Statement of the Resist US-Led War Movement
This statement was originally published on March 5 2025
The Resist US-Led War Movement asserts its grave concern over the looming war clouds and rising global military spending that overshadow US President Trump’s so-called “Ukraine Peace Plan.” What attempts to come across as a criticism of a vain and endless war in Ukraine by Trump hides instead a recalibration of US military priorities to other fronts of war while bluffing European powers into ramping up their war production and preparations for more severe conflicts to come.
The War in Ukraine has just passed its third anniversary. Since then, over 58,000 Ukrainians and Russians have died with over 250,000 wounded, the majority of them Ukrainians. This is in addition to over 14,000 killed in the 2014-2022 Ukrainian Civil War. An estimated $155 billion in damages has been met on Ukrainian infrastructure, and approximately 2.4 million hectares of farmland has been damaged, leading to $1.5 billion lost for farmers in the country. 3.7 million are internally displaced in the country with 6.7 displaced abroad. Yet for 3 years, the US and Western leaders have refused to come to the table for peace talks, instead promising Kiev endless supplies of weapons so that it could win the war in their favor, regardless if they had to fight it down to the last Ukrainian soldier.
Yet, all this took an unexpected turn in Washington, DC. In a shocking White House meeting covered by international press, Trump berated Ukrainian President Zelensky for relying too much on US military aid, for forcing conscripts to the front lines, for not thanking the US enough for its aid, and for “gambling with World War 3.” Zelensky was then officially asked to leave the White House, notably without signing the much-spoken of mineral deal between the US and Ukraine that Trump had touted as the key dealbreaker for continuing military aid to the country. Instead, Trump froze all military aid to Ukraine the very next day.
The TV-style drama of this incident truly was unprecedented in the history of US foreign policy meetings, but beyond the public entertainment factor that Trump has made the hallmark of his political tactics there exist deeper truths to what this moment represents for the current state of US-led war strategy.
It is necessary to break down the different aspects of Trump’s public accusations of Zelensky. First, it is indeed true that Ukraine has been facing a crisis in its soldiers’ will to fight over the past year, with mere inches of territory being traded back and forth for every dozen or so fighters killed. War deserters have been rounded up and imprisoned, with many forced back to the front lines. The war has devastated the country, and there seems to be no end in sight as neither side has made significant gains in relation to the amount of fighters who have been killed on either side. Ukraine spent 36.7% of its GDP on its military in 2023, yet that only amounted to $65 billion, showcasing on the one hand how devastated its economy in general has been with social spending at all-time lows for its civilian population, and on the other hand how utterly reliant it has had to have been on foreign powers up against Russia’s $109 billion at just 5.9% of GDP the same year.
This leads into other aspects of Trump’s tirade: relying “too much” on the US and, according to Trump and Vice President Vance, not being personally “thankful” enough to the President. Both of these accusations speak to a fundamental feature of the relationship between the US and Ukraine. The US is an imperialist power, and as such prefers to wage the majority of its wars through puppet regimes in countries on the periphery of its geopolitical influence while it enjoys the “peace” of being able to plunder the rest of the world through investment schemes and wage war against its exploited and oppressed people at home. Ukraine is one of these puppet regimes and has been ever since the CIA-backed “Maidan Revolution” in 2014 that overthrew Ukraine’s independent government and installed one more friendly to Western influence and investments that immediately started a bloody 8-year civil war against Russian-speaking Ukrainian separatists in the Eastern Donbas region. NATO’s Secretary General in 2021 promised eventual NATO membership to Ukraine, therefore solidifying a US and EU puppet regime right on Russia’s doorstep to be the sacrificial lamb when Russia invaded in 2022 to protect its shrinking buffer zone between it and a military alliance that has existed to destroy it since the end of World War 2 and had looked for whatever reason possible to provoke a war against it that its own soldiers would not have to fight in. The current bloody war in Ukraine provided the golden opportunity.
Kiev has fought both the 8-year civil war and the as-of-now 3-year Russia-Ukraine war with US and EU member-provided weapons. That is the nature of it being a puppet state. Such a state must exist in complete reliance on its imperialist master. When Trump berated Zelensky for this, he was hiding his own country’s role in encouraging further war and military aid (including millions of dollars worth during Trump’s first term) in order to weaken Russia’s growing influence without sacrificing US soldiers. The difference now is that the US President has other priorities for his other puppets. The blanket support for the Zionist assault on Palestine and West Asia with fully-loaded US weapons could not be a starker difference in public messaging, but underneath the surface this puppet relationship is completely the same. Imperialists only care for their puppets when they are useful, and they are tossed aside and bled dry for what they are still worth (like Trump’s rare earth mineral deal) when they no longer are. Zelensky and the rest of the Kiev regime are now paying the price for selling their sovereignty to US overlordship.
To add insult to injury, Kiev’s government took Trump’s bating language at face value, and made a public statement thanking Trump for his supposed efforts to end the conflict, desperately hoping this would win back favor with the narcissistic President. This came a day after Zionist leader Netanyahu publicly did the same, calling Trump “the most pro-Israel President in American history.” Regardless of the political charades being played, the puppets will always rush to lick the boots of the puppet master.
The final accusation of Trump towards Zelensky requires the most critical eye of all of them. Who really is “gambling with World War 3?” The US has tried to use Ukraine against Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, using its age-old strategy of turning ethnic and national groups against one another. The US and its NATO allies have spent decades turning Ukraine against its nuclear-armed neighbor while using neoliberal schemes to dismember the economies of both. If anyone has been gambling with World War 3, it is the US.
In fact, Trump’s surprising abandonment of its puppet regime in Ukraine becomes less surprising upon looking at the other ways in which he is gambling globally with a potential World War 3. Freezing military aid to Ukraine comes a day after Trump unfroze $12 billion in aid to the Zionist military to continue violating its ceasefire with the Palestinian resistance and continue its genocidal assault while continuing its expansionist drive in Syria, Lebanon, and towards Iran. It came a day before Trump’s aggressive tariffs towards multiple countries, including China, another nuclear-armed power the US has spent years decoupling its economy from so that it can wage war without losing profits. The stopping of aid to Ukraine allows the US to pivot further into its militarization of the Asia Pacific where the US aims to contain its main competitor and adversary, China. The recent Trump’s freeze on global foreign aid, while exempting security aid to the Philippines to continue its war build up with Marcos as another puppet and the unfreezing $870 million in security assistance programs for Taiwan show the US’s strain and stretching beyond the front of US led war with Russia, and the need to pivot forces to the pacific. Once again, in the gambling, Ukraine is only a pawn, the US is the true gambler.
Finally, Trump’s gamble is not just with the US’s rival superpowers like China and Russia. By making such a public scene of Zelensky, he gambled with European NATO members’ decisiveness to keep the war in Ukraine going at any cost. Trump’s cabinet criticized NATO members at the recent Munich Security Conference, saying that members should be paying 5% of their GDP on military (a percentage higher than what the US even spends itself). Taking the bait, European members made promises to arm both Ukraine and themselves to the teeth without US support, with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling for a “coalition of the willing” to arm Ukraine until it wins against Russia and Vice President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas reigniting calls for an “Army of Europe” that would take the place of NATO. Stocks of European weapons manufacturers rose exponentially after these announcements, with Rheinmetall up 15%, Leonardo up 17.3%, Thales up 16.7%, BAE Systems up 14.3%, and Saab up 11.6%. Regardless of what agreements the US makes with Russia, the war in Ukraine will most likely not be ending anytime soon.
Despite the dramatic row Trump’s White House meeting with Zelensky caused amongst US allies, in the end the war makers and war profiteers all got what they wanted – a reason to crank out more guns and fighter jets and new opportunities for using them (and therefore buying more). Far from bringing peace, this will only bring more unnecessary deaths. It will also bring more damage to infrastructure and farmland, and with even more of Ukraine’s public funds going to war spending, this will mean more devastated livelihood for the people. The war profiteers of Europe are willing to throw the entire population of Ukraine into the slaughterhouse of war or the hellsscape of economic ruin just to maintain their status quo of power and to keep the war industry booming.
How should the peace movement respond to this moment? Of course, an end to the dire conflict should be welcomed, as the people deserve an end to the constant death and destruction of their country. But we must be wary of how any war ends, with foresight to how the war profiteers will use it to start another conflict as soon as they can.
The most important thing to remember is that our government leaders are not interested in peace, especially not Trump who is just using an opportunistic moment to re-evaluate the US’s war strategy. In the end, it is the people who make peace since the people are the ones most impacted by wars of aggression and militarism in all its forms. Our leaders will continue these public charades to try and fool us, but we must continue to raise our demands and take them to the streets where we can stand united against the US-led war machine. NATO and other US allies have never been this at odds with each other, so the peace movement must take advantage of this moment and expose the cracks. This movement will always be more united than the war makers ever can be! Finally, these imperialist machinations of the US show just how little it cares about the people living in the nations being oppressed by their puppet regimes. The peace movement must be firmly united with these movements for national liberation from semi-colonial oppression. Only then will the arbitrary moves of strongman governments like the US be challenged from the only force that can challenge them – the people themselves. This united movement is the only path towards just and lasting peace.
