When
the betrayal came, it was swift and brutal. Donald Trump, having barely started
his second presidency, phoned up Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, on
Wednesday 12 February and paved the way towards negotiations to end the war
without consulting Ukraine itself (BBC, 13 February 2025). When only a
week later, high-ranking delegations of both countries including Russia’s
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met in Riyadh/Saudi
Arabia for extensive discussions, no Ukrainian representative was at the table
(BBC, 18 February
2025).
At the same time, ‘White House officials told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald
Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to
the US’ (The Guardian, 20
February 2025).
This was presented as a way to pay back all the assistance the US had provided
over the course of the war.
The public humiliation of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting in the White House was the final confirmation that the US had dropped its support for Ukraine. Denounced by many European leaders and commentators for what it is, a betrayal, this was not, however, the first betrayal of Ukraine. The country has been betrayed by the West on several occasions before, leaving it now in a perilous situation. In this blog post, I will discuss previous moments of betrayal taking a much longer historical perspective.
A
previous betrayal occurred after the failed Ukrainian summer offensive of 2023
(Reuters, 21
December 2023).
By then it should have been clear that Ukraine was not going to win the war
against Russia on the battlefield despite all the Western deliveries of modern
weaponry including state of the art battle tanks (see Fanning the Flames
of War).
Nevertheless, instead of advising Ukraine to move towards a negotiated peace
deal with Russia, to end the slaughter and to salvage as much as possible, the
West continued encouraging Ukraine to carry on the war. The promise of cruise
missiles including the eventual permission of using them against targets on
Russian territory kept Ukraine in the war (Politico, 25 April
2024).
Another
betrayal occurred around the time of the so-called Istanbul communique, the
result of initial peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022. This
‘agreement’ was anything but perfect and highly unlikely to provide the basis
for ending the war in its final version. However, rather than pushing for
deepening negotiations, the visit by the then British Prime Minister Boris
Johnson to Ukraine on 9 April 2022 (CNN, 9 April 2022), guaranteeing
his counterpart Zelenskyy the West’s continuing economic and military support, ensured
that negotiations were broken off. We do not know whether a successful peace
agreement could have been concluded back in 2022, but it would have clearly
been the responsible thing to do to explore the potential of a peace agreement
to the full. This did not happen.
The
betrayals of Ukraine, however, do not stop here. It should have been obvious
that the promise of eventual NATO membership at the 2008 NATO summit in
Bucharest as well as discussions around Ukraine’s future membership of the
European Union (EU) in subsequent years would intensify Russian concerns about
increasing Western encroachment (Choonara, 2022). Instead
of taking Russian security interests into account and attempting to devise a
post-cold war new European security order based on the Conference on Security
and Co-operation in Europe process of the 1970s, the West pushed relentlessly
for Eastern expansion. Instead of fuelling the war with further weapons, the
focus should have been on trust-forming measures (Forsberg and
Patomäki, 2023: 15).
Declaring Ukraine a neutral country with close economic relations with both
Russia and Western Europe – a Cold War Finland kind of solution – back then,
would have ensured Ukrainian territorial integrity today.
This
does not justify Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, nor its full-scale
invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It does, however, explain why Russia, an
imperialist power with its own ambitions, eventually decided that war was the
best possible way forward.
And
yet, the betrayals of Ukraine go even further back. In a moment of Western
triumphalism over ‘winning’ the Cold War in the early 1990s onwards, the former
communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe were ruthlessly incorporated
in the global political economy along neo-liberal economic lines (see Capitalist
expansion, the war in Ukraine and three decades of missed opportunities in
Europe).
Sought out for their comparatively cheap and educated, skilled labour, Western
transnational corporations cherry-picked profitable industrial sectors, while
other sectors were run against the wall. Eastern European labour was doubly
exploited in these processes. Partly as cheap labour in their own country and
partly as cheap migrant labour in Western European industries (Bieler and Salyga,
2020).
The economic consequences for these countries were catastrophic. For example, ‘Ukraine’s
GDP in 2019 was lower than in 1989 and life expectancy for men was 67’ (Cafruny
and Fouskas, 2023: 5). Russia had not fared much better with its inclusion
into the neo-liberal global political economy. ‘Its GDP collapsed by 40
percent. Its industrial inputs fell by half, and real wages dropped to half of
what they were in 1987’ (Wargan,
2023).
These
past mistakes undoubtedly cast a long shadow ahead. What does the future hold
for Ukraine? As Adam D. Morton and I wrote in the 2024 Socialist
Register, working people are always on the losing side in inter-imperialist rivalries (Bieler and Morton,
2024).
The US may have appeared as supportive initially, but Trump’s recent decisions
have harshly exposed the true self-interests of US imperialism. It was
Ukrainian lives, which have been sacrificed for containing Russian advances.
With a shifting focus towards China and the Far East, the expensive support for
Ukraine is now regarded as rather wasteful. A deal with Russia over Ukraine will
allow both powers to share their respective influence over the country
including access to its rare earth minerals.
If
the war does end in the near future, there will at least be a stop to the
killing. Ukraine itself will, however, be divided politically and reduced economically
to an exporter of primary commodities including grain and minerals. Its
national sovereignty will be left in tatters. There will be no reconstruction
of Ukraine unless it benefits Western corporations. After three years of war,
the future for Ukrainian people is looking rather bleak indeed. The country is
likely to fragment with right-wing, reactionary forces trying to outcompete
each other in pleasing their respective imperialist masters in East and West.
Where
does this leave Europe? US support for Ukraine had never taken European
interests into account. In fact, the US benefitted enormously from the EU being
cut off from comparatively cheap Russian energy supply. Especially Germany, the
EU’s industrial powerhouse, has descended into a phase of deindustrialisation.
Depending on the import of expensive liquified natural gas including from the
US, the country’s industry is struggling to remain competitive (Cafruny
and Fouskas, 2023: 7). Pressed into ramping up European armament, the
continent is likely to experience heightened social inequality, widespread
unrest and a further rise of the far-right. Not only Ukraine’s, but Europe’s
future too is looking increasingly bleak against the backdrop of a global
crisis of overaccumulation and intensifying great power, geo-political inter-imperialist rivalry.
AsTomáš Tengely-Evans (18 March 2022) had already written three years ago, ‘our opposition to war in Ukraine has to be based on understanding it as an inter-imperialist conflict between the West and Russia that’s tearing the country apart. That means standing against the Russian invasion, but also refusing to be cajoled and bullied into dropping our opposition to the West and NATO which offer no solution.’
Andreas Bieler
5 March 2025
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