Moscow’s murderous war on Ukraine is centered on attacks on civilians in the country’s cities today. In Kherson, Russian President Vladimir Putin is retaliating against working people for rising up against Moscow’s occupation.
Russian forces are using new FPV — First-Person View — small, armed drones with livestreaming cameras to target and drop bombs on people driving in cars, walking with their children, or otherwise trying to carry on a life. People there call it a “human safari.”
“When people, cars or even a cyclist appear, the drone suddenly lifts off and drops the explosive,” resident Orlena Horlova told The Associated Press. “It’s gotten to the point where they even drop them on animals — cows, goats.”
They hunt people as revenge for the celebrations that broke out when Kherson was liberated, she said.
These murderous assaults on hundreds of civilians have been documented both by the United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine as well as Human Rights Watch, which issued “Hunted From Above,” a 93-page report on the attacks.
The ongoing war in Ukraine continues to fuel an upheaval in global alignments among rival capitalist powers and shakes the world imperialist order. President Donald Trump is trying to impose an end to the war that favors Moscow, to advance stability for U.S. business and bankers as they pursue their predatory interests against competitors in Europe and elsewhere.
Russian President Vladimir Putin held a five-hour meeting in Moscow with Trump’s envoys Dec. 2, saying the latest peace plan was unacceptable. He demanded Kyiv cede more territory and threatened war with Europe.
The day before, Moscow launched a massive missile barrage on the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, killing four people and injuring 40.
Top U.S and Ukrainian officials had met days earlier. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted questions of territory and Ukraine’s security guarantees had yet to be agreed between himself and the U.S. president.
Trump said Nov. 25 he would only join a summit once a ceasefire agreement between Moscow and Kyiv is in “the final stages.”
Whatever the outcome of the talks, a deep contradiction will remain between the Kremlin’s drive to conquer Ukraine, ending its existence as an independent nation, and the determination of working people there to defend their country’s national sovereignty.
Trump seeks to realign with Moscow
Representatives of both Trump and Putin met in October, “privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold — with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends,” the Wall Street Journal reported Nov. 28.
They discussed a wish list of commercial opportunities for U.S. and Russian capitalists if Washington signs off on Moscow’s military occupation in Ukraine. This includes rare-earth mining and energy projects for U.S. investors across Russia and in the Arctic; joint missions to Mars between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Russian space industry; and appropriation of the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen by European central banks, to be used for collaborative investment in Russia and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine.
“Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe — while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies,” the Journal noted.
“We know this is not about peace. It’s about business,” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
Toll of Russian workers in uniform
Putin has scant interest in stopping the war, despite the fact that Moscow’s forces — Russian workers in uniform — suffer heavy casualties with over 1,000 killed or maimed daily. He hopes he can continue sacrificing their lives without provoking resistance to his rule and eventually grind down the outnumbered but determined Ukrainians.
The pace of Moscow’s military recruitment has fallen to a two-year low. Only 37,900 people took sign-on bonuses in the second quarter of 2025, compared with 92,800 in the same period last year. In Russia’s Irkutsk region, the number of volunteers signing an army contract has fallen by half from a year ago.
To make up for troop losses, the Kremlin has turned to Russia’s less developed regions, with high unemployment among younger men. But in the Far Eastern Republic of Yakutia, one of the country’s poorest territories, authorities have only been able to meet 40% of recruitment targets.
Indigenous Yakut residents “are unwilling to die for the interests of Moscow” said a Ukrainian intelligence report.
In desperation, the Kremlin has lowered enlistment standards. Now recruits with tuberculosis, HIV and hepatitis are eligible. Volunteers with such illnesses are combined in special “chronic illness” units, unaware that they will likely be assigned to near-suicidal frontal assaults.
In both 2023 and 2024, the Kremlin recruited an estimated 150,000 prison inmates to the army. But this fell dramatically as word got around about the high death rate. Prisoners are now given a choice of “volunteering” or of facing escalating fabricated charges and a life under Putin’s brutal prison guards.
In the Leningrad region, nine convict volunteers organized to escape their transport to the front by killing the driver and fleeing into the forest. This is not the first such escape.
The Kremlin’s war is reinforcing instability around the world and preparing growing resistance to Putin’s rule at home.