These are the prepared notes for the presentation at today’s forum (14th December 2025). A recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
The Ukraine proxy war looks like it is coming to an end. Not through some kind of ‘peace’ agreement, though Trump’s sometime attempts to procure one have put the possibility on the agenda. But through a Russian victory. This is the product of a very determined war of attrition by Russia, which has resisted the temptation to use its obviously superior firepower to fight the way the United States is renowned for fighting wars against smaller countries. There has been no Russian use of ‘shock and awe’ tactics in Ukraine, no use of carpet bombing or mass terror tactics against the population of the Donbass. That’s not because the Russians are militarily unequipped for such a war, but because they are not fighting a war of conquest against the people of the areas they are seeking to deliver from Nazi rule.
Towns and Cities in the Donetsk oblast, otherwise known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, currently the main theatre of the Special Military Operation, have been massively fortified by the Ukrainian Nazis, much of the Russian-speaking population being reduced to hostages by a hostile occupying force. That was the result of the duplicity of Maidan Ukraine and its Western backers over the two Minsk agreements. These were signed supposedly to settle the conflict that broke out between the regime that was created by the US funded Maidan coup in 2014, and the Russian-speaking population of the Southeastern part of Ukraine. This coup, or colour revolution, brought to power a far-right regime that virtually worshipped the Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, which immediately started persecuting the Russian-speaking part of the population
The US spent $6 billion funding the overthrow of the elected President, Yanukovych, who was politically closer to Russia than to the EU and US. A previous ‘colour revolution’ in 2004 had brought to power a pro-Western president, Yushchenko. Initially, Yanukovych was elected then, but there was a strange incident where Yushchenko was apparently poisoned, supposedly by Yanukovitch’s supporters. Because of that allegation, then were able to force a re-run, which Yushchenko narrowly won. But his presidency afterwards was disastrous, with the rapid impoverishment of the country and the government under him splintering under pressure. By the time the next Presidential election happened, in 2010, Yushchenko was so unpopular he ended up in fifth place. Yanokovitch came back to power, again quite narrowly.
It is very clear in that context why the US sought a far-right coup and a war against the population in the East. The Russophone population in the East was the base for pro-Russian political trends in Ukraine, and it was finely balanced. To get a sustainable pro-Western regime in Ukraine that population had to be crushed. So that was the project that the US initiated with far-right allies – chiefly Svoboda and Right Sector (Pravi Sektor), at the end of 2013, which fully unfolded in the spring of 2014. Large demonstrations were initiated according to a well-established pattern by forces guided according to a well-worn formula. A shooting incident, a massacre of protesters from their own side, was carried out by the fascist militias of the Banderaite parties, Svoboda and Pravi Sektor, and then blamed on the police. On the back of that, the presidential palace was attacked and Yanukovych fled in fear of his life. Ensuring a regime where a Russia-friendly and Donbass-friendly president could never again come to power by democratic means.
That was the whole point of the US funded coup. It was in effect a fascist coup, and it meant that, no matter how little electoral support they really had in Ukraine, the decisive power behind the scenes was the far right and their militias. It is true today. Yanukovych was replaced by a puppet regime. One embarrassing episode in this coup was when the US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, was recorded talking to Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine, discussing who should head up the new US puppet government. They chose Yatsenyuk. He chosen by the US, not any kind of purported democratic process. Characteristically, the coup was funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, created by the Reagan administration to carry on as a separate specialism the CIA’s old function of organising coups and creating puppet regimes. The CIA had become tarnished.
This coup immediately led to a popular uprising in the major Russian speaking areas of Ukraine. In Lugansk and Donetsk, the angry populations set up two ‘People’s Republics’, of Donetsk and Lugansk, which the Maidan coup regime immediately declared war on. They claimed that the rebellious populations were ‘terrorists’, and Kiev’s war, with clear genocidal aspects, was dubbed right from the start an ‘anti-terrorist operation’. At the same time Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and voted in a referendum to join Russia. Since the population was overwhelmingly Russian, this was a foregone conclusion. Crimea had been placed in Ukraine by an arbitrary decision of the Soviet leadership of Khrushchev in 1954. The population rebelled against a fascist regime that declared open war on Russian-speakers and actual Russians within Ukraine. Far from being some Putin plot, as the West alleged, all these movements were driven by mass anger from below. There really was not much Kiev could do about Crimea, which is separated from the main body of Ukraine by both the Donbass and also water contiguous to the Black Sea/Sea of Azov, but the so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’ was a declaration of war against the Donbass people.
The Nazi war against the Donbass claimed 14,000 lives in the eight years between 2014 and 2022. And in 2014, there was also mass unrest in Odessa, an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking city on the Western end of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The regime sent in violent football ‘fans’, armed Nazis basically, who proceeded to attack demonstrators in the centre of Odessa and chased many who took refuge in the central trade union building, which they then torched. At least 50, likely more, burned to death. The war Maidan Ukraine waged against its own Russian speaking population was hardly a success, however. So, they had to manoeuvre. This gave birth to the various Minsk agreements. These agreements of 2014 and 2015, and the various supplementary protocols to them, allowed the far-right Maidan regime to play for time, confronted with the popular uprisings to give themselves breathing space to begin preparing for future conflict, including the fortification of cities and towns against their own inhabitants. Hollande and Merkel later revealed that they were fully aware at the time that the Minsk processes were aimed at playing for time, allowing the West to arm Ukraine to continue the war a later date.
This began under the Obama administration. But in 2016, Trump was able to defeat Obama’s successor as the Democratic nominee for President, Hillary Clinton, which gave birth to a slightly different situation regarding Ukraine. There is an important nuance of difference between Trump, and the mainstream of US politics, over Ukraine. It relates to their relations with Zionism. The mainstream of the Democrats and Republicans are virulently pro-Zionist, but there are some important differences with Trump and what he represents. Trump, unlike the normal run of presidential candidates from both parties, was a direct agent of Israel’s main ruling party, Likud. His three election campaigns, in 2016, 2020 and 2024, were all directly paid for by the Likudnik billionaire Sheldon Adelson, and then in 2024 by his widow Miriam Adelson. There are grounds to suspect that at least some of these ultra-Zionists are ambivalent about the volume of US aid to Maidan Ukraine, seeing it as a waste – that these resources ‘should’ be going to Israel.
It should be noted that the Zionists gained major political benefits from Trump’s election in 2016, as Trump implemented the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 2005, which mandated that the US embassy be moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. This measure was forced through congress by the Zionists, but then three Presidents; Clinton, Bush and Obama, failed to implement it. Trump also formally recognised Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, previously a no-no, and he tore up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Earlier, while Obama was still in office, in 2015, Netanyahu visited the US, and at a joint session of the Senate and the House, had vehemently denounced the deal, to numerous standing ovations from the assembled lackeys, who behaved like, in the words of Norman Finkelstein, “demented jack-in-the-boxes”. So, Trump had misgivings about blank cheques for Ukraine, and that seems to be associated with his direct Likud agentry. A clue about this is that Victor Orban of Hungary, another virulent Zionist who is against the Ukraine campaign, is also a clear Zionist agent, and defied the International Criminal Court to host Netanyahu earlier this year.
This was the basis of the Democrats’ “Russiagate” Hoax, claiming that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin. The truth is that he is an agent of Likud, and has some contradictions flowing from that. But the Democrats are too subservient to Zionism to make an issue of that, and too cowardly – afraid of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. So, they tried to use Putin as a proxy for their evasion of the real issue. Trump played a less strident role but still escalated the Ukraine proxy war. He was the first to send Javelin missiles to Ukraine. He played a major role in grooming Zelensky, as camouflage for the Nazi regime, given his Jewish origin. Zelensky won the Ukraine election in 2019 based on promises to implement the Minsk agreements, which meant he won with the massive support of people in the Donbass. But as soon as he won, he became a puppet of the Nazis, and there began a slide to escalation and war against those who voted for him. Trump bore huge responsibility for that.
This intensified under Biden, as Zelenksy’s regime, at the start of 2022, as documented by the Swiss former OECD inspector, Jacques Baud, embarked on a massive escalation and preparation for an invasion of those sections of the DPR and LPR that remained in the hands of the people. Putin tried by diplomacy, and warnings of the consequences, to get the US and its proxies to back off, but to no avail, so in February 2022, he initiated the SMO, a limited, defensive war to stop the crushing of the people of the Donbass. From our point of view, this is a progressive war. Russia is not an imperialist power – far from it. The Russian imperialist bourgeoisie was torn out by the roots by the workers revolution in 1917-18. We totally reject the allegation that the USSR was in some sense an imperialist force. Under Stalinism, it remained a degenerated form of the dictatorship of the proletariat until 1991, when it succumbed to a counterrevolution as the bureaucracy capitulated to an enormous imperialist war drive and neoliberal political offensive.
The massive economic shock treatment, which imperialism and the counterrevolution imposed on Russia, caused millions of deaths in the 1990s – a fall in live expectancy of 5 years can only be explained that way. This caused a huge popular backlash, that was expressed through the state apparatus itself, which was not fully consolidated against the working class, and caused a partial retreat of the counterrevolution. The decrepit character of the counterrevolution was symbolised by the drunk Yelstin. He was ousted by Putin, from the depths of the apparatus, who however no longer even claimed to be a communist. He took the only course open to him to regenerate Russia as a viable state, building a unique kind of mixed economy out of the productive, economic and military apparatus bequeathed to him from the workers’ state.
Russia today is a kind of dialectical inversion of the USSR. The USSR was a weak workers state with massive bureaucratic deformations that came from the pressure of the imperialist environment. Russia today is a weak bourgeois state, but weak not in the face of the external world, but of massive post-capitalist, ‘socialist’ deformations on itself, elements of a higher mode of production that persist in ‘invading’ this form of capitalism, to paraphrase Engels. That class analysis of Russia illustrates the nature of the war, and why it has gone so badly for US and NATO imperialism. This is somewhat unexpected, given the counterrevolution in the 1990s, but this resurgence of Russia has coincided with an accelerating decline of the US. Russia, no longer a workers’ state, has paradoxically been able to forge a degree of unity with the Chinese workers state, in terms of diplomacy and basic military cooperation, that eluded the leadership of the USSR, due to intra-Stalinist rivalry. The accelerating cold war against Russia and China echoes the imperialist war drives of NATO against the USSR. Anti-Sovietism has morphed into outright racist Russophobia.
We see a Western politically-based hatred of Russians for being organically ‘disobedient’ to imperialist neoliberalism, similar in some ways to Hitler’s belief that Jews were organically prone to Bolshevism. Even the liberal bourgeoisie in the West is prepared to arm and fund outright Nazis to kill Russians. Though they try to hide it – hence the hysteria against ‘disinformation’. Under Biden, they were prepared to risk nuclear war by firing missiles such as ATACMS and the European Storm Shadow directly into Russia. Only the cool head of Putin and co averted that. The only ones half-hearted about this are ultra-Zionists who consider Ukraine is taking resources that ought to go to support Israeli genocide of Palestinians. What an appalling counterposition!
It is the combination of this new, implicit alliance of non-imperialist deformed capitalism in Russia, with the deformed workers state in China, that has brought the imperialist world to the brink of a major defeat in Ukraine. We can see the technological superiority of Russia and China in things like the Oreshnik and Burevestinik missiles, which the US has no answer to, and China’s Deepseek AI technology, which is also more advanced than the West’s, and uses much less energy. This is the product of elements of a higher mode of production, in Russia, as a unique kind of non-imperialist bourgeois state with massive post-capitalist, ‘socialist’ deformations – derived from elements of a higher mode of production. And China, a deformed workers state, albeit on where a large capitalist sector exists and is currently controlled and subordinated to state planning. We see NATO in disarray, and on the verge of collapse.
This is not the expectation Marxists had for how the world socialist revolution would materialise. We are a considerable distance from that at this point. But the multipolar world that is becoming visible from this prospect of strategic imperialist defeat will also open up new political space in which massive new opportunities for such a world revolution can arise.
