Historian and left-wing activist Vladyslav Starodubtsev is becoming a prominent spokesperson for Ukraine’s “left-republican tradition,” a tradition he identifies with some of the leaders of Ukraine’s national awakening in the late 1800s, and with those that led the efforts to create a social-democratic Ukrainian state in the years 1917 through about 1922 or so, a period that ended with the consolidation of Soviet control over Ukraine.
Suzi Weissman recently interviewed Starodubtsev for Jacobin Radio, and the two spent more time — almost an hour — discussing the 1917-1922 years than most people have ever spent thinking about those years at all, let alone what they looked like in Ukraine. As the web site puts it, the interview examines “the Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917-1923, born in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, WWI, and the February 1917 Russian Revolution. Built on grassroots power from peasants, workers, soldiers, and cooperatives, the Ukrainian People’s Republic legislated sweeping land reform, gender equality, national-personal autonomy for ethnic minorities, and a cooperative economy. It did not last.”
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).
There are three main hypotheses explaining Donald Trump’s eagerness to please Vladimir Putin.
The first is “conspiratorial”: that Putin has something over Trump, related perhaps to the Steele dossier, Trump’s real estate shenanigans, the KGB’s long-term efforts to cultivate Trump as a “Russian asset,” or maybe even the Epstein files (Trump and Putin do, after all, connect within the ranks of the uber-rich masculinist jet set, where sexist pedophilia seems readily appeasable).
The second is psychoanalytical: that Trump is a pathological narcissist with a fragile father-damaged ego, and that he only looks up to other, more “successfully” imperial father figures. Putin is one of the few who fit his criteria.
The third is “realist,” which acknowledges that there are benefits, from Trump’s perspective, to a cozier relationship with Russia. Allying with Russia could, for instance, steer the latter away from China. More importantly, and more specifically these days, is that Russia is a fossil fuel superpower — and Trump’s authority is also reliant on a perpetuation of the global power of fossil fuels. Rehabilitating Putin will enable Trump to “make deals” around Russia’s only assets, which are its oil and gas deposits. When other prices are rising all around Trump, he could at least keep gas prices down by dealing directly with Putin.
Ukraine may be the only country in the world where black-and-red flags can signify either anarcho-syndicalism — which they mostly do in the photos below, from David Chichkan’s funeral ceremony in Kyïv yesterday — or the right-wing nationalism associated with the world war two era OUN and UPA partisan armies. (Those armies and their followers today are commonly known as “Banderites” in honor of ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who’s become a symbol of all things anti-Russian, though the flag long pre-dates Bandera and has been used well beyond the paramilitary legacy associated with him.)
In some cases they can even be both, as with Ukraine’s national anarchists or anarcho-nationalists. (On anarchism and the Russo-Ukrainian war, see here, here, here, and here.) Sometimes, the “Banderite” flag features red over black horizontal bands, while the anarchist flag features the two in diagonal bands, but that’s not always the case.
VoxEurop has a nice piece about Ukraine’s Solidarity Collectives (anti-authoritarian brigades defending Ukraine from Russian aggression). Entitled “Anarchists in Wartime: The Experience of Ukraine’s Solidarity Collectives in Ukraine,” it covers the decimation of left-wing alternatives (to the Communist Party) in the Soviet Union and the revival of alternatives since 1991, as well as reflections on the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and what’s happened since then.
While it clearly oversimplifies things (as newspaper op-eds tend to do), Phillips’s main claim captures the obsessions of certain key people within the MAGA movement’s post-QAnon “Woke Right” rather well. I’m thinking especially of Tucker Carlson, but also of Laura Loomer, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others influential in MAGA world.
Phillips argues that the twin pillars of MAGA ideology for the last few years have been “Epstein” and “Ukraine” — not the person and the nation, but what they have come to stand for. And so, with Donald Trump’s recent denial that there’s anything at all to be seen there, the whole house of cards is at risk of coming down.
As I prepare to give a talk on Ukraine (my first after my recent visit there), I’m also preparing some simple answers to two questions that I expect to get.
Since the talk is in the United States, the question “What should the U.S. do?” will likely come up, even if the questioner knows it’s a virtually inoperable question in the context of a Trump presidency. The second question, about NATO, is really just rhetorical, but I can be virtually guaranteed that someone will raise something about it. I answer both below.
What should the U.S. do?
We should begin with what it should not do, and that’s to withdraw support from Ukraine. As we’ve already seen, that only encourages Putin to think he can “win” this war and achieve his goals. He’s made clear repeatedly that his main goal is to subordinate as much of Ukraine as possible to Russian control. Achieving that will not be possible without sending more Russian men to their deaths in the effort to kill more Ukrainians, resulting in more bloodshed, more bombing, more trauma all around, and ultimately more police-state machinations once the goal would be (hypothetically) attained. This should therefore be a non-starter (though we know it’s exactly what Trump has been doing).
As for what it should do:
The U.S. should support Ukraineboth rhetorically and militarily, for reasons that include its obligations to guarantee Ukrainian security under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. (That the Trump administration recently “disappeared” the Budapest Memorandum from U.S. government web sites is a telling indicator that it never plans to do this.)
The U.S. should work with other countries to apply greater economic pressure not only on Russia, but alsoon countries that do business with Russia. Economic sanctions by the EU have turned Russia — quite successfully — to other countries (China, India, Iran, et al.) for the oil and gas revenues that sustain it. If business with Russia were turned into an instrument of negotiation with other countries (as Trump’s infamous tariffs are intended to do), then this could become useful leverage.
Economic pressure should also make more use of the Russian financial assets — numbering in the hundreds of billions of dollars — that have been temporarily “frozen” as part of the sanctions regime. How to make use of these is complicated, but any genuine leverage requires the possibility of directing these funds toward the defense and post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.
The U.S. should apply diplomatic pressure toward a resolution that respects international agreements, and it should do this in the context of a foreign policy that does that everywhere. (That means in Israel and Gaza, in Iran, and elsewhere around the world.) While the Biden administration fell rather short of this goal, the Trump administration is falling far, far shorter.
What about NATO?
I phrase this indirectly, since the question is almost always a rhetorical one. But answering it requires identifying first principles, which for me are two:
NATO should be expected to fulfill its mission as a defense alliance protecting its members and devoted to safeguarding “the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” To the extent that its member countries remain democratic, their voice in NATO should be respected. If some fall away from those principles (I’m looking at Hungary, Slovakia, and a few others), their role should be diminished or they should be pressured to withdraw from the alliance. Of course, that’s complicated, but remembering the organization’s founding principles is important.
NATO should not be guided by the self-serving goals of the military-industrial complex. (That’s where I agree with many others on the political left.) Defense should be defense for the sake of democracy, rule of law, etc., and not for the sake of the defense industry. That said, keeping in mind the neo-imperializingstate of the world means that the path toward peace is more complicated today than it might have appeared a few decades ago. If it were still the early 1990s, we could dream of a world without military alliances like NATO. It no longer is that time.
Darya Tsymbalyuk’s Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Books, 2025) is the most important book to come out on the topic of the environmental consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the first English-language volume to examine the topic comprehensively.
The Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group recently published a review of it by Bern University geographer Alexander Vorbrugg. I recommend reading the review, then buying the book. (For full disclosure, Darya authored one of the chapters in Terra Invicta, the anthology I’ve edited which will be coming out in a few months.)
By now it should be clear that the Ukrainian struggle against Russia is an anti-authoritarian and, frankly, anti-imperialist struggle. It is a struggle for collective political agency against an invading force that denies that agency. It is consistent with the series of revolutions that have marked the last 35 years of Ukrainian history: the Granite Revolution of 1991, the Orange Revolution of 2004, and the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. And while there’s been plenty of debate around how satisfactorily those three revolutions ended (Volodymyr Ishchenko’s term “deficient revolutions” is not entirely off the mark, despite my critiques of his position), they have given millions of Ukrainians a real sense that their own actions matter in the making of a better society.
The only social change worth fighting for, to my mind, is the kind that establishes a wider and more satisfying circulation of agency — a sense of “self-determination” of each among many, within a larger world for which that self-determination is suitable, sensible, and socially and ecologically appropriate. As most political philosophies recognize (libertarianism, at least in its right-wing variant, being an exception), the self cannot exist without the relations and differences that enable it to function.
Ukrainians’ gravitation toward Europe results from the perception that European institutions, in stark contrast to Russian or “Eurasian” ones, provide the mechanisms of mutual recognition that allow democratically organized national collectivities to function best. This gravitation has a history that goes back centuries, both at elite levels (as with philosophers like Hryhoriy Skovoroda, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and their latter-day followers and interpreters) and in popular discourse (for instance, surrounding the Cossacks).
Unfortunately, it’s that European drift, along with the perception of the West’s — and especially the U.S.’s — support for Ukraine, that has weakened most of the potential support for Ukraine’s position in the Global South. That, of course, is because of the history of relations between “the West” and “the rest.” As anti-colonial thinkers have long recognized, the U.S., despite its rhetoric, has not been a genuine friend to democracy in the Global South. Its history of military interventions around the world is a long one, and the current bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities is easily interpreted as just another in that line. In Iran, of course, it’s continuous with the CIA-arranged coup in 1953 that ousted democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
As for the rest of “the West,” the history of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and other colonialisms are all too well known in the non-European world. The history of Russian colonialism, by contrast, is only (“only”) known directly in eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the vast expanses of northern Asia (all the way to Alaska). And it’s obscured by the duplicitous role, at once anti-colonial (in its rhetorical support for anti-Western movements around the world) and colonial (in its relations to Eastern Europe and the entirety of the Russian colonial world), played by the USSR for 70 years.
As I’ve argued here repeatedly, U.S.-led Western imperialism is no longer the only imperialism (if it ever was). In an increasingly “multipolar world disorder,” anti-imperial struggles must at times rely on support from forces perceived to be imperial by someone or other. This has been the case with the Kurds in Rojava, and it is the case in Ukraine. The Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukrainian security in exchange for its nukes was, after all, signed by the U.S. and U.K., so the latter have a direct responsibility to protect Ukraine from its invader, the fourth signatory (Russia).
Ultimately, of course, that reliance — perceived by some to be a “cozying up” to unworthy powers — will never be entirely reliable, as Trump is demonstrating daily. To be true to its own anti-imperialism, it can only ever be a reliance on democratic institutions, not on rulers, and certainly not on kings or dictators. In that sense, Bill Brown’s wonderful poster, designed for No Kings Day, is a perfectly apt summation of where many Ukrainians, and supporters of Ukraine, stand (or should stand) on the question of authority.
