Ukraine three years after all‑out invasion: Continue solidarity and support
Thursday 13 February 2025, by Fred Leplat, Liz Lawrence
Fred Leplat and Liz Lawrence explore the situation facing Ukraine today and key solidarity tasks in the months ahead.
The current phase of the war in Ukraine started on the 24 February 2022, three years ago. Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, and then attempted for eight years to annex the Donbass. When Putin ordered the large-scale imperialist invasion in February 2024 to “demilitarise” and “denazify” Ukraine, he believed that the Zelenskyy government would fall within a matter of days and that Russian troops would be welcomed. But the Russian troops were pushed back, and three years on, victory for Putin, or at least achieving his war aims, is nowhere near.
For the Ukrainians, their motivation to continue the war remains the same: the liberation of their country from occupation and restoring self-determination. Their resistance to imperialist aggression and for independence is entirely legitimate, as well as is obtaining the arms from wherever they can. Occupation and annexation are crimes, whether they happen in Ukraine or Palestine. Ukrainians voted decisively for independence in 1991 (at the time of the end of the Soviet Union) in the referendum, with 92% voting in favour, on an 84% turnout.
Casualties on both sides during the last three years have been extremely high. The Russians may have lost over 200,000 killed and 600,000 wounded, while Ukraine has lost over 80,000 dead and 400,000 wounded. In addition, over 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have died, with 30,000 wounded. Despite exhaustion from the war, 4 in 10 Ukrainians still want the war to continue until victory, while understandably, half want war to end as soon as possible. Ukraine is a nation with a long history, with its own language and culture. Like for Palestinians and other oppressed peoples, the sentiment for independence, national sovereignty and self-determination goes back a long way.
After three years of this phase of the war, Ukraine is in a difficult position. Russia has stepped up its bombing of civilian areas and infrastructure, and is making slow but steady military advances. Western sanctions against Russia have not hit its economy significantly, and its export of liquified natural gas is at a record high. However, there are strains now emerging in the Russian economy as a result of the war. After a period when the war actually seemed to be benefiting Russia economically (so-called ‘military Keynesianism’) it has now encountered serious resource constraints and increasing inflation. If significant economic problems arise in Russia, this would strengthen the Ukrainian position in any negotiations.
The financial pressure from Trump is dangerous for Ukraine. Biden, before leaving office, committed the US to $5.9 billion in military and budget aid, but Trump may renew this only as a loan if Ukraine agrees to negotiations with Russia in which it makes concessions. After pausing arms supplies for a few days, Trump has suggested aid may continue in exchange for Ukraine supplying the US with rare earth metals. Trump’s pause in USAid will also affect Ukraine hard: since February 2022, it has received $7.6bn in humanitarian aid from the US.
In Ukraine the war effort is being hit by war-weariness, more difficulty recruiting and the increase in desertions. But more critical is that the government has not instituted a “war economy” with decisive state intervention in critical sectors, from arms manufacture to health and housing. Instead, it has embraced neoliberalism with privatisations and attacks on employment rights. The latest attack on union and labour rights has been pushed back, but the threat remains. Zelensky wants to prove his neoliberal credentials, in particular with his refusal to call for the debt of Ukraine be cancelled. He wants to be a reliable partner with private investors and banks. Cancellation of the debt is crucial to enable a socially just reconstruction. Privatisations have enabled the enrichment of a few and spread corruption, which in turn has damaged morale and trust.
Putin clearly believes that Ukraine will be forced into accepting an imposed “peace” settlement negotiated with Trump behind the backs of the Ukrainians. In a sign that Putin cannot win the war for now, the original war objectives have been watered down. In addition to the annexation of the Donbass, Putin wants Ukraine to reduce its military by 80% and stay out of the EU and NATO. Despite Zelensky conceding negotiating directly with Putin, this has been rejected by Putin, who claims that Zelensky is not legitimate as his term expired and no new elections have been held during wartime. So the Ukrainians have little choice but to fight on and resist as best they can the Russian invasion, the purpose of which is to turn their country into a satellite of Russia.
The war has dragged on because Ukraine has not received weapons in sufficient quantity or quickly enough to defend itself. Western imperialism has always been ambivalent in its support for Ukraine. Some countries would like to see the war end as soon as possible so that “normal” business can resume with Russia, while others would like the war to drag on as long as possible so as weaken Russian imperialism. The West reluctantly supported Ukraine in the name of “defending democracy”. This had the benefit of giving NATO and Western imperialist countries a new coat of paint after their 20-year “war against terrorism” ended in defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their lukewarm support for Ukraine is in stark contrast with their support for genocidal actions of Israel in Gaza and the brutal dictatorship of the House of Saud, providing both of them with an unlimited supply of weapons. Ukraine is of limited geostrategic interest to the West compared to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
White Banner: From Ukraine to Palestine Occupation is a Crime with the respecyyive flags painted above the country names being carried by 5 or 6 people at front of photo with other people and banners further back
Labour leader Keir Starmer has continued the Tory government’s cautious support for Ukraine, carefully avoiding supporting its war aims – the liberation of the country. He only says that Ukraine should be “in the strongest possible position in the coming months” so that any peace deal to end its war with Ukraine “could be achieved through strength”. While he declares that Britain is “standing by Ukraine”, he drags his feet supplying weapons, but recommits Britain to increased military spending. While supporting Ukraine, some on the left have latched on to NATO’s new mission in their belief that Russian imperialism is the gravest danger facing Western democracies, therefore backing Labour’s increases in military budgets. But the West can give Ukraine what it needs without increasing such spending.
The Ukrainians should be supported in their resistance against Russian imperialist invasion despite Zelensky’s neoliberal government. They should also be supported in spite of Western imperialism trying to influence the war aims and the future of Ukraine. The West is using the war to weaken a rival imperialist country, Russia, and ensure a neoliberal reconstruction. For the West, this is more important than the liberation of Ukraine. The neoliberal course of the Zelensky government has to be condemned, and illusions by Ukrainians in the European Union be dispelled. The “structural adjustment” applied by the EU and the European Central Bank on Greece in 2015 for a bail-out of its debt is a lesson for Ukraine. There was an alternative then, and there is an alternative now in Ukraine to extreme neoliberalism. It will come from the left, the trade unions and progressive forces in Ukraine, with international solidarity, fighting for a cancellation of the country’s debt and for a reconstruction based on social, economic and climate justice.
Internationally, supporters of Ukraine must continue solidarity work. This includes education about the oppression being suffered by Ukrainians in territory under Russian occupation. We must challenge any view that the sufferings of Ukrainians will end if they are forced to stop fighting and to surrender. Trump’s plans to allow Putin to annex around 20% of Ukraine will not provide the basis for a long-term settlement to the war. They may lay the basis for further invasion and annexation. In addition to demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine, we must raise demands for return of all Ukrainian prisoners of war and Ukrainian civilians who have been forcibly removed to Russian territory. We must oppose peace talks being held without Ukrainians present or any imposition of a settlement against the will of the Ukrainian people.
AntiCapitalist Resistance 10 February 2025
Attached documentsukraine-three-years-after-all-out-invasion-continue_a8852.pdf (PDF - 920.2 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article8852]
Fred Leplat
Fred Leplat is a leading member of Socialist Resistance, which collaborates with the Fourth International.
Liz Lawrence
Liz Lawrence is a member of ACR in Britain, a past President of the University and College Union and active in UCU Left.
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
AU CONTRAIRE
Trump Gives Peace a Chance in Ukraine
As we approach the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a monumental shift is taking place that might just lead to the end of this calamitous war. This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker.
Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine if he was re-elected as president. On February 12th, he started to make good on that promise by holding a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden had refused to talk to since the war began. They agreed that they were ready to begin peace negotiations “immediately,” and Trump then called President Zelensky and spent an hour discussing the conditions for what Zelensky called a “lasting and reliable peace.”
At the same time, the new U.S. Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, unveiled Trump’s new policy in more detail at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, saying, “The bloodshed must stop. And this war must end.”
There are two parts to the new policy that Hegseth announced. First, he said that Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.” Secondly, he said that the United States is handing off the prime responsibility for arming Ukraine and guaranteeing its future security to the European members of NATO.
Assigning Europe the role of security guarantor is a transparent move to shield the U.S. from ongoing responsibility for a war that it played a major role in provoking and prolonging by scuttling previous negotiations. If the Europeans will not accept their assigned role in Trump’s plan, or President Zelensky or Putin reject it, the United States may yet have to play a larger role in security guarantees for Ukraine than Trump or many Americans would like. Zelensky told the Guardian on February 11th that, for Ukraine, “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”
After blocking peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, the Biden administration rejected peace negotiations over Ukraine for nearly three years. Biden insisted that Ukraine must recover all of its internationally recognized territory, including the Crimea and Donbas regions that separated from Ukraine after the U.S.-backed coup in Kyiv in 2014.
Hegseth opened the door to peace by clearly and honestly telling America’s European allies, “…we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”
Spelling out the U.S. plan in more detail, Hegseth went on, “A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.”
NATO membership for Ukraine has always been totally unacceptable to the Russians. Trump and Hegseth’s forthrightness in finally pulling the plug, after the U.S. has dangled NATO membership in front of successive Ukrainian governments since 2008, marks a critical recognition that neutrality offers the best chance for Ukraine to coexist with Russia and the West without being a battleground between them.
Trump and Hegseth expect Europe to assume prime responsibility for Ukraine, while the Pentagon will instead focus on Trump’s two main priorities: on the domestic front, deporting immigrants, and on the international front, confronting China. Hegseth justified this as “a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and the Pacific respectively.”
Elaborating on the role the U.S. plan demands of its European allies, Hegseth explained,
“If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine… Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.”
To say that U.S. forces will never fight alongside European forces in Ukraine, and that Article 5, the mutual defense commitment in the NATO Charter, will not apply to European forces in Ukraine, is to go a step farther than simply denying NATO membership to Ukraine, by carving out Ukraine as an exclusion zone where the NATO Charter no longer applies, even to NATO members.
While Trump plans to negotiate directly with Russia and Ukraine, the vulnerable position in which his plan would place European NATO members means that they, too, will want a significant say in the peace negotiations and probably demand a U.S. role in Ukraine’s security guarantees. So Trump’s effort to insulate the U.S. from the consequences of its actions in Ukraine may be a dead letter before he even sits down to negotiate with Russia and Ukraine.
Hegseth’s reference to the Minsk Accords highlights the similarities between Trump’s plans and those agreements in 2014 and 2015, which largely kept the peace in Eastern Ukraine from then until 2022. Western leaders have since admitted that they always intended to use the relative peace created by the Minsk Accords to build up Ukraine militarily, so that it could eventually recover Donetsk and Luhansk by force, instead of granting them the autonomous status agreed to in the Accords.
Russia will surely insist on provisions that prevent the West from using a new peace accord in the same way, and would be highly unlikely to agree to substantial Western military forces or bases in Ukraine as part of Ukraine’s security guarantees. President Putin has always insisted that a neutral Ukraine is essential to lasting peace.
There is, predictably, an element of “having their cake and eating it too” in Trump and Hegseth’s proposals. Even if the Europeans take over most of the responsibility for guaranteeing Ukraine’s future security, and the U.S. has no Article 5 obligation to support them, the United States would retain its substantial command and control position over Europe’s armed forces through NATO. Trump is still demanding that its European members increase their military spending to 5% of GDP, far more than the United States spends on its bloated, wasteful and defeated war machine.
Biden was ready to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” as retired U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman said in March 2022, and to enrich U.S. weapons companies with rivers of Ukrainian blood. Is Trump now preparing to fight Russia to the last British, French, German or Polish soldier too if his peace plan fails?
Trump’s call with Putin and Hegseth’s concessions on NATO and Ukraine’s territorial integrity left many European leaders reeling. They complained that the U.S. was making concessions behind their backs, that these issues should have been left to the negotiating table, and that Ukraine should not be forced to give up on NATO membership.
European NATO members have legitimate concerns to work out with the new U.S. administration, but Trump and Hegseth are right to finally and honestly tell Ukraine that it will not become a NATO member, to dispel this tragic mirage and let it move on into a neutral and more peaceful future.
There has also been a backlash from Republican war hawks, while the Democrats, who have been united as the party of war when it comes to Ukraine, will likely try to sabotage Trump’s efforts. On the other hand, maybe a few brave Democrats will recognize this as a chance to reclaim their party’s lost heritage as the more dovish of America’s two legacy parties, and to provide desperately needed new progressive foreign policy leadership in Congress.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Trump’s peace initiative is a gamechanger and a new chance for peace that the United States and its allies should embrace, even as they work out their respective responsibilities to provide security guarantees for Ukraine. It is also a time for Europe to realize that it can’t just mimic U.S. foreign policy and expect U.S. protection in return. Europe’s difficult relationship with Trump’s America may lead to a new modus operandi and a re-evaluation (or maybe even the end?) of NATO.
Meanwhile, those of us anxious to see peace in Ukraine should applaud President Trump’s initiative but we should also highlight the glaring contradictions of a president who finds the killing in Ukraine unacceptable but fully supports the genocide in Palestine.
Given that most of the casualties in Ukraine are soldiers, while most of the maimed and killed in Palestine are civilians, including thousands of children, the compassionate, humanitarian case for peace is even stronger in Palestine than in Ukraine. So why is Trump committed to stopping the killing in Ukraine but not in Gaza? Is it because Trump is so wedded to Israel that he refuses to rein in its slaughter? Or is it just that Ukrainians and Russians are white and European, while Palestinians are not?
If Trump can reject the political arguments that have fueled three years of war in Ukraine and apply compassion and common sense to end that war, then he can surely do the same in the Middle East.
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