Ukraine: a booty that Moscow and Washington are dividing among themselves

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Since Russian troops invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, 3 years and 9 months have passed. This war, which according to Moscow was supposed to last a few months, perhaps a year, had the official aim of protecting the Russian-speaking population of two regions of Donbas – Luhansk and Donetsk. After its independence in 1991 following the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine had never recognized the elementary minority rights of these regions, although they were officially promised, after a long period of social and armed conflicts, in the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015. In fact, these populations – with the exception of a few periods in which certain governments, such as Yanukovych’s, attempted to establish a kind of balance between NATO and the European Union on the one hand and Russia on the other – were instead subjected to systematic oppression and repression both by the central government in Kyiv and by neo-Nazi militias in the service of Kyiv (such as the “Azov Battalion”). Pro-Russian separatist forces, on the pretext that their demands for autonomy had never been met, took advantage of the operation in Crimea (its annexation by Russia in 2014) to declare the establishment of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, relying on Russia’s support and immediately recognized only by it.

In reality, the conflict between Ukrainian pro-Russian factions and Ukrainian pro-European and pro-Western factions began immediately after Ukraine declared independence from Moscow and intensified at the end of the 1990s, when Western and NATO pressure to draw Ukraine into their camp grew stronger and increasingly persistent; in this context, the presidential elections of October 2004 brought Yanukovych (anti-European and “pro-Russian”) to victory, but they were annulled by the Supreme Court due to suspicions of electoral fraud and repeated in December of the same year, when his rival Yushchenko (a supporter of the European Union and NATO; journalists referred to this period as the “Orange Revolution”), strongly backed by the United States and the European Union, won instead. However, the political crisis did not end with the victory of the “Orange Revolution”; in the elections to renew the Ukrainian parliament (March 2006), Yanukovych’s party won, which was not to the liking of Yushchenko or his Euro-American supporters. Political turbulence thus led to further early parliamentary elections after President Yushchenko dissolved parliament; the orange coalition won the majority of seats and in December 2007 brought Yuliya Tymoshenko to the post of prime minister, thereby laying the basis for lasting tension between Yanukovych, then an opposition leader and future president, and the government led by the pro-European Tymoshenko. In 2008 NATO declared that it would in future accept Ukraine’s request to join the military alliance. In 2010 the presidential elections once again brought victory to Yanukovych, defeating Tymoshenko, who at that time was running for the presidency and who, for the misappropriation of public funds (in connection with natural gas supplies agreed with Russia’s Gazprom and considered particularly disadvantageous for Ukraine), was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for abuse of office.

Strong pro-European protests against President Yanukovych, instigated and financed by European and American circles, heightened tensions in the country after the Ukrainian president in 2013 suspended the association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union: this agreement would have opened the way to increased trade between the two, but would have harmed imports and exports between Russia and the European Union due to competition from Ukrainian commodities, especially agricultural products. Economic issues thus became intertwined with political and military ones, as a result of which Russia—because of Western pressure to draw Ukraine into NATO—would have completely lost its influence over this strategically vital border state for Moscow.

In November 2013, mass demonstrations of the “Euromaidan” movement in Kyiv opposed Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the agreement with the European Union and protested forcefully against the pro-Russian government, accused of corruption. The demonstrations and protests, in which armed groups close to neo-Nazism played a significant role, were supported and encouraged to revolt by the United States and European powers, which on the part of the government triggered harsh repression, resulting in dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries. In February 2014, Yanukovych, already isolated and abandoned even by the army itself, fled to Russia, and the pro-European Yatsenyuk was appointed to head the government. Russia declared that what was being presented as a “revolution” was a military coup, and just one month later invaded and occupied Crimea; Crimea is inhabited overwhelmingly by Russians or people of Russian ethnicity. In the same period, with Russia’s support, the eastern Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk also attempted to break away from Kyiv’s political and territorial control, which on the part of the Ukrainian state provoked systematic repression against them.

The social and political turbulence in Ukraine, which arose several years after its independence from Moscow, eventually already in 2014 developed into an armed confrontation between the Donbas separatists and Kyiv; the war that set the Ukrainian and Russian bourgeoisies against each other thus began long before the Russian invasion in February 2022.

First and foremost, Ukraine’s neutrality with regard to NATO and, naturally, also with regard to the European Union, which for all former Soviet republics, after their separation from Moscow, amounted to a kind of passport for accession to NATO. Secondly, the possibility of co-managing or directly managing the thriving extractive and agricultural economy that Ukraine has always represented, especially in its south-eastern regions. Furthermore, Russia undoubtedly had an interest in extending its control over the Black Sea coastline from the Sea of Azov to Odessa, for maritime traffic (both commercial and military) which, through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. Imperialist control and exploitation of the territories of south-western Russia: that is the issue.

WHAT DID UKRAINE SEEK TO OBTAIN AFTER THE PRO-EUROPEAN AND PRO-AMERICAN FACTION DEFEATED THE PRO-RUSSIAN FACTION?

To link up with the European Union in order to benefit from the economic and commercial advantages of one of the richest and most important markets in the world; to expand not only trade but also technological, military and space cooperation with leading imperialist powers such as Europe and the United States; and to place itself under the protection of NATO in order to shield itself from Russia, regarded as the number-one enemy that must not be allowed to gain control of the Black Sea. Imperialist control and exploitation of Ukrainian territory for the benefit of Ukrainian oligarchs and their Euro-American imperialist backers: that is the issue.

The achievement of these objectives on both sides naturally depended on the course of the war, which from February 2022 inevitably intensified as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory.

The war in Ukraine was in fact being prepared—above all by NATO—for at least twenty-five years. After the collapse of the USSR, eastern Europe did not enter a period of democratic stabilization, but rather a period of global disorder (1), which the United States and the historic European imperialist powers, Great Britain and France, joined after reunification by Germany, sought to exploit in order to acquire further influence over the whole of eastern Europe, from which Russia had been compelled to withdraw (including militarily), and in this way to dictate the terms of a new world order in which Russia would play a secondary role. This new world order, however, encountered—aside from the fact that Russia, despite its economic and political crisis, continued to represent a first-rank nuclear power—another, partly unforeseen obstacle: the rise of two other imperialist powers capable of strongly influencing the world market, Japan—which together with Germany was already altering the global balance of economic forces—and China, which began to loom on the horizon as a more than likely and dangerous competitor both to the United States and to the European powers. It was no longer only a matter of the old imperialist powers, among which the United States and Russia dominated on the military plane, but also of a major economic and financial force, with which China was rapidly asserting itself in a world that for a hundred years had been dominated by Euro-American forces.

As we have already had occasion to state in previous articles, Europe is once again becoming a battlefield not only among “domestic” imperialisms, which must confront the imperialism of the United States and Russia, but also through the interference of newly emerging economic and imperialist powers on the world stage, among which China now predominates, followed—albeit at a distance—by India, Indonesia and Brazil, which over the past decade have recorded dizzying GDP growth and which, together with Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, in 2024 constitute the ten most important countries in the world. The economic strength of a given country underpins its political and military strength which, when placed at the service of economic, commercial and financial expansion on a global scale, inevitably generates ever-growing contradictions, leading ultimately to armed clashes.

Thus, Europe, after unleashing wars of conquest and plunder across the entire world and after having been, in the twentieth century, the epicentre of two world imperialist wars, has once again, over the past thirty-five years, found itself at the centre of the division of spheres of imperialist influence—spheres bearing within themselves factors of crisis and wars. The collapse of the USSR, preceded by the “reunification of Germany” (without bloodshed), triggered a general destabilisation of the whole of eastern Europe, beginning with Yugoslavia—within a single decade, from 1991 to 2001, all the republics that made up the “socialist” Federal Republic of Yugoslavia became independent states through extraordinarily bloody wars, the consequences of which persist to this day, as the situation in Kosovo demonstrates—and continuing thereafter in the years 1997–1999 in Chechnya, in the Caucasus, on the very eastern edge of Europe, and again in the Caucasus in Georgia: after multiple armed clashes between opposing factions of Russian and Georgian ethnic affiliation, in 2008, in the two regions contested by these factions (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), a genuine war broke out between Russia and Georgia, after which these two regions, militarily occupied by Russia, declared themselves independent of Georgia. The year 2014 arrived and—as we have already mentioned—the politics of arms took hold in Ukraine.

At the turn of the years 1989–1991, the Euro-American West solemnly reached an agreement with Gorbachev—in exchange for Russia accepting the reunification of the two German republics without resorting to military forces, and for agreements on “nuclear peace”, which envisaged the transfer of Ukrainian nuclear weapons to Russia and the mutual verification of the respective arsenals with the United States—that NATO would not expand into the Eastern European countries, former satellites of Moscow. This development followed upon the increasingly dramatic deepening of the economic crisis in Russia itself; Gorbachev, elected General Secretary of the CPSU in 1985, sought to reach an economic, financial and commercial rapprochement with the hated–beloved West through the introduction of a new policy known as perestroika: that is, a policy of “structural reforms”, through which the Soviet regime attempted to extricate itself from the economic and political crisis, to combat the widespread corruption that had arisen over decades of the CPSU’s absolute power, and to connect openly with the Western and world market by privatising many state economic sectors and opening them also to foreign investment; and at the same time reducing political and military control over the countries of the East and negotiating with the United States the limitation of missiles with nuclear warheads. This period of crisis—not only Russian but also international—decisively contributed to the collapse of the USSR and its “empire”. Between April and December 1991 all the former Soviet republics declared their independence. After the dissolution of the USSR, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was established on the initiative of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, joined by a further eight former Soviet Asian republics (2).

The possibility for the states of eastern Europe, once they had become independent from imperialist Moscow, to trade and negotiate with the most powerful states of Europe and America drew the former Soviet republics into the embrace of Euro-American imperialism, and thus into NATO and the European Union. Russia itself, on the other hand, despite the crisis that had curtailed its imperialist influence, benefited for a long period from trade relations, especially with the countries of western Europe, thanks to their hunger for raw materials (oil, gas, grain, fertilisers, etc.) and to Russia’s great willingness and strong interest in expanding its exports into a rich and easily accessible market. The issue of NATO and its advancing expansion eastwards, however, reached a highly critical stage when the project of drawing also Ukraine into this network became a real possibility.

To make it clear that the political-military deals struck among capitalist and imperialist powers have only a relative value and are violated whenever the interests of one side or the other prevail through strong pressure, it suffices to recall the deals concerning NATO’s expansion in eastern Europe: according to the deals between the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia, this expansion should not have taken place (3), but it nonetheless began to be implemented from 1999 with the inclusion of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland in NATO, and continued in 2004 with the accession of Bulgaria, the Baltic states, Romania and Slovakia. Ukraine and Georgia applied for membership in both the European Union and NATO; however, the war waged by Russia brought this process to a halt.

UKRAINE: FROM ILLUSORY INDEPENDENCE TO A TERRITORY BEING SUBJUGATED BY IMPERIALISMS

Ukraine is far too significant a prize both for United States imperialism and for the European imperialisms, and above all for Russian imperialism, behind which—this cannot be ruled out—the imperialism of China is also taking shape. The fact that Ukraine, led by pro-Western governments, was to be admitted into NATO and at the same time into the European Union represented a historic setback for Russia, which naturally did everything in its power to prevent this: first through political and economic manipulation via pro-Russian political forces, then through the economic blackmail of Ukraine, and finally by resorting to open military actions—the annexation of Crimea and economic and military support for Russian separatists in the Donbass, culminating ultimately in a direct military invasion of the country.

This war could be nothing other than the continuation of the foreign policy of both Russia and the Euro-American West – a policy whose focal point is Ukraine, but whose horizon and objectives extend far beyond its geographical borders. It is obvious that the Euro-American democracies attribute responsibility for the war to Russia; it is equally obvious that Russia assigns responsibility for this war to the Euro-American democracies, which failed to honour the deals concluded in 1989, as well as the deals – specifically concerning Ukraine – reached in Minsk in 2014–2015, and also to the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, which continued to oppress the Russian-speaking minorities in Crimea and the Donbass. Every bourgeoisie sees the foreign bourgeoisie as its adversary, lays upon it the responsibility for aggression, and calls its own people – and above all its own proletarians – to national unity. It is precisely the proletarians who are forced to go to the front and shed their blood. It is no coincidence that Russia’s territorial claims over Crimea and the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbass are used by China to justify its own territorial claims over Taiwan (formerly Formosa), which it considers a land inhabited by Chinese people since time immemorial.

As the months and years of the war passed, it became ever clearer that Ukraine was waging a proxy war, in which both the Ukrainian army and the population were sacrificed in the interests of the Euro-American powers – powers that had no intention in those years of unleashing a direct war against Russia, since this would have meant drawing China in as well, potentially accelerating the outbreak of a world war for which no imperialist power was yet prepared in terms of the necessary economic, financial, political and military exertion. All of them, however – without exception – had an interest in testing on the battlefield both their own capabilities and those of their adversaries to sustain a war that would display markedly different characteristics, partly hitherto unknown, compared with the Second Imperialist World War, which itself had already differed substantially from the First both quantitatively (through the mobilisation of millions of soldiers and the transport of materiel over great distances, ensuring its effectiveness) and qualitatively (not only in terms of ever more effective and destructive weaponry and the transformation of national economies into war economies, but also in terms of intelligence services).

As the enormous investments in satellite and space technologies show, alongside the inevitable technical investments in conventional armaments, the next world war will surpass both quantitatively and qualitatively the destruction and mass slaughter that, already during the second imperialist world war, far exceeded the horrors of the first. The First World War was fought primarily as trench warfare and as the physical military occupation of enemy territory by hundreds of thousands of soldiers, partly echoing the techniques of colonial wars.

The Second World War was fought through a combination of ground forces, navies and military air forces, and increasingly aimed at the destruction of entire cities and attacks on civilian populations with the most destructive weapons, including the atomic bomb, with the aim of breaking the enemy’s resistance and morale and reducing the “enemies” to a position of subordination.

The Third imperialist world war will combine the military techniques of both the First and the Second World Wars: positional and trench warfare in territories to be conquered and controlled, together with war waged against the civilian populations of enemy states, while increasing geometrically the genocides of entire populations deemed an obstacle to the economic and political interests of the dominant imperialist powers. At the same time, the use of robots, missiles and drones operated over very long distances has been added, accompanied by an endless range of electronic means and, more recently, by Artificial Intelligence, as demonstrated by Israel’s war against the Palestinians of Gaza (4). Whereas the First World War had its main and decisive theatre on the European continent, and the Second World War encompassed Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Third World War will necessarily be fought across the entire surface of the globe: no state, no continent, no sea and no sky will be spared military operations – not even the United States of America, which so far have not experienced the destructive effects of war on their own territory, but have always inflicted them beyond their borders.

It is the development of capitalism into imperialism that has determined, and continues to determine, the theatres of war; war is always the continuation of the foreign policy of states by military means and is an inevitable consequence of imperialist policy, which is ever more ravenous for economic territories to dominate and exploit, that is, to wrest from the control of other states. Correspondingly, there is an ever deeper and more extensive oppression and repression of countries and populations that do not submit to the domination of the strongest imperialist states. The brutality with which war is waged between the belligerents – both on the fronts themselves and against the civilian population – is directly proportional to the necessity and the capacity to destroy the enemy. Diplomacy, as the bourgeois claim, still had in the twentieth century a partial role as an instrument for preventing disputes leading to armed conflict, and could in part limit its duration and scope; in reality, however, it increasingly became a blunt weapon, a mere stage-show for deceiving the population and above all the proletariat of countries – whether directly involved in armed conflicts or not.

The European Union and Great Britain, with the United States in the background, made enormous efforts not only to draw Ukraine into the camp of the West and NATO, but also to strip Russia of any ambition to reassert control over territories that had once fallen under its domination. The interest of the Euro-American imperialist powers in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has never been the defence of democracy. Diverting attention is an art that the ruling classes have always refined in order to conceal the real objectives of their wars. Russia succeeded in taking control of the countries of Eastern Europe, which subsequently became part of its belt of western satellites, only thanks to the American victory in the Second Imperialist World War and the subsequent deal to divide control over Europe between the USA and Russia, that is, between the two military alliances—NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The more than twenty million Russian soldiers sacrificed by Russian capitalism in the war, and Russia’s advance as far as Berlin, enabled Stalin to sit alongside Roosevelt (and later Truman) and Churchill (later Attlee) at the table of the greatest imperialist plunderers to divide the spoils; the United States ultimately agreed with Russia on the new borders of Poland and the division of Germany into two parts and— with the participation of France— the sectoral division of Berlin into four zones.

For a war, for which all the major imperialist powers (including Japan) were preparing, it is always necessary that some state take the “first step”, fire the “first shot”. For Marxists, however, it makes no sense to designate a culprit and thereby automatically justify the attacked party vis-à-vis the aggressor. The real cause must be sought in capitalism, that is, in the economic, social and political system that rules over a class-divided society and that constantly generates factors of development and, at the same time, of crisis, up to general crises and wars; on the stage of history the actors are nothing other than representatives of the opposing interests of the ruling classes and of the classes engaged in struggle with one another. The names Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Attlee, Hirohito and the like were nothing more than the names of political leaders who, at given moments, represented the deep and general interests of their respective national capitalisms; capitalisms which, in their imperialist phase of development, compel their class political representatives to take certain directions, to conclude or break particular alliances, or to adopt a “neutral” stance towards direct armed conflict; but even in this case they are never neutral with respect to the interests of the national capitalism they represent and which drives them to support one or the other of the belligerent sides, without themselves taking part directly in the conflict – and above all to trade with both warring parties. The same has happened and continues to happen in the case of figures such as Obama, Biden, Trump, Merkel, von der Leyen, Meloni, Sarkozy, Macron, Starmer, Putin and Xi Jinping in recent years.

When has any imperialist state – that is, a state wholly in the service of national capitalism – ever marched into another country with its capital and military means solely in order to make it more independent, more politically and economically free, or stronger vis-à-vis another or other hostile states? Imperialism presupposes nothing given for free, nor any acts of generosity towards other economic centres, unless they yield some economic, commercial, financial, politico-military or territorial advantage. We must never forget, as Lenin reminds us, that the imperialist phase of capitalism is characterised by a morbid craving for economic territories, that is, for everything capable of yielding concrete returns to invested finance capital – whether industrial enterprises, branches of the economy, land, mines, deposits, ports, geographical areas, or entire states and the corresponding maritime zones.

After the Second Imperialist World War, the bourgeois states that proclaimed themselves democratic definitively lost the “innocence” of classical democracy and were transformed into centralised bodies serving exclusively the interests of big industry and the major monopolies, which led to an enormous expansion of corruption and accelerated the process of social decay. Of the former democracy there remains only a theatre of human puppets, in which these puppets are manipulated by economic and financial forces transcending all state borders; yet it is a theatre immensely useful to the ruling bourgeois classes for deceiving and stupefying the broad masses, upon whom they impose the illusion that they still hold in their hands a small weapon with which to defend their specific interests: the ballot paper. But the slightest hint of an economic crisis, a fall in sales, competitiveness or productivity is enough for any electoral promises—regardless of who made them—to evaporate completely. Capitalism is a dictatorial system in which the life of every human being must depend on an economic system based on private property, capital and wage labour; in peace and in war alike it pursues a policy of defending its own system and the interests of the class that rules society. This domination enables the ruling class to deploy enormous economic, financial and human resources for the propaganda of “values” with which the crude, cynical and inhuman interests of an economic and social system are cloaked—a system that produces in order to destroy, destroys in order to produce again, in an endless spiral in which the needs of humanity are sacrificed to the interests of capital, the market and the class that lives and prospers on these sacrifices, these destructions and these bloodbaths, which are increasingly becoming everyday “normality”.

The political experience of the bourgeoisie at the international level suggests to every national bourgeoisie that it must prepare for a war that will one day break out, because at a certain point the market will become so clogged with commodities and capital that it will plunge the economy into crisis, and with it the governments of all countries, in a more or less acute manner; to prepare for a war which every bourgeoisie can imagine will break out, but cannot know how long it will last or how it will end, since the subjective and objective factors of war can change in the course of the war itself. One thing, however, is certain and is confirmed by the history of capitalism: an imperialist war never brings about the end of the capitalist economic and social system, which is incapable of mastering its own development and which will lead to the breakdown of its entire economic and social stability and to ever more extensive and profound destruction; but at the same time it is generating the objective factors of its own overcoming—factors we call revolutionary because they coincide with the revolutionary movement of the working classes, which constitutes the social antidote to the rotten capitalist order.

And among these factors the proletariat plays a decisive role, which – as the First World War and the year 1917 in Russia demonstrated – can be capable of surprising all the governments of the world with its revolutionary movement and its class war. Only if the class war coincides with the war between states is it possible for the revolutionary movement at the international level to succeed in bringing to an end the long series of imperialist wars. The role of the proletariat, however, is decisive also when it does not enter the terrain of class and revolutionary struggle, albeit in a completely negative sense as far as its class interests are concerned, because by failing to oppose the bourgeois war it objectively contributes with its own blood to the war that its own national bourgeoisie has unleashed against other bourgeoisies, and thus also to the survival of capitalism, which is the fundamental cause of all disasters.

Capitalism has neither heart nor feelings; it demands of the ruling bourgeois classes, which defend it and are existentially dependent upon it, that they ensure its survival through crises generated by its own mode of production, crises that fall ever more deeply and extensively upon the very conditions of survival of the human population. The capitalist mode of production has made the production of commodities the master over the producers and has placed the interests of capitalism – that is, the uninterrupted and ever-growing valorisation of capital through the overproduction of commodities – above the interests of the human species: this one is compelled to supply capital with productive labour, living labour, itself in the form of a commodity, namely wage labour, and, in times of crisis, to supply the god-capital with cannon fodder, that is, the proletariat, the producers of all social wealth. No bourgeois state, no bourgeoisie anywhere in the world, can escape the laws of capitalism; and the more monopolistic and financial capitalism develops, the more cynical bourgeois ferocity grows in the destruction of human lives, means of production, and the environment. The insatiable thirst for profit has no other solution than destruction, famine, and genocide in order to overcome the ever sharper and more extensive crises of the capitalist system of production, which can in general be expressed through the historical law discovered by Marxism: the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall, against which the bourgeoisie has no remedial formula.

Returning to Ukraine, this country too has become – among many others – a territory to be subjugated and a site of contention among the world’s most significant imperialist powers. When the Ukrainian bourgeoisie claims that the fate of its country concerns not only Ukraine but the whole of Europe, it is not far from the truth. It is no coincidence that almost all European states have felt drawn into the Russo-Ukrainian war, to the point of supporting the Ukrainian side with billion-scale injections of capital, deliveries of weapons, and political backing; at the same time, they have seized the opportunity to renew their own military arsenals and to launch a broad campaign of rearmament, through which they are gradually transforming their economies – long limping and incapable of generating the expected profits – into war economies. The bourgeoisie always sees war as a business opportunity: in its preparation, its support, participation in it, its prolongation, and even in its conclusion. As has been repeatedly stressed, capitalist crisis tends to destroy the productive forces that, up to the moment of its outbreak, had been stimulated and driven to produce ever greater quantities of commodities in a blind pursuit of profit; a capitalist crisis is always a crisis of overproduction, of both commodities and capital, and this overproduction, which clogs markets, must be eliminated in order to make room for a new production of commodities and capital. War, with its ever more extensive destruction, is the means by which the bourgeoisie overcomes the crisis of overproduction; yet – as the Manifesto of 1848 states – by conquering new markets and by more thorough exploitation of old ones through the emphasising of additional “needs”, generated by trade and by capital seeking investment, it merely prepares ever sharper and more devastating factors of future crises.

Thus, in the pursuit of new markets and new opportunities for profit – in a world increasingly marked by rivalry among economic powers seeking to seize markets at the expense of their competitors – imperialist bourgeoisies are compelled to act within ever shorter time-frames between successive economic crises and by means that are ever more powerful and destructive. Ukraine and Gaza are two examples of this trend. The generalized destruction of entire cities and of cultivated and cultivable territories not only deprives the masses who lived and worked there of the possibility of life, massacres a part of them and forces those who are not killed into displacement, but at the same time creates a situation in which real-estate and techno-industrial business can provide opportunities for the high valorisation of capitals that would otherwise remain unrivaled. Nor is this all: it also creates a situation in which the strongest imperialist powers, in the clash of their sharply antagonistic interests, determine the supremacy of one side or another, of one alliance or another, thereby laying the foundations not only for mutual business dealings but also for future wars and, above all, for a third world war that is drawing ever closer.

For the real estate and technical-industrial business to take off quickly in areas destroyed by war and take the place of the arms business, the war must end or be significantly reduced, perhaps shifting to other theaters—which are certainly not lacking, for example in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Far East. This is where the policy of imperialist peace comes into play, a policy that seeks to derive the greatest economic, financial, and political advantages from the ongoing war in order to launch the “peace” business as soon as possible. The fact is that, in the capitalist system, the business of peace goes hand in hand with the business of war; one cannot exist without the other. While in one area they take the place of the other, in another area they swap places: this is why, since the end of the Second World War, there has never been a year without war somewhere in the world (despite the much-touted peace that democracies boasted of having conquered for the benefit of the world over Nazi-Fascist dictatorships), followed by peace, perhaps after decades of war, more like a truce than an absence of war. Business, both destructive and reconstructive, comes first!

Ukraine, transformed into a battlefield, acquired a different importance for the Truman faction of the American ruling class with the accession of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump wants to make of it an example of his “policy of peace”, which he has been boasting about for some time – similarly, moreover, to the case of Gaza – and through which he wants to show the power circles of American imperialism that more profit can be made from ending a war started by others and from finding common ground, for example with Russia, than from continuing a war which, according to all leading military experts, Russia is winning. Trump repeatedly declared that this war should never have begun at all and that responsibility for its outbreak lies with Kerensky's Ukraine, the European states that encouraged it to continue, and Biden, who supported it by investing enormous billions. To our knowledge, Trump never referred to previous negotiations that were subsequently thwarted in order to clear the way for an escalation which no one claims to want to intensify, yet to which everyone in fact contributes. The most telling example is precisely the situation of the war in Ukraine. From the moment Trump accelerated the pressure to find a way out of this war that would be advantageous for the Americans, but also for the Russians – given that they are winning the war – and that would not excessively humiliate the European states (the EU has already been sidelined in direct dealings with Putin), the European imperialists did everything possible to sabotage what subsequently became the “28-point peace plan” proposed by the White House, though agreed in advance with the Russians. The European Union continued to support the continuation of the war against Russia (naturally by further sending Ukrainians to the slaughter); they proclaimed the possibility of a Ukrainian counter-offensive which – unlike the previous counter-offensive in the autumn of 2023 – thanks to the ability to strike Russian territory with long-range missiles, could have forced Russian troops to retreat, if not even compelled them to withdraw… Yet it is clear to all that Ukrainian counter-offensives had no chance of success yesterday and have none today, because from a certain point onwards weapons, ammunition and, above all, soldiers run out.

It is true that the tenacity with which the Ukrainian army defended its territory prevented the Russians from spreading across the whole of Ukraine and forced them to concentrate on the Donbas; but it is equally true that, in terms of the forces deployed and the time at their disposal, the Russians can wage this war for much longer than the Ukrainians.

From the standpoint of the financial and military support for Zelensky’s Ukraine on the part of Europe and the United States, between 2024 and 2025 this support was reduced, particularly by Germany and the USA. Regardless of official statements, which normally serve to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, after more than three years of the Russo-Ukrainian war European arsenals have been emptied; and, given how the near future is taking shape – turbulent from both an economic and political point of view – the issue of rearmament has moved to the top of the agenda of every European government. Not rearmament for the purpose of donating or selling weapons to Ukraine, but rather to re-equip, with more advanced technologies, the armed forces of each national state. Regardless of the corruption that has always existed in Ukraine and which, with the war – as happens everywhere where control is concentrated exclusively in the hands of a government proclaiming martial law – has erupted on a massive scale and revealed how all those connected with the government and Zelensky’s clan are involved, thereby increasing governmental instability in Kyiv, the European imperialists find themselves in a position where they must defend a Ukrainian government that is in disintegration. They thus intensify their outcries and declarations about the danger, invoked since the very beginning of the war, that Russia, after victory in the war in Ukraine, is preparing to attack Europe, perhaps beginning with the Baltic states and Poland…

The real and current balance of power among the imperialist powers, and above all among the United States, Great Britain, the European Union, Russia and China, depends on how these imperialist powers have strengthened or weakened over the past eighty years – that is, since the end of the second imperialist war. It is beyond dispute that, regardless of the economic recovery of the European capitalist systems, brought about above all by the influx of American capital through which Washington forced the old European imperialist powers to play a secondary role in the world and, in any case, to act in accordance with the dominant interests of American imperialism, and regardless of the colonisation of Europe by the US dollar and of the American–⁠Russian joint domination over Europe for a full 45 years (from 1945 to 1991), the economies of the European countries are far more dependent on the American market than the American economy is dependent on the European market. The whole affair of the tariffs by which Trump’s America significantly shook its European “allies”, who moreover had to accept without protest the obligation to considerably increase their investments in NATO (the share of GDP of each country is to reach 5% within a few years!), and this at a time when the capitalist economy is moving more towards stagnation or recession than towards growth, shows that the United States – yesterday under Obama and Biden, today under Trump and tomorrow under some other warmonger – is charting the course that will lead it to a third world war, testing which allies it can rely on with certainty and which it cannot, and what long-term policies it should adopt in order to confront tomorrow what may appear as the number one enemy: China. An enemy in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean, in Africa and in Latin America and, through Russia, also in Europe.

Therefore, the so-called friendship between Trump and Putin must be understood as an American attempt to detach Russia from its close relationship with China and thereby to isolate China as much as possible territorially; for the United States today, from a commercial standpoint and tomorrow from a military one, sees in Europe a potential enemy – Germany. Just as Roosevelt once attempted to do when Stalin’s Russia, on the eve of the second imperialist war, reached an agreement with Hitler’s Germany not only to partition Poland but with a view to partitioning Europe. Hitler’s Germany, however, wanted much more – to conquer the whole of Europe – and therefore had to attack not only France and England but also Russia, while its Far Eastern front was “secured” by Japan as its ally; it did not reckon with the fact that America would enter the war on the side of France and England. The Japanese attack on its naval base in Hawaii was the pretext for joining the great business of the world war, from which such an exceptionally powerful imperialist power as the United States certainly could not remain aloof.

No American base in Europe, not even in Eastern Europe, has been attacked by Russia, and therefore no NATO country has been attacked by Russia; it thought better of stepping into a confrontation from which it would have emerged severely battered. Its reaction to NATO’s attempt – that is, the Anglo-American forces that stand at its head – to seize Ukraine must therefore also be understood as a defensive move which Russian imperialism had to undertake in order to show both itself and its ally, China, that it possesses the strength to prevent Western imperialism from crushing Russia throughout Europe and that it is a reliable ally for China in the event that America were to attempt to attack Beijing in the future.

RUSSIAN–AMERICAN PEACE IN THE TANGLE OF CONTRADICTORY INTER-IMPERIALIST INTERESTS

The “28-point peace plan” recently proposed by Trump as a basis for negotiations on an armistice with Russia and the European powers with a view to ending the war in Ukraine was, as is well known, difficult for the European powers (that is, London, Paris and Berlin) to accept: on one side they were excluded by Washington from the very outset from participating in negotiations with Russia, and on the other these points would have meant sidelining the interests of the European imperialists. The European states – especially the so-called “coalition of the willing” – opposed it precisely because its content favours almost exclusively the United States and Russia. In practice, this “plan” would establish a pact of non-aggression between Russia, Ukraine and Europe: Russia would therefore not invade neighbouring countries and NATO would not expand any further; Kyiv could rely on security guarantees modeled on Article 5 of NATO, that is, a commitment to intervene by the Euro-American signatories of this “plan” should it come under attack by any other country; it is also envisaged that Kyiv would build up an army of up to 600,000 men (before the Russian invasion, Kyiv’s army had 200,000 troops) and would enshrine non-membership of NATO in its constitution, while NATO would include in its statutes that Ukraine will not be integrated in the future, and Russia would enshrine its policy of “non-aggression” in law. If Ukraine were to launch missiles at Russian territory, it would lose these guarantees; if Russia were to invade Ukraine again, it would face a coordinated military response and would lose all the advantages of this “plan”. It is envisaged that no NATO troops would be stationed in Ukraine, while European NATO fighter jets would be based in Poland. Ukraine’s accession to the EU is foreseen and, as regards the reconstruction of Ukraine, a package of measures is envisaged, including a Development Fund and a special World Bank programme, while the United States is demanding 50% of the profits derived from the Russian assets so far frozen (valued at 100 billion dollars), which would be invested in Ukraine’s reconstruction. Moreover, Moscow would regain its standing at the international level (the lifting of all economic sanctions and its return to the G7, which would once again become the G8, together with a cooperation agreement with the United States); it would obtain more extensive territory than it has so far effectively occupied (Crimea, the entire Luhansk and Donetsk regions, with the freezing of the current situation along the line linking Zaporizhzhia and Kherson), while withdrawing from the other occupied territories simultaneously with the withdrawal of Ukrainian military forces from those parts of the Donetsk region that remain under Ukrainian control. Both Moscow and Kyiv would receive full amnesty for their actions during the war; Kyiv would once again be able to use the Dnipro River for commercial purposes and would obtain agreements on the free transport of grain through the Black Sea. As regards nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia would conclude new non-proliferation and nuclear control agreements on the basis of the New START treaty, which expires on 5 February 2026, while Ukraine would accept that it will not be a state possessing nuclear weapons. Zaporizhzhia is home to the largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine; it would be placed under the supervision of the IAEA and the electricity produced would be divided equally between Ukraine and Russia. The remaining points concern the exchange of prisoners, the mutual return of the bodies of the fallen, and reciprocal educational programmes. This, in summary, is the 28-point Russian–American peace plan for Ukraine.

That Ukraine has been significantly humiliated is evident; after all, having humiliated the European Union, could the United States and Russia really have refrained from humiliating Ukraine as well?

The European Union, together with Great Britain, effectively entered the war – through Ukraine – against Russia, and its objective was to defeat the Russians; from that defeat it expected an internal uprising in Russia against Putin (who was declared politically dead a hundred times and yet “rose from the dead” a hundred times). Yet everything is turning against them: Russia is winning the war, Putin sits firmly on his throne, while Zelensky is today more threatened than ever following a wide-ranging anti-corruption operation that has reached even his closest associates – his right-hand man Yermak and Defence Minister Umerov – and discontent and distrust are growing in the country, both because of a war that had been presented as the definitive solution to the problems with neighbouring Russia and because of the promise of future democracy and prosperity that membership of the European Union was supposed to bring at the cost of… wartime sacrifices… European leaders – from Macron to Starmer, from Merz to Meloni and Poland’s Tusk, from von der Leyen through Metsola to Kallas and others – have embraced war-mongering theses directed against Russia (the former “empire of evil”, today’s Putinist dictatorship thirsting for European blood), while being entirely indifferent to the fate of millions of Palestinians, periodically crushed by other warmongers such as Netanyahu, supported by that occasional “super-pacifist” Trump. Now they are, of course, attempting to extricate themselves from the chaos of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, into which they have poured billions in weapons and financial support for a cause already lost and for which they bear political responsibility. How will the bourgeoisies of the countries concerned attempt to free themselves from it? – From a “local” war to the preparation of a general war, in which the ruling bourgeois classes will move from “peace plans” to “war plans”.

And so the United States, given that it cannot afford to deny its European allies – who are, after all, members of NATO – at least some measure of satisfaction, was compelled to agree to discuss the so-called “28-point peace plan”. From it, however, the European states struck out all the points that were advantageous to Russia; and now Moscow’s response is awaited – a response that can scarcely be anything other than the continuation of the war in Ukraine, thereby plunging it into an even deeper social catastrophe. How much longer can Ukrainian soldiers endure in this war, moreover in the face of shortages of manpower and of weapons and ammunition in quantities and of a quality sufficient to confront the slow yet deadly advance of Russian troops – as has been seen in recent days at Pokrovsk – which in the month of November alone occupied 272 square kilometres in the southern part of the Zaporizhzhia region and nearly 200 square kilometres in the central-eastern part of the Dnipropetrovsk region?

Does Macron really believe he can send a few thousand French soldiers to become cannon fodder in the Ukrainian winter? Do Merz and Starmer truly think that with a few additional long-range missiles Zelensky can reverse the course of the war? They do not believe it themselves, yet they are so blinded by the notion that Russia should agree to negotiate the end of the war as if it were the defeated party, that they put forward a proposal under which Ukraine is to be free to join NATO, to have an army of 900,000 soldiers armed to the teeth thanks to NATO, to recognise none of the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia as Russian, while Ukraine’s reconstruction is to be borne exclusively by Russia and new elections are to be held whenever deemed appropriate. Anyone with even a minimally functioning brain knows that this proposal has a single purpose: to sabotage any possible agreement between Washington and Moscow and, above all, to prolong the war for a long time at the expense of the Ukrainians, while the European states meanwhile rearm… certainly not in order to save Ukraine from the claws of Moscow, but to prepare for a war that will be global.

In essence, this war will undoubtedly continue for many more months, most likely throughout the winter, until Ukrainian soldiers cease to be willing to continue fighting and dying for the glory of Zelensky and his European protectors, and until their families cease to be willing to go on starving and freezing in a country devastated by a war that the overwhelming majority of them certainly did not want. The tragedy within the tragedy is that the Russian proletariat on the one hand and the Ukrainian proletariat on the other lacked the strength to oppose, through their own struggle, the war unleashed by their respective bourgeoisies for interests irreconcilable with the immediate and historical interests of the proletarian class. The blood that is being shed today – like the blood shed in all previous wars unleashed by imperialist bourgeoisies solely to seize economic territories for exploitation in the service of capitalist profit and to sacrifice millions of human lives merely to advance particular bourgeois interests – cries out for revenge, cries out not to have been shed in vain; it reminds proletarians throughout the world that the only answer to the tragic present, valid for all humanity, can be proletarian class struggle, which will once and for all put an end to the sacrifice of millions of human beings to the god of capital: class war, openly declared against the bourgeoisies of the entire world, with the aim of definitively ending the era in which human sweat and blood serve only to quench the thirst of capital!

The plan which the European imperialists called ReArm Europe (and immediately after coining the name, renamed it Readiness 2030, presumably thinking that this title would provoke less resistance…) envisages an increase of €800 billion in military expenditure over the period 2025–2030. The sum of €800 billion that the EU is making available to its member states for rearmament may seem impressive; but if we consider that Germany alone has announced an investment of €1,000 billion between 2025 and 2030 solely for itself, in order to transform the Bundeswehr into the most powerful army in Europe and move it into third place worldwide in military spending after the United States and China, it is clear that Russia is not the only country accelerating its military expenditure. There is no doubt that among the eight main global groups producing armaments, the largest share is held by American industrial conglomerates (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics), while the largest European groups – BAE Systems (United Kingdom), Thales (France), Leonardo (Italy) and Rheinmetall (Germany) – closely follow them. It is self-evident that they also occupy leading positions in the arms trade, with the American conglomerates at the top of the ranking (in 2023 they sold weapons worth €152 billion), while the European groups together achieved a turnover of €53.6 billion, that is, 35% of the American turnover (5). We do not have at hand data on the arms trade of China and Russia, but it is known that in the global ranking American companies are in first place with approximately 50% of the market, Chinese enterprises in second place with 16%, followed by companies from the United Kingdom with 7.5%, and just below them, with an equal share of 4%, arms manufacturers from France and Russia. It is clear that rearmament concerns all the major world powers, not only Europe. Japan has also begun once again to invest in arms production, allocating 2% of its GDP to rearmament (as NATO countries currently do), although at present it does not represent a direct “competitor” to the United States, nor even to South Korea. It is known that advanced economies such as Japan’s will not require many years to reach a respectable level of military production in order to secure their “defence” in the Indo-Pacific region, where particularly acute and conflicting interests between China and the United States are concentrated. And precisely for this reason India as well, having risen to fifth place in the global GDP ranking, is rapidly expanding not only the production of increasingly advanced weapons within its own borders (it currently appears to be the world’s largest exporter of ammunition), but is also preparing to compete with the giants of the arms export market.

This enormous drive towards the production of weapons and their trade by the major imperialist powers of the world is a clear signal – especially at a time when the global economy is not experiencing a favorable phase of expansion – that they are preparing for a military confrontation, that is, for a situation in which the bourgeoisie of every country will have to allocate ever greater resources to rearmament and ever fewer resources to social security and to all measures connected with social safety mechanisms, by means of which the imperialist powers have kept their proletariat in check for eighty years. The social control exercised by the bourgeoisie over its own population, and particularly over its own proletariat, is destined to intensify and harden, not only because the scope for purely economic competition is shrinking, but also because sooner or later an uprising of the proletariat is expected against increasingly intolerable living and working conditions. The counter-revolution, which in 1926 succeeded in defeating the revolution not only in Russia but throughout the world – whether in its Stalinist version or in the version of bourgeois reaction clothed in fascism or democracy – has for a century continued to crush vast masses of proletarians, peasants and impoverished people of the world in the grip of hunger, misery, wars and so-called environmental disasters, in an unrelenting vortex of frenzied pursuit of profit. The terrain of counter-revolution – said Marx in 1848 – is dialectically also the terrain of revolution; but in order for it to be transformed into the terrain of revolution, the proletariat must regain its class and revolutionary traditions; it must finally break the bonds that tie it to the bourgeois machinery, to the policy of class collaboration, to interclass conciliation, to the national interests that every bourgeoisie propagates as common interests of the exploited and the exploiters alike.

It is for this future renewal of class and revolutionary struggle that Marxist communists work, so that at the first class awakening of the proletariat – no matter in which country it occurs – the proletariat may once again find and recognize its class party!

(1) See the article "The New World Disorder: From the Cold War to the Cold Peace, and in Perspective the Third World War" (Il nuovo disordine mondiale: dalla guerra fredda alla pace fredda, e in prospettiva la terza guerra mondiale), “il comunista”, no. 43–44, October 1994 – January 1995.

(2) The CIS set itself the objective of creating a free trade area among its members, abolishing import duties applied to trade between member states and not increasing the export duties already in force in the future. From December 1991, in addition to Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan joined, with Turkmenistan as an associate member. Georgia, which had acceded in 1993, withdrew completely in 2009 following the Russian war in South Ossetia and in connection with negotiations with NATO; Moldova suspended its participation in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while Ukraine had already officially withdrawn in 2018.

(3) In this context, it should be recalled that for years the West and NATO denied the existence of any agreement in which the leading NATO countries – the United States, Great Britain, France and West Germany – had assured Gorbachev’s Russia that NATO would not move one inch eastwards. In the British National Archives in London, the American political scientist Joshua Shifrinson, a contributor to the German weekly Der Spiegel, discovered documents – declassified in 2017 – recounting the true history of the agreements between NATO and Gorbachev’s Russia in 1990–1991, at the time of the reunification of divided Germany. In 1991, after the collapse of the USSR, some former satellites of Moscow, led by Poland, requested to join NATO. During negotiations of the group known as “2+4” (the USA, Great Britain, France and West Germany plus Russia and East Germany), the representative of West Germany stated: “During the 2+4 negotiations we made clear that we do not intend to advance the Atlantic Alliance beyond the Oder. We therefore cannot allow Poland or other Central and Eastern European nations to join.” At the same meeting, the representative of the United States declared: “In the 2+4 talks, as well as in other bilateral contacts between Washington and Moscow, we officially promised the Soviet Union that we do not intend to exploit strategically the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Central and Eastern Europe and that NATO will not expand beyond the borders of the new [reunified] Germany, neither formally nor informally.” It is well known what became of these assurances… See https://www.startmag.it/mondo/nato-est/, 26 February 2022.

(4) See the article "Gaza, the Deadly Playground of Artificial Intelligence" (Gaza, parco giochi mortale dell’intelligenza artificiale), “il comunista”, no. 180, December 2023 – February 2024.

Il comunista - le prolétaire - el proletario - proletarian - programme communiste - el programa comunista - Communist Program