In Depth
Donald Tump is bludgeoning the Ukrainian government into accepting an imperialist carve-up of the country. Tomáš Tengely-Evans answers key questions about Ukraine, the roots of the war—and how the left should respond
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Sunday 09 March 2025
Issue
Soldiers in eastern Ukraine
Soldiers in eastern Ukraine (Picture: Wikicommons/ Ministry of Defense Ukraine)
Why is Ukraine a “proxy war”?
Ukrainians are the victims of Russian aggression. Russia has sought to dominate Ukraine and its other neighbours since the 1990s.
It annexed Crimea and fuelled a separatist insurgency run by far right gangsters in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014. When Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukrainians were fighting to defend themselves.
But Russian imperialism’s role is only one part of the picture. Imperialism is a global system of competing capitalist states, which vie for military and economic dominance.
Ukraine sits at the centre of a faultline of imperialist rivalry between the US, Russia and regional powers. It stretches from the Baltic states in northern Europe into central Asia—and tensions were rising throughout the 2000s.
It’s this rivalry between the West and Russia that has pulled Ukraine apart and turned it into a bloody battlefield. This escalated into a military conflict in 2014 and then into a full-blown war with Russia’s invasion in 2022.
The West claimed it was simply supporting freedom and democracy in Ukraine—in reality, it only had its own interests in mind.
Under Joe Biden, the US saw Ukraine as an opportunity to overcome its defeats in the Middle East. He wanted to weaken Russia and, more importantly, send a signal to the US’s main competitor China.
“There’s going to be a new world order out there and we’ve got to lead it,” Biden declared shortly after the invasion.
This fitted with a longer-term ambition in US foreign policy circles. Colonel Alexander Vindman was a leading official in the US National Security Council during Trump’s first presidency between 2018 and 2020.
In November 2021, Vindman argued that “Ukraine’s strategic value to Nato” could “enable US and Euro-Atlantic aspirations for competition with Russia and with China”.
The US strategy was to “bleed Russia dry” through a process of “managed escalation”. This meant giving Ukraine enough arms to tie down Russian forces and drain its resources without risking a wider conflict between nuclear-armed powers.
The tempo of the war was set in the White House and the Pentagon, not in Ukraine.
Donald Trump’s humiliation of Volodymr Zelensky at the end of February is a brutal confirmation that it’s a proxy war between the US and Russia. He has made clear that Ukraine’s fate will be decided by the two imperialist powers.
Why is Trump pulling back?
The US has seen “great power competition” as the main challenge facing it since 2018. There is a great deal of continuity between Biden’s and Trump’s foreign policies—defending US hegemony against these challenges.
Today Trump wants to focus on the main threat, China, and cut US losses in Ukraine.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio recently said, “We have been funding a stalemate, a protracted conflict in Ukraine”.
Nato weaponry is important for the Ukrainian government. But so are soldiers on a front line longer than the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War—and Ukraine doesn’t have enough.
Over 100,000 Ukraine soldiers have deserted the army while others hide from conscription officers and risk lengthy prison sentences.
Russia has more manpower and relies more on “contract soldiers”, not conscripts. It has managed to shield its economy from sanctions—for now at least—and has forged closer economic relations with China.
So Trump’s White House has made a calculation that it’s a losing war that is no longer in US interests.
Rubio explained that the US hopes to prise Russia away from China, saying, “The big story of the 21st century is going to be US-Chinese relations.”
“A situation where the Russians are permanently a junior partner to China” is “not a good outcome for America”.
Will Europe step in?
European leaders want to make working class people pay for massive rearmament programmes.
But Keir Starmer is determined to maintain Britain’s position as a junior partner of US imperialism. And the EU is far too disunited and dysfunctional to become a world power or sustain the Ukrainian war effort.
Capitalist competition among its member states was always baked into EU integration. The start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014 showed the lack of EU military power and how divisions among member states hampered a united response.
And today France and Germany—the most important states in the EU—are mired by political and economic crises.
European economic integration was deeply intertwined with US imperialism and Nato from the beginning. Nato means that Britain and other European states are under the US chain of command.
This was highlighted when Trump cut off US—and British—intelligence sharing to Ukraine last week.
Why did conflict erupt in 2014?
The West and Russia were determined to dominate the “near abroad”, Russia’s neighbours that had been of the Soviet Union, since the 1990s.
Russia was able to flex its muscles more in the 2000s thanks to a high oil price.
The US broke its pledge not to expand Nato into eastern Europe after the Cold War and invited Ukraine and Georgia to join in 2008. Russia invaded Georgia to prevent this happening—that was, in many ways, a dry run for 2014.
By 2014, Ukraine was in desperate need of a bailout. President Viktor Yanukovich hesitated between going cap in hand to the European Union or Russia.
Each deal came with strings attached. Russia was prepared to bail out Ukraine—so long as it aligned with it and its Eurasian Customs Union.
The West was willing to throw money at Ukraine too—so long as it aligned with the EU and Nato.
From 2014, the West and Russia poured in support for their proxies as they sought to pull Ukraine into their rival camps
Yanukovich, in the end, turned to Putin. This triggered the “Maidan” movement of initially small protests in favour of signing an agreement with the EU. They swelled in response to police violence, and tapped into a widespread and widespread anger at inequality and corruption.
But some “oligarchs”—the super rich who dominated Ukrainian politics—saw it as an opportunity to pivot to Western markets. The Ukrainian far right and nationalists sought to grow out of the Maidan.
When Yanukovich fled to Moscow, he was replaced by a pro-Western government.
Now, the West and Russia poured in support for their proxies as they sought to pull Ukraine into their camps.
Russia annexed the Crimea and instigated a separatist insurgency in the east. And the Ukrainian government launched an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in the east with the help of far right volunteers.
The US and Nato poured military aid into Ukraine under president Barack Obama and then during Trump’s first presidency.
Why did Putin invade in 2022?
A series of “peace talks”—known as the Minsk Agreements—produced a frozen conflict in Ukraine from 2015. But competition between the West and Russia didn’t stop.
By 2021, it became clear that Russia would not win that tug of war against the US’s and EU’s superior economic weight. For instance, the EU accounts for 14 percent of global GDP while Russia is only 1.9 percent.
So the Russian state opted for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the hope that brute military force would achieve its aims.
The decision was reinforced by a series of uprisings in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan that rocked Russia’s near abroad. While they were popular revolts against corrupt rulers, the West hoped to benefit from them.
Putin needed to stamp Russia’s authority not just on Ukraine—and hoped the invasion would show its neighbours who’s boss.
You support the Palestinians’ struggle for national liberation and their right to resist. So why don’t you say ‘Victory to Ukraine’?
Socialists should support national liberation struggles against imperialism.
First, the rulers of imperialist states like the US, Britain or Russia use nationalism and racism to justify their wars and occupations. They use “patriotism” to claim that there is a “national interest” between bosses and workers.
If socialists persuade workers to back a national liberation struggle against their own rulers, it can help break the hold of reactionary ideas.
Think of how the Palestine solidarity movement has struck blows against Islamophobic ideas in Britain.
Second, the victory of a national liberation struggle would be a blow to imperialism and weaken our own rulers.
Palestine is a national liberation struggle against Israel, a settler colonial state that acts as a watchdog of US imperialism in the Middle East. A defeat for Israel would be a massive blow to ruling classes in the US, Britain and across the West.
We don’t place conditions on the Palestinian resistance to adopt a socialist leadership or programme for us to support the struggle.
We support the Palestinian’s right to resistance by whatever means necessary, while arguing that liberation will only come through a broader revolt in the Middle East.
In Ukraine, imperialist rivalry between the US and Russia has subsumed the fight for national defence
That’s why the front page of Socialist Worker in October 2023 proudly declared, “Victory to the Palestinians.”
Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression. So why do we say, “Russian troops out, no to Nato,” rather than, “Victory to Ukraine”?
Inter-imperialist struggles and wars of national liberation or defence are often interwoven—and there are elements of both in Ukraine.
But the key question is, what is the dominant character of the war? In Ukraine, imperialist rivalry between the US and Russia has subsumed the fight for national defence.
The Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky is not an independent, anti-imperialist force. He tied Ukraine’s future to the West and said he wanted Ukraine to be a “big Israel”—in other words, an armed outpost of US imperialism.
In inter-imperialist wars socialists shouldn’t line up behind any power—including their “own” government.
What is the socialist solution?
Western leaders, the media—and many on the left—called for a victory for Ukraine through Nato force of arm. What would be the consequence have been?
It would not be the end of conflict in Ukraine and the broader region, but rather the beginning of a potentially much larger one. It would have strengthened US imperialism—not just in eastern Europe, but in the Middle East too.
Instead, we argued the solution lies with mass movements in Russia and the West that fight against their own governments.
At the beginning, Socialist Worker wrote, “The real hope lies with an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement. In Russia, the hope is an anti-war movement that opposes the Russian invasion and Nato.
“In Britain, the hope is that we’re able to build an anti-war movement that can put the brakes on Nato escalation and expansion.
“In Ukraine, the hope lies with a resistance that’s independent of Nato, that’s able to fraternise with the Russian troops. And, ultimately, it rests with a vision emerging of a Ukraine that’s free from both imperial camps.”
This was far from inevitable. But it was—and is—the only anti-imperialist, anti-war solution to the horror. And the last three years have hammered this home.