Trump’s peace, Lenin’s test: Class, empire and the price of a deal
In late November, the world woke up to a sudden and, for many, unwelcome “peace initiative” from United States President Donald Trump: a leaked 28-point draft circulating between US, Ukrainian and Russian interlocutors, as a framework to end the war. The document is not an official text and may change substantially, but its core logic is clear enough to analyse.
At its heart, the draft proposal would freeze the front roughly where it stands and entrench Russian control over Crimea and large parts of Donbas; neutralise Ukraine by constitutionalising a NATO renunciation and extracting parallel pledges that NATO never admit Ukraine; replace alliance membership with a US-style security guarantee subject to conditions; pair a phased sanctions rollback for Russia with economic cooperation (energy, mining, high tech) and channel frozen Russian assets into reconstruction; and wrap the whole package in a bespoke oversight body chaired by Trump. Everything else hangs off those pillars: troop caps, quick elections and broad amnesties, IAEA management at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and implementation timelines.
Reactions have been all over the map. European Union leaders publicly treated the draft as a starting point that “will require work,” signalling red lines on borders, force limits and any clauses that would bind EU or NATO processes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it an unprecedented challenge to Ukraine’s dignity, even while indicating a willingness to engage with Washington.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, by contrast, said it could serve as a basis “in principle” for settlement. Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky noted from prison that the draft is vague on most points yet painstaking on the money. In its current form it reads like a template where Ukraine looks the loser, Russia not quite the winner, and the US the only clear beneficiary. Even so, any step that stops the killing would be a step worth taking.
Why Lenin? Why now?
Invoking Vladimir Lenin is not nostalgia; it is a way to keep analysis from collapsing into moral binaries or great-power fandom. His wartime polemics, succinctly distilled in the relatively little-known 1916 essay A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism, supply a compact toolkit for thinking about modern conflicts.
He forces us to focus on two disciplines that contemporary debate keeps evading: first, to read war as the continuation of class policy, not as a sudden meteor; and second, to hold together two planes at once, the inter-imperialist struggle for redivision and the national liberation struggle of oppressed peoples. That dual focus is exactly what the Ukraine war scrambles and what any externally brokered “peace” threatens to flatten.
Lenin is also relevant because he treated wars inside the stage of imperialism, and not as isolated clashes of flags. That premise is largely airbrushed out by mainstream commentary and openly debated within the left, which recognises the imperial dimension even as it disagrees over how much weight to give it against Ukraine’s national liberation struggle (see, for example, the exchange between Alex Callinicos and Gilbert Achcar).
Finally, Lenin links analysis to strategy: judge each belligerent by what its victory or defeat means for workers, and fight opportunism inside the labour movement while opposing imperialist war.
Lenin’s four tests for modern wars
1. War as the continuation of class policy
Clausewitz called war “the continuation of policy by other means.” Lenin keeps the sentence and changes the subject of the policy: not an abstract “state,” but a ruling class pursuing its accumulation strategy. So, the task is to reconstruct each side’s pre-war class policy — its profit model, external dependencies, regional ambitions, and domestic crises — and then read the outbreak of war as the switch from peaceful to violent instruments in pursuit of those same aims. Official slogans about defence, civilisation or democracy are evidence, not explanations.
2. Two planes in one war
On one plane, rival capitalist states (or blocs) fight to redraw hierarchies of extraction and control: an inter-imperialist war for redivision. On the other, a dominated people fights to secure or preserve sovereignty: a national liberation war. Lenin’s test is to identify which relation holds between which actors, and then refuse to collapse the two planes into a neutral “clash of states.” Supporting an oppressed nation’s right to resist does not require political endorsement of its bourgeois leadership, and recognising an inter-imperialist struggle does not erase the agency or rights of the dominated.
3. Judge each belligerent by class outcomes, not camp loyalties
Socialists do not pick sides the way chancelleries do. They ask, for each belligerent separately: What is the position of its ruling class in the world system? What would its victory or defeat mean for the capacity of workers and oppressed people — locally, regionally, internationally — to organise, win rights, break dependencies, etc? A predatory victory that consolidates chauvinism and repression is to be opposed; a defeat that opens space for democratic and labour struggles can be welcomed, even if it benefits no government you like. Conversely, a “friendly” victory that locks a country into new dependency or debt servitude is not a socialist gain. The metric is strategic empowerment of the working class, not diplomatic score keeping.
4. Fight opportunism inside the labour movement as part of fighting the war
Anti-imperialism is not real if it stops at criticising the enemy’s propaganda. Lenin’s last test turns inward: break with social-chauvinism (backing “our” bourgeoisie’s war under progressive pretexts) and with centrist evasions (condemning war in words while tailing ruling-class policy in practice). Apply the same discipline everywhere: in aggressor states, oppose annexations and chauvinism; in invaded states, defend the right to resist while resisting wartime assaults on labour and minority rights; in core states, reject both crusader liberalism and apologias for rival imperialisms, and fight the militarisation and austerity imposed at home. There is no durable anti-war politics without an internal struggle over the line of the movement itself.
Taken together, these four tests form a method, not a mantra. They compel analysis of prior class policies, insist on keeping two planes in view, replace campism with outcome-based judgment, and weld anti-war work to a fight against opportunism. That is why they remain usable for evaluating any “peace plan” offered by great powers today.
Trump’s peace through Lenin’s lens
Lenin’s third test — judge each belligerent by class outcomes — sharpens the agenda. Looking at the current “peace initiative”, Lenin would immediately note that the principal beneficiaries are the US and Russian imperialists, carving up Ukraine’s natural wealth and territory over the heads of the population. He would also read the draft’s call for US–Russia “cooperation” in energy and mining as the signature of subordinated imperialism on the Russian side, a return to the pre-2014 pattern in which Western majors were invited into hydrocarbons and extractives on privileged terms (Rosneft–Exxon tie-ups, BP’s equity in Rosneft, Sakhalin consortia).
At the same time, he would also see through European imperialism: prolonging the war without a clear, credible victory plan simply bleeds Ukrainian workers, while Ukrainian elites position themselves to profit from flows of aid, contracts and energy-sector rents, as the high-profile Energoatom ‘Operation Midas’ kickback probe suggests.
He would not chalk Ukraine’s mobilisation crisis up to some alleged lack of national identity, still less to the fiction that Ukrainians are an “artificial nation” as Putin claims; he would point to class suspicion — the reasonable fear among workers that their sacrifices will be appropriated by Ukrainian capital. Pressed to rank the imperialisms at play, he would refuse the game.
To adapt Josef Stalin’s famous quip from the 1925 XIV Party Congress on “right” and “left” deviations, “both are worse”, in this triangle all three are worse: the US and Russian imperialisms that bargain over Ukraine’s resources and territory, and a European strategy anchored in “support to Ukraine as long as it takes,” with a maximalist end-state (full withdrawal, reparations, prosecutions) but no credible route to get there and financed by Ukrainian blood and deepening EU dependency.
Lenin would also read the frozen-assets plank as open inter-imperialist rivalry: about €210 billion in Russian state funds are immobilised in the EU, yet the leaked draft channels $100 billion of those assets into US-led reconstruction vehicles, with the US taking a profit share and a further tranche parked in a joint US–Russia investment instrument, overseen within a bespoke “Peace Council” chaired by Trump. In Lenin’s terms, that is the core muscling the core: Brussels carries the legal risk of immobilisation while Washington positions itself to manage and monetise the pot.
Read strictly through Lenin’s tests, the draft “peace initiative” functions as an inter-imperialist bargain that subordinates Ukraine’s sovereignty to the interests of the core. A Russian-imposed partition would mark a defeat of an oppressed nation’s right to exist; yet a “victory” under the present Ukrainian leadership, on these terms, would likely be cashed out as deeper NATO tutelage and debt-driven restructuring. A tolerable outcome, in Lenin’s terms, would be a compelled halt to the killing that neither recognises annexations nor launders occupation plebiscites, and that avoids converting Ukraine’s dependence into a permanent settlement. Anything else reads as peace that sanctifies defeat.
Ukraine’s national question, without hagiography
A Leninist reading starts by naming the structure without mythmaking: vis-à-vis Russia, Ukraine is an oppressed nation whose right to exist has been denied, in word and deed, and whose territory has been seized under the alibi of “historical unity.” That diagnosis does not require airbrushing the past or canonising the present. It simply restores the basic asymmetry that any serious analysis must keep in view.
The Soviet layer complicates but does not erase that asymmetry. Ukraine was one of the principal centres of Soviet development: it received huge industrial investment, became home to advanced sectors (aerospace, armaments, research institutes), fostered a rich national culture, and even held a formal seat at the United Nations.
Economically, the picture is mixed in precisely the way ideologues hate: by contribution to all-Union Gross National Product Ukraine functioned as a net donor (as did Russia), while in narrow fiscal flows it was a modest net recipient; it also benefited from targeted investment and cheap energy. Politically, however, decisive power was centralised in Moscow, real statehood was off the table, and the Ukrainian language was subordinated in high administration and all-Union communication. Both truths sit together: material advance within a framework of national subordination.
Post-1991, Russia operates as a semi-peripheral empire: dependent on the core in finance and technology yet exercising regional domination over its “near abroad.” Toward Ukraine that has meant leverage through energy, currency and security ties, periodic territorial grabs, and now a full-scale war framed by open denial of Ukrainian nationhood. Semi-peripheral status does not mitigate the relation; vis-à-vis Ukraine, Russia is the oppressor.
None of this implies that internal relations inside Ukraine are harmonious. In Crimea and Donbas, genuine grievances about Kyiv’s policies, language laws and post-Maidan orientation pre-dated 2014, and should have been addressed as a minority/national question within Ukraine. Ukrainian language and education rules grant protections to EU-official languages that do not extend equivalently to Russian, and wartime cultural bans have deepened that divide; the result is a de facto narrowing of the public sphere for Russian language and identity.
But referenda under occupation and pseudo-republics organised by Moscow are imperial instruments built on those grievances. By an ironic twist of history, the Bolsheviks made exactly this point about Ukraine at Brest-Litovsk in 1918: “self-determination” staged under foreign bayonets by puppet authorities is annexation in costume. Acknowledging internal injustices does not convert Ukraine from oppressed to oppressor when a larger power is carving it up.
Today, the national question clarifies stakes rather than dictating tactics. Vis-à-vis Russia, Ukraine remains the oppressed side of an asymmetric relationship; acknowledging internal injustices and regional grievances does not invert that fact, nor does it legitimise partitions engineered under occupation. The analytical bottom line is simple: keep the asymmetry clear and the history honest; treat annexations and staged plebiscites as imperial instruments; and read any prospective settlement through what it means for the political equality of citizens and the durability of a common state.
The practical implications of that frame follow only after the guns fall silent.
After the deal: Anti-opportunism in practice
A brokered ceasefire will not end class struggle; it will simply change the field on which it is fought. Lenin’s last test makes the next steps into organisational questions rather than rhetorical ones.
Ukraine
From a Leninist angle, near-term priorities often identified by Ukrainian socialists include rebuilding independent unions and workplace organisation; rolling back wartime carve-outs that weakened collective bargaining; designing reconstruction to favour open contracting, public or worker control in strategic sectors, and local value added; resisting debt conditionality by pressing for grants, write-downs and ring-fenced social budgets; providing legal support for labour rights, demobilised soldiers and IDPs; and sustaining independent media and cross-regional organising.
It would also mean confronting neo-Nazism and ethnonationalist gatekeeping wherever it surfaces, defending minority and language rights as a condition for class unity, and systematically exposing the neo-colonial character of US deals over Ukraine’s minerals (see the Ukrainian socialist critique of the US–Ukraine minerals agreement), while developing practical ties with Russian workers and anti-war activists (joint union statements, prisoner support, safety funds, sector-to-sector links) on the simple premise that chauvinism on either side weakens workers on both.
Russia
From a Leninist angle, breaking social-chauvinism in practice would mean opposing annexations and Great-Russian chauvinism, sustaining anti-war organising, and offering legal support to conscripts, refuseniks and political prisoners. Proletarian solidarity here implies shedding the “Big Brother” reflex and engaging Ukrainian workers as equals; practical links with Ukrainian unions can be sector-to-sector and problem-focused rather than paternalist, as recently argued by Russian socialists Alexey Sakhnin and Liza Smirnova.
Any talk of demobilisation or a “peace dividend” is more credible if paired with releases of political prisoners, as urged in the July 4, 2025 open letter from 11 jailed Russian dissidents (including Kagarlitsky), visible withdrawal steps and protections for minorities, while conversion of the war economy under worker oversight could shift the post-war agenda toward social gains rather than imperial restoration.
Core states
In the core states, a Leninist emphasis falls on demilitarisation and de-rentierisation at home, rather than a generic “progressive support” package. In practice, that could mean treating war-time profits and lock-ins as the core problem and favouring measures that redirect capacity from arms to civil uses, keep procurement transparent, and keep financing grant-heavy rather than debt-heavy. Assistance to Ukraine would come with labour and open-contracting clauses rather than investor privileges, and with technology sharing/public options that reduce long-run dependency instead of vendor lock-ins.
On the domestic side, a peace settlement would be a moment to wind down emergency powers and surveillance, and to pair any residual security spending with matching social outlays so the “jobs from militarisation” logic does not quietly harden. None of this claims to be a master plan; it simply draws a line between “support” that feeds the security-industrial complex and support that preserves democratic space, labour strength, and fiscal room for the majority.
Common discipline
Across contexts, a few guardrails seem basic: no de jure recognition of annexations; no recognition of plebiscites conducted under occupation; no secret clauses on bases, minerals or debt; no convenient amnesia about war crimes. Wherever possible, translate policy stances into organisational capacity — membership growth, sectoral networks, cross-border union links — so that, after any deal, workers are more able to act independently of all ruling classes involved, not less.
Conclusion: Complexity against propaganda
Reading a Trump-style peace through Lenin’s method resists the flattening that propaganda demands. It keeps two planes in view at once: an inter-imperialist bargain over hierarchy and access, and a national liberation struggle against a regional oppressor. It replaces camp loyalties with a class test: what outcome enlarges the capacity of workers and oppressed people to act tomorrow? And it ties every anti-war stance to an internal fight against opportunism, so the labour movement is not dragged behind any ruling class’s settlement.
The result is unglamorous but usable: oppose annexations and the laundering of plebiscites held under occupation; refuse a “peace” that swaps aid for resources, contracts, and debt servitude; tolerate only a compelled truce that halts the killing without sanctifying the map; and use any respite to rebuild independent organisation, restore labour rights, protect minorities, and block new dependencies. If this position will not fit on a placard, that is the point. Analysis worthy of its subject should protect complexity from being sacrificed to someone else’s storyline.
In today’s Russia, Lenin’s legacy is officially inconvenient. The ruling narrative rehabilitates imperial cohesion and derides his nationalities policy as a “time bomb” under the state. Putin has repeatedly blamed Lenin for “inventing” or “artificially” creating Ukraine. Yet public opinion tells a different story. Elite hostility to Lenin’s nationalities policy helps explain his official unpopularity, but among the public a 2024 Levada poll shows 67% rating his role positively and a record 45% supporting leaving his body in the Mausoleum, with support highest among 18–24-year-olds.
The gap between elite vilification and popular memory is not a program, but it is a resource, a reminder that the materials for a principled, anti-imperialist politics still exist beneath the state’s storyline.