For some radical left politicians in Greece and other European countries, there is blame on both sides in the Ukraine conflict.
They argue NATO’s eastward expansion provoked Russia’s invasion, oppose military aid to Ukraine, and some have doubts about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political alignment.
“The war could have been avoided,” Greece’s former foreign minister Yorgos Katrougalos—who served in the previous leftist administration run by the Syriza party—told AFP.
Europe “should have built a new security architecture including Russia in the first decade of the 21st century”, he argued.
In a June 2021 Pew Research poll, 57 per cent of Greeks said they did not have a favourable opinion of the transatlantic alliance, bucking the generally positive trend among respondents from other NATO countries.
NATO warplanes bombed Greece’s traditional ally Serbia in 1999.
And in April, a cross-European YouGov poll found 28 per cent of Greeks blamed the situation in Ukraine “entirely” on NATO, while another 29 per cent said NATO and Russia shared responsibility.
Only Bulgaria and Slovakia scored higher on blaming NATO entirely, the poll found, while respondents in most of the 17 countries polled blamed Russia.
Sending arms ‘a big mistake’
Greece’s conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in February angered party leaders on the left by deciding to send Kalashnikovs, ammunition and anti-tank weapons to Kyiv without consulting parliament.
Leftist former PM Alexis Tsipras described the move as a “big mistake”, and thousands marched in the streets of Athens on May Day, denouncing both Russia and NATO, but the transfer went ahead.
In Bulgaria however, the openly pro-Russian Socialist Party which is part of the government coalition, held up a similar delivery of military aid.
The government there eventually agreed a compromise, settling for a military-technical repair and maintenance package rather than weapons.
Both Greece and Bulgaria are majority Orthodox countries with historical links to Russia, which helped them become independent states in the 19th century.
“The Greeks have always had good relations with the Russians and have done so since the Greek War of Independence in 1821,” says Alexandros Dagkas, a professor of history at the University of Thessaloniki.
The Greek Communist Party (KKE) condemned Moscow’s decision to invade Ukraine, protesting on 25 February in front of the Russian embassy and then the US embassy.
But it also boycotted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the Greek parliament on 7 April.
Shared responsibility
Elisaios Vagenas, head of international affairs at the KKE, said the Ukrainian government had “a great deal of responsibility” for the conflict, as did Moscow.
“NATO and EU member states involved in the imperialist massacre of Ukraine share responsibility,” he told AFP.
The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), which has six seats in the country’s 230-seat parliament, also boycotted Zelensky’s speech in parliament on 21 April.
Paula Santos, leader of the communist parliamentary group, argued that the Ukrainian president “personifies a xenophobic and warmongering power, surrounded and supported by forces of a fascist and neo-Nazi character”.
Spain’s hard-left Podemos, the junior partner in the governing coalition in Madrid, has condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “criminal” invasion. But it has also described the delivery of military aid to Ukraine as a “mistake”.
And while Germany’s far-left party Die Linke also condemned the invasion of Ukraine, a vocal minority within the party has criticised NATO’s Eastern Europe expansion as “US imperialism”.
In North Macedonia, the small left-wing Levica party is the only political player to have openly taken a pro-Russian stance, criticising the “Russophobic, provocative and unfriendly” rhetoric of the government in Skopje.
