In this article, we analyse the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, arguing that it is a conflict driven by imperialist rivalry, competing bourgeoisie factions, and broader capitalist realignment.
The war is essentially caused by NATO’s eastward expansion, which triggered Russia to take action to take control of its westward border. By foregrounding the class interests that influence state policies and military interventions, it can be demonstrated how both the US and the Russian Federation perceive Ukraine as a strategic lever for securing energy pipelines, arms markets, and spheres of influence. Due to this the Russia–Ukraine war should be understood not as a struggle between a revanchist Russia and a besieged nation but as a clash between a semi peripheral capitalist country (Russia) and the US led imperialist encroachment of NATO over the former Soviet Republics and parts of Europe. According to our analysis, Russia does not meet Lenin’s definition of finance-capital-dominated imperialism, but nevertheless operates as a reactionary, capitalist power. Under the Putin-regime, Russia is intent on securing strategic bases, exporting capital, and staving off U.S led encroachment and NATO expansion into its traditional sphere of influence. We call for a revolutionary strategy that sees the solution to the war through class unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers, and a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism in both countries in alliance with the international working class.
To fully understand the stakes of this conflict, it is essential to consider the role of Russia within the global capitalist system. Russia is a centre within the periphery and plays a dominant role in Eurasia. Although it has imperialist ambitions Russia is not an imperialist power. Russia does export capital and seek to dominate regions, but it lacks the economic structure to act as a fully imperialist power. Russia’s contemporary economy falls short of the defining features of imperialism defined by Lenin in his Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin’s conception of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism is defined by five characteristics. First, there is the concentration of production and capital, creating monopolies that play a decisive role in economic life.Through monopoly capitalism, the economic surplus greatly rises, but finds increasingly fewer outlets in the domestic economy for its realisation. Second, the export of capital, as distinguished from the mere export of commodities, acquires exceptional importance, with surplus capital sent abroad in search of higher profits. Capital export is the natural result of a falling rate of profit, and the bourgeoisie’s inability to profitably use its capital domestically. The result is that capitalists open factories in the colonies, exporting their capital and exploiting the local workforce, who receive a far-lower wage than the domestic working class. Third, the merging of bank capital with industrial capital into finance capital gives rise to a financial oligarchy. The banks no longer function as intermediaries between exchanges, but monopolise the money-capital of the whole bourgeoisie and play a dominant role within the capitalist economy. Fourth, the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations, or cartels, coordinates production and territories internationally, carving up markets among a few giant firms. Sweezy and Baran demonstrate how this creates oligopolies who control access to capital, and a massive group of countries who struggle for contracts with oligopolistic companies. Fifth, the territorial and colonial division of the world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed, with major powers carving the globe into spheres of influence. This leads to imperialist wars of redivision, with the twentieth century being the era in which billions of workers died for the wars of imperialism.
Although Russia possesses a handful of large firms, Sberbank (ranked 51st in 2024), Rosneft (53rd in 2020), Lukoil (99th in 2020), and Gazprom (49th in 2022), only four of its companies appear among the world’s top 100 corporations. Its banking system operates on the margins of global finance, with only Sberbank appearing among the world’s top 50 banks by total assets. Capital exports are relatively modest: in 2022, Russia’s net foreign direct investment outflows were negative US$39.8 billion, well below Norway’s US$14.38 billion and Finland’s US$13.36 billion. Moreover, much of Russia’s capital exports represent capital flight into real estate and tax havens rather than genuine overseas industrial ventures. The export profile remains predominantly raw materials: fuel and energy accounted for 63.2 percent of merchandise export revenues in 2017 and 63.9 percent in early 2018. By 2023, Russia was the world’s 17th-largest exporter of goods, trailing economies not considered imperialist, such as Mexico or Singapore. Because it lacks the primacy of finance capital, significant capital exports into productive ventures, and a diversified export profile, Russia does not satisfy Lenin’s economic criteria for imperialism and thus cannot be classified as a full-fledged imperialist power.
Russia should therefore be understood not as a fully-fledged imperialist power but as a non-hegemonic aspiring empire in gestation and a semi-peripheral economy. It lacks the economic criteria Lenin identified above, namely dominant finance capital, extensive capital exports into productive ventures, and powerful international monopolies, and its GDP and productivity place it far below the core capitalist states. Instead, Russia’s global influence stems primarily from its geopolitical and military capabilities rather than economic domination. Its limited trade with peripheral countries, reliance on oil and gas exports, and modest outward investment reinforce its status as an intermediate economy rather than an imperial centre. In this sense, Russia’s role resembles that of a mid-level power that leverages military intervention and diplomatic alliances rather than economic might to project influence abroad.
We are now in an era of rising global instability. US isolationism under Trump has driven the European capitalist powers into a panic over its own defense. EU leaders debate expanding nuclear arsenals and drastically boosting military budgets. Germany is in recession, public debt is high, and social welfare is already under pressure. In Britain the Labour party led by Keir Starmer has revealed itself to be completely incapable and unwilling to confront the crisis of capitalism. The Labour leadership has instead chosen to subordinate the needs of the working class to the profit demands of the military-industrial complex. Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, the Labour Party has embraced the logic of imperialism, declaring that Britain must “play its role on the world stage” by raising defence spending from 2.32 percent of GDP (roughly £64.6 billion) to 2.6% percent by 2027, and ultimately to 3 percent, financed through tax increases and cuts to welfare and foreign aid. BAE Systems, as the private arms monopoly building and maintaining Britain’s nuclear-armed submarines, epitomises how the capitalist state harnesses working-class labour and public funds to sustain imperialist militarism and protect the interests of the ruling-capitalist class. The UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has already diverted an extra £2.2 billion toward the military and £400 million to arms manufacturers, even as the so-called “independent” nuclear deterrent remains wholly dependent on U.S. technology, the two new aircraft carriers rarely sail with full air wings, and the army stands at its smallest size in two centuries, incapable of fielding a single fully supported division. This militarist drive masks the reality of class war in the UK: winter fuel payments and disability benefits have been slashed, threatening to plunge an additional 250,000 of the working class into poverty and provoking popular anger. In place of such imperialist destruction and war mongering Communists need to organise and call for a complete socialist reorganisation of society. The collective welfare of the working class must be prioritised over the profits of the arms manufacturers. This can only be achieved through the expropriation of the capitalist class and the planning of production on a democratic basis.
In order to understand Russia and Ukraine’s current situation it is useful to reflect on the events of the global class struggle after World War 2. After WW2, transnational corporations (TNCs) resumed rapid expansion, prompting many Latin American and African states to adopt import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) measures, tariffs and regulatory constraints meant to shield nascent domestic industries from foreign monopolies. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the international socialist and national-liberation movements suffered serious setbacks, and the threat of nationalisation evaporated and conditions became far more favourable for capitalist foreign direct investment.
In former workers’ states such as Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, TNCs leapt at the opportunity to exploit low-wage labour and privatise state‐owned enterprises. Marx’s famous metaphor of capital as “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” aptly captures how, since the 1990s, international capital has been leveraged through outsourcing to extract surplus-value, intensifying the exploitation of the working class and creating stark inequalities and undermining national sovereignty. Indeed, global FDI into developing economies soared from $34.9 billion in 1990 to $779 billion in 2008, often deepening social stratification and ceding control of key sectors to foreign investors. In Ukraine, for instance, the 2005 sale of Kryvorizhstal to Mittal Steel (now ArcelorMittal) placed a strategic steel producer under the direct control of a major TNC. Similarly, Kazakhstan’s privatization of the Temirtau steel plant to the Dutch company ArcelorMittal and the dominance of China’s CITIC Group in its oil sector catalysed popular unrest. These developments exemplify how, in Trotsky’s terms, uneven and combined development manifests: former Soviet republics became arenas where advanced capitalist enterprises sit atop weakened state infrastructures, intensifying imperialist competition and heightening the exploitation of the proletariat. The dystopian conditions often attributed to former socialist states are, in fact, emblematic of monopoly capitalism. The relentless consumerism drives individuals into unmanageable debt, leaving people vulnerable to harassment from banks and dependent on low wage jobs for survival. This debt cycle fuels widespread depression, which pharmaceutical companies exploit through the sale of drugs like antidepressants, perpetuating unhappiness rather than addressing its structural causes. The capitalist state avoids meaningful reform by resorting to punitive or palliative measures such as incarceration or medication. Furthermore, the financial sector exacerbates this dependency by extending high credit limits, ensuring perpetual borrowing.
The root cause of the Russia-Ukraine war is to be found in the restoration of capitalist social relations. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the planned economy had severe social and economic consequences. Ukraine inherited an industrial structure which was entwined with Russia’s when it emerged as an independent state in 1991. Under the Soviet Union, Ukraine specialised in heavy industry, chemicals, metals processing and machinery, that depended on Russian raw materials, while its agricultural output fed populations across the USSR. The abrupt shift to a market economy beginning in 1992, modelled on shock therapy, dismantled central planning, abolished price controls and privatised state-owned enterprises. The immediate result was an economic collapse more severe and longer–lasting than Russia’s own, accompanied by hyperinflation and the rapid rise of a small class of capitalists who captured the most valuable former state assets and came to dominate politics and society.
Over the next two decades, Ukraine’s capitalists and its population divided roughly between an eastern, Russian-speaking region favouring continued ties with Russia and a western, Ukrainian-speaking region oriented toward Europe. Officially neutral since independence, Kyiv maintained a non-bloc stance until 2014. When the former President Yanukovych abruptly walked away from an Association Agreement with Brussels and instead sought a deal with Moscow, protests erupted in late 2013 among students, intelligentsia, rural youth and the ruined middle layers, especially in western Ukraine. Although these demonstrations reflected real discontent with corruption and austerity, their leadership came from liberal bourgeois parties and their “shock troops” from far right and neo-Nazi militias. The U.S.-backed Maidan uprising toppled the Russia-leaning president Viktor Yanukovych, banned the Russian language in official settings and formally committed Ukraine to seek EU and NATO membership.
In the wake of the 2014 Maidan demonstrations, Ukraine’s parliament passed a suite of so called “decommunization” laws on 9 April 2015 that outlawed Communist symbols and sought to ban parties deemed to support what it totalitarian regimes. Under those laws, on 24 July 2015 the Interior Ministry stripped the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) and its offshoots of the right to participate in elections. Then, on 16 December 2015 a Kyiv administrative court formally prohibited the activities of the CPU altogether. The party’s leaders appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, but domestically the CPU has been barred from elections and ultimately dissolved under that 2015 decommunization framework. Since 2014, the conflict has reshaped Ukraine’s political economy in several ways. Wartime conditions have enriched new classes of trench-line profiteers and entrenched the influence of oligarchs and nationalist militias. Simultaneously, Kyiv has deepened its economic integration with the EU, reoriented trade away from Russia and accepted massive Western loans and investments. The resulting paradigm sees Ukraine locked between its historic economic ties to Russia and a strategic alignment with the capitalists in the West, a tension that precipitated the Russian invasion of February 2022 and continues to define Ukraine’s economic and political trajectory.
Post-WWII, the US led global capitalism and established its hegemonic position by dismantling trade preferences like Britain’s Commonwealth system, sidelining alternative voices including Europe and the Soviet Union, and also voices from the global South. In their The Making of Global Capitalism, Gindin and Panitch point out that the US harnessed its economic and geopolitical power to refashion the global capitalist order, notably through institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. Institutions were shaped to reflect the priorities of dominant powers. For example, at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference American negotiators dictated the framework for international monetary arrangements, ensuring that allies became increasingly dependent on US financial dominance. These institutions aimed to stabilise and expand global capitalism on terms favouring US strategic and economic interests. While European economies benefited from reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, the global South received comparatively limited support and was generally excluded from shaping the rules of the new emergent order. During this period US leadership was reinforced within the broader capitalist world system.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, the US has witnessed a steady process of deindustrialisation, characterised by widespread factory closures, the offshoring of production to lower-wage regions, and an increasing reliance on the financial sector rather than core manufacturing. Profit rates in key industrial sectors stagnated or declined substantially, eroding the material foundation that had underpinned American economic dominance. At the same time, rising public and private debt, from student loans and mortgages to mounting credit-card balances, constrained domestic demand as households and governments tightened their belts in response to mounting debt obligations.
The US capitalist class, along with capitalist classes of other countries based in the global North, through Transnational Corporations (TNCs) such as Apple and Amazon etc, have pursued surplus value outside of their borders through outsourcing. As Foster and McChesney explain in The Endless Crisis, TNC’s will strategically relocate production to extract surplus value, eroding national sovereignty and local industry development. For example, the global garment industry frequently shifts manufacturing sites from one developing country to another as soon as workers secure modest wage increases or improved safety standards. Once labour costs rise in one region, production is moved elsewhere, undermining any sustainable advancement in local economies and keeping workers’ bargaining power perpetually weak. As labour costs and safety standards have improved modestly in countries such as China, many global apparel brand TNC’s such as Nike, Gap, H&M, and Walmart’s private-label suppliers, have shifted parts of their production to countries in the global South such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, where wages remain lower than in the US, Europe, and Japan. This relocation ensures that TNCs maintain a cost advantage, thereby perpetuating an asymmetric dynamic in which workers in lower-cost countries struggle to negotiate lasting improvements in pay and conditions. By continually seeking out cheaper labour markets, TNCs mostly based in the global North can fragment and disperse their supply chains, keeping workers’ bargaining power minimal and obstructing sustainable economic development in host nations.
After the 2008 financial crisis, political pressure for spending restraint led to cuts or stagnation in social spending and constrained public investment in infrastructure and education, contributing to working-class precarity and somewhat weakened support for new imperialist interventions. These shifts, combined with rising public resistance to costly wars, limited the political will to fund expansive overseas commitments, even though total defense outlays remained high. At the same time, challenges to U.S. dominance in global arms markets and export financing grew as China and other powers increased their roles, while energy corridors were contested by Russian pipelines and Chinese investments. Beginning in 2001, protracted military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen soaked up trillions of dollars in borrowed funds, stretched U.S. logistics across multiple theatres and exposed the limits of occupying guerrilla-resistant terrains without clear strategic endgames. This overextension has created geopolitical space for rival blocs to assert themselves.
In Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe, China’s state‐led industrial policy, backed by massive domestic high‐speed rail investment and the Belt and Road Initiative, has challenged U.S. hegemony by forging new trade ties, infrastructure linkages, and digital‐connectivity projects. However, it should be understood that despite its relative decline the US still maintains its hegemonic position due to its major security and financial leverage. At the same time, Russia modernised its armed forces after 2008, raising defense spending from roughly 3 percent to about 5 percent of GDP, leveraged energy exports (notably Nord Stream pipelines and TurkStream) to secure political partnerships in Europe, and pursued transactional alliances across the global South through arms sales, security agreements, and diplomatic outreach.
The post-Cold War era marked the emergence of the US as the sole global superpower. However, the US led global capitalist system faces challenges, as the relative decline of the US economy has diminished its ability to align developing countries with its strategic priorities through economic leverage alone. For example, during the Pink Tide movement in the early 21st century, several pro US governments in Latin America were replaced by administrations that opposed US interests. These governments demonstrated their independence by overwhelmingly opposing the 2003 Iraq War and voting to recognise a Palestinian state. More recently, imperialist states led by the US, including the UK, France, Japan and the NATO aligned countries, seek to secure strategic bases, export capital and contain Russian influence by expanding their economic and military presence in Eastern Europe. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and backing of separatists in Donbas reflect its drive to protect its economic and geostrategic interests, while the NATO blocks support for Kyiv advances their own countries' capitalist classes interests through the pursuit of access to markets, resources and military footholds. Therefore, the Russia–Ukraine war is not merely a territorial dispute but a struggle among rival bourgeois factions and contending capitalist interests that produces devastating consequences for the working classes in both Russia and Ukraine.
In line with Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which highlights uneven and combined development, and Trotsky’s emphasis on understanding states within their historical and global contexts, both Russia and the declining hegemonic US led imperialist block compete for the extraction of surplus-value from the working classes of each nation. Communists should refuse to side with either camp, denounce both Russian and US led war mongering, reject nationalist justifications for the war, and should instead call for proletarian internationalist movements and insist that only independent workers’ movements in each nation can overthrow the bourgeois regimes driving these conflicts. We should follow Karl Liebknecht’s famous saying that “the enemy is at home”, and wage a protracted struggle against our own bourgeoisie and its defeat. For the workers across Europe, this means agitating against the expansion of the military budget, supporting efforts of workers to stop shipments of arms to Ukraine, and put forth a revolutionary programme for a united socialist federation of Europe.
As revolutionary communists, we are not interested in a simple ceasefire that results in a return to the status quo. We should unite with the revolutionary left in both Ukraine and Russia, oppose fascism in both countries and support every expression of independent proletarian action. It should not be forgotten that Ukrainian and Russian workers lived peacefully in Soviet times. Ukrainian and Russian workers shared workplaces, neighbourhoods and social institutions, and that their material interests overlap far more closely with one another than with the handful of capitalists and their apologists who profit from their division. Under the Soviet system, despite its bureaucratic and political shortcomings, the official ideology of proletarian internationalism enabled millions of workers in places such as Kyiv, Moscow and Donetsk to see each other as part of a united working class, and not as enemies. It is therefore in the interests of the Ukrainian and Russian working class to unite and fight against capitalism on class lines.
–For the revolutionary unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers!
–No to fascism, national chauvinism and other reactionary ideologies in both Russia and Ukraine!
–Down with capitalism in Russia and Ukraine!
–For a socialist federation that unites Russia and Ukraine, as well as former Soviet countries in Europe and Central Asia!
–For the unity of workers across Europe with the Russian and Ukrainian workers!
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