Ukraine Retains Pawn Status

Jul 1, 2024

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will hold its summit in early July, where it is expected that Ukrainian president Zelensky will continue to push for Ukraine to be allowed to join NATO. But the U.S. government is again indicating that NATO will not invite Ukraine to join right now.

The U.S. organized NATO 75 years ago as a military threat against the Soviet Union. NATO was originally made up of the governments and military forces of the U.S., Canada and most of the countries of Western Europe.

After the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, many of the former Soviet dominated states in Eastern Europe were pulled away from Russia and brought into NATO. The U.S. and other NATO countries have built military bases and stationed troops in former Soviet territories, right up to the very border of Russia. They have missiles that are aimed at Russia.

It was this growing military threat from the U.S. and NATO that provoked Putin to launch his brutal invasion of Ukraine.

While the U.S. claims to be helping the Ukrainian people defend themselves, in reality, the U.S. is using this war for their own reasons, in order to weaken Russia. Russia, along with China and Iran, present a problem for the U.S. because they are able to take some independence from U.S. imperialism. As the U.S. prepares for a possible third world war, they seem to want to weaken Russia by extending the war in Ukraine.

The U.S. and NATO are perfectly fine to keep this war going today by supplying weapons and money. They are perfectly fine that hundreds of thousands of people, soldiers and civilians have been killed on both sides. But they are not ready to send in their own troops, at least not yet. The U.S. and NATO want to be able to decide when and how to intervene in this war and future wars, based only on what serves the interests of imperialism.

For U.S. capitalism, Ukraine is just a pawn to be used in a world that they want to dominate.