The stance of the Donald Trump administration in its efforts to bring to an end Moscow’s assaults on the Ukrainian people continues to shift almost daily. What doesn’t change is its goal of advancing the interests of U.S. imperialism.
Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska Aug. 15, followed by a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several top European leaders at the White House three days later. He now says he’s working on a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents. Where all this is headed is unclear. All the parties have competing interests.
The one thing that’s certain is that Putin continues to target working people in Ukraine with nightly bombardments of apartment buildings, schools and other civilian targets. And he’s losing thousands of troops — workers in uniform — every week trying to take a few extra yards of territory in Ukraine’s east.
The U.S. rulers seek to restore normalized relations with Putin, trying to pull Moscow closer as Washington’s economic and military rivalry with Beijing intensifies. Trump is trying to stabilize U.S. imperialism’s place as top dog in capitalism’s world disorder through a combination of trade conflicts and Washington-brokered peace deals.
Trump aimed to pull leaders of the governments of the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Finland, as well as from the European Commission and NATO, in behind Washington’s lead. All these “allies” seek to advance the interests of their own capitalist rulers in a possible “settlement” of the war, regardless of their professed concerns about Ukrainian sovereignty.
Hours before the White House meeting, Moscow’s missiles and drones rained down on several Ukrainian cities, killing 14 civilians and injuring dozens more. Half the deaths were in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, as a residential building was targeted.
‘Inalienable right to sovereignty’
Any “peace deal violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity” will only prepare the ground, and allow breathing space for new attacks by Moscow, Mustafa Dzhemilev told the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group Aug. 18. Dzhemilev is the central leader of the Crimean Tatar people, who was expelled from the Crimean Peninsula when Putin seized it in 2014. Trump’s aim is to end the war, he said, whatever it takes. “He’s not concerned about Ukraine’s interests.”
“No one has the right to pass any decisions about the fate of Crimea,” he said, without ensuring “the inalienable right of the Crimean Tatar people to self-determination in their historical homeland as part of the Ukrainian state.”
Trump has raised “possible exchanges of territory, taking into consideration the current line of contact” for a “peace” deal. He claims measures will be put in place by the European powers in “coordination” with Washington to “deter any future aggression against Ukraine.” He ruled out Kyiv’s admission to the U.S.-led NATO alliance, which Zelensky had sought.
Even if circumstances were to force Kyiv to make territorial concessions, the Ukrainian people would never cede their right to fight to recover their country.
The metallurgical and coal-mining region of Donbas is Ukraine’s industrial heartland. It has been coveted by Russia’s capitalist rulers ever since Ukraine became independent in 1991 during the breakup of the former Soviet Union. Moscow occupies most of the Luhansk province, but only three-quarters of Donetsk.
To give up territory beyond what Moscow occupies would be untenable for Kyiv. In addition to losing key natural resources and industry, ceding the heavily fortified string of cities in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Donetsk region to Moscow would open a path for Putin to push toward Dnipro and then Kyiv.
Whatever happens in these negotiations, Putin has no intention of giving up his plans to conquer all of Ukraine. Putin aide Yuri Ushakov told the media in July, “Our president said Russia will achieve the goals it has set: that is, the elimination of the well-known root causes that led to the current state of affairs.” He added, “Russia will not back down from these goals.”
The Ukrainian people are determined not to let Moscow conquer their country. “The reality is that negotiations are negotiations, meanwhile the fighting keeps going and if we do not deal with it, no negotiations will save us,” Oleksandr Solonko, Ukrainian commander of a drone strike unit involved in the fierce fighting near Pokrovsk, wrote on Telegram.
Small Russian advances recently threatened to encircle that embattled town on the eastern front by breaching Ukrainian defensive lines to its north. But they were cut off by battle-hardened Ukrainian reinforcements, including from the Azov Brigade. By Aug. 18, over 800 Russian soldiers were surrounded, suffering heavy casualties, with dozens surrendering.
Russian troops are cannon fodder
Against the advice of his wife, Mikhail Simdyankin, a St Petersburg warehouse worker saddled with debt, enlisted last year when the sign-up bonus reached 2 million rubles ($25,000). He was one of hundreds of thousands of men lured into the Russian army by propaganda, offers of lucrative pay or as a way to get out of prison time.
Russian officers either use brutal Stalinist-era tactics of “meat grinder” advances or try to claw small battlefield gains by deploying “suicide squads.” Either way hundreds of their troops die. Well over a million Russian workers in uniform have been casualties in the three and a half years of war.
Simdyankin was thrown into the front lines three weeks after enlisting. In less than a month, most of the 100 soldiers in his assault group were killed or injured. He was lucky to be injured and captured. He is now in a prisoner-of-war camp in Ukraine. “Our commanders saw us as expendable,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “They didn’t care whether or not we survived.”
As opposition to the Putin regime and its war grows, Russian working people, not Washington or the other “democratic” imperialist powers out for their own gain, will be the most reliable allies of Ukrainian people fighting to defend their national sovereignty.