STOP THE WAR Cymru is today taking its call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine to the Welsh Labour Party conference. By publishing and distributing this statement to conference delegates, we hope to put peace back on Labour’s agenda along with the need to pressurise the Westminster government to focus on welfare and not warfare in the interests of the people of Wales and Britain.

Welsh Labour has previously prided itself on having clear red water between Wales and Westminster, and this spirit needs to be revived as a matter of urgency; choosing to advocate for peace rather than fuelling war by pouring more weapons into conflicts would make the “clear red water” statement true again.

With British military aid to Ukraine currently standing at around £8 billion and the government committed to an additional £3bn each year for the foreseeable future, it’s clear that there’s a very different attitude to money for war than there is for relieving poverty at home.

Welsh Labour needs to start holding the new Labour Westminster government to account, with the Prime Minister currently more interested in out-militarising the US in order to appear “strong,” fuelling and escalating already horrific wars with an apparent open chequebook while impoverishing pensioners with the fuel allowance cut and perpetuating child poverty by retaining the two-child benefit cap.

Over the last year, Stop the War Cymru and the wider anti-war movement in Wales have rightly focused predominantly on campaigning to end the growing genocide in Gaza and the further spread of bloody war into the wider Middle East, but the war in Ukraine is still grinding on at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Ukraine and Russian casualties and growing casualties at home from continued austerity that pays the price for warmongering.

It is unclear how or whether a new Trump presidency in the US will affect US and British imperialism’s aims, but what is clear is that when communities unite for peace and against war, we can effect change.

The anti-war movements are having an impact, with the TUC supporting positive resolutions on Palestine and the wider Middle East war and, here in Wales, Unison Cymru and GMB Wales and the south-west affiliating to Stop the War.

But we want to take the movement more deeply into the unions and link it with the Nato proxy war in Ukraine, the new arms race which is threatening the future of humanity, and the growing threat of wider war.

Uniting the labour and trade union movement in Wales for peace and against militarism is the mission, and we call on Welsh Labour delegates to join us.

For an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, without preconditions, with the aim to achieve a lasting peace.

It’s now over two and a half years since the US/Nato/Ukraine provoked the Russian entry into the Eastern region of Ukraine.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, injured or captured on both sides since February 2022. Ukrainian and some other European economies have been hard hit by the war, while Russia, whose economy is still growing, has resisted US sanctions supported by continued trade with countries of the global South, eastern Europe and China. Nato countries have been encouraged to increase military spending and support for Ukraine at the expense of austerity and poverty for their own populations.

The purpose of the West’s military campaign is to extend the sphere of control eastward — despite assurances made to Russia following the collapse of the USSR.

Having concluded that the Russian regime can’t be incorporated, it is perceived as a threat. If a generation of Ukraine’s youth must die (along with many young Russian men), that’s considered an acceptable price to pay.

There is a growing understanding that Ukraine cannot win this war. Ukraine’s Nato-trained and armed military incursion into the Kursk region of Russia represents a dangerous escalation, notwithstanding that it may have already backfired with Ukraine losing further ground in the East.

Now, the British government intends to send long-range missiles against targets deep inside nuclear-armed Russia, increasing the territory involved in the conflict — recklessly risking escalation with the nuclear-armed state.

The US and other Nato countries have undermined all efforts at peace negotiations to date. The 2015 peace deal (Minsk II), which granted devolution to Russian-speaking East Donbas within a Ukrainian state, was never implemented by Kiev.
 
Any new deal must come with a commitment to end a war which is bringing no benefit to the ordinary peoples of Ukraine, Europe or Russia. The call of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for a new peace conference, this time including Russia, is very welcome. This must be the way forward if further loss of life and the extension of the war into Europe are to be avoided.

Whether you fully share Stop the War Cymru’s analysis in this statement, everyone should unite around a call for an immediate ceasefire and good faith negotiations, without preconditions, for a lasting peace.

Stop the War Cymru can be contacted at StoptheWarCymru@gmail.com.