I have no sympathy for the Ukrainian president, a neoliberal politician. But, in this case, one must acknowledge a certain courage and even pride in him. He already, at the beginning of the war, refused the taxi that Biden offered him for evacuation. This time, it is Trump whom he dared to resist. After an exchange of words bordering on altercation, he even left slamming the door... And without signing the infamous agreement on the neocolonial plundering of rare earth minerals!

In this matter of rare earth minerals, Zelensky can blame himself. It was he who proposed to offer Ukraine’s mineral wealth to the USA. He hoped to thereby charm Trump and secure the extension of military aid. Instead, he probably gave Trump, unwittingly, the idea of a diabolical deal: cut off aid, thereby increasing the Russian threat... and consequently force Ukraine to sell off its resources at bargain prices... to then share them with Putin. For now, it seems that Trump has missed his shot. But he will certainly try again.

Meanwhile, those who have been misguided for years in saying that Ukraine is waging a proxy war against Russia, on behalf of the USA and NATO, are struggling to hide that they understand nothing of the matter and are playing into the hands of Putin’s imperialism. For after all, who is Washington’s proxy today? The answer is obvious: the proxy [the intermediary] is Putin! It is indeed on him that Trump is counting to strangle the Ukrainians and force them to surrender their wealth... with the help of Kim Jong-Un!

It is certainly evident that the USA has sought to take advantage of Ukrainian resistance to weaken Russia. Why would they have missed this opportunity? In inter-imperialist rivalry, all means are fair. But this rivalry is at the same time complicity between bandits. The entire sequence of events since Biden’s evacuation proposal shows that the Americans especially do not want to bring down Putin. The West, in truth, wants the despot to remain in power to ensure stability and to share with him (and his ilk) the world’s wealth at the expense of the peoples.

With Trump, the masks are falling. They are also falling on the left. For the theorists of the so-called “US proxy war against Russia”, the hour of truth has struck. Internationalism is not choosing the camp of one bandit against another, in the name of the “lesser evil”: it is always choosing the camp of the oppressed against the oppressors, the exploited against the exploiters, the aggressed against the aggressors. As the slogan aptly puts it: “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” To persist in campism is to choose the path that leads to the red-brown swamp, of sinister memory. Solidarity with the Ukrainian people!

Daniel Tanuro