Trump, Putin and Ukraine

By David Sole

The much-reported phone call between US President Donald Trump and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin can be looked at from three perspectives.

The February 12 call lasted about one and a half hours and concerned the war in Ukraine. Trump, during his 2024 campaign for his second term as president, had promised to end the war, now entering its fourth year, on the very first day in office. The ruling class faction backing Trump had come to the realization that the US proxy war against Russia was rapidly being lost. They seem to have decided that ending the Ukraine war would allow the US to pivot into a bigger economic and military confrontation with the socialist China.

Trump’s call, and the remarks by his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the Munich meeting of NATO leaders on February 14, made headlines for finally recognizing that there would be no peace without accepting that Ukraine could not be inducted into the NATO alliance and that Ukraine had irrevocably lost much of its eastern territory to the Russian Federation.

These demands were among the first goals put forward by Russia at the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022. That military intervention, it should be remembered, came after the US-CIA sponsored right-wing, anti-Russian coup of February 2014. For eight more years the US and its NATO allies spent tens of billions of dollars to build up a Ukrainian military that had been unable to suppress the ethnic-Russian population that maintained independence from the neo-Nazi forces of the Kiev regime.

Trump, of course, had no problem supporting and arming Ukraine’s fascists for the entire four years of his first term (2017-2021). And Trump had no problem sending 90 Patriot missiles from storage in the zionist settler state to Ukraine on January 28, 2025 – one week after his inauguration.

Trump has also been quoted as still expecting Ukraine to repay the US for hundreds of billions in military and civilian aid from the vast amounts of minerals, especially lithium, much of it in the former Ukrainian territory now incorporated into the Russian Federation.

But it is possible that Trump’s phone call to Putin and recognition of the “facts on the ground” of Russian military advances may lead to more substantive talks for a peace deal.

Predictably the liberal bourgeois media in the US and much of Europe are attacking Trump for this new orientation. US media especially have been faithful lapdogs of the neocon position that led to Ukrainians dying by the tens of thousands in this proxy war. Trump is constantly being attacked – rightfully for his many assaults on programs vital to poor and working people – but coupled with these commentators still trying to defend the Ukraine war spending and anti-Russia bias.

The “liberal” mouthpiece for US imperialism headlined on February 13 that “Putin scores a big victory, and not on the battlefield.” The Times was upset that Trump made it clear he believed that the US and Russia ought “negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly.” This seems to leave out all of the European allies as well as Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky. But the fact is that the war all along was a proxy affair planned in Washington. And NATO allies are, in reality, just junior partners subservient to US imperialism.

A third view of the phone call is from the direction of anti-US imperialism. This considers Trump as an erratic agent of US capitalism and opposes his entire program of racism, cutbacks and war. Anti-imperialists oppose the US intervention in Ukraine from 2014 onward, the build up of the Ukrainian military and the military actions against many ethnic minorities in Ukraine.

It cannot be forgotten for one minute that Trump is a strong supporter of the genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. The entire military might of the zionist apartheid settler state was provided by the US government including Trump’s new administration.

The Russian intervention three years ago should be viewed as forced upon the Russian Federation against the stated aim by the West to incorporate Ukraine into NATO with the establishment of NATO bases all along the Russian border. After all, that is exactly what has been done over the past 20 years in one country after another in an attempt to surround Russia. The proxy war and the severe economic sanctions against Russia had the aim of weakening Russia and provoking a possible regime change against President Putin.

Supporting Russia in this war was the duty of all anti-imperialists, without the necessity of supporting all the internal policies of the Russian government. Should peace talks proceed and, perhaps, result in an enforceable peace agreement, that would not alter the predatory nature and hegemonic aims of the Wall Street capitalist and Pentagon militarists.