Two years ago, the Ukrainian Defence Minister Alexei Reznikov, admitted during an appearance on local television that “Today, Ukraine is addressing [the] threat (of Russia). We’re carrying out NATO’s mission today, without shedding their blood. We shed our blood, so we expect them to provide weapons.”  Nothing could be clearer – Ukraine was fighting a proxy war for Western imperialism against Russia.

In January this year, it was reported that in a closed-door meeting with the Ukrainian parliament, military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, predicted “If there are no serious negotiations by the summer, then very dangerous processes for the very existence of Ukraine may begin.”

In other words, Ukraine was losing the proxy war.  Despite all the support from the West, it was running out of soldiers while its Western sponsors were running down their own stock of weapons and ammunition; it had either been destroyed by the Russians or had been expended to no avail.

Now, with Donald Trump’s proposals, there is some prospect of “serious negotiations by the summer” and an end to Ukrainians “shedding their blood”.  The US has other concerns and has torpedoed the declared purpose of the war by declaring that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO, will not return to its 2014 borders, and no US troops will be placed in Ukraine at any time, even after the end of hostilities. European NATO countries will have to take up the burden.  He announced that ceasefire negotiations with Russia would start and of course, Ukraine would be involved, although it was not even informed of Defence Secretary Hegseth’s statement about the radically changed objectives of the war.

Zelenskyy’s ‘Victory Plan’ is dead in the water, as is his statement that US troops are essential for Ukraine in the event of a deal.  Having declared that it would be ‘very difficult’ to survive without U.S. military support, and that he doesn’t “want to think about” not having it, he now declares the need for an “army of Europe.”  It is a form of denial.

So is the statement by the ‘High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission’ Kaja Kallas, who said that ‘we must help Ukraine to defend itself against aggression so that there is no wider conflict.   It will be a dirty deal, which we’ve seen before, for example in Minsk, and it just won’t work. It won’t stop the killing. It’s not going to stop the war.”  “Why are we giving them [Russia] everything they want even before the negotiations have started? It’s appeasement. It has never worked.” “It is clear that any deal behind our backs will not work. You need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”

Of course, Russia hasn’t been given everything it wants, and what the US administration has accepted is something it does not have the power to deny. Pretending you can go into negotiations demanding the impossible as a bargaining chip undermines your position from the start and subverts credibility.  It is a recipe for continued and ‘wider conflict’, which is what the EU and the British are proposing.  All the sanctimonious snivelling about ‘stopping the killing’ and ‘stopping the war’ is just so much hypocritical and cynical lying.  It is also a form of denial because the European arm of NATO cannot impose its will on Russia and cannot even police an eventual settlement with any degree of certainty.  Neither can Ukraine continue the war without avoiding defeat and the longer it goes on the worse it will be.  The so-called friends of the Ukrainian people in European governments are happy to continue to shed their blood even when NATO’s mission is dead.

If the European ‘friends’ of the Ukrainian people are false, so they are also betrayed by their own political leaders who, having declared the need to shed blood in a war for NATO and need for US military support, are now determined to continue to shed more blood without the declared objective and without this support.  Meanwhile Zelenskyy fends off the US emissary seeking his signature to Trump’s deal for his takeover of 50% of Ukraine’s mineral deposits.

Any observer with any appreciation of the reality of the war has noted that the first impact of Trump’s initiative is to further demoralise Ukraine, already suffering from exhaustion, desertion and draft-dodging.  Many Ukrainian workers are voting with their feet and see no sense in following orders that risk their lives on behalf of NATO or to allow the plundering of the country’s natural resources.  On top of these we now have the glaring reality that they cannot win.

In the absence of working class political opposition, the proxy nature of the war has imposed itself anyway, and many Ukrainian workers will not fight and die for it.  Despite this political absence the resistance to the war has weakened the West’s project and that  of the Ukrainian state and this can now can only increase.

Some observers have already noted the repeated attempts by the Zelenskyy regime to escalate the war with the latest being the false flag attack on Chernobyl nuclear power station, blamed of course on the Russians, who could blow it up if they wanted, have no interest in doing so, and especially at this time when it suits only Ukrainian attempts to drum up support.

It is by no means obvious that the road to ending the war is clear.  Not only the Zelensky regime but also the far-right Banderite factions stand in the way.  The nonsense that the West is fighting for democracy has again been exposed by Zelenskyy sanctioning his political rivals in preparation for elections that will come sooner or later.  The Banderites are another obvious threat to his regime and any attempt by it to negotiate a less damaging and humiliating peace agreement.  

Kaja Kallas, has stated EU opposition to “a dirty deal . . . for example in Minsk” and that “you need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”  Her and the EU’s demands are and will be unacceptable to Russia while the Minsk agreements failed not least because Ukraine had no intention of implementing them and Germany and France had no intention of making it.  What this means is that Russia will itself not accept an updated version of Western promises that might not last longer than a change in the US administration.

Russia therefore has its own problems in enforcing a deal that cannot be unravelled later, including the extent of its territorial acquisitions and the nature of the rump Ukrainian state; the scale of its armed forces and the need to exclude NATO troops from it under the pretence of being ‘peace-keepers’.  It also needs the removal of sanctions, which the EU can stymie.  These point to pursuit of a definitive Ukrainian defeat and Russian victory which is not yet imminent, but which endangers any arrangement with Trump and provides more opportunity for Ukrainian provocation and European intervention.

The task of socialists is clear – no support to Trump and whatever plans he has, which can radically change; opposition to the attempts of European imperialism and the Ukrainian state to continue the war, and advance its end by explaining its reactionary character to the workers of all the combatant states, including Russia.  If the pro-war left in the West is consistent with its existing policy it will row in behind Starmer, Scholtz and Macron etc. in seeking to continue the war and in doing so increase the risk of a wider conflict with Russia.  It will leave European workers politically disarmed in opposing rearmament, the militarisation of their society and the austerity and repression that will be required for its implementation.

One supporter of the Russian invasion has stated that “we need to organise a mass movement to demand a just and democratic peace in Ukraine”, as if any peace agreement arising out of negotiations involving Trump, Putin, Zelenskyy and von der Leyen could possibly embody a democratic solution.  The only possible democratic solution to this war and to capitalist war in general is a working class revolution but neither the social-imperialist left in the West, or the so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ left that supports Russia, will contribute to this.  Instead, they will look to their favoured reactionary state to triumph.