For a Peace From Below in Ukraine

Critics often compare Trump’s peace plan to the Munich Agreement of 1938, when the leaders of Britain and France forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. That strategy of “appeasing the aggressor” ended in disaster. In March 1939, Adolf Hitler occupied and subdued the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Just as London and Paris once did, Trump is pressuring an ally to hand over territory to an aggressor and threatening to cut military aid. Upon returning from Munich, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously declared: “I believe it is peace for our time.” Trump speaks about peace with no less pathos. There are many parallels between Trump’s diplomacy and the Munich catastrophe but also important differences. After all, why has Vladimir Putin continually rejected Trump’s proposals?

Among the many aspects of the Ukrainian crisis, one makes compromise nearly impossible: one side’s gain means total defeat for the other. At stake is the preservation or destruction of American global hegemony. Russian control over Ukraine would not only be Moscow’s revenge for losing the Cold War; it would radically alter the balance of power in Europe and beyond. Such a Russian triumph would show that borders can be changed without regard for Washington, and that American guarantees are meaningless. When Joe Biden spoke of defending a “rules-based world,” he was referring to US hegemony.

Certainly, Trump has changed the “rules” of American hegemony. In his version, international law can be violated, and foreign territory seized, if Washington grants political indulgence. He is demonstratively sacrificing the interests and demands of his European allies. Russian Marxist political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky writes in the terms of Immanuel Wallerstein: “Trump seeks to transform the Western-centric world system into an American world-empire.” But even under such rules, he cannot give Putin all of Ukraine without destroying the entire architecture of US global influence.

Putin, on the other hand, cannot settle for certain regions while leaving the rest of Ukraine under de facto Western protection — in some proposals, even with European troops and military guarantees. Standing in his way are not only imperial ambitions but also pragmatic considerations rooted in history.

In the 1990s, the United States saw Russia as its main partner in the post-Soviet space, and Ukraine as peripheral. But by the end of the decade, ties between Moscow and Washington had weakened. The Kremlin was alarmed by US interventionism (clearly manifested in Yugoslavia, and then in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in a series of “color revolutions” in Europe and the post-Soviet space). Washington feared that deep integration of Russia into Western structures would weaken American influence. Thus, in 2000, Bill Clinton refused Putin’s proposal to join NATO.

To control Moscow’s rapprochement with the European Union, Washington turned to Ukraine. In 2004, the United States supported the first Maidan revolution, which inspired Russia’s liberal opposition. Putin was frightened — not only by the geopolitical implications, but by the threat to his own power. Over time, this fear crystallized into the doctrine that Ukraine had become an American tool for regime change in Moscow — an “Anti-Russia.” In 2007 in Munich, Putin publicly denounced American hegemony for the first time.

After the protests of 2011–2012 in Russia, the second Maidan in 2013–2014 convinced the Kremlin that the struggle was not just over Kyiv but over the survival of the Russian regime itself. The new Ukrainian government dismantled pro-Russian organizations, downgraded the status of the Russian language, and announced that the Black Sea Fleet’s lease in Crimea would not be renewed. The annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass from 2014 further tied Ukraine to the logic of Russian internal politics. Any defeat would threaten the very existence of Putin’s system.

The full-scale invasion finally bound the fate of Putin’s rule to its success in Ukraine. The Russian president can feel safe only through triumph in war and Ukraine’s full subordination to Moscow. From the Kremlin’s perspective, the Ukrainian state, at least since the 2014 Maidan, has been institutionally integrated into the system of Western hegemony: aspirations for NATO and EU membership are included in the Constitution; pro-Russian parties, media, and even informal groups of the ruling class oriented toward Moscow are systematically squeezed out of legal politics; linguistic and religious policies are aimed at ousting the Russian language and the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate; the nationalist consensus of the post-Maidan elites in the Kremlin is understood as a determination to make the cultural and political rift between the two countries irreversible. In Russian diplomatic language, this is called “the root causes of the conflict, which should be eliminated.” This requires dismantling the Ukrainian state as currently structured.

Any compromise that leaves Ukraine in the Western sphere of influence is dangerous for the Kremlin: massive losses, depleted resources, economic crisis, and hundreds of thousands of traumatized veterans will make political turmoil almost inevitable. Meanwhile, revanchism will become an idée fixe for the Ukrainian elite and much of society, whose military capacity is far greater than in 2022. The Kremlin’s long-standing nightmare has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The diplomatic maneuvers of Trump and Putin perfectly fit the principle of ancient strategist Sun Tzu, who called war “a path of deception.” Moscow and Washington are each trying to sell the other a strategic defeat disguised as compromise. Trump hints he may recognize border changes to persuade Putin to abandon ambitions over the whole of Ukraine. Moscow, in turn, praises Trump’s “peace efforts,” but attempts to add conditions that transform compromise into a Russian victory.

To achieve this, Russian diplomacy advances two sets of demands. First: “demilitarization” of Ukraine — limits on the size of the armed forces, bans on weapon supplies, and prohibition of security guarantees or alliances. This would leave Ukraine defenseless and quickly make it a compliant satellite.

Second: engineering political crisis in Kyiv. Russia demands control over unoccupied territories in Donbass, Zelensky’s resignation, and cultural changes incompatible with Ukraine’s current nationalist narrative (such as restoring official status to the Russian language and legalizing the Moscow-affiliated Orthodox Church). Political chaos is intended to let Russia rebuild the Ukrainian state on its terms.

The “platinum guarantees” for Ukraine promised by Trump after the Berlin talks, if they prove truly serious, could invalidate these Kremlin tactical maneuvers. Then Putin will abandon the ceasefire, and we’ll return to another round of escalation.

On both sides of the front, a powerful “war party” persists. In Russia, war has enabled the largest redistribution of property since the 1990s. The officials and oligarchs who have benefited see any compromise as a threat. For many Western politicians, militarization is a last chance to maintain power amid sustained economic crises. The strategy of defeating Russia on the battlefield still enjoys the support of many governments in Europe, as well as parts of both the Republican and Democratic establishments in the United States. However, this strategy seems unlikely to succeed.

First, the United States failed to isolate Russia: China and the Global South resisted Western pressure, and trade with them cushioned Russia from sanctions. Desire to secure Russia’s strategic defeat helped the Kremlin consolidate domestic support.

Moreover, sanctions targeting ordinary Russians, visa bans, canceled flights, and rhetoric about “collective responsibility” have fueled Kremlin propaganda. As Russia Today’s Margarita Simonyan once said: “If we lose, The Hague — literal or symbolic — will come for everyone, even the janitor at the Kremlin wall . . . The scale of catastrophe is unimaginable.” The regime exploits the trauma of the 1990s, remembered as a period of disaster imposed by Western “rules.”

Still, this rally-’round-the-flag effect is fading. Levada Center polls suggest that Russians’ support for relatives signing army contracts has fallen from 52 percent in 2023 to 30 percent today; 52 percent do not want family members to serve. Twice as many people favor immediate peace talks as continuing the war. A closed VTsIOM poll found 57 percent of Russians saying they are tired of the war. Desertions are growing: 18,500 convictions for unauthorized absence have been issued, and independent reports estimate nearly 50,000 deserters as of late 2024.

Before the war, discontent was most common among the urban middle class. Now it is concentrated among the poor and working class. Wealthy Moscow has become a fortress of loyalty to Putin, while the provinces show the highest levels of dissatisfaction. This is logical: the working class is paying the heaviest price. The profile of political prisoners has changed dramatically (their number has grown eight-to-tenfold, not counting tens of thousands of deserters). As Re:Russia notes, “Resistance to the regime now comes not from urban liberal milieus, but from entirely different social strata.”

These social groups — especially the working class, from which hundreds of thousands of soldiers are recruited — pose the greatest threat to Putin’s rule. But they lack political representation, media, or organizations. Neither Western politicians nor Russian opposition exiles communicate with them, though the basis for dialogue is obvious: peace, which the regime cannot give them.

This latent discontent could turn into action if a force emerges that can offer Russians peace over the heads of a war-entrenched dictatorship. Such a peace must rest on self-determination of peoples—not the sham “referendums” staged under military occupation, but deep democratization across the post-Soviet space. Borders, state structures, and cultural policies should be decided by people themselves, not elites at backstage negotiations.

Militarization in the West cannot stop Putin’s imperialism — but can grimly turn Western societies into its mirror image. A call for immediate peace based on rejecting hegemonic ambitions, military blocs, and spheres of influence would have enormous moral power. It would win support from hundreds of thousands of soldiers and millions in the rear — both in Russia and in Ukraine. If the Kremlin refuses, it will lose both the Global South and its own population.

It would surely be naive to expect such a radical peace program from current governments in Moscow or the West. For it to come to the fore, we cannot rely on the failing traditional center-left parties that uphold the hegemonic consensus but the rising movements that break with the neoliberal establishment. That also means the kind of forces that powered Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York, or La France Insoumise, or the mass solidarity campaigns for Palestine that have become such a tremendous force across Europe.

Left-wing movements across continents share core principles: stopping genocide in Gaza, fighting climate catastrophe, rejecting colonialism and militarism, reducing inequality, and ensuring education and health care as basic rights. But they lack a clear strategy for ending the war in Europe. This was the discussion begun at the recent international antiwar forum in Paris organized by La France Insoumise, its allies, and leaders of Britain’s Your Party including Zarah Sultana.

Hundreds of delegates from global left movements participated, including us, the Russian-Ukrainian coalition “Peace From Below,” which unites left-wing activists from Russia and Ukraine. We are convinced that current governments are incapable of bringing sustainable peace to our peoples, and that the path to achieving it lies through internal change in our countries. We believe this discussion must continue. Victory of progressive forces — nationally or globally — is impossible without a clear strategy to end the war that sustains today’s ruling classes.