In an effort to impose a settlement leading to the end of Moscow’s war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump announced that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin would meet in Alaska Aug. 15. While they talk, working people in Ukraine are continuing to fight courageously against Moscow’s murderous invasion and daily bombardment aimed at civilians.
The talks will be the first face-to-face meeting between the presidents of the two countries since the war began in February 2022.
Trump’s goal is to find an end to the conflict — regardless of the cost to Ukraine — that will provide stability for the U.S. rulers to enforce their declining place as top dog in the imperialist world order. Trump especially seeks to draw Moscow closer to Washington and away from Beijing, the U.S. rulers’ main competitor.
Trump said a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia would likely include “some swapping of territories.” Moscow’s invasion has resulted in its occupation of around 20% of Ukraine. Putin hopes to get Washington’s backing for a deal that will not only legitimize his regime’s landgrab, but also hand over other parts of eastern Ukraine that are currently held by Kyiv’s forces.
President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected this, saying, “Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier.”
He added that any decisions made by Putin and Trump without the Ukrainian government will be “dead decisions; they will never work.”
This stance has been backed by a number of capitalist powers seeking to advance their own rival interests, including France, Italy, the U.K., Germany, Poland and Finland.
While opposing Zelensky’s exclusion from the talks, these governments are using their financial and military backing to Ukraine to pressure Kyiv to compromise on its territorial integrity. “The current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” they said in an Aug. 9 statement.
There is a possibility Ukraine will be invited to the talks, Vice President J.D. Vance said Aug. 10. Putin’s agreement to meet the U.S. president came just as Trump was about to enforce an Aug. 8 deadline of imposing new secondary tariffs on nations importing discounted Russian oil. The effects of Washington’s current sanctions on Russia fall most harshly on working people there.
Putin’s war goal is to subjugate Ukraine and forcibly incorporate as much of it as possible into Russia. He wants to eliminate Ukrainians as a nationality and destroy their language, identity and culture. As recently as June he said, “We see Ukraine as ours.”
Volunteers defend Ukraine
Regardless of the Alaska talks, working people in Ukraine are determined to keep resisting Moscow’s assaults on their cities and front lines.
“We’ve fought so long that we rely only on ourselves, not on presidents, gods or talks,” Ukrainian army Capt. Filatov told the Aug. 9 New York Times, from the ruins of Pokrovsk, a key site of bloody battles in Ukraine’s east. Thousands of Russian soldiers have been sent to their deaths there in “meat grinder” assaults.
Combat medical volunteer Viktoriia Honcharuk had been working in a Wall Street bank in New York. “And then Russia invaded my country, and I reevaluated my life,” she told the Wall Street Journal Aug. 7. She said she accepts that “every single time I go for evacuations, I might be killed — but that’s OK with me.”
“When you see what Russia brings — the mass graves, the forced deportations, the torture of civilians — you stop romanticizing compromise,” Honcharuk said. The struggle for Ukraine’s survival is “about dignity, about never having to look a child in the eyes and explain that you gave up their future.”
Women in Ukraine’s armed forces
Of Ukraine’s 1 million military personnel, 100,000 are women, all of whom are volunteers since Ukraine doesn’t conscript women. Some 5,500 serve on the front lines as snipers, fighter pilots, medics, drivers, artillery and drone crew members or in other roles. The toll of Ukrainian troops killed resisting the Russian invasion now includes an increasing number of women.
A tribute to seven women, who lost their lives serving in front-line combat roles, was carried in the online Euromaidan Press Aug. 8. Christine Chraibi wrote that some were career soldiers, others signed up as the war intensified. They evacuated wounded under artillery fire, carried out reconnaissance missions in contested territory and conducted military drone missions.
“Their stories reveal how Ukraine’s war has quietly revolutionized military service,” Chraibi wrote. “Civilians became drone pilots. University students became battlefield medics. Mothers learned reconnaissance. They died performing jobs that placed them in the most dangerous areas of combat — from evacuation routes under artillery fire to reconnaissance missions in contested territory.”
Their courage and dedication exemplify the resistance of the Ukrainian people.
Moscow’s drive to Russify Ukraine
The Putin regime has “a large-scale state policy of militarizing Ukrainian children,” Dariia Zarivna, executive director of Bring Kids Back UA, told the Journal. She said they have been systematically seized and transferred from areas of Ukraine occupied by Moscow’s forces to Russia. The Ukrainian government has records on nearly 20,000 cases of children being kidnapped to Russia.
Some are advertised for adoption, searchable by eye and hair color. For those not adopted, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War says Moscow has set up “at least 43 children’s camps throughout Russia to house deported children, at least 32 of which are explicitly ‘reeducation’ facilities.” Many of these children are being stripped of their Ukrainian names and birthplaces as they are put up for adoption.
The Kremlin also seeks to prepare teenage Ukrainian boys to fight against fellow Ukrainians. They can be conscripted to fight in the Russian army as soon as they turn 18.