anarchist comrades who are today participating in the Ukrainian resistance.
These attacks do not affect only us. They also target the self-determination of a collective process that brings together different subjectivities, anarchist and non-anarchist alike, united by the will to support those resisting a real act of aggression. Claiming the authority to decide from the outside what is “legitimate” to do, which practices are acceptable and which are not, means arrogating a power we reject.
This is also why we are speaking out: so that those who read us clearly understand the context, and because we do not intend to leave space for distorted narratives or self-serving reconstructions.
There is something profoundly indecent in the writings of those who, while a people is being bombed, occupied, and deported, find the time and tone to pontificate against those who resist. It is not only a political mistake: it is a moral inversion.
To turn concrete solidarity into “complicity with militarism” means having completely lost contact with the material reality of war.
Those who write about the “normalization of militarism” do so from a position of safety, far from the front line, far from the rubble, far from the brutal choice that millions of people have faced: to submit or to resist. Speaking of “refusal of conflict” as a general line, while an invading army advances, is not radical: it is an elegant way of telling others to surrender.
The Ukrainian resistance exists, and it is made up of real people, not abstract categories. Among them are also anarchists who have chosen not to flee, not to submit, not to hand over their cities to an authoritarian and imperial power. Dismissing them as “enlisted” means denying their autonomy and reducing them to extras within an ideologically constructed narrative.
The equivalence between aggressor and aggressed is the most convenient of positions: it allows one not to choose, not to take a stand, not to risk anything. But it is also the most hypocritical. Not all violence is the same, not all wars are symmetrical, and pretending otherwise means obscuring the responsibility of those who invade.
To say that materially supporting the resistance strengthens the “war machine” is a sophism that ignores a basic fact: without means, those who resist are crushed. There is no form of “pure” resistance capable of opposing an army without tools. Demanding it is pure abstract moralism, useful only to those who do not bear the consequences of their words.
The obsessive call for desertion, detached from any concrete analysis, sounds like an escape from reality. Desertion can be a political act in certain contexts; in others, it means leaving the field open to oppression. Turning it into a universal solution is a theoretical shortcut that completely ignores real power relations.
Those who speak of “two barracks of the same prison” construct an imaginary world in which differences disappear and everything is equivalent. But in the real world there are those who invade and those who are invaded, those who bomb and those who defend themselves, those who impose and those who resist. Refusing to see these differences is not clarity: it is political blindness.
The anarchists participating in the Ukrainian resistance have not ceased to be anarchists. They are operating within a real contradiction, trying to defend spaces of existence against an immediate threat. This is not a surrender to the state, but a difficult choice within extreme conditions. Criticizing it from the outside, without taking any risk, is easy—much easier than living it.
So-called antimilitarist “purity,” when it becomes a refusal of any concrete solidarity, turns into its opposite: a sterile position that changes nothing and helps no one. Worse still, it ends up objectively aligning with those who hold more power, because it leaves the weakest without means.
Solidarity is not a slogan. It is a material stance. It means choosing a side when no perfect options exist. And today, choosing means standing with those who resist, with those who do not surrender, with those who try to defend their lives and their freedom even within a terrible context.
Everything else is rhetoric. And rhetoric, when it covers the abandonment of the oppressed, ceases to be harmless. It becomes complicity.
(photo: Zenon Sych/Wikimedia Commons)