Trumputin’s plan for Ukraine

Trump hands Ukraine to Putin in a power-for-power bargain

Italian version

Trump’s plan for Ukraine carries the same unmistakable stamp as his plan for Palestine. In Palestine, he proposes a colonial protectorate built on the bodies and rights of the Palestinian people, all in service of a genocidal settler-colonial regime. In Ukraine, he proposes nothing less than national surrender to Russian imperialism – negotiated directly with the invader over the heads of the invaded.

Different stage, same script. Donald Trump negotiates with the conquerors for the capitulation of the conquered, always in accordance with the shifting priorities of U.S. imperialism and its new slogan: America for the Americans (starting with Venezuela), Palestine for the Zionists (blessed by the reactionary Arab regimes and facilitated by Russia’s and China’s dirty UN abstentions). And in return? Russia is allowed to carve up Ukraine after four years of invasion – signed and sealed through a Washington–Moscow joint venture. The trade between decaying and ascending imperialist powers at the expense of oppressed peoples has rarely been this naked.

The 28 points of Trump’s Ukraine plan speak for themselves – just as loudly as the 20 points of his Gaza plan. In both, the crown jewel is a so-called “Peace Council” chaired by Trump, a self-appointed overseer of capitulation. In Gaza, Trump proposes to supervise the disarmament of Hamas and the entire Palestinian resistance, the insertion of a multinational occupation army, a massive reconstruction scheme tied to Western capital, guarantees for the genocidal Zionist regime, the continuation of terror in the West Bank, and the obedient collaboration of the Arab bourgeoisie. Russia and China did not even bother to veto this atrocity – letting Washington parade its diktat as “UN peace.”

In Ukraine, Trump aspires to the same role: overseer of surrender and of the partitioning of the country to the benefit of Russian occupation forces.

This means handing Moscow not only the land it has seized, but also territories it has not conquered but already “annexed.” It means the disarmament of half of Ukraine’s army – Putin’s consistent demand since 2022. It means Russian-American co-management of Ukraine’s reconstruction, using $100 billion in frozen Russian assets – half the profits to the United States – plus a joint investment fund where the two imperialismt powers share the spoils. It means Russia’s triumphant return to the G8 under an accord with Washington. In short: the humiliation of an invaded nation forced to serve its invader – all to satisfy American imperial interests.

The 100-day timetable for elections in Ukraine completes the scheme. Trump and Putin intend to depose Zelensky after degrading him politically. And Trump’s so-called “security guarantee” for Ukraine? A worthless piece of paper, a theatrical prop meant to cloak the real aim: Ukraine’s absorption into the sphere of Russian imperialism in exchange for a Russian-American rapprochement in business and geopolitics – above all, in the Arctic.

Is Trump trying to wrench Russian imperialism away from Chinese imperialism? Very likely. The United States can supply Moscow with digital technologies and AI. Russia can supply the West with the raw materials essential for high-tech production, breaking dependence on Chinese rare earths. And for Moscow, Washington offers something priceless: a possible escape route from becoming Beijing’s vassal.

Whether the plan will succeed is uncertain. But what is certain is that Ukraine has become currency in the transaction. And this operation is anything but improvised. Putin himself announced, without contradiction, that negotiations on the Trump plan had already begun between Moscow and Washington even before the Alaska summit. Only fools and opportunists could have failed to notice the steady courtship of Russian imperialism by Washington over the past year. Sadly, there were many.

“Better peace than war,” “peace above all”, from journalist Marco Travaglio to sectors of the pseudo-radical left, the applause for Trump’s plan is deafening. It is a toxic cocktail of cynical amateur militarism and counterfeit pacifism. But peace for whom, and on whose graves?

The “peace” proposed for Gaza is the peace of mass graves, imposed after two years of genocide and the crushing of Palestinian rights. The “peace” offered to Ukraine is capitulation, after four years of invasion, plunder, territorial amputation, and forced disarmament. We cannot yet know whether the Ukrainian government will accept this capitulation, this “loss of dignity”. But we know what we are confronting: a diktat of the great powers, an ultimatum born of blackmail and brute force, crafted exclusively from imperial calculations. That parties calling themselves “communist” or even merely “democratic” can applaud this filth is a political scandal of the first order.

The truth is that all the nonsense hurled for four years about a supposed U.S. “proxy war” has collapsed under the weight of reality. Not only wrong – utterly inverted. In 2022, the first U.S. proposal to Ukraine, two days after the invasion, was to evacuate Zelensky. Only the Ukrainian people’s decision to resist forced the U.S. to support them, reluctantly, haltingly, always with conditions. Now it is U.S. imperialism that is stabbing Ukraine in the back, delivering it trussed and bound to Moscow, and planning a joint administration of whatever remains: a Russian-American protectorate, an imperialist “peace by proxy.”

This is Zelensky’s real responsibility. Not that he defended Ukraine, but that he placed the fate of Ukraine entirely in the hands of Washington and Brussels, hiding from the Ukrainian population, especially the working class, the real nature of Western imperialist “democracy” and its predatory appetites.

Under Western pressure, his government sold off public companies, infrastructure, farmland, and natural resources to foreign investors. It gifted the EU and the Ukrainian bourgeoisie a bonanza of neoliberal measures: layoffs without limits, union rights hollowed out, strikes curtailed.

All this was supposed to serve Zelensky’s propaganda of “modernization” and national defense. Instead it demoralized workers, undermined resistance, fueled capitalist looting, and strengthened the Russian invasion, culminating in the American “betrayal” now unfolding. The corruption of the Ukrainian state is the inevitable offspring of these policies, as it is in Russia, and everywhere. Today it merely greases the wheels of Moscow’s and Trump’s anti-Zelensky blackmail.

Thus the position of our party, of the International Socialist League to which we belong, and of its valiant Ukrainian section, stands confirmed. For four years our Ukrainian comrades have fought on two fronts: against the Russian imperialist invasion in defense of Ukraine’s national rights, and against Zelensky’s bourgeois government in defense of working people – fighting for an anti-capitalist, socialist path, for the expropriation of the oligarchs, the cancellation of foreign debt, and the creation of a workers’ and people’s militia to defend the country.

Only a workers’ government can carry out these measures, and stand against the Russian-American plan for Ukraine’s surrender.