Trump is forcing Ukraine to sign away its resources (Photo: flickr/Trump White House)
Donald Trump is forcing Ukraine to sign up to a “pay back” deal that allows the United States to grab its resources. It has agreed to turn over revenue from some of its mineral resources, according to US and Ukrainian officials.
The US and Ukraine haven’t released the details, but it’s a watered-down version of Trump’s plan for plunder that was leaked last week.
The US had demanded that Ukraine give $500 billion to an investment fund. It would have grabbed 50 percent of revenues from resources—and 50 percent of the financial value of “all new licenses issued to third parties”.
The leaked agreement did not have any US security guarantees for Ukraine.
Zelensky says the new deal is more of a “framework” and hopes it “will lead to further deals. “I wanted to have a sentence on security guarantees for Ukraine and it’s important that it’s there,” he added.
In reality, the US is getting what it wants. Trump’s moves hammer home that Ukraine is a proxy war between US imperialism and Russian imperialism. And Zelensky is paying the price for tying Ukraine’s future to one of those rivals.
The mainstream media is full of claims that Trump is “pro-Russian” or “pro-Putin”. But Trump isn’t the first Western leader to do deals with Putin in the interests of Western imperialism.
In 1999-2000, missiles, bombs and shells rained down on Grozny, capital of a break-away republic in southern Russia. Putin was determined to teach Chechnya a lesson and send signal to its neighbours that Russia was still the dominant power in the region.
There was no outcry from European politicians demanding weapons for Chechnya—far from it in fact.
Labour prime minister Tony Blair flew to St Petersburg to congratulate Putin’s action against “terrorism”. As smoke rose from the Chechen capital Grozny, the Blairs and Putins watched an opera—Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
And US secretary of state Madeleine Albright praised Putin as a “problem solving patriot” with a “candid approach”.
Why did the West back Putin then? In the 1990s the US was the one military superpower in the world, but was determined to stop the rise of potential rivals. That meant asserting its position in the world through a series of wars against weaker states.
The US didn’t want Russia to gain dominance over its neighbouring state, known as the “near abroad”. But it feared that a victory for the Chechen resistance would be an inspiration for other movements taking on imperialist powers such as itself.
So the US backed Putin’s war on Chechnya—and sections of its ruling class hoped that Russia might be a tame partner in the new world order.
But, at the same time, the US tried to pull some of Russia’s other neighbours into its sphere of influence. It set up the Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova (GUAM) Organisation for Democracy and Economic Development as a front for Nato in 1997.
Competition between the West and Russia grew in the “near abroad”. This wasn’t simply due to “bad policy decisions”. It flowed from the dynamics of imperialism, a global system of competition among capitalist states.
From the 2000s, Russia’s victory in Chechnya and the increase in oil prices allowed it to flex its muscles.
The US was determined to expand Nato into eastern Europe and the European Union was also jockeying for influence in the “near abroad”.
Ukraine’s rulers had balanced between the West and Russia. But this became harder as imperialist rivalry increased and Ukraine reeled from the impact of the global financial crisis of 2007 an
By 2014, the Ukrainian state was desperate for a bailout from either the West or Russia. But each deal was mutually exclusive—“If you want money, you can only be a member of our club.”
When Ukraine seemed like it would pivot to the West, Russia stepped in. It annexed the Crimea and backed separatist insurgencies in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the south east
A series of “peace talks”—known as the Minsk Agreements—produced a frozen conflict from 2015.
But the West and Russia continued their military and economic tug of war over Ukraine. Under Trump’s first presidency, military aid increased as the US sought to pull it closer into its orbit.
By 2021, it had become apparent to Russia’s rulers that they could not win against the West’s superior economic weight and resorted to brute military force.
The devastation in Ukraine is down to this competition between two predators. Cooperation one day can easily turn to confrontation the next as they look out for their interests.
Today, Trump is willing to cut a deal with Putin because the Ukraine war has turned into a stalemate. He wants to focus on the main challenger China, and hopes that a deal with Russia will pull it away from China’s orbit.
For the left, the lesson is don’t line up behind your own government or any imperialist power.
Fascists could be in office for the first time since the war
Dominion Society is building links with Restore Britain
Germany is the second largest supplier of arms to Israel
The US is home to 989 billionaires
