Last Friday, US president Donald Trump met with Russian president Vladimir Putin in a ‘summit’ that Trump boasted would finally end the imperialist ‘proxy’ war in the Ukraine.
Trump went into this meeting demanding a temporary ceasefire while ‘negotiations’ took place to reach a deal to end the fighting, but he emerged three hours later insisting that this was now off the table and a permanent peace deal was his sole priority.
The onus, Trump insisted, now lay with Zelensky making concessions to Russia, while he dropped his previous threat of ‘very severe consequences’ if Putin didn’t agree to end the war.
Putin emerged from the meeting saying he agreed that Ukraine’s security should be guaranteed but the ‘root causes’ of the conflict must be resolved.
Among the root causes that Putin insists must be resolved is the issue of Ukrainian membership of NATO, the imperialist war machine, the denazification of Ukraine and for recognition of the rights of workers in the Donbass region and Crimea to remain part of Russia. It was these issues that were the root cause of the conflict.
It was the imperialist powers who organised and financed the fascist coup in Ukraine in 2014 in a deliberate drive to push NATO forces up to the Russian border that provoked the military response from Russia.
The war, waged by the puppet regime of Zelensky, was deliberately started to return Russia to the domination and exploitation of world capitalism.
What has been completely written out of history by the bourgeois media and the imperialist narrative is the brutal reality that when the workers in the heavily industrialised Donbass region voted to have nothing to do with the fascist-supported Ukrainian regime and declared themselves a Republic, they were subjected to brutal bombardments that killed over 14,000 people, including women and children.
These atrocities and the threat posed by NATO’s intention to position missiles and troops right on the border, led to Russia recognising the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics and launching its security operation.
Despite the years of war, funded by the US, UK and the imperialist powers pouring billions into arming Ukraine and the subsequent international economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the US, the attempt to weaken Russia and open it up to capitalist exploitation has ended in total failure.
This was underlined when Trump met Zelensky, accompanied by Starmer and other EU ‘minders’, on Monday and made it clear that the US was throwing in the towel and if the UK and European governments want to keep a lost war going then they will have to pay the cost.
Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that, desperate to win security ‘guarantees’ from the US, Zelensky offered Trump a deal to buy $100 billion worth of weapons from American arms companies.
That $100 billion will come straight from the pockets of UK and EU workers just as they have been forced to pay with savage austerity and inflation in order to keep this proxy war stumbling on to inevitable defeat.
Driving Trump and the US ruling class to dump the lost war against Russia is not a desire for peace but to concentrate on the real enemies of US capitalism.
These are the working class at home – which refuses to accept being driven into poverty as the economy collapses under the weight of massive national debt – and its former allies and competitors across the world that Trump is waging a tariff war on in an attempt to rescue US capitalism from crashing into bankruptcy and recession.
World capitalism, in its final imperialist stage, is at its weakest today, torn apart by divisions and facing a powerful working class that will not accept being driven into abject poverty to rescue the profits of the bankers and bosses.
The working class in the US, UK, EU and across the world have the power to put it out of its death agony by taking power and advancing humanity with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required to bury bankrupt capitalism in the dustbin of history where it belongs.