When ABC Belarus asked to take part in the Anarchist Bookfair in Bremgarten, Switzerland, they weren’t planning to recruit soldiers for the Ukrainian army or host a panel singing the praises of NATO and western capitalism. Like they’ve done at other bookfairs, they planned to speak about repression in Belarus and run a distro table. The organizers decided to reject their request, in short, “because of the war topic.” They apparently offered no further explanation, leaving ABC Belarus to understandably conclude that the problem was its position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This stubborn rejection goes beyond being a silly dispute over who gets a table at a Eurppean anarchist bookfair - it has material consequences. ABC Belarus currently supports 15 different prisoners, some facing sentences of more than 18 years, alongside recently released comrades who have been forcibly deported and are trying to rebuild their lives abroad. International bookfairs typically bring in funds via donations and distro sales for the collective, which goes toward legal representation, care packages and other basic yet crucial forms of prisoner support. And now that material aid will take a backseat to purity testing from western European anarchists.
This situation is frustrating but it isn’t exactly surprising as Bremgarten isn’t an isolated case. ABC Belarus has been blocked from similar events before and expects the problem to continue. Technically, ABC Belarus could take the easy way out by making itself more palatable and separating its prisoner work from the politics that produced those prisoners in the first place. But they reject that, clarifying that “We are not just a ‘fund’ that will avoid uncomfortable topics in order to keep the resources flowing.” The collective’s clear analysis of “Russian imperialistic aggression,” it continued, is “as much a part of our anarchism as our anti-prison work.”
This is a classic case of the rift that has grown between anarchists since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The rift derives from a question - does opposition to states and militarism require anarchists to withhold support from people resisting conquest?
It goes without saying that any serious anarchist case for supporting Ukrainian resistance doesn’t require blind faith in the Ukrainian government, NATO or military institutions. The real disagreement is over what anti-statism demands when one state is actively trying to eradicate another population. Is refusing loyalty to both governments truly and materially the same thing as refusing to help the people being invaded? Does anti-militarism require rejecting armed self-defense when no nonviolent movement is capable of stopping the army already attacking you? And if anarchists make tactical use of state military structures because they lack an effective autonomous alternative, does that automatically make them supporters of the state?
ABC Belarus has answered those questions one way. So have anarchists in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Czechia and elsewhere in the region. While their answers aren’t always identical or unanimous, they’re markedly more realistic than those given by anarchists and collectives who have never had to deal with Russian occupation and aggression. Both anarchist history and contemporary anarchists actually living with the consequences of this war make it clear that there’s no merit in the idea that defending Ukrainian resistance is somehow self-evidently incompatible with anarchism.
recognizing popular resistance vs. state worship
Ukrainian anarchists and anti-authoritarians have repeatedly argued that the object of solidariity is not the government in Kyiv but ordinary people defending their homes, communities, and ability to determine their own future. Supporting their resistance doesn’t require pretending that the Ukrainian state is progressive, emancipatory, or beyond any real criticism. It also doesn’t require pretending that NATO is some altruistic force of good and that receiving weapons from the west can’t create uncomfortable dependencies. But it cannot lose sight of what the material reality is for people on the ground.
Solidarity Collectives is a clear example of what this looks like in practice. The collective materially supports the resistance of Ukrainian people in the form of both humanitarian and military aid, while continuing to stand in opposition to inequality, authoritarianism, attacks on workers and neoliberal reconstruction.
And Belarusian anarchists have described this wartime understanding of the Ukrainian state in similarly pragmatic terms. ABC Belarus has explicitly warned about the possibility of military participation turning into a new form of state patriotism and that cooperation with Ukrainian authorities remains a temporary necessity rather than ideological alignment. It clearly shows that anarchists can oppose both state entities involved without pretending they’re the same thing or present the same level of threat.
Russia chose to launch the full-scale invasion, it chose to occupy and annex territory, and it chose to impose its authority on people who chose to resist it. Ukrainians fighting back aren’t doing so simply for a flag, a border or the interests of their ruling class, and insisting on such is ghoulish. If that resistance were abandoned in the name of being “principled anarchists,” the result would leave the vastly stronger Russian military freer to impose its rule, and there would no longer be space left for Ukrainian anarchists to organize at all.
pacifism hasn’t always been the default
When examining anarchist history, it’s possible to find examples of clear pacifist tradition among some individuals and collectives. Christian anarchists, for example, like Tolstoy rejected armies, patriotism and violent resistance. A Tolstoyan response to Ukraine would emphasize conscientious objection, desertion, noncooperation and nonviolent resistance.
While it can be considered a coherent position, it’s never been the only position.
Anarchist history also contains armed insurrection, anti-colonial resistance, sabotage, revolutionary militias and temporary cooperation with political forces anarchists deeply distrusted. And there’s been discourse about those choices almost from the beginning.
Bakunin is useful here because he drew a distinction between freeing people from imperial rule and building a new nationalist state in its place. During the revolutions of 1848, before his anarchist ideas had fully matured, he called for the breakup of the Russian, Austrian, Prussian and Ottoman imperial systems and imagined the peoples living under them joining voluntary federations instead. In his Appeal to the Slavs, he even spoke of “Great Russia, Little Russia, and Poland” being liberated from the Russian Empire, with “Little Russia” being the imperial-era name then commonly used for much of Ukraine.
His later anarchism made the distinction even clearer. Bakunin rejected nationalism as a political principle and opposed replacing one centralized state with another, but he still argued that peoples had the right to exist freely and organize themselves from below. In Statism and Anarchy, he described freedom in explicitly federalist terms, running upward from autonomous communes and regions to “whole peoples,” while insisting that nationality should never become an exclusive or superior political principle.
So the relevant point is not that Bakunin would have supported a modern Ukrainian nation-state. Almost certainly not. It’s that his hostility to nationalism did not translate into indifference toward imperial domination. For him, getting rid of foreign rule and getting rid of domestic ruling classes were connected problems, not mutually exclusive ones.
The split between Kropotkin and Malatesta during the First World War gets especially close to the problem. Kropotkin supported the Entente because he believed German militarism posed a particular threat and feared that an immediate peace would simply reward conquest. Malatesta fiercely disagreed, warning that anarchists were allowing governments and ruling classes to define political necessity for them. But Malatesta was not an absolute pacifist. He explicitly defended the right of oppressed and conquered peoples to resist. His objection was to turning legitimate self-defense into political loyalty toward the states claiming to provide it.
Both warnings remain useful. Kropotkin recognized that the outcome of a war can dramatically affect the freedom available to people living under conquest. Malatesta recognized how easily resistance can become an excuse for subordinating anarchist politics to governments and armies. Russian occupation would make autonomous organizing in Ukraine considerably harder and recognizing that doesn’t require giving the Ukrainian government or NATO the benefit of the doubt
The Makhnovists faced a similar contradiction in practice during the revolutionary struggles in Ukraine. They combined armed defense with peasant self-organization and free soviets, fought multiple occupying and counterrevolutionary forces, and at times entered temporary military agreements with the Bolsheviks against the White armies. Clearly, that didn’t make Makhno a Bolshevik. It was tactical cooperation against an immediate enemy, and the fact that the Bolsheviks later crushed the movement is also a useful warning about where such alliances can lead.
Even Korean anarchists fighting Japanese colonialism show that opposition to nationalism has never necessarily meant indifference to foreign domination. They participated in anti-colonial struggle while trying to connect liberation from Japanese rule to a broader libertarian social revolution rather than simply replacing colonial government with an ordinary nationalist state.
None of these examples maps neatly onto Ukraine today, and they shouldn’t be forced to. What they do show is that anarchists have repeatedly faced the same basic dilemma - how do you resist an immediate form of domination without allowing the institutions used for defense to become another source of domination? Historically, the anarchist answer has not often been to refuse resistance.
and contemporary anarchists have differing views on the war in ukraine
There is no single anarchist position on Ukraine. The Polish Federacja Anarchistyczna, for example, issued an anti-war statement in March 2022 that rejected the demand to choose between Russian imperialism and NATO expansion. Its emphasis was transnational worker solidarity, refugees and opposition to militarism rather than military support for Ukraine. While many might disagree with this position, it has its place in an egalitarian discussion.
But also, it’s only one part of contemporary anarchism. A striking number of anarchists in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Czech Republic have reached a very different conclusion - resisting Russia, including through armed force where necessary, is compatible with remaining anarchists.
ABC Belarus is about as unambiguous as it gets. In June 2022 it wrote that anarchists have the right to collective self-defense when a state comes to take their freedoms and explicitly rejected the demand for peace “by any means necessary.” It went further, calling armed resistance to Putin a “revolutionary necessity” and urging support for anarchists fighting in Ukraine alongside anti-war work in Russia and Belarus.
At the same time, ABC Belarus insisted that cooperation with Ukraine’s government was a forced, temporary arrangement and warned against allowing military participation to harden into patriotism. Their argument isn’t that military institutions have stopped being authoritarian, but that surrender to another authoritarian state would not solve that problem.
The Belarusian collective Prameń reached a similar conclusion. It openly acknowledged that joining state military structures is “a departure from the anarchist tradition,” then said it nevertheless supported comrades who did so because, under actual wartime conditions, it saw no other effective way to offer armed resistance. It supported both military and nonmilitary forms of struggle.
Prameń’s reasoning was practical rather than romantic. Anarchists lacked the manpower, resources, training and weapons to create a fully autonomous army. An unrecognized armed formation operating independently could simply be destroyed. Joining Ukrainian structures was therefore understood as a compromise forced by material weakness, not some ideological discovery that state armies were suddenly desirable.
And Russian anarchists have reached much the same conclusion from inside the aggressor state.
In an August 2024 statement, Autonomous Action described the invasion straightforwardly as “imperialist aggression of the Russian state.” It simultaneously declared that it was not on the side of the Ukrainian state, or any state, while arguing that a Russian victory would be disastrous for people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The statement also touched on the tendency for some to approach the war from a position of symmetry, “In the current circumstances, we consider meaningless the stance like “both are equally repulsive”, ‘no difference between Zelensky and Putin’ and so on. It made sense to cry ‘against all!’ during the First World War, when equally authoritarian imperialist predators fought each other directly. Now, in the conditions of radical inequality of forces and objectively freer political system of Ukraine, such a position only helps the Kremlin to win.”
More importantly, it explicitly supported anti-authoritarians who had taken up arms against Russian imperialism “even if they joined the state army of Ukraine.” It also opposed forced Ukrainian conscription and restrictions on men leaving the country. That position is difficult to dismiss as being tainted by Ukrainian nationalism for the fairly obvious reason that it’s coming from Russian anarchists.
The clandestine Russian anarchist group BOAK went further still, pursuing sabotage against Russian military and logistical infrastructure while continuing to frame its goals in explicitly anti-state and revolutionary terms.
The Czech Anarchist Federation has been one of the clearest pro-resistance voices within the International of Anarchist Federations. In its 2022 text People Must Come First, it argued that workers in Ukraine were not primarily fighting for the Ukrainian state but to preserve the political freedoms that make future social struggle possible in the first place. Its authors put the point with admirable impatience: “an attacking dictator who is razing entire communities to the ground will not be stopped by our anti-militarist manifestos.”
The Czech federation also openly acknowledged that anarchists internationally were divided over the question, and that’s important because it avoids replacing one false orthodoxy with another. Contemporary anarchism is split. But there’s clearly a substantial, historically continuous and regionally rooted anarchist current that supports Ukrainian resistance.
It’s worth pointing out the geography of where this current is strongest - Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Czechia, precisely the places where anarchists have direct experience with Russian power or Russian-backed authoritarianism. And many of these groups share a recognizable commonality of supporting resistance, rejecting unconditional loyalty to Kyiv, opposing compulsory military service, continuing prisoner and labor solidarity, and treating cooperation with state structures as tactical rather than ideological.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that proximity makes anyone automatically correct. But it does mean there is something strange about anarchists living safely elsewhere declaring that those actually confronting Russian invasion or dictatorship have disqualified themselves from anarchism by choosing to fight back.
the compromise is real
A controversial yet necessary point is the idea that “support Ukraine” doesn’t mean entirely shutting up about Ukraine and shying away from any due criticism.
Contradictions don’t disappear just because the resistance is justified. Forced conscription remains coercive, attacks on labor rights are still attacks on workers, and far-right groups do not become harmless because they happen to be fighting Russia. Western military aid can create real dependencies and give outside states leverage, while military structures themselves still reproduce hierarchy and obedience. Pro-resistance anarchists in the region are generally quite explicit about these problems rather than pretending they do not exist.
There’s no need to romanticize the Ukrainian state or its military to make the case for resistance. The fact that the available means of defense are compromised, hierarchical or tied to state power doesn’t make Russian conquest a neutral outcome, much less a preferable one.
The same goes for military aid. Taking weapons from states doesn’t mean trusting those states or treating their involvement as benevolent or altruistic, and dependency can easily become a source of political pressure. But the more important question is whether those weapons are being used to resist conquest while anarchists maintain their own politics and independence, rather than whether the resistance has somehow remained completely untouched by state structures.
Pacifism presents a similar tension. Desertion, strikes, sabotage of war logistics, draft resistance and nonviolent civil resistance all belong in an anarchist anti-war politics. But they have to actually work.
If Russian soldiers lay down their weapons, the invasion ends. If Ukrainians defending their homes lay theirs down while the Russian military remains in place, any hope for Ukrainian sovereignty ends. Autonomous Action made precisely this distinction in rejecting calls for everybody to disarm simultaneously in theory when the two sides do not occupy symmetrical positions in practice.
The anti-militarist concern is that fighting through state institutions can strengthen hierarchy, nationalism and militarized forms of politics, and that risk is real. But pro-resistance anarchists point out that invasion and occupation are themselves forms of militarized domination, and refusing to fight back does not make that domination disappear. The real disagreement is over which dangers anarchists should prioritize, and how to resist one without becoming absorbed by the other.
But these points of disagreement can’t even be discussed if western anarchists far removed from this war decide to shut down any voices that aren’t explicitly pacifistic.
As already mentioned, the rejection of ABC Belarus is not an isolated incident. The collective has described being shut out of other anarchist events over its position on Ukraine, and similar disputes have surrounded Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian anarchists who joined defensive formations or supported those who did.
ABC Belarus is hardly alone in arguing that opposition to state power does not require passivity in the face of invasion. Prameń, Autonomous Action, the Czech Anarchist Federation, Solidarity Collectives and other regional anarchists have reached versions of the same conclusion, even if they disagree over tactics and limits. There’s also a real anti-militarist current, including among Polish anarchists, and those disagreements should exist. War, violence and compromise are exactly the kinds of questions anarchists ought to argue about. The problem begins when one position is treated not as something to debate, but as grounds for deciding who counts at all.
The choices being made by anarchists in the region can’t be reduced to a theoretical argument about whether states are bad. They already organize against states, flee them, get imprisoned by them and support people inside their prisons. The harder question is what to do when one of those states invades.
An anarchism that can theorize endlessly about insurrection and collective self-defense, then declares self-defense illegitimate the moment it happens under messy real-world conditions, risks becoming a politics that works best only when nobody actually has to defend themselves.
Nonviolence, purity tests, etc... are things we have already gone through in the past and the consequences were disastrous. Rather then repeating the same mistakes we should learn from them, my support goes to the ABC and to the other anarchists who join the fight, not to protect the state, but the peoples who live in it
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