Dave Stockton
Since the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region stalled in early October, followed by Putin’s forces advancing in the east and south, it is clear that Ukraine will be unable to radically change the situation on the battlefield to its advantage.
The victory of Donald Trump in the US elections means there is likely to be no substantial increase in arms from abroad after his inauguration on 20 January. Ukraine is running out of resources, including military personnel, while Russia can maintain its offensive with the arrival of North Korean soldiers, despite a huge cost in casualties. In fact, there has been no serious attempt by Ukraine to recover its territory since the counter-offensives of 2023, even the Kursk incursion was rather a means to relieve Russian pressure on the Donetsk front, and provide a bargaining chip in future ceasefire negotiations.
At the same time, Russia’s annexations in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have consolidated Putin’s rule at home, with public opposition effectively crushed. This has not always been the case throughout the war, but in the short-term Putin’s regime is relatively stable and a victory either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table would further strengthen him.
However, even a peace on the victor’s terms would eventually allow for an accounting of the human and economic losses suffered by Russians. Then there will be the cost of rebuilding and integrating the devastated ‘conquests’—unless they are merely turned into a giant militarised zone. In addition, there are the ballooning costs of the arms race with the West, whose resources are greater than Russia’s.
The West’s war
While the US, Britain and France have allowed Ukraine’s use of longer-range weapons on Russian soil, this will not fundamentally alter the course of the war. If the West really wanted Ukraine to win militarily, it would need to intervene directly. This it has never come near to doing, not only because this would change the character of the war into an inter-imperialist one, which it hitherto has not been, but because to the Western imperialists Ukraine is quite simply not worth starting a world war over, devastating Europe, diverting the US from its ‘pivot to the East’, i.e. to ramping up tensions with China.
More fundamentally, the war aims of the Western allies have been ambiguous and fluid, reflecting the internal divisions and domestic policy concerns much more than any concerted strategy to confront Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine.
Instead the West’s strategy was limited to incremental increases in support, driven by diplomatic, rather than military objectives. This was guaranteed to bleed Ukraine to the point of a negotiated peace, or permanent frozen conflict. Far from being motivated by concern for national self-determination, the war has been used to expand Nato further and increase militarisation on its border with Russia, raising the likelihood of an inter-imperialist conflagration while at the same time reducing public spending, whipping up nationalism and attacking civil rights at home. Socialists must consistently denounce Nato and its reactionary war aims.
However, simply noting the imperialist self-interest of the West in arming Ukraine and taking advantage of Russia’s invasion to mount their own ‘proxy war’ does not excuse those on the left who take a neutral stance between the sides in Ukraine and who call for a peace at any price. The price, of course, will be paid by the workers, youth and small farmers who are fighting to defend their country—the people of an oppressed semi-colony—not by the imperialist great powers who are ripping it apart.
Moreover, the new US government does not want to maintain the war and the cost it brings. This is not simply election demagogy by Trump, as some Ukrainians and their Western supporters desperately hope, but it corresponds to a basic geostrategic orientation of the incoming administration. Biden and the leaders of Britain, Germany and France cannot bind a future Trump administration, nor are most European states either willing or able to provide a substitute for US weapons and dollars.
The prospects for ‘peace’
Given the increasing military pressure on Ukraine at the front and the reported unwillingness of civilians (seeing the fruitlessness of the war and the attacks on their rights by Zelensky) to accept further conscription, things will get much worse in the New Year. A ceasefire, imposed by an agreement between Trump and Putin, is almost inevitable.
It will be impossible for Ukraine to oppose this, since Zelensky and his government have tied themselves to the US and Nato to such an extent that refusing its terms would just lead to losing more and more territory and the prospect of an even worse deal in the end.
Nevertheless, any such deal, whatever its form (it may just start with a temporary ceasefire or armistice), would have a thoroughly reactionary character. It would lead de facto to a partition of Ukraine, with one part occupied by Russia as a colonial territory and the other drifting into subservience to the US and the EU.
Partition would not only increase the national oppression of the undisputed Ukrainian parts under Russian rule, but also violate the self-determination of the Russophone population of the Donbas and Crimea. Large proportions of the population have either fled to the west or been deported to the east. It would also strengthen Russia in the brutally annexed north Caucasus, like Chechnya, and other countries in its sphere of influence, Georgia and Belarus.
It would lead to the permanent loss of several millions of the Ukrainian population or, worse still, to many thousands being driven back from the EU while others become cheap, legally insecure labourers. The economic and natural resources of the country will be further divided up between the West and Russia. Already during the war, Western companies have taken over much of Ukraine’s economy, the agrarian sector in particular.
In the event of a reactionary ‘peace deal’, it is certain that the new cold war will only change its form. This is why the working class movement needs to denounce the imperialist peace from the beginning and oppose it as a further tightening of the national, social and economic oppression of Ukraine. The successor regimes will be far from democracies. It will certainly not be any step towards solving the underlying national questions, nor will it lessen the inter-imperialist tensions.
Whether Zelensky’s government can survive this is a different, but secondary question, though Klitschko and the opposition in the Ukrainian parliament will hardly be in a position to mount a successful rejectionist alternative. The Ukrainian bourgeoisie will go along with this and they may even ally themselves to Trump, rather than the EU, or be blackmailed into such an alliance, with the US offering to ‘secure’ what is left of the Ukrainian state as part of the deal. An acceleration of the arms race by the US, the EU and Russia will certainly accompany the ‘peace’.
No to a robber’s deal
In short an imperialist peace in Ukraine will only lay the explosive charges for a future war or wars even more destructive than this one. That is why the international workers’ movement, including class conscious workers in Russia, must denounce such a ‘deal’ as a robber’s peace. Putin’s grasp will weaken as the true and terrible costs of this war become clear.
Ukrainian workers should refuse to endorse the validity of this peace, demand the imperialist powers that fomented and encouraged this war pay for reconstruction. The Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs must be forced to pay for the enormous costs of reconstruction of homes and infrastructure. Workers in both Russia and Ukraine need to fight for workers’ governments, and for a socialist federation of the states of the whole region.