Between March and April 2026, the documentary Anti-Authoritarians at War traveled across Italy, from Turin to Bari, passing through Padua, Bologna, and Milan. It wasn't just a militant tour. It was a detonator. Everywhere it went, it reopened a rift that has plagued the left for years: how to live through a war without losing one's political identity. ---- It was launched by Solidarity Collectives , a Ukrainian network of anarchist, transfeminist, and internationalist origins that, since the beginning of the Russian invasion, has chosen to operate on multiple levels: mutual aid to affected civilians, logistical support for fighters, and, for some of its members, direct participation in the war. An experience difficult to classify within the usual categories, combining solidarity, armed militancy, and revolutionary discourse.
There was no shortage of controversy. In Bologna, where the initiative found its way into the social districts, the local federation of the Communist Refoundation Party even called for its suspension, denouncing the risk of legitimizing organizations that support foreign armed forces. On the other hand, the organizers asserted the need for direct dialogue with those experiencing war, rejecting schematic interpretations and denouncing the return of a "campist" approach, incapable of breaking away from the logic of opposing blocs.
The clash is neither marginal nor episodic. It's not just about a documentary or a series of public meetings. It touches on a deeper issue: the relationship between war, antimilitarism, and radical politics. On the one hand, there are those who see the Russian invasion as an imperialist attack that requires supporting the Ukrainian resistance, even in its armed forms, to prevent the nationalist right from taking over. On the other, there are those who reject any involvement in the military machinery of states, viewing war as a device that, beyond destruction, strengthens social control, forced mobilization, and the interests of elites.
It's a rift that runs through anarchism and the international left, but in Ukraine it takes on a concrete and dramatic character. Because here, it's not about taking a stand from afar, but about choosing how to live-or survive-in a war.
The Solidarity Collectives were formed in the days immediately following the February 2022 invasion, when thousands of people lined up to receive weapons and defend their cities. At that moment, their activists explain, the issue wasn't posed in abstract ideological terms: the choice was between resisting or succumbing. It was in this space that they attempted to position themselves. Not as a hegemonic force, but as a presence attempting to prevent the war from being monopolized by nationalist and far-right elements.
Their trajectory is significant. The initial attempt to build autonomous units of libertarian fighters quickly failed. Operational difficulties, army constraints, and the very dynamics of the conflict led to the dispersal of militants within regular units. Today, there is no such thing as an "anarchist army." There are individuals and small groups who fight within a state structure, maintaining-at least in their intentions-their own political identity.
Hence their current strategy: not to build a separate alternative, but to act on three intertwined levels. On the one hand, material support for anti-authoritarian fighters; on the other, humanitarian work in the affected areas; and finally, intense international communications efforts to explain and legitimize this choice. This position is based on a clear conviction: Ukraine's political future will also be determined by those who participated in the resistance. Remaining outside of it would mean renouncing any ability to influence the situation.
But it is precisely this point that is contested by other sectors of Ukrainian anarchism. In Kharkiv, a city under almost daily bombardment, the Assembly collective develops a radically different interpretation. Here too, there is no ambiguity regarding the Russian invasion, which is defined as a violent and destructive aggression. However, this observation does not lead to support for the Ukrainian state, but rather to a rejection of both sides in the war as the expression of interests that do not coincide with those of the population.
Their analysis shifts to another realm: that of class and material conditions. They speak of forced conscription, closed borders, workers trapped between mobilization and unemployment, and an economy that continues to function even during wartime to ensure profits and energy flows. In this framework, war appears not only as a clash between states, but as a device that organizes and exploits the lives and deaths of the subalterns, while elites maintain spaces for economic cooperation.
This is where a second line of response emerges: not participating in the war, but encouraging practices of refusal. Desertion, conscientious objection, sabotage, and community self-organization. Not as an individual act, but as a potential collective rupture. In some cases, they argue, this is already a material reality: the growing number of deserters, the difficulties in maintaining front lines, the use of increasingly coercive measures to ensure recruitment.
The gap between these two positions is evident, but it's not simply a divergence of ideology. It stems from the same experience of war and the same awareness of its brutality. Both reject nationalism as a political horizon. Both place themselves outside the official narratives, both Western and Russian. But they diverge on one crucial point: the relationship with the state and with organized violence.
For the Solidarity Collectives, joining the resistance is a way to prevent Ukrainian society from being dominated by the most reactionary forces. For the Assembly, that same choice risks dissolving all political autonomy within the state and military machinery. There's no easy solution in the middle.
The war in Ukraine isn't just testing tactical choices or international alliances. It questions something deeper: the categories through which the left has conceived itself.
For decades, words like antimilitarism, internationalism, and antifascism served as relatively stable coordinates. Today, they're back in the spotlight, but they no longer point to a univocal direction. They're riddled with tensions that can't be resolved with formulas inherited from the past.
Antimilitarism is perhaps the area where the divide appears most evident. On the one hand, the classic idea remains: war is a state device that mobilizes, disciplines, and sacrifices the lower classes. Hence the refusal to participate, the support for desertion, and the opposition to sending weapons. On the other, a different position emerges: war is something to be stopped, but under certain conditions it cannot be avoided. In this framework, fighting becomes-paradoxically-a way to end war itself. Not to affirm it, but to end it.
Internationalism is also changing shape. In its classic form, it is based on solidarity among workers across national borders, against the wars of states. Today, this perspective clashes with a different reality: a military invasion that generates concrete resistance, rooted in a territory and a population. For some, supporting that resistance is a form of internationalism: siding with those who suffer aggression. For others, internationalism remains incompatible with any participation in a national war, even when it is presented as defensive.
Finally, anti-fascism. In the discourse of the Solidarity Collectives, war is interpreted as resistance to imperialist and authoritarian aggression. In this light, fighting becomes a form of anti-fascism. But here another problem arises. Because that same struggle takes place within a state, an army, and a dynamic that, in wartime conditions, tend to reinforce hierarchies, discipline, and national sentiments.
The contradiction is not abstract: the fight is taking place within a field where, alongside those who invoke libertarian or egalitarian practices, there are also nationalist and far-right forces that have found in the war a space of legitimacy and visibility.
The dilemma, however, doesn't just concern the Ukrainian left. It directly affects us too. Not only in the increasingly divisive decision to send weapons to Ukraine, but also in how we view those on both sides of the front who refuse to fight. Russian antimilitarists are largely in prison or in exile; in Ukraine, the number of conscripts seeking to avoid mobilization is growing. Ignoring this dimension means reducing the war to a confrontation between states, erasing the social terrain on which a decisive part of the conflict is played out.
There is no completely clean position. Sending weapons means agreeing to fuel a war, even when it is done to prevent an occupation. Refusing all military support means assuming the concrete risk of the attacked party being crushed. Supporting desertion calls into question both states, but also confronts the most difficult question: what happens to an invaded population if its armed defenses dissolve?
At the beginning of the war, we saw something else. Women and men taking to the streets, organizing, building Molotov cocktails to stop the Russian tanks. A people in arms, in the most concrete sense of the word.
But what remains today of that experience?
Very little. That momentum was quickly reabsorbed into a state machine consisting of a regular army, discipline, hierarchies, and forced conscription. Autonomy was shrunken, almost to the point of disappearing.
And on the opposite side?
In Russia, in the first months of the invasion, a spontaneous antimilitarist movement-made up of men and women, often very young-tried to stop the war.
Today they are mostly in prison or in exile.
And so the question directly concerns us too.
What concrete solidarity have these antimilitarists received from the European left?
Almost none. And it's a void that weighs,
Instead, a different logic prevails: transforming the war into a forced line of attack, a "just war" that enlists everyone and everything, eliminating any room for dissent. A simplification that ends up erasing the very individuals who, in fact, question the war on both sides of the front.
This is where the problem becomes clear.
Not wanting war isn't a neutral position. It's a political choice.
It means rejecting the army and militarism that make it possible; an economy based on permanent rearmament and war production; even the wealth that war produces. It means refusing to be part of the material and social infrastructure that fuels it and ensures its reproduction.
It's not a simple position. It doesn't automatically solve the problem of aggression. But it points in a different direction than that imposed by states: demilitarize, reduce armaments, divert resources and manpower from war.
From this perspective, desertion, objection, and refusal-in Russia as in Ukraine-are not marginal. They are one of the few points where a real fracture opens up.
The question then is not to choose a more just war.
It is taking away from war the ground on which it grows.
Not being on the right side of the war, but being against the war.
http://www.alternativalibertaria.org
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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