The slow advance of Russian troops continued both on the southern front of Donetsk and in the Kursk region of Russia. The four regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson annexed by Russia with the referendums called in September 2022 are not yet fully under Russian military control, apart from Luhansk. They are included, together with Crimea, in the territorial claims that Moscow has always set as a precondition for negotiating an agreement.

In Donetsk, a powerful defense system built over years must be conquered meter by meter. The Russian strategy seems to be to force the Ukrainians to mass troops at certain points on the front where they can be hit by aircraft or artillery. On the diplomatic front, Russia does not seem interested in quickly reaching a ceasefire. The situation of the Ukrainian armed forces, hit by tens of thousands of desertions, uncertainty about military supplies, a shortage of ammunition and a minimal air force, opens the way to new successes for Moscow, which must justify to the proletariat the tens of thousands of deaths and economic damage caused by this conflict.

Russia also demands the demilitarization of what remains of the Ukrainian state and an assurance that Ukraine will remain outside of NATO.

The recent strategic agreement with Iran has strengthened Russia’s international position, although the military alliance has precise limits and does not go so far as to foresee that if one of the two signatories is attacked by a third state the other is obliged to intervene.

During the election campaign, Trump, in contrast to the prevailing “isolationist” ideas about abandoning Kiev to its fate, had his national security adviser state that the new administration would push Ukraine to “lower the mobilization age to 18 to attract hundreds of thousands of new troops, ” thus continuing the war “to the last Ukrainian.”

The leaders of the European Union and NATO insist on their decision to help Kiev “until victory” with the reconquest of the territories currently occupied by Russia. They even intend to continue supporting Ukraine even if the United States were to stop doing so. “If we do nothing, Russia could attack us”, the warmongers representing the European Union shout in chorus, to mask their common interest in the profits of the arms industries. Currently, the United States supplies 70% of the weapons to the European NATO states.

There is also an agreement with NATO leaders for member states to increase spending on weapons to 5% of GDP, which would be more than double the current level. There are even threats of risky unilateral decisions to send military contingents from some NATO countries to fight in Ukraine.

The European states, on the other hand, risk being cut out of any peace negotiations because the US president has already announced that he is ready to get rid of them and deal directly with Putin, without giving the European states, as always, a say in the matter. On the other hand, the famous sanctions against Russia are bringing the European industrial apparatus to its knees rather than the Russian economy, which has found other buyers on the world market.

Of course, there is no single position among the 27 states of the Union that pursue different and even contrasting policies. France has adopted a hard-line military response, recently calling for the direct involvement of the Atlantic Alliance in the conflict, and has lifted restrictions on the use of its SCALP cruise missiles to strike Russian territory. Poland also hoped for direct involvement in the conflict and has been undertaking a bold rearmament plan for several years now, with major purchases from the United States and South Korea, and plans to allocate 4.7% of its state budget to defense next year. The German government, now out of office, has taken an intermediate position, sending significant military aid to Kiev but preventing the use of its long-range Taurus missiles inside Russia. Italy continues to send weapons and aid to Kiev but has always declared itself decidedly against sending troops to Ukrainian territory. The United Kingdom declares itself ready for a direct confrontation with Moscow and authorizes the use of cruise missiles against Russia. The new Labour government, in perfect continuity with the previous Conservative one, has signed a “one hundred year collaboration” pact with the Ukrainian government that would even include the possibility of installing military bases in the country. But military circles point out that Her Majesty’s Armed Forces have never been so weak since the Napoleonic era.

In these power games the Ukrainian state has no role, it depends entirely on its "protectors" in Washington. This subservience to the government of the "beggar" Zelensky, as Trump called him, is proven by the role of the Kiev secret services in supporting the advance of the rebels who overthrew the Assad regime in Syria, alongside the United States that protected and supported them.

The numerical consistency of the armies is a problem that the war in Ukraine is posing to all the General Staffs of Europe. Professional armies, composed of tens of thousands of specialists, are not suited to fighting the war that is being prepared. It will be necessary to mobilize hundreds of thousands, millions of proletarians to be deployed as cannon fodder. Many states are already preparing to reintroduce compulsory military service.

What is emerging, therefore, despite the propaganda talk about the possibility of peace, is a prolongation of this war for a long time to come.

The proletarians of Ukraine and Russia, already tested by years of war, subjected to the iron heel of corrupt and warmongering governments, could rebel against a new demand to shed their blood and impose on the States their peace, the only possible one, overthrowing the regime of capital as the Russian proletariat did in October 1917. Only the proletariat fighting for communism will be able to put an end to the state of permanent war, misery and hunger, uncertainty and terror of tomorrow into which the capitalist regime, in full crisis, not only economic and ideological, but tomorrow social and political, has brought all humanity.