Trump wants Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to pay for US support
Donald Trump wants to loot Ukraine and turn it into an outpost of the American Empire. He is demanding a £400 billion “payback” and control of Ukrainian resources and infrastructure.
A secret document, obtained by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, says the United States and Ukraine should form a joint investment fund. It would give the US a stake in the “economic value associated with resources” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure”.
“This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states. The US would grab 50 percent of revenues from the extraction of resources—and 50 percent of the financial value of “all new licenses issued to third parties”.
One clause would allow the US to keep hold of revenues until Ukraine repays its debts for the war effort. A source close to the negotiations said, “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’.” It says that “for all future licences, the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals”.
Trump’s plan for plunder is not an aberration. It is a shattering confirmation that the conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war between US imperialism and Russian imperialism.
Supporters of the war have smeared anyone who questioned the West’s role as an “apologist” for Russian imperialism.
Their argument is based on two claims. Firstly, that Ukraine is a war of “national defence” against Russia. Secondly, that the idea of a proxy war denies the Ukrainians’ “agency”.
Russia has sought to dominate Ukraine and its other neighbours since the 1990s. It annexed Crimea in 2014 and fuelled a separatist insurgency run by far right gangsters in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine.
When Russia invaded in 2022, Ukrainians were fighting to defend themselves against Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
Ukraine isn’t the first time socialists had to grapple with the relationship between imperialist wars and national self-determination
But this is only one part of the picture. Ukraine sits at the centre of a faultline of imperialist competition that cuts through eastern Europe and into central Asia. And the West and Russia have been jockeying for influence along it.
The US expanded the Nato warmongers’ alliance into eastern Europe, inviting Ukraine to join in 2008. This was part of attempts by the US to assert its dominance—alongside its wars in the Middle East.
How should the left approach such situations?
Ukraine isn’t the first time socialists had to grapple with the relationship between imperialist wars and national self-determination. Serbian socialists faced a difficult situation when the Austro-Hungarian Empire invaded in July 1914.
It had long sought to dominate its weaker neighbour and the Balkan region. But this wasn’t just an Austrian war of conquest against Serbia—it triggered the First World War between the “great powers” of Europe.
Dusan Popovic was a leading member of the Serbian Social Democrats. He wrote, “As far as the conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary was concerned, our country was obviously in a defensive position.
“Austria had been carrying on a policy of conquest against Serbia long before the latter became an independent state.
“If Social Democracy had a legitimate right to vote for war anywhere, then certainly that was the case in Serbia above all.”
But, despite this, Popovic did not support the war. He explained, “The decisive fact was that the war between Serbia and Austria was only a small part of a totality”. It was “merely the prologue to universal, European war” which had “a clearly pronounced imperialist character.”
In inter-imperialist wars socialists shouldn’t line up behind any power—including their “own” government.
In Ukraine inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and Russia has subsumed any for fight national defence.
The two situations aren’t identical. But the key question remains, “What is the dominant character of the war?”
In Ukraine inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and Russia has subsumed any for fight national defence.
Supporters of the war also said that by denying that the conflict is a proxy war, they were recognising the agency of Ukrainians.
President Volodymyr Zelensky tied Ukraine’s future to the West. He said he wanted Ukraine to be a “big Israel” after the war—in other words, an armed outpost of US imperialism.
In 1914 Popovic acknowledged the Serbian state had agency. But he described how it had “conducted a policy of enslaving itself to Russian diplomacy and to the Paris Stock Exchange”.
“Yet Russia’s diplomacy and the Paris Stock Exchange have only the interests of Russian Tsarism and French finance capitalists in mind,” he warned.
Today, it is Zelensky who has tied the Ukrainian state to the US—with disastrous consequences.
He would strain at the leash and demand more Western weaponry, but the US set the tempo of the war.
Former US president Joe Biden saw Ukraine as an opportunity to assert US power in the world. But it has turned into a bloody stalemate for both sides and Trump wants to focus on the main challenge—China.
Ukrainians have paid in blood, now Trump wants them to pay in treasure too.
The anti-war movement was right to say, “Russian troops out, no to Nato.”
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