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What’s behind Trump’s moves in Ukraine?
Ukraine is a proxy war between US imperialism and Russian imperialism
Donald Trump is changing US strategy in Ukraine (Picture: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
By Tomáš Tengely-Evans
Wednesday 12 February 2025
The West and Russia turned Ukraine into a slaughterhouse. Now, after almost three years of war, the imperialist rivals want to carve it up and call it “peace”.
Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he had a “lengthy and highly productive phone call” with Russian president Vladimir Putin. He said the two agreed to begin “negotiations immediately”—and added that he would “inform” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “of the conversation”.
His remarks came on the same day that US defence secretary Pete Hegseth told European leaders they must provide the “overwhelming’ share of aid to Ukraine. He declared that a return to Ukraine’s borders before 2014 was an “unrealistic objective” and “illusionary goal” that “will only prolong the war”.
Hegseth added there must be “robust security guarantees, but that the US does not believe Nato membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome”.
The dramatic turnaround in US policy towards Ukraine flows from—and reinforces—the crisis of US imperialism.
Trump’s vile plan for ethnically cleansing Gaza can seem separate from this move, but it flows from the same strategy of asserting US dominance in the world.
How can we explain the shift over Ukraine?
First, Ukraine is not a war for freedom and self-determination nor did it begin with Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022. Trump isn’t calling up Putin because he’s abandoning a fight for democracy.
There was a proxy war between US imperialism and Russian imperialism brewing since the 1990s.
US president Joe Biden saw Ukraine as an opportunity to overcome US imperialism’s defeats in the Middle East. He wanted to weaken Russia and, more importantly, send a signal to the US’s main competitor China.
Biden described Ukraine as an “inflection point in the world” to a group of business leaders at the White House shortly after the Russian invasion. “There’s going to be a new world order out there and we’ve got to lead it,” he said.
Colonel Alexander Vindman, who worked in the first Trump White House, pushed for a more aggressive stance on Ukraine
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. After leaving, he spent his time drumming up support for US and Nato involvement in Ukraine.
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”.
After the invasion, the Biden White House said it wanted Ukraine to “fulfil its European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations”
The US strategy in Ukraine was to “bleed Russia dry” through a process of “managed escalation”. In practice, this meant giving Ukraine enough arms to tie down Russia forces without risking a wider conflict.
But, despite over £100 billion in US aid, Ukraine is an abattoir of imperial ambition with no victory in sight.
Second, the US faces major challenges to its “hegemony”—it’s ability to dominate the world and demand leadership over its allies. Trump represents a more “go it alone” strategy to maintain it.
The US built a liberal capitalist world order after the Second World War based on free trade and free markets. There was always an economic and military dimension.
In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, the US was the only world superpower left standing. But all was not well.”
The US could use the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and dominance of the dollar to project its power against rivals, allies and weaker states.
This “Bretton Woods system” allowed the US to fix the supply of dollars and make sure its corporations had favourable terms of trade. While it fractured in the 1970s, the US still used the IMF and dollar dominance to force neoliberal policies onto states.
US capitalism’s dominance was backed by military might, through the Nato warmonger’s alliance and hundreds of military bases across the world.
In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, the US was the only world superpower left standing. But all was not well. Imperialism is a global system of competing capitalist states. The old war criminal Henry Kissinger warned that the US would face economic competition—particularly from China—on scale it hadn’t seen before.
The War on Terror in the 2000s was an attempt to assert US hegemony through military force. But the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan signalled to the US’s rivals that it was possible to assert their own interests.
Alongside this, we’ve seen important shifts within global capitalism. For example, the likes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are becoming more important capitalist states, diversifying from being a source of oil alone.
All this means there is growing competition among the big imperialist powers and regional or “sub” imperialist ones.
Since 2018, the US has seen “great power competition” as the main challenge facing it.
There is a great deal of continuity between Biden’s and Trump’s foreign policies—defending US hegemony against these challenges.
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.
“It’s one in which incrementally Ukraine is being destroyed and losing more and more territory.”
But more broadly he prefers a much more “go it alone” strategy—and sees US allies as draining US resources and wants them to pay their own way. Here, he said that European states would have to pay for Ukrainian security.
But there is a broader shift taking place in US foreign policy—there is a method behind Trump’s seemingly erratic announcements.
Marco Rubio laid out the US strategy in a revealing interview last week
Rubio recently described how the Trump administration wanted to deal with a world of many “great powers”. He described how the US wanted to maintain dominance in the world, but not through the institutions of the liberal capitalist order.
Instead of “multilateral agreements” between the US and many allies, it would focus on bilateral ones with states.
Rubio said, “The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China. The Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States.
“Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances. Where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests.”
But he complained that “that was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world”. “And so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem,” he said.
“It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power— that was an anomaly and a product of the end of the Cold War.
“But eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.
“We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”
There are important limits to the shift that Rubio described. For example, the Trump administration’s moves in the Middle East and Ukraine intensify the crisis faced by US imperialism.
The US has relied heavily on the alliances to maintain dominance for decades and can’t easily undo this web of control.
In the Middle East, Trump is pushing alliances with Egypt and Jordan to breaking point over his Gaza ethnic cleansing plan. But it’s not in US interests to see those Arab states go to another power.
He’s banking on using US leverage to get his way with allies—make them cough up more money and obediently toe the line.
The Ukraine plan doesn’t mean peace for millions of ordinary people.
Ukraine—no to Russian invasion, no to Nato escalation
As the bosses’ Financial Times newspaper said, “EU diplomats had unsuccessfully sought to lobby the Trump administration for a role in the talks. They stressed that Ukraine’s post-conflict state was a critical part of Europe’s security architecture.
“Instead, EU capitals believe they will be pressured to pay for whatever deal is agreed in money, arms and peacekeeping troops on the ground.
“‘How to implement any deal without Europe?’ said one Western official in response to Trump’s statement. ‘Cash and boots would be European’.”
The anti-war movement was right to say, “Russian troops out, no to Nato.”
We have to redouble our efforts to fight against imperialist wars and the system that produces them.
UK - Ukraine initiatives
Current and upcoming activities in solidarity with Ukraine
Saturday February 15th, 11.0 am — 4.0 pm, Conference: End the Russian invasion and occupation. National Education Union, Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BD. Register here.
Saturday February 22nd, 12.00 , Demonstrate at the Russian embassy. Assemble 12 noon – St Volodymyr statue, London W11 3QY Rally 1pm – Russian embassy, W8 4QP
Tuesday February 25th
Ukraine’s biggest trade union body, the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU), is organising an international trade union conference in Kyiv to coincide with the third anniversary of Putin’s invasion.
Wednesday March 26th-27th
International conference in solidarity with Ukraine, in Brussels. Here trade unionists, progressive elected representatives, Ukraine solidarity committees, feminist and LGBTI+ groups, environmentalists, and defenders of democratic and civil liberties will come together to strengthen ties with their Ukrainian counterparts and develop practical solidarity initiatives.
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EDM on companies breaking sanction on Russia
Early Day Motion 651
Chris Law MP (Scottish National Party, SNP) has tabled this Early Day Motion in the House of Commons.
“That this House stands with the people of Ukraine against the illegal invasion and occupation of their country by Russia; believes that sanctions on Russian exports and, in particular, Russian-produced fossil fuels, are necessary to help reduce the ability of Russia to fund its ongoing invasion; welcomes that the UK government has prohibited the importation of Russian LNG into the UK; notes with concern, however, that British companies continue to be involved in the transport and sale of LNG from Russia to other countries; further notes with extreme concern that it has been reported that Glasgow-based corporation Seapeak Maritime Glasgow Ltd owns and operates six tankers transporting Russian LNG and at least twelve tankers transporting Russian gas through the Arctic Ocean have protection and indemnity insurance provided by UK-based insurers, including North of England P&I Association, Standard P&I Club per Charles Taylor & Co, and UK P&I Club; believes that companies involved in the sale and exportation of Russian LNG should not be eligible for government assistance, financial or otherwise; and calls on the UK government to close current loopholes that allow British-based companies to transport Russian LNG despite previous sanctions.”
Write to your MP to ask them to sign it. Seapeak Glasgow’s transportation of Russian LNG is financing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to the tune of $4 billion a year.
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Statement initiated by trade unionists in the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign
As friends of Ukraine, supporters of its self-defence and self-determination against Russian imperialism, we support the Ukrainian trade unions’ struggle to defend workers’ rights. In particular we salute their ongoing resistance to a proposed new Labour Code that includes numerous restrictions on the rights of the workers and their organisations; as well as draft law 5344d, restricting the rights and social security of people with disabilities.
(For a detailed summary of these attacks Ukrainian workers are facing, see here.)
We congratulate the Ukrainian unions on their recent victory, in January 2025, pushing the Verkhovna Rada to vote down anti-worker draft law 5054. Attacks on labour rights at work and in society are large-scale, ongoing, and frequent.
Ukraine’s workers’ movement has resisted and continues to resist Russia’s authoritarian assault on independent trade unionism and democratic rights in the occupied territories. Naturally it also rejects any attacks on workers’ rights by its own government.
The severe erosion of labour rights involved in the proposed new Labour Code is the latest in a series of such measures introduced under the cover of the war. This constitutes an attack on the very people who have sustained Ukraine’s war effort against the odds – its working class. Shameful in themselves, such policies also undermine both Ukraine’s self-defence and post-war reconstruction: and are strongly opposed by Ukrainian and international trade union confederations.
We call on the Ukrainian government to repudiate all such changes, reverse earlier attacks on workers’ rights, and change course.
We know that the former UK Conservative government actively promoted anti-worker changes to Ukraine’s labour laws. We call on the Labour government to work with trade unions in the UK and Ukraine to instead defend and promote workers’ ri
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