Version imprimableWe are entering the end game. The second Trump administration has eliminated military aid apart from intelligence sharing, and with increased US aggression in the middle east, the other NATO countries are unable to buy the sophisticated US weapons needed for Ukraine’s defence against rocket attacks. A highly unfavourable Russian-American deal is now the most likely outcome of the conflict.
The price of the war
In free Ukraine, the war is increasingly dangerous for civilians. 2025 was the deadliest verified year of the war (2,514 killed, 12,142 injured), and the first four months of 2026 alone produced 815 verified civilian deaths and 4,174 injuries. [2]
Six million Ukrainians live under Russian occupation. There are around five million Ukrainian refugees in Western Europe, several million more in Russia, and 3.7 million internally displaced people (IDPs). Of the 300,000 residents who lived in Kherson before the war, only about 65,000 remain, more than two-thirds of them pensioners. [3] Every winter, Russia systematically targets the energy grid. Hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, churches, grain terminals, water systems and district heating networks have been struck deliberately.
The 2022 manoeuvre war, in which Ukrainian forces defended Kyiv and liberated Kharkiv and Kherson, gave way in 2023 to a stalemate of fortified lines. Ukraine’s 2023 summer counter-offensive broke against them. From 2024 the Russian advance ground inexorably forward. By 2025 the drone war had become the dominant tactical reality, with drones now causing an estimated seventy per cent of casualties on both sides. Russian advantages in glide bombs, electronic warfare and manpower were partially offset by Ukrainian advantages in drone production and asymmetric improvisation, and --- until the Trump-era pause --- by superior Western precision weapons.
EUR 300 first-person-view drones [4] routinely destroy Russian equipment worth millions, and most of the innovation is happening not in the west or in Kyiv oligarchs’ private arms companies but in workshops, garages and kitchens funded by families, volunteers and small donor networks including the anarchist Solidarity Collectives. [5] Armin Papperger, chief executive of Rheinmetall, dismissed this cottage industry to The Atlantic at the end of March 2026 as "Ukrainian housewives" with "3-D printers in the kitchen" playing "with Lego" rather than producing real innovation. Zelensky’s retort --- that any such housewife could be chief executive of Rheinmetall --- recognised the role of civil society, but maintains the illusion that a major war can be fought without state coordination and financing of arms production.
The price paid by Ukrainian workers
Resilience has an unglamorous core: the workers who keep the country running under bombardment. Energy resilience networks have operated across four winters, as have municipal workers in water, district heating and sewage. Ukrzaliznytsia railway workers have kept passenger and freight services moving through the systematic strikes on rail infrastructure, paying a terrible price: by October 2025 some 949 railway workers had been killed. [6] Energy workers are routinely killed and injured restoring grid infrastructure under continuing fire. On 1 February 2026, a Russian Shahed drone attack on a bus carrying miners between shifts in the Dnipropetrovsk region killed twelve people and injured at least sixteen. Mykhailo Volynets, chair of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) and of the Independent Trade Union of Miners (NPGU), described the strikes as a deliberate pattern: "Miners cannot work safely... Hundreds of thousands of people are forced to live and work under permanent stress and anxiety." [7] IndustriALL records 2,968 Ukrainian workers injured by Russian attacks while performing their work duties, of whom 857 have died; in 2025 alone 1,101 workers were injured and 220 killed, the highest annual figure since the invasion. [8]
Oligarchic asset bases have been left largely untouched. The country pays salaries and pensions from Western financial assistance, not tax revenues. Volodymyr Zelensky’s wartime conservative-neoliberal government [9] has continued the pre-war neoliberal direction. Vitaliy Dudin, the labour lawyer and former chair of the democratic-socialist organisation Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), insists that "workers, farmers, labourers and the working classes are paying a disproportionate price in this conflict. Recent laws have reduced social protections and made it easier to fire people, even in times of war. While Ukraine’s existence depends on the resilience and collective effort of its citizens, the government is working to weaken the very foundations of this solidarity." [10] A country fighting for survival is being ground down because the state is unwilling to ask the rich to pay for defence.
The collapse of Western military support
Western support has always been narrowly conditional. The 2022 reluctance to supply heavy ("offensive") weapons gave way in 2023 and 2024 to deliveries of HIMARS, NASAMS, Patriot batteries and interceptors, Leopards, Abrams and F-16s. The second Trump administration disrupted this arc from January 2025: an initial suspension of military assistance and intelligence sharing was partially reversed under European pressure, but bulk US military aid has not resumed. Sophisticated air defence munitions in particular --- Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, ATACMS-class long-range strike --- depend on US production lines now redirected to the Middle East. European governments have agreed to purchase US weapons for donation to Ukraine, but the volume actually delivered remains well below 2024 levels.
The Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage in August 2025 produced a 28-point framework, drafted by Russia and presented through Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, structuring Ukrainian partition as the basis of a settlement; the European 24-point counter-proposal was withdrawn within days. European rearmament has been announced as "support for Ukraine", but the bulk of new spending is contracted for delivery into national stocks, not to Ukraine.
Society resisting
The state has neither asked the rich to pay nor protected those who keep the country functioning. It has abdicated, and civil society has carried the burden. The mass mobilisation of Ukrainian civil society in spring 2022 has shifted shape across the four years but has not collapsed. Volunteer networks, fundraising for drones and vehicles for the front and emergency services, and support to displaced families remain stable. The prytulok (shelter) solidarity culture, the crowdfunding for soldiers at the front, and traditional faith-based social support networks have persisted. Exhaustion is increasingly visible: declining donor pools, longer fundraising campaigns, volunteer burnout.
The volunteer infrastructure that has held the country together is itself heavily feminised. Daria Saburova, drawing on fieldwork with Kryvyi Rih working-class volunteer networks for her 2024 book Travailleuses de la résistance, argues that "the impoverishment of the working class" in Ukraine "has, first and foremost, a female face." Women are concentrated in the country’s lowest-paid public-sector jobs --- teaching, nursing, childcare, social work --- and these are precisely the sectors absorbing the heaviest infrastructure damage and deepest funding cuts. Much of what is done for the front (cooking, laundering, weaving camouflage nets, fundraising, care for the displaced and the wounded) is unpaid female labour. With men mobilised, women have also taken on family support, the care of the elderly, of children, of the wounded, and a disproportionate share of the labour of survival. What follows --- Veteranka, Be Like We Are, Zla Mavka, the unpaid volunteer networks --- operates in this material context and is shaped by it.
About 8% of the armed forces are female. Veteranka, Ukraine’s first organisation for women veterans, has been one of the country’s most consistent liberal/progressive feminist forces, growing from approximately twenty initial members in 2018 to over 1,700 by late 2024. With the Ministry of Defence failing to issue women’s summer uniforms until February 2024, and winter uniforms still unavailable, Veteranka’s sewing workshop produced approximately 700 free uniform sets tailored to women’s bodies --- women’s unpaid labour again filling the gap left by a state that will not provide. Between February 2022 and mid-2025 the organisation raised over UAH 90 million (EUR 2.1 million), delivering vehicles, drones, ammunition and gear to the front. Veteranka’s head Kateryna Pryimak puts the political stakes plainly: "Today, the military is the group in society with the fewest rights, and women in the army face the greatest restrictions." Veteranka’s petition for Bill 13037 --- adopted by the Verkhovna Rada with 276 votes on 25 February 2026, symbolically on Ukrainian Women’s Day --- obliges commanders to investigate cases of discrimination and violence in the Armed Forces, mandates zero tolerance toward harassment, and formally defines sexual harassment as a disciplinary offence. [11]
Anti-authoritarian volunteer politics has been the most visible left-wing engagement on the front and behind it. Solidarity Collectives is the most significant network. It describes itself as "a group of Ukrainian anarchists who united when the russian invasion began, in order to support our comrades fighting at the front and help those affected by the russian invasion." [12] In practice this has meant body armour, helmets, thermal imagers, drones and vehicles for anti-authoritarian and left-wing combatants across the Armed Forces and Territorial Defence; humanitarian convoys to Bucha, Bilohorodka and Kramatorsk as well as FPV drone production.
Resistance under occupation
Civil resistance has been most exposed and least visible internationally in the occupied territories. Intense Russification across regions held since 2014 and those seized in 2022 includes pressure to take Russian citizenship, school curricula reinforcing Russian "patriotic education" for children as young as three, militarised competitive activities under Russian army oversight. Even speaking Ukrainian can lead to arrest, torture and conviction. More than 20,000 Ukrainian children have been deported and russified, with only 2,133 returned as of May 2026. On 12 March 2026 the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that "deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children by Russian authorities, as well as enforced disappearances, amount to crimes against humanity." [13] Property expropriation is transforming the geography of the occupied territories into "New Russia." More than 38,000 homes have been registered as "abandoned" by Russian authorities, and settlers from the Russian Federation are moving in in large numbers.
The Crimean Tatars --- the first victims of the 2014 occupation --- continue to face systematic targeting: the ban on the Mejlis, Russian conscription of Crimean Tatar men, persecution on trumped-up charges of Islamic extremism, the suppression of the Crimean Tatar language. Mustafa Dzhemilev, the long-time Crimean Tatar leader, former Soviet political prisoner and Ukrainian MP, warns that any deal accepting Russian occupation of Crimea would mean disaster for his people --- "We struggled for half a century to be able to return to our homeland; now we are again forced to flee." [14]
Civil resistance under occupation has also taken the form of the Yellow Ribbon civil disobedience network, partisan operations, and refusal to take Russian citizenship despite mounting cost. The all-women Zla Mavka network (Angry Mavkas, named after the female forest spirit in Ukrainian folklore), founded in occupied Melitopol in early 2023, distributes Ukrainian-language leaflets, vandalises Russian propaganda, and coordinates non-violent dissent across Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and other occupied regions; its activists exploit what the founders describe as the occupiers’ assumption that women cannot be saboteurs --- turning gendered invisibility to operational advantage. [15]
Labour rights under occupation have been systematically extinguished. As Vasyl Andreyev of the FPU and Luca Cirigliano of the Swiss Trade Union Confederation, both members of the ILO Governing Body, reported in January 2026, Ukrainian workers in occupied territories are "compelled to accept Russian labour law, re-register under occupation authorities or obtain Russian passports --- or risk detention or dismissal"; union property has been seized and handed to Kremlin-backed structures. [16]
Language as casus belli and as practice
Russia’s justification for war is based on the claim that it was defending Russian-speakers in Ukraine. Hanna Perekhoda, a Sotsialnyi Rukh historian originally from Donetsk, insists "before the Russian invasion in 2014, practically no such problem existed in Ukraine. It was a Russian discourse aimed at fueling internal conflicts, using the Russian-speaking population as a tool for their own political purposes of subjugating Ukraine." [17] She notes that the actual effect of the war has been the opposite of the one Moscow predicted: "the war and the atrocities committed by the Russians have led many Ukrainians to speak only Ukrainian." [18] Most military units (including the ultranationalist Azov-inspired units) function in Russian, reflecting their recruitment from central and eastern Ukraine, the regions where Russian is most widely spoken.
The war has certainly strengthened some reactionary Ukrainian nationalist currents, with constant pressure to remove Russian from public life, denigration of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and restrictive laws on the use of Russian (and other minority languages) in official communication, the public sector, and education. The June 2022 law on Ukrainian music in broadcasting, in force from October 2022, prohibits performances and broadcasts of music by post-1991 Russian citizens with a "white list" exemption for those who have publicly condemned the invasion and declared support for Ukrainian sovereignty.
The Russian-Ukrainian language conflict is a product of, not a cause of, Russian aggression --- as the destruction Russia has inflicted on Russian-speaking Mariupol and Kharkiv makes plain.
Anti-corruption: the rear breaks open
The largest civic mobilisations since the start of the full-scale war came in summer 2025. The anti-corruption protests --- triggered by Bill 12414, which stripped the operational independence of the anti-corruption agencies [19] --- took place in 22 cities, with 13,000-16,000 in Kyiv. Generation Z and military veterans formed the protest backbone. A Facebook post by the veteran Dmytro Koziatynskyi explicitly echoed Mustafa Nayem’s 2013 call that brought the first crowds to the Maidan (the 2013-14 Euromaidan revolution). Vitaliy Dudin saw a particular kind of political moment: "These mobilisations are chaotic by nature. People have no experience of mass demonstrations for more than three years. Political parties have no influence on this movement. At least not yet." [20] His Sotsialnyi Rukh colleague Denys Pilash noted that by tacit agreement, nobody at the protests was displaying their political affiliation. Dudin recognised an opportunity: "We can make new friends there. We see in these demonstrations how deep the demand for social justice is."
The government partially retreated. In November 2025, the anti-corruption agencies exposed a $100 million (around EUR 90 million) kickback scheme at the state nuclear company Energoatom, implicating Zelensky’s long-time business partner Timur Mindich as well as Andriy Yermak, the president’s chief of staff, who resigned on 28 November 2025 following a raid on his home. [21] According to National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) chief Semen Kryvonos, "without the [July] protests, the Energoatom case wouldn’t have happened. It would have been destroyed for sure." [22]
LGBT rights in wartime
Over six hundred LGBT+ military personnel and veterans now organise openly through LGBT Military for Equal Rights, serving in at least fifty-nine units, with the unicorn patch --- adopted in 2014 as sardonic answer to Russian claims that "there are no gay people in the army" --- sewn beneath the national flag. Their visible service has been politically consequential. In a country where homosexuality was criminalised until 1991 and where public attitudes remained predominantly hostile until the eve of the full-scale invasion, the combat record of openly LGBT soldiers, and the unanswerable counter it produces to a Russian state that classifies LGBT identity itself as "extremism", have done more for the political legitimacy of Ukrainian LGBT rights than decades of prior advocacy. Polling now shows a substantial shift in Ukrainian public opinion in favour of legal recognition and protection. Some liberal reforms have been won despite the constraints. On 25 February 2026 the Supreme Court of Ukraine confirmed a same-sex couple as a family, "affirming that such recognition can be based on proven circumstances of their shared life rather than on political decisions or the existence of formal partnership laws." [23]
The far right
The far right parties Svoboda and Right Sector polled in low single digits before 2022 and have had no parliamentary representation since 2014. The far right is most visible elsewhere: in municipal politics in Lviv and parts of central and western Ukraine, in street mobilisations around historical memory, language and minorities, and in physical attacks on the Ukrainian left. According to Ihor Vasylets of Pryama Diia "there have been beatings in Kyiv and on several other occasions, and it is a fairly serious problem that prevents us from working actively in the streets and at the university." [24]
Workers, soldiers, the left
Among the organised political forces inside Ukraine, the anti-capitalist left is small, but with a distinctive voice and practical engagement. Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) [25] is the largest anticapitalist organisation. Its membership has doubled during the war but remains in the low hundreds. It describes itself as "during difficult times for Ukraine, consistently defending the interests of workers, veterans and internally displaced persons (IDPs), whilst also supporting military personnel." [26] Its programme of progressive taxation, debt cancellation, expropriation of oligarchs, public-led reconstruction and labour rights frames the radical left’s response to the wartime political economy.
The student union Pryama Diia (Direct Action), refounded in February 2023 and close to Sotsialnyi Rukh, has built a federally structured network of university-level unions. [27] Its campaigns are concrete. At the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, during the 2024-25 winter, dormitory residents facing utility overcharges and temperatures below 16°C drafted collective complaints, then pickets; by July 2025 they had won UAH 2,200 (around EUR 50) per resident in returned utility costs, capital repairs and a full-time dormitory manager. In parallel a collective complaint forced the academy to remove a life model accused of harassment by multiple female students. [28] On 24 October 2025 a Pryama Diia student conference on the same question was disrupted by 8-10 far-right youths who blocked the doors, denounced the union for spreading "LGBT ideology, feminism, and anarchism", drew a knife and attacked a security guard. [29]
The feminist organisations Bilkis, FemSolution and Feminist Workshop work on women’s labour, gender-based violence, women in the army and queer rights. [30]
[(On 20 March 2022 the National Security and Defence Council banned eleven opposition parties, mostly openly Russia-aligned and oligarch-linked, and a few marginal left and far right parties. [31] Several party leaders fled to Moscow. The Ukrainian radical left, which had no political affinity with the banned organisations, has condemned this move as unjustified and a dangerous precident.)]
Labour under fire from both sides
Healthcare workers, concentrated in one of the feminised sectors Saburova identifies as carrying the heaviest war burden, have produced the most developed worker self-organisation in any wartime industry. The Be Like We Are movement (formerly Be Like Nina), founded by nurses against the consequences of the 2017 healthcare reform and the loss of roughly 14% of Ukraine’s healthcare workforce since 2022, has built independent trade union structures at hospital level, supported colleagues in legal cases against abusive directors, and conducted international solidarity work with striking nurses in New York and at the Garrahan children’s hospital in Buenos Aires. Be Like We Are chair Oksana Slobodyana warns that "if healthcare is not protected, if human resources are not preserved, no renovation, no innovation, no improvement will be useful. In fact, there will be no state without medicine, without education and without an army." [32]
The major union confederations, KVPU and FPU, have come under sustained legal attack. Draft law 5054, which would have exempted managers of foreign-capital enterprises from Ukrainian labour law, introduced enterprise-level lockouts, made fixed-term contracts the norm, and weakened protections against unfair dismissal, was voted down in the Verkhovna Rada on 8 January 2025 after opposition led by KVPU chair Mykhailo Volynets and international intervention from IndustriALL Global and IndustriALL European. [33] A parallel draft law, 5344d, would have stripped rights from people with disabilities, war veterans and Paralympians in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Labour organisations work under conditions the Western left has not faced for decades. Martial law has restricted strikes, protests and the press since February 2022. Collective bargaining has been suspended in many sectors.
The FPU has been the target of a state campaign to expropriate its property: on 5 June 2025 the National Agency for Asset Management (ARMA) entered the House of Trade Unions on Maidan and ordered FPU staff out; on 13 May 2026 a Pechersk District Court ruling permitted the FPU to return under a renewed leadership. The Ukrainian socialist left has insisted that the state attack on FPU property is to be opposed, while consistently criticising the accommodating posture of the FPU leadership on the Labour Code and other issues. At the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome on 10-11 July 2025, the Ministry of Economy under Yulia Svyrydenko and the FPU signed a tripartite memorandum on Labour Code reform. The more dynamic KVPU did not sign.
Soldiers under pressure
Soldiers are overstretched and under-rotated. The 2024 lowering of the mobilisation age to 25 has not closed the manpower gap. There are fewer and fewer new volunteers; desertion is rising. [34] Many of these are men who have served continuously for several years, watching wealthier Ukrainians purchase medical exemptions for $3,000 (around EUR 2,600) or legally avoid conscription by maintaining university registration. Over one million government officials hold mobilisation exemptions. The November 2024 "Army+" platform, allowing soldiers to request unit transfers electronically, and a partial amnesty under which approximately 9,000 deserters returned voluntarily, address symptoms rather than causes. As I wrote last year, Ukrainian defenders fight "not only Russian imperialism but also their own state’s failures in mobilisation, welfare and accountability." [35]
Soldiers also push back collectively. In September 2025, 24 soldiers from the repair battalion of the 125th Separate Heavy Mechanised Brigade --- mostly 50+ drone-repair specialists operating self-organised workshops with 3D printers funded by their families --- announced they would collectively go absent rather than obey orders transferring them to assault positions. The order was cancelled within forty-eight hours. Two months earlier the 48th Separate Assault Battalion, ninety per cent volunteers and including many Crimean Tatars fighting to reclaim occupied homelands, issued a public video protesting the removal of their founding commander Lenur Islyamov at Pokrovsk: "Changing the commander at a critical moment is a direct threat to the unit’s combat capability." So far, the military hierarchy deals with most such incidents through negotiation and transfer of the soldiers and officers involved, rather than with wartime discipline. This reflects the regime’s reliance on public support, and an awareness of its fragility.
The left’s intervention
Sotsialnyi Rukh’s October 2024 conference resolution called for "ending the uncertainty regarding the duration of military service, as it is a matter of elementary fairness", defending the rights of conscripts and servicemen "to dignified treatment, demobilisation after a defined term of service, and rehabilitation." Its March 2025 ten-point programme links military and economic mobilisation: fixed service terms, restored salary protections for mobilised workers, dignified compensation for the wounded, and the parallel shifting of the war’s economic burden from working-class men to oligarchic capital. [36] "Economic reservation" --- a 2024 proposal allowing companies to exempt employees by paying UAH 20,000 (around EUR 440) monthly per worker --- would have formalised the class evasion already operating informally. Technological superiority combined with dignified treatment of personnel, Sotsialnyi Rukh argues, is the path to sustainable defence.
The Ukrainian left, feminist and social movements have remade themselves in part through their active role in the war. The Commons editor Taras Bilous, a serving soldier in Ukraine’s armed forces since the beginning of the Russian aggression, explains that "In the first days of the invasion, I understood that the future of the left movement in Ukraine depended on whether we actively participate in the war or not. ... If we had not gone to fight, everything would have fallen apart. The left would have ceased to exist as any kind of entity in Ukraine." [37]
The anti-capitalist left’s institutional weight and recruitment infrastructure cannot be compared with the much larger and better established far-right military units which have an explicit far right identity. [38]
Peace, reconstruction, solidarity
Ukrainian opinion has shifted across four years. Most Ukrainians would now accept a ceasefire along the current line of contact. Most would not accept formal cession of territory and Russian sovereignty over Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. [39]
Sotsialnyi Rukh member Oleksandr Kyselov set out the dilemma: Ukrainian forces are exhausted and Western support increasingly conditional, but the terms emerging from Washington amount to surrender dressed up as compromise. [40] According to Kyselov, "the Trump administration’s proposals for peace in Ukraine sound like a real estate deal, where the United States gets a payoff for handing over Ukrainian land." [41] Conditions for the safe return of refugees depend on security guarantees that do not yet exist. The credible guarantees Ukrainians demand --- western countries’ commitment to provide similar arms supply, financial and diplomatic support in the event of a second Russian Federation attack --- are precisely what the Trump-led West is unwilling to provide. The "peace" being negotiated by Washington is a coerced ceasefire on Russian terms without guarantees that would make it sustainable.
What kind of country will Ukraine be after the guns fall silent?
Reconstruction is not a question deferred to peacetime. It is being designed now, and visible through a series of donor conferences --- Lugano 2022, London 2023, Berlin 2024, Rome 2025 --- and reform conditionalities attached to the EU Ukraine Facility, IMF loans, the World Bank Development Policy Loan and the Matrix of Reform. The political economy these instruments converge on is consistent: privatisation of public services, fiscal austerity, deregulation of labour, attraction of foreign investment as the engine of post-war growth. According to Yuliya Yurchenko, KVPU representative in the United Kingdom and member of Sotsialnyi Rukh, "the design on the table for Ukraine, with its crippling state debt, austerity approach to public spending, high reliance on remittances (10% of GDP in 2021), low wages and labour protections could hardly be seen as capable of delivering anything comparable" to post-war European welfare-state reconstruction. [42] Mass displacement, demographic collapse, destruction of housing and infrastructure, debt overhang, oligarchic continuity and the proposed terms of EU accession compound on one another.
In this perspective, post-war Ukraine will be a permanent dependency: a deregulated periphery delivered to international capital. The US push for mineral access under Trump 2.0 openly structures Ukrainian partition and reconstruction as a market opportunity. Sotsialnyi Rukh has put the choice plainly: in its March 2025 statement it argued that "the Ukrainian government has a unique opportunity to show, in practice, what it is willing to sacrifice --- the country or the oligarchs"; its programme calls for progressive taxation up to 90% of income, expropriation of oligarchic assets, debt cancellation, and public-led reconstruction. "The dismantling of oligarchic capitalism has become more possible than ever in the context of full-scale war and is seen as justified by society."
The rearmament programme noted earlier is largely a transfer to Western arms manufacturers rather than to Ukrainian defence. The financing question remains open. "There are three options," argues Hanna Perekhoda. "Firstly, one can cut funding for national social systems --- that is dangerous and wrong. Social insecurity strengthens anti-democratic populists and fascists. Secondly, taxes could be increased for the super-rich and corporations. This requires coordination, however, to prevent capital flight. Trump’s announcement of golden visas for the super-rich means he is already preparing for such a scenario. But there is a third solution. Around EUR 300 billion in Russian assets have been frozen. These could be confiscated and used to finance the defence of Ukraine and also for European security. Russia would thus be held accountable for its war crimes, and the defence burden would not be placed solely on European citizens." [43]
In February 2026, Bilous wrote that Washington had surrendered Ukraine’s leverage rather than using it: "Trump surrendered one negotiating position after another, abandoned his demand for an unconditional ceasefire, and gave Putin what he wanted: recognition and a way out of international isolation." His question to the Western radical left was direct and largely unanswered: "But who on the Left is saying that Russia must be forced to comply with the ceasefire?" Bilous’ warning is that a bad ceasefire, particularly one requiring Ukraine to cede unoccupied Donbas territory, would destabilise Ukrainian society and strengthen the far right. [44] A bad peace would also be the moment at which the wartime contradictions analysed above --- between a working class carrying the burden of defence and an oligarchy carrying none of it, between worker self-organisation from below and donor-driven reform from above --- become the political content of post-war Ukraine.
The contribution to the war effort by the Ukrainian left --- the labour and student unions, feminist groups, Sotsialnyi Rukh, Pryama Diia, Be Like We Are, Solidarity Collectives --- has built the political vocabulary and credibility for the hard work in Ukraine after the guns fall silent. It is the responsibility of the Western left to listen, and to provide political and material support.
Solidarity means standing with Ukrainian workers, women, soldiers, refugees and the people of the occupied territories against the imperialisms that have shaped this war, and against a "peace" that would deliver Ukraine permanently to occupation, dependency, or both.
21 May 2026
Source: ESSF. This is a slightly modified version of an article published in Spanish on 20 March on Viento Sur: La economía política de la guerra de Ucrania y la política de una mala paz en ciernes.
