the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 17, 2025
The following is translated from the February 28, 2025 issue #2952 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
When Trump demands that Ukraine give the U.S. exclusive right to the country’s resources and infrastructure to the tune of 500 billion dollars, he crudely puts into words one of the stakes of the war since the start: the sharing of Ukraine’s wealth between American capitalists and Russian oligarchs.
These riches are many. Thousands of square miles of very fertile agricultural land called “black soil” made Ukraine the world’s fourth largest agricultural exporter until 2022. The war accelerated the takeover of these lands by a handful of agri-businesses run by Ukrainian oligarchs but controlled by Western capital, some American, like Goldman Sachs, and some European, like BNP. The war allowed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to pass a law authorizing companies with foreign capital to buy these lands. Laws inherited from the Soviet period had prohibited this, and successive Ukrainian leaders had never managed to impose this “reform.”
The Ukrainian subsoil is full of minerals essential to modern industrial sectors, such as electric batteries and telecommunications. Titanium, lithium, and certain metals called “rare earths” are particularly coveted. Ukraine also has uranium, which is essential for nuclear power plants. The stakes of the ongoing negotiations, with Trump holding a revolver to Ukraine’s head, are the financial and legal conditions under which American capitalists will be able to exploit and maybe own the mines and factories that extract, process, and refine these minerals. Negotiations are moving forward. In February, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said that Ukrainian and American teams are in the final phase of negotiations over these minerals.
Control over the Ukrainian economy also takes other forms. Westinghouse has taken over the nuclear sector, the pillar of electricity production in Ukraine. French-owned Crédit Agricole Ukraine became co-owner of the main land-line telecommunications provider and is the third largest cell phone operator in the country. French bank LCL was voted the leading bank in the country for car loans last year. LCL is not the most powerful Western predator to set its sights on Ukraine’s economy. Other capitalists such as retail giant Auchan are very present in Ukraine … and ALSO in Russia.
By negotiating one-on-one with Putin, Trump and his team kill two birds with one stone. They displace European capitalists from the Ukrainian trough, or leave them only with second-choice slops. And they place themselves in first position to resume their dealings in Russia which were hampered by the war but which never fully stopped. Putin said this explicitly on February 23: “We are ready to attract foreign partners to the historical territories that have been returned to Russia…. We are ready to work with our partners, including Americans, in the new regions.”
After three years of war, hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian deaths, and a gulf of hatred dug between two sibling peoples, now bureaucrats, oligarchs, and capitalists are flocking around the juicy Ukrainian prey.