Russia and Ukraine have been in a state of full-scale war for three years. The number of killed and injured soldiers, on each side, is now measured in the hundreds of thousands. Eastern Ukraine, the former industrial heartland of the country, now stands in ruins. Stretching for over 1000 kilometers, the front line is barely moving, while an aggressive mobilization campaign in the civilian sector ensures a steady flow of new recruits to reinforce this stalemate of mass slaughter.
What is the point of continuing to push the toiling people of these nations that, just over a generation ago, shared one country, the Soviet Union, to kill each other on an industrial scale?
In Ukraine, the answer to this question is obvious, at least among the leading agents of the ruling class. “To win or not to be. This is not a question; it is a terrible, brutal dilemma for Ukraine, for Europe, for the entire civilized world,” declared Victor Pinchuk, the country’s second richest man, at the elite gathering of the 2024 Yalta European Strategy conference. He called on the West to provide more assistance, describing it as a win-win partnership, in which “the West doesn’t give lives; only Ukrainians do.”
Image: Viktor Pinchuk at the 2010 Time 100 Gala. (Licensed under CC BY 3.0)
The willingness of the Ukrainians to give up their lives is guaranteed by a campaign of forced mobilization, which has been ongoing since the start of the full-scale war. Across the country, from large cities to small towns and villages, the conscription of new recruits is administered by the so-called Territorial Center of Recruitment and Social Support. The main target of their daily raids are men within the age group 25 to 50, namely, those with the lowest income and no capacity to bribe themselves out. Once mobilized, these men face indefinite service in the military, with a maximum monthly compensation of 100,000 hryvnias – about $2500 – for being deployed on the front line. The majority of Ukrainians view this as a one-way ticket to the grave and desperately try to avoid mobilization.
Those who fail to escape mobilization get the opportunity to sacrifice themselves by “dying for the cause of independence,” which Pinchuk defined as the condition where “the country is… anchored in the West, its natural geographic, political, and strategic home.” Incidentally, the West has long been the strategic export market and investment destination for Pinchuk’s business empire. While the war is destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure, the Interpipe Group, a company specializing in the manufacturing of steel pipes and railway products, is boasting that 83 percent of its output is intended for export, with the European market accounting for 47 percent of the sales. Pinchuk and his family retain a large real estate portfolio, including the Grand Buildings in London and four villas on the Italian island of Sardinia.
Image: Akhmetov in 2008 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
Besides Pinchuk, this cause of independence is also entirely compatible with the business schemes of Ukraine’s wealthiest capitalist, Rinat Akhmetov, and his mining and steel conglomerate Metinvest. The company’s CEO, Yuriy Ryzhenkov, proudly boasts that Metinvest is successfully able to export raw materials out of the war-turn country, while channeling the proceeds into the development of its enterprises in the European Union. Among its current goals, reports Ryzhenkov, is the acquisition of the Polish steel plate producer Liberty Czestochowa, which would provide “a good opportunity for Metinvest to go into European green steel production…”
Metinvest is also working on expanding its production activities in Italy, where the company already owns two plate mills in the north of the country. The latest edition is a joint venture project with the European steel manufacturer Danieli in the coastal town of Piombino, with construction set to begin in the first quarter of 2025. According to Ryzhenkov, the plant would “use iron ore from Ukraine to produce [finished] steel in Italy.” In the current conditions, claims the CEO, “it’s natural” for Ukraine’s largest corporation “to build… somewhere on the Mediterranean,” no less so than for its owner to hold his wealth in the form of luxury real estate, stretching across Britain, France, Belgium and Switzerland.
It is no accident that Akhmetov and Pinchuk now rank at the top of Ukraine’s financial elite. Such is the reward for not following the path of their counterparts who backed the ousted Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych in 2014 and thus became the target of Western sanctions and had to leave the country and relocate to Russia. Such is the reward for keeping Ukraine in the pro-Western camp and backing Zelensky’s government in the face of the full-scale war with Russia.
The Ukrainian capitalists benefit from the status quo where the country’s working class is being sacrificed at the front. So does the Russian bourgeoisie, for whom Ukraine is simply a buffer state in the struggle against Western competitors.
In an interview with RBK, Vladimir Potanin, the largest shareholder of the mining giant Nornickel, lectured the public on the importance of resilience.
“We, as a… country, must [stay] in good shape and simply survive this period and reach the shore on which we will then build new rules of relations with all other countries…”
Surviving this period is no big deal for Potanin, who was happy to report that, “in my case, I think it was easy to adjust” to the new conditions. In response to Western sanctions, Nornickel simply shifted “the logistics chain to more friendly countries, particularly to China…” Sharing a similar view, another leading Russian capitalist, Alisher Usmanov, whose net worth currently stands at $15 billion, proudly declared that Western sanctions failed “to punish the business elite…” The West “wanted to harm the Russian economy, but it is growing.”
The fortunes of Russian capitalists continued to grow during the war. Such is the reward for choosing rivalry with the ruling class of the West, for refusing to accept the conditions under which Russia could integrate into the Western economic and political bloc, and for pursuing – especially since 2014 – a gradual shift of economic relations toward Asia. Such is the reward for realizing that, in the current conditions of the world order, it’s time “to take off [our] pants and bow to the Chinese” bourgeoisie. At least that is how the situation was described by a prominent Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. And, until the Deripaska-types feel that peace is compatible with the profit of their business empires, the current status quo must be sustained by pushing the proletariat into the meat grinder.
This simple and bitter truth is carefully wrapped under a thick blanket of patriotism – the ideological weapon of Russia’s bourgeoisie.
“Patriotism is the readiness to die for one’s country,” said the prominent businessman and media magnate Konstantin Malofeev. “This is what the army gives to a person, because only in the army does a person have such love for his Motherland … Our compatriots, the real heroes, are now going to the front to die for Russia, for Victory.”
Unlike their Ukrainian counterparts, at this stage of the war, Russia’s ruling class does not see the need to mobilize the population through the mechanism of brute coercion. In the early stages of the war, this instrument was only applied in the Russian-controlled territories of Donetsk and Lugansk. Since then, however, the front was sufficiently reinforced by an aggressive recruitment campaign, selling the population an opportunity to make money, wrapped in the pretty colors of nationalistic nonsense.
In a country where trade unions have no power to bargain on behalf of the working class, where up to 17 million urban residents live in dilapidated housing and more than 37.7 percent of the population make less than $280 a month, there is no shortage of those willing to take this risk by signing a contract with the Ministry of Defense.
The recruits’ salaries vary by region. By signing a one-year contract, residents of Moscow can expect to get 5.2 million rubles, which is equivalent to $54,700 or about $4550 a month. In contrast, residents of Tuva can expect no more than $1400 a month. These salaries are ensured by an intricate system of taxes, which have proven effective at redistributing the income from the working class in the civilian sector toward their compatriots fighting the war. Aside from oil and gas, the value-added tax is the largest source of revenue for the federal budget, targeting consumer goods, from textiles and electronics to eggs, vegetables and meat. Hence, the contract soldier earns $1300 a month not because the war-mongering Malofeev-types are burdened with heavier taxes but because his compatriots earning $280 need to buy groceries and other durable goods for their basic sustenance.
Furthermore, it is the poorest regions like Tuva – offering the lowest compensation for taking the risk of dying in the war – where the Ministry of Defense gets the largest share of contract soldiers. Out of 336,000 inhabitants of Tuva, nearly 10,000 have already participated in the war. This is 6 percent of the entire male population. At least 948 of them did not make it back alive. Such is the number of deceased soldiers whose names have been identified from publicly available sources. Those missing in action and those whose bodies have not been recovered from the front line are excluded.
The ability to recruit and sacrifice tens of thousands of citizens on the front line reinvigorates in Russia’s bourgeoisie the confidence that it can withstand external pressure and raise the stakes at the negotiating table. The principal interest in any such negotiations would be the terms on which it can trade with the outside world, particularly the West. This objective was never a secret. Speaking in June 2023 at a conference devoted to the development of Russian exports, Alexey Mordashov, the key shareholder of Severstal, Russia’s largest steel and mining corporation, articulated the urgency of the matter.
“I am convinced that we need to fight for a ‘place under the sun’ in foreign markets. Our capacities in many sectors of the economy traditionally exceed national consumption. Thus, with the capacity of domestic metallurgy at about 70 million tons, the domestic market can consume only 40 million.”
According to Mordashov, the existing status quo is compatible with this objective; it “gives us a good chance to maintain our position in the global system of international division of labor and remain serious players in the export market.” Hence, as the billionaire Deripaska expressed it on 18 February 2025, “If we want a successful return of peaceful life to Ukraine, … then all restrictions and sanctions must be lifted.”
In the meantime, war is no deterrent to the lavish tastes and lifestyle of the Russian elite. Since 2022, its capitalists spent at least $6.3 billion on luxury properties in Dubai; they account for up to 20 percent of real estate purchases on Bali. And the Maldives has become an important destination for the billionaires’ mega yachts.
Such is the nature of the relationship between the civilian sector and the front. Such is the nature of the social unity that Vladimir Putin boasted about when, in a pre-election interview with Dmitry Kiselev on 14 March 2024, the President emphasized how
the war provided the “Russian society an opportunity to express itself. I have the feeling that people have been waiting for this for a long time, that an average person would be in demand by the country and the state, and that the fate of the country would depend on him. It is this feeling of inner connection with the Motherland, with the Fatherland, of one’s importance in solving key tasks, in this case in the sphere of security, that has raised to the surface the strength of the Russian and other peoples of Russia.”
Image: EC President von der Leyen, 2023. Facebook
On the other side of the front line, the Western financiers and political backers of Ukraine are also keen to philosophize about the meaning of this war for the average Ukrainian. In June 2022, the European Commissioner, Ursula von der Leyen, famously declared that the “Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective.” Moreover, as the war dragged on, there has been growing criticism in the West that Zelensky’s government is doing an insufficient job at mobilizing the population towards fulfilling this mission. In an opinion piece for The Telegraph, published on 1 October 2023, the former British secretary of defense urged Kiev to mobilize more young people.
“The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40. I understand President Zelensky’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but… just as Britain did in 1939 and 1941, perhaps it is time to reassess the scale of Ukraine’s mobilisation.”
This opinion is shared by Washington. During an interview on 4 December 2024, the Secretary of State of the Biden Administration, Antony Blinken, conveyed that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary. Right now, 18- to 25-year-olds are not in the fight.” Speaking just a week before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz declared that the “mobilization age could be one of the rare issues where the new Trump administration aligns with its predecessor on Ukraine.”
While the consensus is strong that Ukraine should put more of its citizens into the trenches, there are conflicting visions among the leading NATO powers over the outcome for which Ukrainian lives must be sacrificed.
The ruling class of Western Europe sees Russia as the most serious threat to the EU, advocating for the war to continue until the competitor is neutralized, i.e., until the European elite can force its will upon its Russian counterpart. Speaking on 3 May 2024, then-Vice President of the European Commission Joseph Borrell affirmed that “Russia is considered as the most existential threat to Europe,” whose growing influence must be checked by supporting the bloodbath in Ukraine.
“I know how to finish the war in Ukraine. I can finish the war in Ukraine in a couple of weeks just by cutting the supply. If I cut the supply of arms to Ukraine, Ukraine cannot resist, they will have to surrender, and the war will finish. But is this the way we want the war to finish? I do not want [that], and I hope that many people in Europe do not want [that] either.”
This opinion is shared by the Defense Minister of Germany, the main power center of the EU. During a speech in the Bundestag on 5 December 2024, Boris Pistorius articulated that
“Russia is the greatest threat to Germany’s security and will remain so for the foreseeable future.”
Such rhetoric from bureaucrats and state apparatchiks aligns with the general will of the capitalist class. To be clear, the leading European companies are more than keen to do business with Russia, especially if the latter is nothing more than an international gas station, supplying energy to the European market; but not with a Russia that produces more steel than Germany, France and the U.K. combined, and whose bourgeoisie is pressing to deal with the EU, at the very minimum, as equal partners. When dealing with such a competitor, they prefer to conduct business in the conditions of gunboat diplomacy.
On the subject of Russia, Klaus-Michael Kühne, the main stakeholder in the shipping giant Kuehne + Nagel, openly declared that Germany “must stand up to this warmonger even more strongly,” denouncing any wrangling about supplying arms to Ukraine. Another German magnate, Reinhold Wuerth, also views Russia as a strategic rival of the EU. In an article from 2019, Wuerth reiterated that “we Europeans are nestled between the power blocs of the US, China and Russia and…if we don’t stick together closely we will only be tribute-paying vassals of these three power blocs in 20 years from now…” Once the full-scale war started, the Wuerth Group was quick to declare support for Ukraine and scale back its dependence on the Russian market.
The ruling elite on the other side of the Atlantic also recognizes that Russia must be contained, and that the Ukrainian proletariat is the raw material of the buffer state. Throughout the war, Washington has been the key supplier of military equipment to Ukraine, sending more than 4 million artillery shells, 9000 armored vehicles and 500 million rounds of small arms ammunition. By contrast, the European powers have provided less than half of that amount. Germany, the largest supplier among them, shipped only 422,000 artillery shells, about 1000 military vehicles and 60 million rounds of small arms ammunition to Ukraine.
And yet, unlike its European partners, the United States does not view Russia as an existential threat. The U.S. commitment toward containing Moscow, in the final analysis, is shaped by a calculus directed against its far more serious rival, China. Nor is there any sign that the American bourgeoisie aspires to strengthen the European Union by destroying its principal competitor. Hence, it should come as no surprise that, after three years of actively helping Ukraine sacrifice its men in the war, the U.S. is exploring the possibility of making peace with Russia, aiming for a deal that would undercut the latter’s ties to China.
Speaking at a panel at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, the U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, clearly articulated the logic of the Trump administration.
“Right now, what we are going to do is try to break this alliance he [Putin] currently has. He’s got an alliance around North Korea that wasn’t there before. He’s got an alliance with Iran that wasn’t there before. He’s got an alliance with China that wasn’t there before, meaning four years ago.”
In line with this exposition, Vice President JD Vance stated in an interview on 14 February 2025 that “it’s not in Putin’s interest to be the little brother in a coalition with China.” Having said that, the Vice President did not elaborate on how it would be in Russia’s interest to trade this partnership with China for rapprochement with the West.
There is no indication that the U.S. can, in practice, offer Russia anything that would be more advantageous than its current relations with Asia. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington has consistently refrained from establishing a roadmap for Russia’s integration into the Western economic and security bloc. Even back in the 1990s, when Russia’s bourgeoisie found it very profitable – and patriotic – to lick the boots of the West and dismantle the vast industrial capacities inherited from Soviet times, the leading strategists in Washington conceived that the country was still too big to be the little brother in an alliance. In an article for the Washington Post, published on 2 May 1994, Zbigniew Brzezinski made a frank admission
“that Russia bulks too large, too backward currently and too powerful potentially to be assimilated as simply yet another member of the European Union or NATO…. Instead of perpetuating the illusion that Russia — someday, somehow — will join the West’s core political institutions, it is more important to define what it means for Russia to become a good neighbor for Europe and eventually a partner for the United States.”
Incidentally, what bulks too large for the West is not conceived to be too large by China. Beijing did not mind Russia becoming the little brother in its institutions, nor did it mind Russia recovering some of the economic capacities that were lost during the 1990s. Once the war started, it was only thanks to China that the Russian capitalists – the Potanin and Usmanov types – encountered no serious difficulties adapting to Western sanctions and could proudly brag that the restrictions failed to put the business elite on its knees.
Nonetheless, the partnership with China is not without strings, namely, when it comes to Russia’s conduct towards China’s principal rival, the United States. In response to the current efforts of the Trump administration, the state apparatchiks of China’s elites were quick to send a signal that Beijing will not support Russia if the latter chooses rapprochement with the U.S. at its expense. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, conveyed that peace in Ukraine will not be established through a bilateral deal between Russia and the U.S., suggesting “for Europe” – whose ruling class views Russia as an existential threat – “to play its part” in any negotiations. If that was not enough, leading up to the meeting between the top diplomats of Russia and the U.S. in Riyadh, Wang deliberately downplayed the existing contradictions between China and Europe, telling the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief, Kaja Kallas, that “there is no fundamental conflict of interest or geopolitical conflicts between China and the EU.”
This should come as no surprise. The terms of China’s partnership with Russia never presupposed that Beijing would restrict itself from commerce with the European bloc, or abandon the aspiration of splitting Europe from the U.S. Hence, while aiding Russia’s efforts to sacrifice its men in Ukraine, China never closed its doors to Kiev. It is no other than China from where Ukraine gets the majority of drones for the battlefield. It is no other than China’s leading drone manufacturer DJI, owned by billionaire Wang Tao, for which the Ukrainian market represents up to 60 percent of Mavic quadcopter sales. And nothing restricts China from doing more in support of Ukraine’s independence if Russia takes the risk of reconciling with its principal rival.
So far, however, the prospect of such reconciliation remains elusive. Following the summit in Riyadh, the Russian government insisted that nothing had fundamentally changed. At a press conference on 21 February 2021, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov assured external partners that Moscow’s recent engagement with Washington does not in any way presuppose “an end to the epoch of rivalry between Russia and the West.”
And thus, on the eve of the third anniversary of the full-scale war, the capitalists of the world’s leading imperial centers are farther than ever from conceiving a framework that would not only stop the fighting but also guarantee stable peace. As long as their struggle over the new re-division of the world continues, any ceasefire in Ukraine will be nothing more than an armistice before the next – even more horrific and catastrophic – round of mass slaughter.
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Maxim Nikolenko is an independent researcher. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Delaware.
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