In his appearence before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State Blinken said that the United States will support Ukraine’s possible decision not to join NATO and maintain its neutrality. This represents not only a welcome de-escalation of war rhetoric from the Biden admininistration, but also aligns with the position of Ukraine’s President Zelensky.

What Zelensky isn’t ready to do is to accede to any demands of Putin that violate the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Makes sense.

By the way, truth be told, there was never a roadmap to Ukraine’s membership in NATO, in large measure because of the hesitation of some of its current members. In their calculus, bringing Ukraine into NATO, could easily become more trouble than it’s worth.

According to many communist parties (including the cpusa), the eurocommunist movement in the 1970s was nothing but rot and opportunism. But we were wrong as we were about many things.

Admittedly, Eurocommunism didn’t get everything right, but it was more right than the larger movement of which it was a dissenting part. I agree with the writer that its legacy retains positive relevance to the left in the contemporary world, a world besigned by cascading, entwined, and existential moral, social and political crises.

Heard Nina Simone’s interpretation of this song, thanks to Radio Woodstock, for the first time Saturday on my way – 7:30am – to my spin class. Good way to begin a sunny day in Kingston.

Any explanation for the outbreak of war in Ukraine has to allow for the convergence and interaction of multiple short and longer term factors that set the stage and triggered Putin’s order to invade an independent, sovereign country. In ths regard, the expansion of NATO figures into any explanation for Putin’s decision, but to turn it into the singular factor renders a complex of factors and their consequences – the social and economic collapse of the 1990s, the rise of Russian nationalism, the political formation and psychology of Putin, the changing political dynamics of Ukraine and its drift to the West – invisible and thus empty of explanatory-causal weight.

To turn the rollback of NATO, moreover, into the main focus of the peace movement’s energies is wrongheaded too. A ceasefire, negotiations, and the withdrawal of Russia’s troops from Ukraine should be its main demands, it seems to me. Only the silencing of the guns of war, the return of Russian soldiers to Russia, and a free and independent Ukraine will restore some sense of normalcy to that besigned and battered country, puncture the bubble of war fever, gripping too many capitals, and give peace, disarmament, and global cooperation a chance.

President Biden’s “regime change” remark rightfully earned him rebuke from many quarters. It was gasoline on the fire. But it doesn’t follow that progressive minded people should have any hesitation to express their solidarity with the people and organizations in Russian society, whose goal is to “remove” Putin and his dictatorial regime from power.