In an opinion piece published a few days ago in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper (“The Ukraine emergency is far from over – because Donald Trump is the emergency,” August 21, 2025), popular center-right columnist Andrew Coyne writes about the “three possible explanations for Mr. Trump’s seeming capture by Mr. Putin.” (Coyne is the journalist whose writing following the re-election of Donald Trump made the rounds widely for its prescient prognostication of what was to come.)
The three “possible explanations” closely parallel the three hypotheses that I had written about last week, except that they fail to mention the one I spent much of that article discussing.
My first two hypotheses, which I called the “conspiratorial” (that Putin “has something on him,” in Coyne’s words) and the “psychoanalytical” (that Trump’s particular form of pathological narcissism lends him to looking up to certain kinds of men) are covered by Coyne, though the latter becomes a little vague: Coyne writes that, in this rendition, Trump
has simply been rolled by him, over and over – whether because he has some sort of inexplicable man-crush on him, or because of Mr. Putin’s adroit application of flattery to the suppurating wounds of Mr. Trump’s ego, or because of Mr. Trump’s peculiar susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left ‘when you think about it, the West are really the bad guys’ arguments favoured by your stoner roommate in first year.
Coyne’s third explanation, however, merely repeats a variation of the second: “that Mr. Trump just happens to agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one.” Coyne misses the all-important “realist” explanation I had written about, which is rooted in a particular constellation of political-economic relations, especially those of fossil fuels.
Now, Rolling Stone’s star writer on these topics, Antonia Juhasz, has penned a piece that provides many more details to support the contention that the Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska was largely about joint fossil fuel dealmaking (“Inside Putin’s Fossil-Fueled Victory Lap in Alaska,“ August 23, 2025).
As Juhasz puts it,
Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of the Russian economy and the basis of Putin’s power. They have long dominated Russian-Ukrainian relations, with gas flowing through the heart of the conflict. […]
Ukraine has always maintained the key role of delivering Russian gas to European markets via pipelines, dating back to the Soviet era. The government of Ukraine owns the pipelines, and Russia pays Ukraine transit fees, which have been a substantial source of revenue and conflict. Russia has sought for decades to either wrest greater control of its pipelines through Ukraine — which it could now achieve through the U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement — or bypass Ukraine altogether through the construction of several alternative gas pipelines, the most significant of which is Nord Stream 2. The long-stalled project could now be revived as part of Trump’s economic negotiations with Russia.
Nord Stream 2 is the controversial pipeline completed in 2021, but never put into operation, and which was sabotaged in September, 2022, allegedly by a pro-Ukrainian team, though investigations have not been entirely conclusive.
Juhasz quotes Ukrainian environmental lawyer and founder of Razom We Stand, Svitlana Romanko, who has long argued that the way to end the war is to “end the global fossil fuel addiction that feeds Putin’s war machine.” Romanko notes,
We cannot return to that dark energy future that empowers dictators like Putin, fuels wars, and locks the world into fossil dependence […]. We need our full territories back, and an energy transition just as strong so that future generations of Ukrainians never again face a fossil-fueled monster, encouraged and sugarcoated by appeasement, red carpets, and the like.
On the 34th anniversary of Ukrainian independence, it’s important to repeat that there are ways to end this war that could be enacted immediately — by a simple Russian withdrawal of all its forces (or, perhaps better, by a decapitation of its government, which would likely leave its army in disarray and unable to continue fighting).
Seeing this war as a war that’s in large part about the future of fossil fuels, however, enables us to see it as part of a much larger global struggle — the struggle to end our civilization’s addiction to fossil fuels, and to the extractive capitalism that underlies that addiction. While that explanation ignores the important cultural dimensions of this specific conflict (which I’ve written about before), ignoring these equally important political-ecological dimensions leaves us unable to make sense of the global configurations of power that all of us, not just Ukrainians, are up against.
Long live Ukraine. Long live the Earth that sustains Ukrainians and all of us.
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