A year and a half ago, we published a bigger text titled “When ideology stands in the way of solidarity” about how certain anarchist groups in various Western European countries manipulate facts to exclude Eastern European anarchists from discussions about the war in Ukraine.

Since then, unfortunately, the situation has taken a turn for the worse, and the popularity of old anti-militarist and pacifist perspectives within the Western European anarchist movement has only grown. This month, we received another refusal from Berlin regarding our participation in the anarchist book fair, whose organizers emphasized that they had no connection to last year’s organizing group.

Over the past few years of speaking in Western Europe, we have become convinced that a significant part of the anarchist movement there deeply believes that the war in Ukraine is not their war, based on outdated political analyses. We see how these people have chosen to sit comfortably in the back rows of history and simply wait to see how the situation in Eastern Europe will develop without their participation. In the event of the political rise of the far right in our countries, it will always be possible to say, “Well, we told you so,” and in the event of alternative scenarios, to pretend that this was the plan all along.