Trump’s move will probably lead to an end to the war, but how much will Ukraine have to pay?
Tomasz Konicz, Originally published in analyse & kritik on 02/18/2025
Are the imperialists in the Kremlin on the home stretch of their war of aggression in Ukraine? With right-wing populist Donald Trump taking office, Ukraine’s already hopeless military situation appears to have deteriorated abruptly on a geopolitical level. Immediately after taking office, the Trump administration froze all foreign aid – including aid programs for Ukraine. Trump has now entered into direct talks with Vladimir Putin.
Link: https://exitinenglish.com/2025/03/25/for-a-piece-of-land/
He has now also specified what a geopolitical “deal” to end the war could amount to: Russia receives large parts or even all of the claimed territories in Ukraine (he is not particularly interested in which territories Putin gets, Trump said), the U.S. gets access to the mineral resources of the attacked country, the Europeans are to take care of security guarantees, and NATO admission for Ukraine is off the table. The EU states reacted with alarm and demanded to be included in the negotiations. However, the Trump administration does not appear to be willing to grant it a role in the negotiations, nor Ukraine.
Putin’s strategic calculation – which was based on a protracted war of attrition and Trump’s election victory – therefore appears to be working. The last time Russia’s head of state was challenged was back in November, when long-range Western missile systems were deployed against Russia. Putin declared this a “red line” in the fall of 2024, which would effectively drive the Kremlin into a state of war with NATO.
But Putin did not escalate at the end of 2024 because he believes he is on the road to victory in his war of aggression against Ukraine. And this in two respects. On the one hand, the protracted war of attrition means that Russia’s greater resource potential is increasingly coming to bear. It has already become apparent in recent months: Russia’s territorial gains in the east are accelerating, while the Ukrainian army is barely able to mobilize enough manpower for the front. Drones and information technology function as the great equalizer on the battlefield of the 21st century, making offensive warfare more difficult – similar to the machine gun during the First World War.
What remains is the firing of material and people on the largely static front until one of the warring parties collapses. This is why Russia’s gradual successes in the east are so decisive, as the best-developed defense lines in Ukraine have been overcome. Every other Ukrainian front line is weaker. Since the West will in all likelihood not intervene directly in Ukraine, the bloody law of war mathematics dictates that Kiev must lose the war of attrition if it is fought to the last consequences.
Logic of Escalation and a War of Attrition
The only realistic chance of a military victory for Kiev was a shake-up of the Russian power vertical, i.e. the loss of important decision-makers below Putin. This possibility briefly emerged during the revolt of the Wagner group around the mercenary leader Prigozhin. However, he has since been removed by the Kremlin, meaning that the opposition within the Russian elite lacks a military-organizational core that could spark an oligarch uprising against Putin’s disastrous war – which is also a socio-economic and demographic disaster for Russia.
The Kremlin is speculating along similar lines. Russia’s winter terror campaign against the Ukrainian infrastructure, especially against Ukraine’s energy sector, aims to erode the morale and resilience of the Ukrainian “home front” in order to minimize and ultimately destroy the mobilization capacity of the Ukrainian army and society. The increasing desertion in the Ukrainian army shows that this tactic is successful in the context of the war of attrition.
What both sides – realistically speaking – can aim for is the erosion of the statehood of the opposing warring party. Another form of victory, especially against Russia, is hardly conceivable. The enemy state should become a failed state – this war aim is indeed realistic because it is woven into the crisis-ridden course of events. The crisis of capital causes the brutalization and disintegration of state apparatuses – war only accelerates this tendency. Military conflict, as the ultimate form of geopolitical crisis competition, is the means by which this crisis process will be consummated.
However, the Kremlin has its sights set on victory primarily due to Donald Trump’s new term in office. During the election campaign, Trump repeatedly stated that he would be able to end the Ukraine war quickly through negotiations. For the Kremlin, the prospect of a victorious peace at the negotiating table therefore seemed realistic – especially since the U.S. is now entering into open fascization, complete with a reactionary political climate and an oligarchic power structure, which is also characteristic of Russia under Putin. It is obvious that the crisis of capital in the Western core has now progressed so far that they are approaching the shattered power structures of the post-Soviet semi-periphery. A dirty geopolitical deal on the corpse of Ukraine, concocted by authoritarian leaders of highly corrupt, fascist, oligarchic statesmen, is what the Kremlin is hoping for this year, and it now seems closer than ever to this goal.
Which brings us back to the Kremlin’s aforementioned red lines, which were crossed by the West at the end of 2024 in the form of long-range missile strikes on the Russian hinterland. From Moscow’s perspective, it seemed that these attacks only had to be accepted until January 20, when Trump took office. Why risk a nuclear war when victory seems so close? In the West – in Washington as well as in many EU capitals – the panic of closing the door was spreading. Much of the foreign policy initiated by Washington or the EU after Trump’s election served to make geopolitical processes and developments irreversible. The new faces, who are now allowed to live out their nationalism and imperialism in Washington, should be deprived of as many options as possible. Ukraine was supplied with weapons for the last time and its negotiating position was to be improved through far-reaching military options.
New Cuban Missile Crisis
In fact, however, it is only a matter of damage minimization, as the West’s defeat in the battle for Ukraine has long been openly discussed, even in the West. How much of Ukraine will have to be thrown at Russian imperialism in order to end the war – this is now the logic that is finding its way into Western think tanks. The only question still being discussed is whether it will be possible to give the “rest of Ukraine” any kind of sovereignty.
The crossing of Putin’s last red line, the release of missiles that can reach Russia’s territory, was a clear escalation at the end of 2024 that was sought by the U.S. in the interregnum between Biden and Trump. In practice, it only served to drive up the price that Russia had to pay for its victory in Ukraine. It was a kind of nuclear Russian roulette that both sides played at the end of November 2024. Largely unnoticed by the Western public, the world was on the brink of nuclear escalation for days. The difference between this and the the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, was that in 1962 the world held its breath in shock, while in 2024 Putin’s threats were merely annoying and barely noticed. Putin threatened nothing less than the use of nuclear weapons.
The new volatility in the geopolitical sphere, the increasing tendency towards war as a means of politics, even in the core, and the willingness to take ever greater military risks are an expression of the new crisis phase into which the capitalist world system is entering after the exhaustion of the neoliberal deficit cycles. The crisis era of neoliberalism with its construction of global debt towers, the corresponding speculative bubbles and its world wars in the periphery is finally coming to an end with Trump’s re-election. What now follows is a phase of open authoritarian crisis management, state erosion and military conflicts at all levels – including between the world’s political and economic centers. Putin’s state-oligarchic Russia, authoritarian Belarus – both manifest the future of crisis management in their unstable authoritarianism.
Originally published in analyse & kritik on 02/18/2025