Donald Trump is demanding $500 billion in mineral riches from Ukraine in exchange for supporting its war effort. The bid to loot Ukraine’s resources makes a mockery of calls to defend its national sovereignty.
Ukraine’s history since at least since 2004 is a story of betrayal. It was betrayed by Russia in 2014 and even more so in 2022, as Moscow trampled on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that had guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But Ukraine has also been betrayed by its supposed allies in the West.
The narrative of both the Biden administration and European Union governments held that, faced with the Russian invasion in February 2022, they were simply bystanders with no geopolitical or geoeconomic interests in Ukraine. They were just there to help a country under attack as it fought for its freedom. Military assistance and aid to the tune of at least €267 billion was said to respond to the United Nations Charter’s Article 51, which contains the right to self-defense against a war of aggression.
This notion of heartwarmingly principled and moral behavior — especially altruistic when coming all the way across the Atlantic — however soon faced a contradiction of double standards.
The “rules-based international order” appeared to be guiding Western foreign policy in Ukraine. It seemingly didn’t apply when NATO member Turkey invaded both Syria and Iraq, conducting a bloody war against the Kurdish autonomous regions in those countries. It also didn’t apply when the Saudi Arabian dictatorship bombed hospitals and schools in Yemen with Western military and political support. That was even before Israel’s war in Gaza, led by Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government and backed to the hilt by Western states.
Today Donald Trump’s foreign policy is brazenly imperialist in a late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century fashion, reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” policy. Yet this is also tearing down the camouflage of moral and idealist rhetoric that had sought to conceal the fact that foreign policy is ultimately about national, material interests rather than immaterial values. This is true for the Russian government’s narrative that its war is about making Russia great again, protecting ethnic Russians in the post-Soviet world, or a continuation of the Great Patriotic War against Nazism. It’s likewise true for the West, which presents the new Cold War against rising China and the other BRICS countries in terms of “democracy versus autocracy.”
This is dangerous rhetoric too, because it is always possible to negotiate interests and find common ground, such as an interest in preventing mutual destruction, even among the fiercest enemies. Yet when foreign policy is a morality play of “good” versus “evil” — in which one side is the Shire and the other Mordor, one side Harry Potter and the other Lord Voldemort, one side Princess Leia and the other Darth Vader, as was fed to the hungry public even by NATO HQ itself — then there cannot be any compromise. Evil must be annihilated. In the end, as moralistic and “idealist” a liberal foreign policy may present itself, this can only lead to a mindset in which the ends justify any means. This has turned the media into a force pressuring governments and military officials into policies that are irrational, oblivious to their unintended consequences, not even in the narrowly defined power bloc’s national interest, and thus extremely perilous.
Interests matter, and values only come into play when they do not run counter to those interests. The problem, therefore, is not that a moral Biden administration, which defended a “rules-based international order,” has now been replaced by an immoral Trump administration seeking to maximize its particular national advantage at the expense of everyone else. When the war in Ukraine began, Western leaders spoke of solidarity, defending the sovereign state of Ukraine. Yet it is important to look beyond what was said and to study what was actually being done. Words are cheap — deeds weigh heavy. The same leaders who moralized about Ukrainian sovereignty did everything to pull the rug from under its feet when they started using Ukraine’s $152-billion-plus government debt — more than 70 percent which is foreign-owned — as leverage for initiating the largest post-1990s privatization scheme on behalf of Western corporations, orchestrated by BlackRock.
While BlackRock, the largest US-based capital fund in the world, has insisted on immediate repayments even under conditions of an ongoing war, international governmental donors have extended the credit line until the end of the war. This, however, appears to be approaching fast.
Trump’s telephone call with Vladimir Putin and their meeting in Riyadh — freaking out the European liberal class to the point that even former Munich Security Conference chief Wolfgang Ischinger called it “naive” and “embarrassing” — appears to be finding ways to put a halt to the conflict. During the election, Trump had promised that he could do this in twenty-four hours. Later on, he corrected his statement, saying that it would take about half a year. Nonetheless, Trump’s goal of stopping the war, no matter how erratic his actions, seems real.
Brain-Dead
There’s good reason for that — for the United States has no interest in continuing the war. Few Western liberals will yet acknowledge what left-wing and conservative critics have said from the start, namely that the war is “unwinnable” and that a nuclear power like Russia can only be defeated at the price of World War III. But Trump can now end the war through enforced negotiations because Washington has won as much as there was for it to win.
Russia, if not defeated, has been weakened, with the depletion of its arsenals and loss of much of its share in a booming world market for military equipment, most notably in India. Furthermore, the cancellation of the EU-Russian energy symbiosis — regardless of whether the United States was itself behind the Nord Stream 2 attacks — has severely weakened the EU as an economic competitor and killed the German export model. This has helped the long-term US goal of reindustrialization, first announced by Barack Obama and pursued by all succeeding administrations, albeit through diverging means. Europeans, who even thought NATO might be “brain-dead,” have now committed to massive military spending and a new bloc confrontation against China, strengthening NATO as a transatlantic division of labor against the far-eastern high-tech rival. It’s something that the United States has been demanding since the Obama administration and that it set in stone during the 2014 NATO Summit in Vilnius, where it was established that no single NATO member state, i.e., the US, should bear more than 50 percent of its budget. (It’s still around 70 percent.)
Trump is thus in the fortunate position of being able to harvest what Biden sowed. He can posture as the peacemaking strongman, empathetic to the horrific and senselessly perpetuated bloodshed and capable of what liberals were unable, even unwilling to do, given that peace plans emerged from all regions of the world with the exception of North America and Europe, which deems itself the “power of peace.” Now Trump must only hope that the threats he and Vice President J. D. Vance leveled against Russia — namely, that the US would jack up sanctions and the military aid to Ukraine should Russia not agree to negotiations — are not seen as a bluff.
Even arms deliveries do not solve the problem of war fatigue in Ukraine, which entails an emerging majority for negotiations even if it means territorial losses; a subsiding of war volunteers, which has led Western leaders to consider cutting support for young Ukrainian males in Europe as an incentive for them to ship off to the trenches; mass desertions at the front line; and illegal mass resistance against coercive recruitment that now includes bombings of government recruitment facilities.
In this situation, the Putin government could decide that more of the mineral-rich parts of the Donbas as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia could come under its control given the possibility of an outright collapse of the Ukrainian front. At the same time, continuing the war would also be highly risky for Moscow for domestic reasons, if it misses the opportunity of face-savingly exiting the botched war, which failed to achieve “regime change” in Kyiv. This may also help explain the openness that Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, have shown toward the American peace deal plans.
Disinformation
Peace, however, will come at a high price for Ukraine. This is not only because the Trump administration has undermined Volodymyr Zelensky’s legitimacy by calling for elections, severely overstressing various polls that have shown Zelensky’s unpopularity on the rise. Zelensky’s response — insulting Trump by saying that he was “living” in a Russian “disinformation space” by “blam[ing] Ukraine and NATO for the conflict” — deepened the alienation. Trump responded by calling Zelensky a “Dictator without Elections” for refusing to hold elections under martial law, accusing the Ukrainian president of having talked the United States “into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a war that couldn’t be won,” stating that Zelensky had admitted “that half of the money we sent him is ‘MISSING.’” The Ukrainian government, with the support of European leaders like Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz, responded by pointing to a poll showing that Zelensky still was seen favorably by half the population and that “attempts to replace” him would fail.
Regardless of whether that indicates that such plans are underway, the new agenda for Ukrainian “reconstruction,” which the Trump administration sent to the Zelensky government in Kyiv on February 7 and which the British Telegraph made public, is key to the great betrayal of Ukraine. It goes even further than the sell-off of Ukraine’s national wealth already planned by BlackRock and the International Monetary Fund. Here the emperor really has no clothes.
According to Trump’s plan, the United States seeks $500 billion in compensation for the war effort —in proportional terms, asking more from the alleged ally Ukraine than what Germany, the defeated foe, had to pay in World War I reparations according to the Versailles Treaty. Which, as John Maynard Keynes correctly predicted, created the ultranationalist revenge fantasies that helped bring Nazism to power.
The Trump plan also lays out the modus operandi of how to get the $500 billion. It is not only the total buyout of everything that is of value and should have been the material foundation of an actually sovereign Ukraine; but to ensure that all benefits from privatizations are channeled toward US billionaire interests, they are to be strictly licensed to American corporations. The document, classified as “Privileged and Confidential,” suggests that the United States and Ukraine ought to create a joint investment fund that would ensure that “hostile parties to the conflict do not benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.” As a result, US corporations would settle in Ukraine to exploit and reap the benefits of the country’s national wealth, which would, however, function as a quasi-security guarantee, because Russia would never attack territories with American foreign direct investment of that magnitude. And the magnitude is enormous. “Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) ‘payback’ from Ukraine,” comments the Telegraph, “goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.”
The plan also explains why Trump is considering a continuation of the war under certain circumstances, with the idea of a deal that the United States would continue sending arms to Kyiv government if Zelensky used them to reconquer the rare-earth-rich region at the front line in Donbass on behalf of the United States and as a means to repay the $500 billion. Zelensky rejected this deal, stating that “the agreement” was “not ready,” which led Trump to reassert his goal and blackmail the Ukrainian government by saying that a failure to accept it was “not gonna make [Zelensky] too happy.”
It explains why Trump has also been open to proposals from EU officials who have tried to lure the United States into prolonging the war, as unwanted and unwinnable as it clearly is, by committing themselves to buying all the weapons sent to Ukraine exclusively from US arms manufacturers — something that should not be too hard given that the United States is home to the six largest weapons producers in the world. In the end, war is a question of business.
During last week’s Munich Security Conference, European leaders appeared to have decided that they will loosen the European Fiscal Compact exclusively to allow the biggest military spending effort since 1945. A program of short-term arms deliveries to Ukraine plus long-term EU militarization shall amount to a total of €3.1 trillion, roughly €7,500 per EU citizen.
Knowing that, as conservative Eastern Europe historian Jörg Baberowski phrased it, they will eventually be asked “what justifies the prolonging of a war that no one can win,” EU officials have been quoted as saying that they agreed to wait to announce this sensitive initiative until after Sunday’s German election. This, however, did not stop German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock from giving an interview to Bloomberg in which she let the plans slip, apparently presuming that, as she can hardly speak English, no other German would be reading Anglo-American news outlets either.
The question obviously remains: How will sending ever more weapons to Ukraine, without a clear military goal, help the problem with war fatigue? An answer could be a new initiative by Zelensky’s government that is essentially an economic draft on steroids. Given that no sane person would any longer voluntarily enter the trenches to get killed, maimed, or traumatized, the Ukrainian government has stepped up its game, promising eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, so far spared coerced recruitment, the equivalent of ten years of a high-salaried job, interest-free mortgage rates, and tuition-free education if they sign up voluntarily for a one-year contract. Given the depopulation, deindustrialization, and foreign-debt-financed budget of Ukraine, where is all that money going to come from? Ask the European public.
Suicidal
Whichever road the world is now on, the result will have been the great betrayal of Ukraine. It takes a lot of naivety to unsee what is now obvious: Foreign policy is not about friendship or democracy or other such “values.” It is about geopolitical and geoeconomic interests — and the empires drop allied countries like hot potatoes if they are no longer of interest.
This has always been the case with regards to the West’s relationship with Ukraine. When the Soviet Union was about to collapse in 1991, US president George H. W. Bush traveled to Kyiv initially warning against “suicidal nationalism” and independence. Once Ukraine had voted for independence in December 1991, Washington shifted its position, establishing — against powerful warnings by George Kennan, the architect of US Cold War containment policies — strong connections to the newly established multiethnic nation-state in Eastern Europe.
After the signing of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which entailed that former Soviet republics would give up their nuclear arsenals in exchange for Russian guarantees of territorial integrity, the United States continued on this trajectory. This included military cooperation, which, according to Die Zeit, was bigger “than with any other country” in the world. In The Grand Chessboard, written in 1997, former Democratic national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out a blueprint that saw NATO’s Eastern enlargement and control of Ukraine as the key to global hegemony, which presupposed preventing the Eurasian landmass from coming together, arguing that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Hence, the Bush Jr administration supported the “Orange Revolution” of 2004, which ousted the Russia-oriented president Viktor Yanukovych. The United States financed both protest groups and polls “designed to back up accusations” according to which Yanukovych had been involved in election fraud. The new president, Viktor Yushchenko, whose wife had worked at the US State Department, then established closer connections with the United States.
There were reasons why powerful segments of Ukrainian society sought to “go West.” The Western Ukrainian agrarian oligarchy and urban professionals who were culturally and professionally adapted to the new global economy — in many cases making a living through American- and Europe-financed NGOs — wanted to become part of the West and the European Union in particular. They had good reasons to believe that they would materially benefit from it. It was these segments of Ukrainian society that George W. Bush could also rely on when his administration sought to aggressively bring the economically, socially, politically, culturally, and linguistically split country into NATO during the 2008 Bucharest Summit.
In December 2013, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland stated at the US-Ukraine Foundation Conference that “since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States” had “invested over $5 billion” to support “Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations,” ensuring a “secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.” However, not everyone would have benefited from ceding the country’s neutrality, to which it had legally bound itself: for there were to be many losers. This was also visible in polls at the time, which did not show popular majorities for Western integration. Because the Eastern Ukrainian industrial oligarchy, economically oriented toward Russia and Eurasia, had to fear EU association just as much as sections of the Ukrainian industrial working class, the country was eventually torn apart.
This happened in 2014, during the Euromaidan protests, when the United States continued its regime-change policy in Ukraine and the EU continued to go along with it, despite Washington’s rabidly nationalistic and irresponsible politics, best expressed in the infamous “Fuck the EU” telephone call between Victoria Nuland and US ambassador Victor Pryatt, whose leaking highlighted Washington interference in Ukraine’s domestic affairs. Similarly, Germany and the EU had significant imperial interests in Ukraine — ranging from resources to an internal periphery providing cheap labor — albeit not at the cost of Ukrainian civil war and alienation from Russia.
A Great Deal for America
The Western-facing Ukrainian government hoped that aligning with the West would be beneficial to the class forces it represented, if not the country as a whole. But what is the result?
The country was split in 2014. Russia broke the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and openly supported the eastern secessionist forces. The latent and frequently open conflict led to a militarized Ukrainian state targeting a multiethnic population with ideas of national homogeneity, including the recasting of Nazi war criminals as Ukrainian freedom fighters, as Marta Havryshko has courageously documented. Since 2022, Russia’s escalating war on Ukraine has destroyed the country’s infrastructure. The wealthier and mineral-rich territories in the Donbas were conquered and annexed by Russia.
The Ukrainian population lost basic civic and economic rights including the right to collectively bargain over wages. It lost basic political rights when Zelensky outlawed eleven opposition parties in March 2022 on the premise that they were pro-Russian. The secret police continues to repress all forms of socialist and other political opposition that criticize the war. Ukraine has been irreversibly depopulated due to mass emigration and the casualties of the war. Hundreds of thousands of traumatized soldiers will bring the experience of violence right back into their homes and families. And now the country is being betrayed, plundered, and turned into a colony by the same powers — the United States and the EU — that its Western-facing elites sought so hard to join. Meanwhile the Trump administration wants to end the unwinnable war, because it has won most of what there was to be won, and the EU obsessively tries to postpone the moment of truth at the expense of more Ukrainians getting killed senselessly.
And now people wonder why Russia was never internationally isolated during the conflict, despite its gross violation of international law?
Now people wonder why many in Georgia and other post-Soviet republics are now hesitant to embrace Western advances?
Now people wonder why they are tabling laws that seek to restrict the money flows from the West that influence domestic elections to bring about Western-oriented governments?
Such conflicts bring a high chance of civil wars turning into — as Boris Johnson also has acknowledged — open proxy wars. Yet these wars do bring tremendous benefits for some, as US senator Lindsey Graham put it in September 2023: “People ask me, ‘Is it worth it?’ Here’s what we’ve gotten for our investment. We haven’t lost one soldier. We reduced the combat power of the Russian army by 50 percent. Not one of us has died in that endeavor. This is a great deal for America.” Rather less so for Ukrainians.