Three years ago this month, Russia invaded Ukraine and launched what has turned out to be a bloody, grinding war. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in this war, and many have been severely injured or maimed. But with the possible exception of a brief period at the outset of the Russian invasion, this has NOT mainly been a struggle for national liberation by the Ukrainian people. Instead, the U.S. and Europe poured over 300 billion dollars in arms to Ukraine and turned it into a proxy war—an arena in which the U.S. and Russia dueled over the division and plunder of the world. (For documentation on how and why that is so, go here and here.)

In the past two weeks, Donald Trump has overturned this policy. Trump began direct negotiations with Russia. He cut Ukraine out of them and began attacking its leader, Voloydymr Zelensky. This kind of shift has set off all kinds of speculation as to why. But there are three important things to know about this for now: 

1. On both sides this war has been an unjust proxy war, one in which the rival imperialist powers of the U.S. and Russia have pursued imperialist aims. Russia’s invasion was imperialist and unjust. But what has been covered up are the aggressive moves by the U.S., over years, which preceded this. In the early ʼ90s the U.S. made an agreement with Russia not to incorporate countries in eastern Europe that bordered Russia into NATO, the U.S.-headed military alliance. In 2014, the U.S. conspired behind the scenes to overthrow an elected Ukrainian government which was friendly to Russia. At that point, and increasing since, there were moves for Ukraine to join NATO. Just imagine what the U.S. would do if Russia was making aggressive moves for Mexico—what the U.S. views as their "backyard"—to join a rival imperialist military alliance! When Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. seized on this by arming Ukraine with enough arms to bleed Russia dry.
    
2. Trump’s “peace offensive” does not break with U.S. imperialist aims to maintain its domination of the planet… it aims for the same goal in a different way. How this fits into a larger strategy needs to be further investigated and analyzed. Right now, Russia is closely allied to China—itself a global imperialist power. The war in Ukraine, along with the attempts of the U.S./NATO alliance to economically isolate and break Russia, has driven Russia even closer to China. Both Biden and Trump view China as the main threat to U.S. world domination. And both sides of the ruling class—Democrat and Republican—aim to maintain that bloody domination. 
   
   But there are sharp differences over how to pursue that rivalry, as can be seen in the 180 degree about-face in how Trump moved to sideline Ukraine, reach out to Putin, and instruct his suck-ass lackeys like JD Vance over the past week to insult NATO military allies like France, Germany, Britain, etc. at NATO's yearly conference in Munich. All this bears close watching. The possible consequence—global war between nuclear powers—is enormous and horrific.
    
3. The Ukrainian government has been ruthlessly sidelined in this deal, and, like a gangster, Trump has attacked its leader Zelensky while demanding half of Ukraine’s mineral wealth in payment. Over the last three years, Biden built up Zelensky as a "heroic democratic leader" and Zelensky spoke before Congress in what was heralded as a great show of "bipartisan unity." But despite all this phony bullshit, the U.S. has always called the shots in this war and used it for its own imperialist interests. Biden and NATO played Zelensky like a pinball machine, calibrating aid so as to be enough to continue to bleed Russia but not so much as to provoke a world war, and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians on the altar of U.S. imperialist aims. 

But it must be understood that those calibrations were not and are not foolproof, as Biden himself admitted;¹ and the fact that the U.S. was willing to risk a third world war that could spiral into the destruction of all of humanity is evidence of unbelievable criminality.

It was in part in response to this war, and the madness and inhumanity at the root of it that Bob Avakian said:

We can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way.