With extraordinary speed, Moscow and Washington have agreed to talks about ending the war in Ukraine and fixed on a venue where they will initially take place (Riyadh). There have so far been no invitations issued either to Zelensky or to Europe. By snubbing Zelensky in this way, it is tacitly admitted by the US that the war has never been a war between the Russians and the Ukrainians, but rather an unprovoked proxy war of the US against Russia. And by leaving the EU out in the cold, it is made clear from the outset that Russia has no intention of being led a merry dance the way it was with the Minsk accords, with Angela Merkel laughing up her sleeve throughout the whole performance whilst the murderous shelling of villages in the Donbass continued unabated.
Whilst Russia’s diplomatic initiative was very brisk, it was clearly a long time in gestation, and in choosing this moment to put the US on the spot, Putin’s hand was guided primarily by the recognition that the enemy had been decisively beaten on the battlefield. The fact that the American electorate had also chosen this moment to elevate Trump back into the presidency was no more than the icing on the cake.
The fact is that imperialist proxy forces in Ukraine are facing unmitigated disaster, both on the front lines of battle and on the home front. So unignorable has this situation become that even the New York Times has started to admit the true state of affairs.
On the battlefield
“Building on their momentum in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces have seized control of yet another small town, military experts say, taking another step in their grinding push to conquer the entire Donetsk region. Battlefield maps from independent groups analyzing satellite images and combat footage show that the town, Velyka Novosilka, is now under Russian control, and the Kremlin claimed its capture on Sunday. Ukraine’s military acknowledged its withdrawal from most of the town but said that its troops maintained a foothold on the northern outskirts. Although this gain is modest compared with Russia’s recent seizure of nearby Ukrainian strongholds like Vuhledar and Kurakhove, it underscores the effectiveness of a tactic that Moscow has been employing to take one town after another in eastern Ukraine: using its overwhelming personnel advantage to attack relentlessly, gradually trapping Ukrainian forces in a pincer movement and forcing them to retreat to avoid encirclement” (Constant Méheur, ‘Russia seizes another Ukrainian town in push to take all of Donetsk’, New York Times, 29 January 2025).
The press officer, Major Sekach could not conceal a grudging admiration for the bravery and intelligence of the Russian forces as they launched relentless small-scale infantry assaults, “sending groups of about five soldiers every hour who moved under the cover of tree lines, making them hard to detect and target with drones. Once they reached buildings, they took cover in basements.” He was candid in his appreciation of his enemy’s tactics. “‘From a tactical perspective, their approach was correct — they understood their capabilities and advantages and used them effectively,’ concluding ruefully,’It would not be accurate to claim that the Russians don’t know how to fight’” (ibid.).
Civil war
With the situation on the front lines going from bad to worse, the home front morale is at an all-time low, with demoralisation and apathy developing into something like civil war. The pretence by the gestapo SBU that the growing incidence of recruitment centres getting blown up is all the work of Russian agents, whilst complimentary to the latter, hardly accounts for the scale of the social revolt in progress:
“As Ukraine faces a desperate shortage of troops at the front line, there has been a wave of bombings against the recruitment centers meant to replenish the ranks, which law enforcement officials are calling a Russian-orchestrated campaign.
“In just the past week, explosions have gone off at three draft offices across the country. In two of the blasts, those placing the bombs were also killed, while 12 others were injured, including servicemen. Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, said that Russian special services are recruiting young men to carry out the attacks in exchange for money.
“The bombings come as Ukraine’s mobilization effort has been flagging three years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Soldiers in the field have said reinforcements are needed to fend off the invading Russians, but few Ukrainians are volunteering to fight now. Many draft-age men avoid recruitment centers and their officers altogether out of fear of being forced into service and there have been cases of centers being targeted by ATTACKS WITH NO OBVIOUS EXTERNAL LINKS [our emphasis]. [!]
“Some soldiers placed stickers on their cars to say they weren’t recruitment officers because vehicles were being set on fire.
“The SBU and National Police said this week they had jointly identified 497 individuals who had committed arson against military vehicles or planned to bomb recruitment centers and the Ukrainian railway, which is crucial for delivering weapons to the front line. Though Ukrainian law enforcement officials have pointed to Russia as being the main coordinator of these attacks, SOME INCIDENTS HAVE OCCURRED WITHOUT MOSCOW’S DIRECT INVOLVEMENT[!] [Our emphasis].
“On Jan. 31, a new conscript being transported to a training center called an acquaintance to help him escape, according to law enforcement officials. When the bus stopped at a gas station, the acquaintance arrived and allegedly shot and killed a recruitment officer while he and the conscript escaped. Ukrainian prosecutors have since charged both men.
“Mykhailo Drapatyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, condemned the draft officer’s killing in a social media post, describing it as ‘a red line that cannot be crossed.’ Calling for the perpetrators to be swiftly punished, he added that ‘we have no right to silently observe the growing wave of contempt toward defenders of Ukraine’” (Isabelle Khurshudyan and Kostiantyn Khudov, ‘As Ukraine struggles to field soldiers, recruitment centers are attacked’, Washington Post, 7 February 2025).
But the reality is that nothing can stop that wave of contempt aroused in Ukrainian citizens as they come to understand the full damage for which the Banderite forces have been responsible.
Project Ukraine was intended to lighten the consequences of overproduction crisis, but it has had the reverse effect.
The humiliating defeat of the proxy war against Russia has brought to a head the crisis in world imperialist society, revealing at a stroke the deep divisions that are tearing it apart. The war, which began with the Western-backed Nazi coup in Ukraine in 2014 and is now concluding with the complete victory of the Russian anti-fascist liberation forces, was intended to stave off the worst effects of the global crisis of overproduction. The intention was to weaken and divide the Russian Federation in line with earlier Nato expansion, opening the way to a forcible change of government in Moscow and hand over of the economy to the market-starved monopoly capitalist parasites, resuming (only on a larger scale) the treacherous gangster capitalism which characterised the Yeltsin period.
But things have not worked out that way for the warmongers. Not only has imperialism failed to drive a wedge between the Russians and their President and crack open the Russian economy, thus denying monopoly capital the desperately needed temporary respite from the stifling consequences of its own crisis of overproduction, but the failure of the war has hastened the maturation of the very crisis from which it had sought to escape.
The war has speeded up the deindustrialisation of European nations, squandered their resources, emptied their armouries, destabilised their politics, driven their workers out of the factories and left the working class angry and rudderless. Meanwhile US imperialism rubs salt in the wound, castigating European leaders for not pouring even more weapons into the Ukrainian black hole, for not cranking their arms spending up to 5% of budget and for not pulling their weight in propping up Nato. In short, the war which was supposed to foster a spirit of unity in the collective West has served only to reveal the depth and breadth of the rancorous splits now opening up on all sides.
As it has always been fundamentally a proxy war waged by the US against Russia, with Europeans serving in a subordinate role as bag carriers, gun runners, mercenaries and propagandists, it should be self evident that the only countries with any claim to a seat at any serious peace talks would be Russia and the US. It seems that for some this reality only began to dawn at the Munich conference. Neither Ukraine nor Europe has so far been invited to take part in the talks in Saudi Arabia which came out of a lengthy phone call between Putin and Trump. NBC noted that Zelensky, “still excluded from discussions in Saudi Arabia as of late Saturday, has been left sidelined, and European leaders shared the Ukrainian president’s unease.
“After years of disunity and dithering, the leaders of the EU and the UK are worried they no longer have a seat at the table in negotiations that may reshape their ally’s borders, and are set to gather in Paris this week for a summit on the war, in response to concerns the US is moving ahead without them” (Freddie Clayton and Nancy Ing, ‘Europe scrambles for a seat at the table on Ukraine after Vance spells out collapse in relations’, NBC News, 16 February 2025).
Ruffled feathers were not much smoothed when it became clear that the US had asked European governments gathered in Paris to make a list of what they would undertake to supply in the way of peacekeeping troops and cash once a deal had been done in Riyadh. Instead of an invitation to the party, they were just presented with another shopping list. As the Financial Times put it, “Many European governments are also uneasy about responding to a US request this week for specific details about weaponry, money and peacekeeping troops that they would be prepared to send to post-conflict Ukraine, according to multiple officials briefed on the discussions between capitals. ‘The general feeling is that this is a good exercise in terms of thinking about what each can offer, but that the response to the US should be collective,’ said one of the officials”. Another commented somewhat cravenly, “I hope that whatever comes out of Paris is something which is appealing to the Americans so we can have more skin in the game” (Henry Foy, Laura Pitel, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, Max Seddon and George Parker, ‘Europe scrambles to respond as US and Russia prepare for Ukraine peace talks’, Financial Times, 17 February 2025).
The four-man Russian negotiating team will be headed by the formidable Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. Notable for his absence from the US team will be Keith Kellogg, the retired US general in his eighties who had previously been given the unenviable task of trying to achieve a common approach within Europe. His new task, breaking it to Cinderella that she was not invited to the ball after all, was no more enviable. “Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, said it was not realistic for Europe’s leaders to be involved. ‘It may be like chalk on the blackboard, it may grate a little bit, but I am telling you something that is really quite honest’” (Patrick Wintour and Toby Helm, ‘Starmer to join Macron-led European crisis summit on Trump’s Ukraine plan’, The Observer, 15 February 2025).
Kellogg’s mission to keep the Europeans on side was doomed from the start. Starmer may fool himself into believing that Britain, France and Norway could between them cobble together a ‘coalition of the willing’ – willing, that is, to further bankrupt their own national economies in the effort to grease the Nato war machine. But selling this tomfoolery to populations already hit by austerity, unemployment and poverty is another matter. Take for example the pushback in the Czech Republic against spending yet more money to prop up Nato:
“A Prague-led international effort to buy ammunition for Ukraine has come under threat by the opposition party of Andrej Babiš, who is slated to make a political comeback in elections later this year. The populist ANO party, which is leading in opinion polls ahead of the October vote, has pledged to put the ammunition initiative on hold if it returns to power… Czech President Petr Pavel, a former Nato commander, last year announced that his government was coordinating purchases of artillery shells on international markets in order to help replenish Ukraine’s dwindling ammunition stockpiles and fight Russia’s invasion. But Havlíček expressed doubts about the quality and price of shells. ‘We have information from the military sector that the quality is not ideal and that it is just extremely expensive,’ he said. The liberal government in Prague has warned that Babiš could turn his back on Ukraine and tighten links with pro-Kremlin leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Austria’s likely next chancellor, Herbert Kickl. Babiš’s ANO party was initially aligned with European liberals but last year joined Orbán’s far-right group in the EU assembly” (Raphael Minder, ‘Ammunition for Ukraine at risk as former Czech PM Babiš eyes comeback’, Financial Times, 2 February 2025).
A coalition of those European countries willing to resist pressure from the Nato protection racket would have a lot more to recommend it than a coalition of those willing to be endlessly fleeced by the Nato/EU mafia.
Now the war is coming to a close and the US imperialists have shifted their tactics as they recognise that the Ukraine war is now utterly lost, the leaders of the European imperialist powers (France, Germany and Italy) are left desperately trying to cover up the fact that their gamble on defeating Russia and reviving their flagging economies by doing so has failed. The imperialists are now finding that the big bourgeois political parties are starting to fall apart as the working class and sections of the petty bourgeoisie turn on those leaders who have led them into ever greater poverty as a result of the war and the sanctions regime. The European leaders are utterly trapped, they cannot back out of their alliance with US imperialism but at the same time sticking with this alliance will only cause more immiseration of their domestic working classes. Breaking away from NATO and the EU will become increasingly popular now as the masses see these institutions only as the bringers of poverty and despair.
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