Dragan Plavšić looks at the dangers of the war in Ukraine, why it happened and where it’s leading

The war in Ukraine is in its end stages. Ukraine is losing, but this is an endgame bristling with terrifying dangers, including nuclear ones.

In 2022, Ukraine repelled Russia’s advance on Kyiv. In 2023, the war became a bloody stalemate. This year, Russia’s key advantage – its ability to place and replace boots on the ground – is proving decisive, notwithstanding the vast amounts of military aid to Ukraine from the US ($61.1 billion), Germany ($11.4bn), the UK ($10.1bn) and other Nato states ($39.9bn).

Negotiations to end the war are inevitable – barring a catastrophe – and would have been, sooner or later, whoever was in the White House. But until then, a desperately reckless race is under way to maximise battlefield positions for leverage at the negotiating table.

Biden took the decisive escalatory step. Hypocritically citing Moscow’s use of North Korean troops as an excuse (the US has 750 bases in eighty countries), he gave Kyiv permission to fire US Atacms long-range missiles into Russia. Starmer followed suit with British Storm Shadow missiles. To launch, these missiles need targeting data provided and authorised by US and UK personnel. This isn’t just any proxy war; it’s the proxiest of proxy wars.

Putin responded by launching the new Oreshnik ballistic missile at Ukraine. He reserved the right to attack the military facilities of countries whose missiles were fired at Russia. Most ominously, he lowered the threshold for using nuclear weapons to cover an attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state backed by a nuclear power i.e. the Ukrainian scenario.

Escalation has chased escalation in this war, but this wave is the most dangerous. It brings the US, the UK and Nato closer than ever to direct conflict with Russia, raising the prospect of the war turning catastrophically nuclear. How is it that things have come to this?

Causes 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war’s markedly proxy character can only be explained if placed in the competitive geopolitical context of US-led imperialist expansion of Nato eastwards to the borders of Russia since 1999.

In that year, Nato bombed Serbia for 78 days, stamping its authority on eastern Europe in an illegal war of aggression waged two decades before Russia’s on Ukraine. Since 1999, fourteen eastern European states from the Baltic to the Balkans have joined Nato. But Ukraine would be the greatest prize, hence why it’s long been in Washington’s strategic sights.

Back in 1995, President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, explained: ‘… some states of the former Soviet Union command particular attention because of their potential to influence the future of the region. Ukraine is critical. With its size and its position, juxtaposed between Russia and Central Europe, it is a linchpin of European security.’

But what Christopher saw as a linchpin of European security, Russia saw as a linchpin of Russian security. Losing Ukraine to Nato threatened its very status as a regional imperialist power. As US geostrategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote: ‘Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an Eurasian empire.’

In February 2008, the US ambassador to Moscow warned Washington that ’NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains “an emotional and neuralgic” issue for Russia’. Moscow was ‘worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against’ could lead to a civil war in which ‘Russia would have to decide whether to intervene.’

Just two months later, at its Bucharest conference of April 2008, Nato ‘welcome[d] Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.’ Tellingly, Germany’s Merkel and France’s Sarkozy opposed premature membership. Merkel recently recalled: ‘It was completely clear to me that President Putin would not have stood idly by and watched Ukraine join Nato.’

Ukraine’s best option was to stay neutral (its policy since independence in 1991) and not shift westwards. But with Nato encouragement and support, its ruling class did the opposite, with disastrous results. In 2014, Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was overthrown with US backing. The country split and Putin annexed Crimea, backing the pro-Moscow rebels of the Donbas. In 2019, Kyiv enshrined the goal of Nato membership in its constitution. The stage was set for a clash of imperialisms.

Where next?

What might negotiations to end the war bring? Peace is better than war but this peace will be ugly. Ukraine will be partitioned between a Kyivan Ukraine and a Russian one. Both will be armed camps of their respective imperialisms with social needs sacrificed for military ones and the border between them turned into a perilous inter-imperialist faultline packed with explosive potential.

Though Ukraine’s Nato membership will have to be put off (though not necessarily ruled out), Trump will seek to sub-contract Ukraine’s defence to Nato’s European member states, further fuelling the rise of militarism in Europe. Before the war, the UK announced the ‘largest sustained increase in the core defence budget for 30 years.’ During the war, Germany announced it would spend €100 billion on rearming. Finland and Sweden, neutral throughout the Cold War, have now joined Nato.

Trump is keen to end the war in Ukraine, but only in order to pivot US foreign policy decisively to the East to counter China, which backed Russia. His goal is to reassert US imperialist power after defeats and setbacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and arguably Ukraine. But rising tensions with Beijing, over Taiwan for example, will reverberate along Ukraine’s partition border, further exacerbating tensions, especially if Russia and China consolidate their current alliance. Dangerous instabilities therefore abound.

Conclusion

The war in Ukraine has intensified competitive antagonisms between the US, Russia and China, fuelling militarism and fears of nuclear war. The antidote is mass peace movements like Stop the War Coalition and CND offering rational alternatives to the destructive logic of competing imperialisms. The journalist Peter Oborne once wrote of StWC that it ‘consistently’ shows ‘far more mature judgment on these great issues of war and peace than Downing Street, the White House or the CIA.’ Join it and help build peace.

From this month’s Counterfire freesheet