There was never going to be justice for Ukraine, argues Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

On Wednesday 12 February, Donald Trump announced he had spoken to Vladimir Putin and that peace talks to end the Ukraine War would start now. The announcement left the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and European states blindsided. They were forced to plead publicly for Ukraine and Europe to be present in any negotiation between the US and Russia about ending the war in Ukraine. However, the reality is that Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression was always dependent on US military aid. Europe was very much the US’s junior partner in the proxy war with Russia.

Dependence

Now neither Ukraine nor the EU will have the option of continuing the war without US support. The Ukrainian elite’s wager on fighting a protracted war with Russia, relying on Western help, has proven to be a disaster. Its appeals in recent days to the US to keep funding its war effort in exchange for control over its rare-earth metals have fallen on deaf ears. Trump is willing to do a deal, but still take the mineral resources on offer.

It is hardly a testament to self-determination for your war effort to offer the sale of your country’s greatest riches, but still to depend entirely on the mercy of whoever sits in the White House. Yet that is where Kyiv’s elites have taken the Ukrainian people, after years of pursuing Nato integration over the heads of ordinary Ukrainians.

Just as it was easy for George Bush in 2008 to declare that Ukraine’s future was in Nato, when few in Ukraine wanted that, so it is easy for Donald Trump’s secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, to declare in 2025 that the US ‘does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement’.

The reality has always been that US policy in Ukraine was not driven by the proclaimed high ideals of defending Ukrainian sovereignty or the liberal international rules-based order. It was driven by hard interest. Joe Biden’s administration was prepared to bleed Ukraine to weaken Russia, but it was not motivated to start a world war over Ukraine.

And the truth is that, short of Western boots on the ground, which would have risked all-out nuclear war between the West and Russia, Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia in a conventional war were always, at best, slim. The US strategy of ‘creeping escalation’ to weaken Russian military power without provoking wider war was essentially based on the premise that it could fight to the last Ukrainian.

But Ukrainians proved increasingly unwilling to fight. Six million Ukrainian men failed to submit their details to draft offices by July, as they were required to do by a mobilisation law passed last April. Just four million men did so. This scale of evasion can be partly explained by the toll of death in the war of attrition, the meatgrinder, but also partly on account of the evident lack of motivation to fight for an increasingly neoliberal and corrupt state failing to provide the prospects of a brighter future for its citizens.

Ukraine was progressively losing territory, but, critically, increasingly unable to replace the motivated, but dwindling volunteers who bravely fought the Russian invaders from the early phases of the war. Its defensive lines have become more permeable as the mobilised, or ‘bussified’ (forcibly drafted) troops, proved more and more likely to desert.

In truth, then, Ukraine was losing the war even before Trump’s election in November 2024, and Trump has now simply chosen to cut US losses before Ukraine collapses completely under the weight of Russia’s vicious and relentless stranglehold.

Imperialist carve-up

In that sense, Trump’s move to do a deal with Putin is not some kind of stab in the back, an unexpected betrayal of a cause likely to win. It is the logical outcome of the cynical US strategy to bleed Russia, using ordinary Ukrainians, which was evident from the beginning of the full-scale invasion and indeed well before it.

But Trump’s desire to end the war is simultaneously part of a re-orientation of US imperialism. It amounts to a recognition that US power is in decline, that the world is no longer unipolar and that multipolarity is on the horizon. It is in fact the result of the failure of the US attempt, over the last two and a half decades, to leverage its massive military advantage over its rivals to reverse its slow economic decline.

Even as Nato eastern enlargement helped precipitate the Ukraine war in the first place, and as American adventurism in the ‘War on Terror’ destabilised vast swathes of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, so the US still saw China’s economic star rise and its own decline in recent decades. Trump’s strategy to deal with this is to try to cut US losses in these regions and pivot more decisively to the Pacific to contain China.

Trump may also be trying to prevent the solidification of a Russia-China alliance by offering Putin not just a slice of Ukraine, but also the end of sanctions and the return to business with the West. Unsurprisingly, sections of European capital will be quietly delighted. Many European states, primarily Germany, relied on cheap Russian energy supplies to maintain their economic models. The Ukraine war has damaged their prospects.

Europe’s decline is palpable. In terms of GDP, the drop is dramatic, as the EU was roughly equal to the US in 2008, but was a third smaller by 2022, and will have shrunk further still. Even on a more charitable reading, the EU’s economy in terms of purchasing power parity has declined. It was equal to the US in 2000, but, by 2022, and despite EU enlargement in the intervening period, it was 4% smaller. The IMF predicted in 2023 that it would be 6% smaller by 2028. No wonder the EU’s political centres, France and Germany, are undergoing severe political crisis.

Trump’s ‘peace’, if it arrives, will not come without costs, however, even for Europe. He is demanding that the US’s European allies spend 5% of their GDP on military spending, far higher than the US’s own 3.5%.

Presumably, Trump would like to see the US dominating the Americas, behind a protective wall of tariffs, and acting as the primary force in a new Concert of Powers, along with Europe, Russia, and other big regional powers, policing the world. This new order would keep China on board, but in check.

Alternative

There is no doubt that it would be ordinary people who would pay the price of maintaining such a Concert of Powers, as demonstrated by the fate of Ukraine. If, and when, a peace deal is eventually done, the rump country will be savagely parcelled out between Russia and the West, while the living will be left to ponder what the loss of their loved ones had been about.

To know that a peace deal was on offer and infinitely more advantageous in April 2022 than whatever will be negotiated now should give us all pause for thought. It will be too late for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians who have lost their lives. But if we are to prevent more such catastrophes in the future, the question of how we get peace with justice must be posed.

The answer to that question must surely begin with the recognition that the anti-war movement was correct in warning against the conduct of a proxy war between imperialist powers. And that, in fact, the conduct of such a war not only led to more deaths on the frontlines, but also to the increasing impoverishment of tens of millions across the world, as military spending and competition spiralled, energy and food inflation rose, and millions were made into refugees.

That the left did not make such arguments in a decisive and mass way, but was divided over the Ukraine war, has allowed more reactionary forces to pose falsely as champions of peace and the popular classes. The wave of reaction that will follow the end of the war was far from inevitable, but it can be resisted, if the left can learn the lessons and unite against imperialist war, racism and the system that breeds them.