(Video) Ukraine’s anti-imperialist struggle (plus statements on anniversary of Russia’ invasion)
For twelve years, Ukraine has been fighting for its independence against imperial aggression. For most of this period, the conflict has been in a hybrid form, and exactly four years ago it took on the appearance of an open war, unleashed by the Russian army shelling almost all Ukrainian border towns and launching hundreds of missiles at military and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine has chosen a difficult path to defend its freedom, which it is pursuing.
Over the years, it has become clear that this is neither a “conflict” nor a “misunderstanding,” but a targeted war of aggression aimed at destroying the Ukrainian state and establishing a puppet government. The Ukrainian army has been able to stop Putin’s blitzkrieg and prove its ability to resist the imperialist invasion. Behind this success lies the exploit of the working masses, who have often felt marginalized in their own countries, but who have in reality become the pillar of the army. At the same time, we owe our survival to the help of people from all over the world, who have made us aware of the extraordinary power of solidarity.
The present state of the war is determined by its prolonged and exhausting nature. Russia is waging a war of extermination, systematically committing war crimes: torture, deportations, abduction of children, targeted bombing of residential areas, hospitals, schools, energy infrastructure and transport. These are not side effects, but a deliberate strategy of terror, as the Russian army is unable to defeat the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the battlefield. Despite extreme fatigue and a lack of manpower, Ukrainian soldiers are repelling the occupiers’ offensive and, in places, counterattacking. But the invaders’ approach to cities like Zaporizhzhia can only be worrying. Unfortunately, the Kremlin still has far superior long-range strike capabilities, which it uses constantly.
At the same time, the war has profoundly affected the social sphere and civil society. The severe shortage of housing and decent jobs is accompanied by ineffective social protection. Millions of people, especially in frontline regions, suffer from inequality and social precariousness. Awareness of the profound shortcomings of the state’s social policy has sparked a surge of solidarity: solidarity initiatives have emerged, trade unions have mobilised and other social movements have taken on a significant part of the support for society. The energy of the mobilizations is focused not only on humanitarian aid, but also on conflicts with a strong social dimension that reveal the failures of the system.
In our quest for a quick victory for Ukraine, we take a critical look at the liberal market policies pursued by the ruling elite. The desire to immediately maximize corporate profits harms Ukraine’s strategic interests, which demand modernizing its industry, ensuring full employment and uniting society. Encouraging imports, deregulation and the free movement of capital will not build a sustainable economic system that can give an advantage over the occupiers.
The enemy has been and will be cruel, but the greatest risk for Ukraine is to renounce justice, as this will breed discord and despair. Peripheral capitalism, mired in corruption, produces injustice on a large scale. It allows selfishness to flourish and businesses to grow, but it does not create any common protection for all. Imposing controversial reforms like Ukraine’s new labor code will amplify the scale of social inequality, but will not bring stability.
We aspire to unity, but we refuse to condone the mistakes of the authorities. This is where our spirit of freedom and our difference with Russia are manifested. Ukrainian society has not disappeared in the face of the prevailing anxiety; It continues to act and defend democracy and its independence.
Ukraine is not only fighting for its territory, but also for the right to be a space of freedom, diversity and confrontation of ideas, and not an authoritarian dictatorship. People of diverse opinions, including representatives of the left-wing movement, participated in this fight. Among the dead are artist David Chychkan, anarchist Dmytro Petro, anarchist Lana “Sati” Chornohorska, Yevheniy Osievskyi, and many other heroes and heroines of the Ukrainian and international anti-authoritarian movement. The Sotsialnyi Rukh is also not indifferent to our history: some of us have been serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the first days of the invasion, and every year more and more of our activists join it. Being part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine means being close to the people, whose social liberation we are working for.
At the international level, this conflict has long since transcended national borders and does not concern us alone. Around the world, reactions to the events in Ukraine are distinguishing between progressive and internationalist movements and anti-democratic and isolationist movements. Because it is above all a question of protecting universal values, namely the right to individual freedom.
If Ukraine is forced to capitulate or is defeated, it will not mean peace, but the legitimization of a forced change of borders. This will pave the way for further aggression and bring the world closer to a world war that could claim billions of lives across the globe.
We have no confidence in individuals like Donald Trump, who flout international law. That is why we see his peace initiatives first and foremost as an attempt to abandon Ukraine to its fate. The time has come to restore the balance of power in Ukraine’s favour, by demanding that Western countries hand over their military arsenals and impose sanctions on Russia.
The Kremlin will not stop its violence against the Ukrainian people until it has suffered a significant defeat. It is the duty of humanists around the world to help Ukraine complete what it has started and defeat the invader.
Ukrainian workers have paid too high a price to return to the same social injustice in post-war Ukraine that prevailed before. It is not the oligarchs, nor their neoliberal politicians in their pay, nor the economic elites, but the workers who have taken up arms to defend Ukraine. For these people, the state must serve their interests!
Glory to the hard-working and steadfast Ukrainian people, to their defenders!
Glory to international solidarity against imperialism!
Eternal glory to our brothers and sisters who died at the hands of Russian forces!
Posle Editorial Collective (Russia): Statement on the fourth anniversary of the war
The fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is being marked by the most intense and destructive shelling of Ukrainian cities since the war began. Over 1.2 million households have been left without heat or power in the harsh winter, and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to endure inhumane conditions. Ukrainian retaliatory strikes have, in turn, led to widespread power outages and heating disruptions in Belgorod. Meanwhile, Russian casualties have reached the highest level since the beginning of the war, despite the Russian army advancing only around 15 meters per day. According to Mediazona’s estimates, at least 200,186 Russian soldiers have been killed since February 24, 2022. This count includes only those whose names have been confirmed; the real toll is likely far higher. Nevertheless, there is little reason to believe that these or even greater losses will weaken the Putin regime’s resolve to continue the war.
On the one hand, after four years in which Putinism has hardened into a totalitarian dictatorship, war has become the regime’s only viable mode of existence. It legitimizes the concentration of power and repression, and it binds the elite more tightly to the dictator. More importantly, however, the regime lacks a coherent vision for the country’s future once the war ends and thousands of traumatized, battle-hardened contract soldiers return home — men whose previous high pay and social standing the state will no longer be able to sustain. This looming challenge is one the authorities seem to fear as much as military defeat.
At the same time, the Kremlin sees the growing divide between the EU and the United States, as well as the Trump administration’s willingness to strike a bilateral deal, as an opportunity to achieve the “goals of the special military operation.” When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the global response was unequivocal: this was an unjustifiable war of aggression, and Ukraine’s resistance was grounded not only in international law but also in basic principles of morality and justice — ideas humanity seemed to have internalized after the Second World War. Four years of bloodshed, however, have brought not only the deaths of hundreds of thousands but also a broader moral shift. Talks initiated by the Trump’s administration treat the war as “senseless” on both sides — something to be brought to an end not by reaffirming international law, but by establishing a new balance of power. In this worldview, there are no victims or aggressors, no right or wrong — only the strong and the weak, with “balance” secured through concessions by the latter.
This moral shift in global public opinion may be Putin’s most significant achievement to date. If it becomes the new consensus, it will almost certainly pave the way for new, more destructive wars fueled by the redrawing of smaller states’ borders and the reassertion of control by great powers over their former colonies. This is why any genuine anti-war movement today must stand firmly and unreservedly with the victims of aggression. This is no longer just about defending Ukraine’s right to independence; it is the only credible way to stop the world from being pulled into a spiral of escalating conflicts.
Ukraine Solidarity Network (US): Ukraine still stands
As Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine enters its fifth year on February 24, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls on progressive and peace-minded people to renew their moral, political, and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s invasion and their rights to self-defense and self-determination.
We must remember Ukraine even as we struggle against so many other outrages that rightly demand our attention: the US-backed genocide in Gaza, US military strikes on Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and small civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants, health, the environment, and social and democratic rights.
Massive casualties
Russia’s war of aggression has been as deadly as any war in the world over the last four years. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, battlefield casualties (killed, wounded, missing) reached an estimated 1.8 million by the end of 2025, including 1.2 million Russians and 600,000 Ukrainians. The battlefield death toll alone is estimated at around 460,000 combatants – 325,000 Russians and 140,000 Ukrainians.
In addition to battlefield casualties, civilian casualties in Ukraine have reached over 53,000, including over 14,500 killed. The civilian death rate in Ukraine rose 31% in 2025 as Russia escalated its terrorist tactics of targeting civilian homes and energy infrastructure far from frontline battlefields with missile and drone strikes.
Russia’s constant offensives on the frontlines have been sending Russian soldiers to their deaths at a rate of 1,000 or more a day for the last two years. At around 30,000 per month, twice as many Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine every month as the nearly 15,000 who died in all of Russia’s 10-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The horrors in Ukraine join the horrors of other wars and associated hunger and disease ravaging our planet over the last four years in Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. People struggling for peace and democracy in all of these countries deserve our active solidarity.
A stalemated war
Contrary to the Kremlin narrative of inevitable Russian victory, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill. In the first year of the war in 2022, Ukraine recovered nearly half of the land that Russia occupied in its initial offensive, pushing Russia out of the northern regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and most of Kharkiv and much of Kherson in the south. Since then, the frontlines have been largely frozen. Despite enormous losses of personnel and materiel, Russia has gained only 1.5% of Ukrainian territory in the last three years.
Russia’s rulers are afflicting their people with an endless war not of their own choosing. Russia has now been attacking Ukraine longer than it took the Soviet Union to push the Hitler’s Nazi army back to Berlin in World War II.
Russia’s war finances are in trouble. Oil and gas revenues, 30% to 50% of Russian state revenues over the last decade, dropped by nearly 50% in 2025 to a five-year low. Ukrainian “kinetic sanctions” have hit Russian oil refineries, ports, and tankers, and have combined with declining global oil prices and western sanctions to begin to defund Russia’s war machine. Russia’s 2025 military budget was 40% of its national budget, which means that stronger sanctions might cripple Russia’s military.
Unspeakable war crimes
The war crimes committed by Russia are unspeakable. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova, for the war crime of abducting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia for Russified and militarized education. The ICC has issued further arrest warrants for four top Russian military commanders for the war crime of bombing civilians. Russian air strike terrorism on civilian homes and energy infrastructure in Ukraine has increased since these ICC arrest warrants were issued.
In an ominous escalation, Russian has been striking substations that feed power into the cooling systems of nuclear power stations since November and most recently earlier this February, risking a deadly Chornobyl-scale meltdown and radiation release.
Russia is training its drone operators on “ human safaris” that target Ukrainian civilians in Kherson. One in twenty people remaining in the city of Kherson were a casualty of Russian drones in 2025.
In the occupied territories, Ukrainians are subjected to political repression and forced Russification. If they refuse to take Russian passports, they are denied access to public services and banking. Children are often taken from parents who want to remain Ukrainian and their homes and property are being confiscated. Many are subject to detention and interrogation, forced conscription into Russia’s army, torture, sexual violence, and/or summary execution.
The Trump-Putin alliance
The Trump administration policy has allied with Russia against Ukraine in its actions and negotiation posture. Since the Trump administration came into office, military aid to Ukraine has been cut by 99%. It cut all humanitarian aid to Ukraine shortly after taking office for education, healthcare, shelter, heat and power, war-displaced persons, HIV drugs, mental health services for war-distressed children, families, and veterans, and other services. In December, the US restored a token $2 billion of the former $63 billion USAID budget for humanitarian aid programs that is now being spent through UN programs trying to aid Ukraine and other war-torn countries like Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Also immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration closed US Justice Department programs to monitor and enforce sanctions against Russian frozen assets, influence operations in the US, and other sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Trump defunded US programs to document Russian war crimes, including cooperation with the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine and the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which had identified and documented some 35,000 Ukrainian children forcibly abducted by Russia.
After repeatedly voting for UN General Assembly resolutions since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022 that affirmed Ukraine’s sovereignty and demanded that Russia halt its military operations and withdraw back to Russia, in February 2025, the US reversed course under the Trump administration on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. The US, and its satellites including Israel, voted with Russia against a similar resolution condemning Russia’s invasion and demanding that Russian troops withdraw.
While Trump still allows Europeans to buy weapons they can send on to Ukraine, US shipment delays have left crucial Ukrainian air defense missile launchers without missiles to fire against incoming Russian missiles in recent weeks.
Trump’s alliance with Putin is rooted in their far-right ideological affinity for a world of imperial spheres of influence, authoritarian rule, and racist, misogynistic, and homophobic “traditional values.” Grifters on both sides have been bargaining to partition Ukraine between them like a piece of real estate. The Russian side has been led by Kirill Dmitriev, a Stanford and Harvard trained veteran of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and 15 years ago scammed purchasers of apartments in a building development in Kyiv out of their investments. On the US side are Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, all long engaged in money laundering the real estate investments of Russian oligarchs and other Russia business ties.
Russia is now pitching Trump’s team on a $14 trillion business deal that is contingent on the US forcing Ukraine to accept Russia’s negotiation demands. It would involve lifting Western sanctions on Russia, joint arctic oil and gas exploitation, Russia returning to the dollar-based payments system, preferential US access to the Russian market, compensation for US corporate assets lost in Russia during the war, US aid for Russian aircraft modernization, joint mining of lithium, copper, nickel, and platinum, and cooperation on nuclear power plants to power AI data centers. All of this scheming is being conducted behind the backs of the Ukrainians.
Negotiations on the DimWit Plan
In the Trump-sponsored negotiations, the US has pressured Ukraine to capitulate to Russia under what has been dubbed the DimWit Plan (after Russian negotiator Dmitriev and US negotiator Witkoff). Russia demands that Ukraine cede occupied land in Crimea, plus land Russia does not control in partially-occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces. Furthermore, Russia demands deep cuts in Ukraine’s military, no international security guarantees for Ukraine, and snap elections in hopes of seating a new Ukrainian government that will become a Russian vassal.
President Zelensky has indicated a reluctant willingness to compromise on a ceasefire and freeze at the current frontlines and forgo joining NATO – but if and only if Ukraine receives credible international security guarantees against further Russian aggression. The Ukrainian public seems to agree.
Despite Ukraine’s openness to compromise and Russia’s intransigence, President Trump repeatedly says Putin wants peace and Zelensky is the obstacle. Trump’s year of negotiations has been the deadliest year yet in the war for both Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s predominantly poor and ethnic minority soldiers.
Campist contradictions
The Trump-Putin alliance puts to rest the false proxy war narrative of those campist geopoliticians and privileged pacifists on the Western left who are far away from the Russian assault troops, missiles, and drones raining down terror on Ukraine.
The campists have claimed that Ukraine is merely a proxy force fighting Russia on behalf of Western imperialism as if the Ukrainians do not have their own reasons to fight for their right to exist. The proxy war claim was always a canard. With Trump now aligning the US with Putin, the narrative collapses on its own contractions. It is more absurd than ever.
As Artem Chapeye, the Ukrainian writer, progressive activist, and now soldier explained to an American audience last August, “If this is a proxy war between Russia and US, why are the Ukrainians still fighting after the Trump-Putin alliance?”
Ukrainian self-determination
The Ukraine Solidarity Network totally supports the Ukrainian struggle for self-defense, security, and self-determination – as do most American people by a strong two to one margin in recent polling. It is up to the Ukrainians to democratically decide what is an acceptable peace. We will not stand by while Russian and American oligarchs try to sell out Ukraine and divide it between them for their own profits and far-right ideological objectives.
We will continue our material aid and public education in coordination with trade unions and progressive organizations in Ukraine.
We will continue to work with progressive Ukrainians and Russians and support their demands:
Full and complete withdrawal of Russian troops from all of Ukraine.
International support for the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian invasion.
International economic sanctions against Russia’s war machinery, including its political, military, and economic elite, its access to the international financial system, its imports of weapons-related technology, and its exports of fossil fuels that fund and fuel Russia’s war machine.*
Return to Ukraine of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred to Russia and Belarus.
Freedom for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territories incarcerated for opposition to the occupation and resistance to genocidal Russification.
Freedom for all Russians incarcerated for war resistance and political dissent.
Asylum in countries abroad for Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, and all people seeking refuge from political repression and war.
No amnesty for Russian war criminals.
Cancellation of Ukraine’s foreign debts.
Confiscation of Russian assets abroad to be used to support Ukraine’s military self-defense, social services, and post-war reconstruction.
Reparations from Russia to help fund a full post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.
An end to the Western imperialist policy of imposing a neoliberal program of privatization, deregulation, debt dependence, exploitative mineral extraction, and cuts to public services and labor rights on Ukraine today and for its post-war reconstruction.
- *
The question of sanctions is complicated and controversial among activists committed to Ukraine’s struggle. It’s especially important in the US that we do not accept the predatory politics of the imperialist US state. The Ukraine Solidarity Network will be discussing these issues with our Ukrainian comrades whose lives and national freedom are on the line.
