WeeklyWorker

19.02.2026
Trump seems to be trying to split Russia from China

Notes on the war

Four years since the launch of the ‘special military operation’, Russia is predictably bogged down in a war of attrition. Exactly what the US wanted, says Jack Conrad. But now we have Trump, the trifecta and the shredding of the post-World War II order

Before the ‘special military operation’ began, I remember talking at our Online Communist Forum, to the effect that Russia was unlikely to invade Ukraine. That despite repeated CIA warnings to the contrary. Why?

Firstly, because, in general, it is never a good idea to take the CIA on trust. Think Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. Etc, etc.

Secondly, western reports of Russian troop formations told me in no uncertain terms that there were simply far too few of them to do the job. Even if it was to be limited to taking Kyiv and forcing Volodymyr Zelenskyy to either flee abroad or agree some grossly unequal treaty. Russia’s aim was certainly to put a block on Nato and EU membership and perhaps create a Novorussiya that would landlock a disarmed and ‘de-Nazified’ rump Ukraine.

Thirdly, I thought that any Russian invasion of Ukrainian Ukraine - that is, the non-Russian oblasts - would trigger stiff, stubborn, fanatical resistance.

Fourthly, surely the US and Nato - as had been preplanned, certainly at least since 2014 and the Maidan coup - would pour in arms, provide substantial financial backing and whip up a propaganda storm designed to make Ukraine into a holy cause. People would thereby be fooled into voting for guns, not butter.

As events proved, I got things wrong. But I did so for the right reasons. Four years on, Moscow fully controls just one of the Ukrainian oblasts it officially annexed in September 2022: Luhansk. The other three - Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia - still remain partially in Ukrainian hands.

Moreover, note, the Ukraine war has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War. That titanic struggle began in June 1941 with the disastrous and, as far as Stalin was concerned, entirely unexpected Nazi invasion. Operation Barbarossa took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, but ended with the Soviet Army taking Berlin and famously raising the red banner over the ruins of the Reichstag in May 1945.

By contrast, the Ukraine war has been slow, grinding and narrowly focused. Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead for a full-scale invasion on February 24 2022. The special military operation began with simultaneous thrusts from the north, east and south. A Russian armoured column, sporting the tactical ‘Z’ symbol, headed towards Kyiv from bases in Belarus. The city’s outskirts were reached three days later. Hostomel Airport was taken. Special forces briefly occupied positions in Kyiv. Selected Russian soldiers were told to take dress uniforms with them. The expectation being that within a few weeks Russia would hold a strutting victory parade through the ‘liberated’ city.

However, the PO2 road from Chernobyl to Kyiv became hopelessly clogged. It turned into a turkey shoot. Russian tanks, armoured cars and soft-skinned vehicles were blown to smithereens. Western-supplied Stinger, Javelin and NLAW shoulder-launched missiles turned the tide. Effectively they ended phase one of the war. Putin’s generals scuttled. Even the latest T90Ms proved highly vulnerable. The tank, for sure, is no longer the main deliverer of shock and awe on the battlefield. A revolution in warfare prefigured by the US-supplied Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

True, in the south Russia made substantial gains. Kherson was taken and so, after a long siege, was Mariupol. Hence a land bridge was created, joining Russia with Crimea (annexed in September 2014). Things looked set for a further, a decisive, push on to Odessa and the breakaway Russian-speaking Moldovan republic of Transnistria. That would have cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea. Meanwhile, in the east, Russian forces advanced on a wide front and approached Kharkov, Ukraine’s second city.

However, western arms, plus Ukrainian nationalism, plus severe Russian logistical limitations ensured that any forward momentum was quickly lost. As a result, there were Ukrainian gains, though mainly after the Russian high command ordered a retreat to optimum defence positions. Kherson was abandoned without a fight. Phase two of the war ended anything resembling rapid movement. Instead, there came lines of trenches, minefields, tank traps and dragon’s teeth. The 800-mile-long front thereby bears comparison with World War I and its associated horrors, routines and possibilities of fraternisation. The war became a war of attrition.

Ukraine’s failed 2023 southern offensive, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s miassoroubka tactics in Bakhmut and the unsustainable incursion into the Russian oblast of Kursk - all underlined the essential stalemate. A salient fact which we quickly recognised and repeatedly emphasised.1 That, of course, never meant a frozen war.

The fighting and the killing have continued at a pretty steady and sickening rate. Who knows how many have died or been terribly injured: one recent estimate puts Russian military casualties at around 1.2 million (of whom as many as 325,000 have been killed); as for Ukraine, the reported figure is between 500,000 and 600,000 (of whom 100,000 to 140,000 are thought to have died). Civilian fatalities, mercifully, have in comparative terms been small: around 7,000 Russians and some 16,000 Ukrainians.2 So, again, more like World War I, certainly not World War II.

The kill rate is increasingly down to that other revolution in warfare: drones. The skies above battlefields are thick with them. There is also the long-range drone war: Russia’s mainly against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure; Ukraine’s mainly against Russia’s oil and gas sector. Most drones are intercepted, but enough get through to cause real problems. There are also cruise and ballistic missiles: most get through.3 But, whereas cruise and ballistic missiles are expensive, drones are, in relative terms, dirt cheap, and are produced on a mass scale.

Emulating Engels

We have consciously sought to emulate Fredrick Engels and his coverage of the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war (he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette under the heading, ‘Notes on the war’). Over the last four years readers have been provided with the best information available: ie, technological developments, the significance of this or that town changing hands, the shifts in infantry tactics, the marginalisation of fixed-wing aircraft, the role of morale, etc.

But there has always been the bigger - the strategic - picture. How Ukraine was cynically set up to fight a proxy war by Joe Biden’s administration. The demand was for the withdrawal of every last Russian soldier from every last inch of Ukrainian soil … that and the overthrow of the ‘murderer’, Vladmir Putin. The impact of sanctions and the political economy of the Russian Federation have been analysed: yes, it aspires to be, but is definitely not, an imperialist power. The fragility of the Zelensky regime, the endemic corruption and the lowering Banderite menace have been stressed throughout. Crucially, the Russo-Ukraine war has been placed in the context of the global rivalry, pitting a declining US against a rising China. Nothing can be understood in isolation.

Leon Trotsky’s March 1924 observations - ie, when he was still commissar of war4 - concerning Engels’ Pall Mall Gazette articles are well worth quoting:

Of Marxism or dialectics, Engels says not a word in all these articles; which is not to be astonished at, for he was writing anonymously for an arch-bourgeois periodical and that at a time when the name of Marx was still little known. But not only these outward reasons prompted Engels to refrain from all general-theoretical considerations.

We may be convinced that even if Engels had had the opportunity then to discuss the events of the war in a revolutionary-Marxian paper - with far greater freedom for expressing his political sympathies and antipathies - he would nevertheless hardly have approached the analysis and the estimation of the course of the war differently than he did in the Pall Mall Gazette. Engels injected no abstract doctrine into the domain of the science of war from without and did not set up any tactical recipes, newly discovered by himself, as universal criteria.

Regardless of the conciseness of the presentation, we see nonetheless with what attentiveness the author deals with all the elements of the profession of war, from the territorial areas and the population figures of the countries involved down to the biographical researches into the past of General Trochu [Louis-Jules Trochu served as president of France’s government of National Defence from September 4 1870 until January 22 1871 - JC] for the purpose of being better acquainted with his methods and habits. Behind these articles is sensed a vast preceding and continuing labour.5

Of course, we have said more than a word or two about Marxism and about dialectics too: eg, the shift from quantity into quality, when it comes to drone warfare. We also write for a revolutionary-Marxist paper. Polemics against centrists, social-pacifists, social-imperialists and conciliators therefore regularly feature. Nonetheless, we have followed Engels down to an assessment of the key players involved in the war, both directly and indirectly: Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, obviously, but also the likes of Ihor Kolomoisky, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Aleksandr Dugin, Mykyta Nadtochiy, Denys Prokopenko (‘Redis’) and Andriy Biletsky.

We have, too, tried to get to grips with Donald J Trump the man. I have, in particular, recommended Michael Woolf’s books, a biopic and The art of the deal.

Fire and fury (2018), Siege (2019) and Landslide (2021) cover the trials and tribulations of the first term, including the January 6 2021 attempted self-coup. A fourth volume by Woolf, All or nothing, was published in February 2025 and deals with the last presidential campaign and Trump’s return from ‘exile’. Given that Woolf says he remains in contact with Trump, more books should be expected. One does not need to treat his quartet as gospel, that goes without saying. However, there can be no doubting their worth. A mine of information, especially given the close, first-hand account of events and people: above all of Trump himself.

Then there is Ali Abbasi’s 2024 film, The apprentice. It appears to be thoroughly researched and solidly based in fact - note, Trump has not carried through on his threat to sue the producers. The biopic focuses on Trump’s early years as a budding tycoon. His father, Fred, made his money from low-end New York real estate. He is domineering, sometimes cruel. Donald is determined to surpass, to overthrow, the family patriarch. His buildings will be high, upmarket and full of gold, marble and bling. Donald shamefully fails to help his alcoholic brother, Fred Jr. Self-aggrandisement, the pursuit of money, power and sex always came first. He is contemptuous of weakness. Trump’s 14-year marriage to the former Czech model, Ivana Zelníčková, ends in violence, public scandal and a bitter divorce. He also abandons his mentor, the ruthless, manipulative and thoroughly crooked lawyer, Roy Cohen. He was gay and suffering from Aids-related illnesses.

What about The art of the deal? (The 1987 book is credited to Trump, but is written by the journalist, Tony Schwartz.) Here we have how Trump wants to be perceived by others. He certainly wanted to see himself as a self-made business genius - a visionary along the lines of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark (the central character in her 1943 novel, Fountainhead, who Trump still cites - though he might simply have watched the King Vidor film).

You will not have a clue about what is going on in global politics if you ignore or discount Trump and his driven, but highly contradictory, personality. That includes, of course, the tripartite US, Russia, Ukraine talks in Geneva. People make history. A basic Marxist proposition.

Philistines

Yet, amazingly, we come across self-described ‘Marxists’ who object to any attempt to understand Trump. Apparently, instead of putting in the hard work, we should turn to the classic works of Marx and Engels. A completely imbecilic approach. Trump was not even a twinkle in his father’s eye when Marx and Engels were alive. They can, therefore, tell us nothing specific about him. Such philistinism is, of course, utterly alien to the real Marx and Engels, who rejected anything smacking of scholasticism and resorting to ready-made answers. They studied, studied and studied.

Having not studied, studied and studied, there are then those ‘Marxists’ who unhesitatingly dismiss Trump as “ignorant” and “stupid” and, of course, a “fascist”.6 An approach which, quite frankly, goes way beyond “ignorant” and “stupid”.

Trump doubtless has a short attention span. He is certainly not book-learned. Michael Woolf says: “Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist.” He calls him to all intents and purposes “no more than semiliterate”. Tellingly, though, Woolf adds this caveat: perhaps Trump “didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist.”7

If truth be told, Trump has a mercurial intelligence - a sixth sense for the public square. He puts his gut instinct above accepted opinion and consensus-making. He knows what his base thinks and how they think. He thrives on chaos, conflict and grabbing media attention. He delights in enraging adversaries, throwing them off balance. Though from the upper classes, a member of the gilded elite, a billionaire who is always on the make, he speaks as the ultimate anti-politician. He is America’s “synthesis of monster and a superman”.8 With a majority in both houses, an enabling Supreme Court and the constitutional ability to issue an endless stream of executive orders, the 47th president certainly possesses extraordinary powers: both at home and abroad.

New order

Since assuming office for the second time on January 20 2025, Trump has behaved according to the ‘act fast and break things’ playbook. At home that means a counterrevolution against environmental protection, established working conditions, women’s reproductive health, sexual minorities and the whole post-1945 social settlement. Most notably there is ICE and the mass deportation of migrants. Suffice to say, this is not ‘fascism’. It is unfettered presidentialism. It is the trifecta.

Abroad, the ‘rules-based’ global order has been shredded. Leave aside threats to close the Mexican border, invade Greenland, and promises to take back the Panama canal and incorporate Canada as the 51st state. With the cold war won and long gone, his America has no need to cover the imperium with cant about freedom, justice, democracy and international law. He can afford to arrogantly parade America’s power and even its naked greed. Trump no longer asks the world to love America: instead the world is expected to fear and obey.

Liberals are mortified - often reduced to spluttering incoherence. And most of the left miserably tails liberal opinion. To restore the old order we therefore have entirely hollow demands for a “general strike” 9 and equally vacuous calls for “determined and courageous resistance”.10

Marco Rubio once again spelt out the stark realities at the 62nd Munich Security Conference with his February 14 speech (whereas last year JD Vance broke with the normal diplomatic language, Rubio was polite and seemingly ever so reasonable). Much to the relief of the assembled European prime ministers, presidents and foreign secretaries, he talked of the US being the “child of Europe”, of “unbreakable links” and sharing a “great civilisation”. Besides praising the “genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci”, he even praised the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Nevertheless, the message was exactly the same. America’s main energies are directed at countering the “existential threat” of China.11 So Rubio bemoaned the dependence on cheap Chinese goods, denounced the “climate cult”, the “wave of mass migration” and Europe’s “erasure” of national identity.12 He got himself a standing ovation too.

What about Ukraine? Notably, Rubio skipped that meeting. Yet, as we all know, Trump wants an agreement with Russia, freezing the whole of the 800-mile front line and then immediately thereafter establishing a buffer zone - Keir Starmer has volunteered British “troops on the ground”13 and so have the Baltic and Nordic states, Poland and the Netherlands. Nato peacekeepers can, of course, easily become Nato peacemakers: ie, 100,000 active combatants.

Trump is ready to allow Russia to keep what it has got: ie, around 20% of pre-2014 Ukrainian territory ... he is even willing to transform the Ukrainian-held oblasts claimed by Russia into some sort of free trade zone. Vladimir Putin can thereby claim a victory. He has already won a firm commitment that there will be no Ukrainian membership of Nato for the foreseeable future. Russia will once again be able to safely base its warships in Crimea’s Sevastopol and thereby be allowed free access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean.

So why does an economically weakened, diplomatically shunned and militarily ineffective Russia not grab at Trump’s deal? The answer is pretty obvious. It is those 100,000 Nato troops and the associated US security guarantees. What could be presented as a Putin victory could equally be presented as a Russian defeat by rivals and potential successors.

Either way, Trump has discarded Biden’s goal of regime change in Moscow ... for now. Remember, however, that Trump comes not only bearing an olive branch: he carries a big stick too. If he cannot close the deal by June, there is the possibility of aggressively increased American support for Ukraine. Perhaps Trump will dust off Zelensky’s now almost totally forgotten victory plan … and then add some. In other words, while Trump is seeking an accommodation with Russia, failing that, there is the “phasing into World War III” he once warned about.

Stab in the back

As things stand today, Zelensky is highly vulnerable. His spectacular political career looks like ending in its inevitable failure … soonish. Trump has, for example, been insisting on holding much delayed presidential elections (delayed because of the war and martial law).

Imagine then that Zelenskyy reluctantly agrees to hold presidential elections and combines them with a ‘peace referendum’ … naturally with a suitably loaded question designed to secure the ‘right’ outcome. Assuredly, the far right will accuse him of cheating, misleading voters, betraying the sacred fatherland and serving his fellow Jews, not Ukraine. Perhaps led by Mykyta Nadtochiy, Banderite mobs, guarded by Azov units, pre-empt the vote. They storm the presidential palace, arrest Zelenskyy and seize the Rada. Their central demands would be national unity and no concessions to the war criminal Putin. Why, they would ask, give away Ukrainian land that the enemy has failed to take by force? Have 150,000 Ukrainian patriots died in vain?

What Donald Trump would make of that is beyond me. The Banderites are, after all, ‘his kind of people’. But, as with Zelenskyy, a Banderite regime would still have to come to terms with global realities … that or fight an asymmetrical war with Russia and risk total defeat and the incorporation of the whole of Ukraine into Putin’s neo-tsarist empire.

Conditions are certainly ripe for a Ukrainian version of the ‘stab-in-the-back legend’ (Dolchstoßlegende). Germany’s far right - crucially the high command - insisted that they had suffered no defeat on the battlefields of 1914-18. Instead, they had been betrayed on the home front by communists and social democrats. Almost instantly, the idea was given an anti-Semitic twist, not least by Adolf Hitler and his chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. The fall of the Weimar republic was already in sight.

There are precious few communists and social democrats in Ukraine today, but Zelenskyy is Jewish and its army has successfully fought for four long years against all the odds. And, inevitably, there are all manner of absurd conspiracy theories already doing the rounds: Trump has been a Russian agent since 1987; the Ukrainian government acts under the control of the “Jewish oligarchy”; Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in cahoots with Jeffrey Epstein to ensure that the war benefited the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers; Zelenskyy is in cahoots with Vladimir Putin in the attempt to replace Ukraine’s indigenous Slavic population and create a New Khazaria, a new Jewish homeland, etc.14

Ukraine, note, has a deeply ingrained history of anti-Semitism. During tsarist times there were frequent pogroms. White forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in the 1918-21 civil war. And, to this day, Stepan Bandera - Ukraine’s foremost fascist and, in the early 1940s, a Nazi collaborator - is venerated as a national hero. His anti-Semitism was combined with anti-Bolshevism: “The Jews are the most faithful prop of the Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine”.15 There are statues and streets, bridges and squares named after him, postage stamps bear his image … in other words, Banderaism is the ideal ideological vehicle for a reactionary national revolution in Ukraine.

While parallels with Weimar are easy enough to draw, Ukraine cannot give birth to its version of the Third Reich. Empire, national independence, even neutrality are all chimeric. Small and medium countries are dependent countries. Switzerland and Ireland are dependent on the EU; Belarus is dependent on Russia and Brexit UK is dependent on the USA. Without powerful outside backers a post-Zelenskyy regime could do nothing serious militarily, that is for sure.

Will Europe ride to Ukraine’s rescue and prevent a 1938-style betrayal? No, it can only act with US permission. Europe can pay for US arms deliveries to Ukraine, it can send peacekeepers, it can complain about US bullying. But without centralised political and economic unity it is doomed to impotence. JD Vance’s hard-cop Munich speech in 2025 confirms that assessment. Marco Rubio’s soft-cop Munich speech in 2026 likewise confirms it … as does the standing ovation he got.

Geostrategic

Given the absence of European unity, Trump recognises only five great powers: the US, China, India, Japan … and Russia. This deliberately flatters Russia, because, apart from its nuclear arsenal, it is decidedly a second-rate power. Russia has a GDP roughly on a par with Canada - that despite its 150 million population.

We have though repeatedly speculated about Trump offering Russia entry into the lower ranks of the imperialist club. Quid pro quo, Russia would be expected to break its ‘no limits’ alliance with Xi Jinping - a Mao-Nixon rapprochement in reverse. That would allow America to surround and eventually strangle China. Probably that is what Trump’s Ukraine deal is designed to achieve.

While I am personally sceptical about the chances of a US-sponsored Russia-China schism, we have, rightly, stressed the likelihood of geostrategic shifts and realignments. True, the Brics+ have nothing in common - apart, that is, from chafing against US hegemony. But this does give Russia allies, or at least sympathy, amongst what it calls the “global majority”. Amongst those who have, want to, or have been invited to join are Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (all traditionally US-aligned).

Aukus has already been established and Japan and South Korea bolted on. This has broken Australia from its natural trading partner, China, and secured it firmly in the US-UK camp. The US can perhaps rely on India to be antagonistic to China, but not, it might be expected, Russia. Despite that, Trump recently announced on Truth Social that his “great friend”, Narendra Modi, agreed that India will cease purchasing cheap Russian oil. As a reward Trump slashed tariffs on Indian goods from 25% to 18%.16

There is, moreover, the ever-present danger of the five great powers being dragged into conflicts over Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Palestine, etc, etc, with all manner of dire, unintended consequences. That said, the passivity, the non-involvement, of either China or Russia, when it comes to the Israeli-US 12-day war, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, the crippling oil blockade imposed on Cuba, testify, surely, to the fact that the US remains the global hegemon.

In this context, once again bear in mind the long ‘sleepwalk’ towards World War I.17 Enemies became friends and friends became enemies. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 transformed Germany from being the fragmented and weak centre of Europe into its most dangerous power. Soundly beaten, resentful and fearful, republican France sought allies to contain the newly formed German Reich - the chosen partner being tsarist Russia.

Their 1894 alliance committed each side to mutual aid. In the event of war, Germany would have to fight on two fronts. The alliance, however, was just as much directed against Britain. France and Britain were, of course, old enemies and there were bitter rivalries between Britain and Russia over Afghanistan, Persia, China and the Turkish Straits. Russia longed to gain unfettered access to the Mediterranean by getting its hands onto Constantinople.

And it was fear of Russia that took Britain into alliance with Japan in 1902. A few years later, in 1904, the Russo-Japanese war began, and ended in a stunning defeat for Russia. British-built and British-designed Japanese battleships featured prominently. A global shock and a trigger for the 1905 revolution in Russia.

Against the Franco-Russian alliance, Germany responded by tying Austria-Hungary ever more closely to itself. Because Austria-Hungary and Russia were fierce competitors in the Balkans, this committed Germany to a war with Russia that it really did not want. Germany also started an ill-judged naval race with Britain. Germanophobic scare stories were regularly promoted in the Daily Mail and The Times and featured in popular novels, such as Erskine Childers’ The riddle of the sands (1903). The German Reich came to be seen as Britain’s mortal enemy by elite and middle class opinion alike.

Britain’s ‘near-run victory’ in the second Boer War compelled it to abandon ‘splendid isolation’ from continental European concerns. It embraced the old enemy, France - an arrangement cemented in 1904 with the Entente Cordiale. France’s alliance with tsarist Russia became, in due course, a triple alliance between Britain, France and Russia. Historic rivalry pitting Russia against Britain over southern Asia ended with various robber-deals, including dividing Persia into two zones of interest.

Such realignments readied the conditions needed for defeating the central powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. True, the US eventually entered the war and guaranteed the outcome, and Russia was taken out of the imperial system altogether by the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution.

Yet, while between 15 to 22 million died, in the end, Germany was much reduced territorially, stripped of colonies and saddled with crippling reparation payments. As for the Austro-Hungarian empire, it was fragmented into small, often rival, states. That left Austria as little more than a pocket-sized territory with a grand imperial capital. And, apart from Turkey itself - ‘liberated’ by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - Anglo-French imperialism neatly sliced and diced the Ottoman empire into colonial or semi-colonial administrative units.

Clearly there is more than a whiff of pre-World War I about the current situation - ie, great power military conflict seems all too possible - but with the added danger of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. However, tragically, what is lacking is a viable socialist alternative.

Today the general secretaries of the countless confessional sects hold out the promise to their little bands of followers that they are on the cusp of another Russian Revolution. The comforting myth is that the Bolsheviks went from nothing to everything in the eight short months between February and October 1917. Absolute and total nonsense, of course. From 1905 onwards, despite periods of intense repression, the Bolsheviks were, in fact, the majority party of the working class - as proved by newspaper circulation figures, workplace donations, duma, trade union and, from the summer of 1917 onwards, soviet elections in Petrograd, Moscow and other major towns and cities.

No, we must do away with sect delusions - along with Labour Party mark-two projects, strikes and streets economism and cross-class popular fronts - and get down to the serious business of uniting in the common struggle to build a mass Communist Party here in Britain and internationally. That perspective, if successful, will lift the working class into being the world’s sixth great power … before becoming the world’s sole power.

  1. J Conrad ‘Experience and expectations’ Weekly Worker June 23 2022 (www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1400/experience-and-expectations).↩︎

  2. www.russiamatters.org/news/russia-ukraine-war-report-card/russia-ukraine-war-report-card-feb-11-2026.↩︎

  3. Ibid.↩︎

  4. Incidentally, an embattled commissar, Trotsky was under intense pressure from Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin and other political opponents, who feared that he might entertain Bonapartist ambitions. They began to remove - that or downgrade - his “most influential followers from the commissariat” and replace them with critics. Hence, surely, the barbed comments about “abstract doctrine” and “tactical recipes”. He resigned from the post in January 1925 (I Deutscher The prophet unarmed Oxford 1982, p161).↩︎

  5. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/03/engels.html.↩︎

  6. C Ryan ‘A general strike to stop Trump’ Solidarity February 12 2025.↩︎

  7. M Wolff Fire and fury: inside the Trump White House London 2018, p138.↩︎

  8. F Nietzsche The genealogy of morals: a polemic London 1913, p56.↩︎

  9. C Ryan ‘A general strike to stop Trump’ Solidarity February 12 2025.↩︎

  10. A Callinicos Socialist Worker February 12 2025.↩︎

  11. P Navarro ‘The case for fair trade’ in P Dans and S Groves  eds) Project 2025: mandate for leadership Washington DC 2023, p766.↩︎

  12. www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference.↩︎

  13. The Daily Telegraph February 16 2025.↩︎

  14. See foantisemitism.org/introducing-the-anti-slavic-jewish-conspiracy.↩︎

  15. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists.↩︎

  16. The Guardian February 2 2026.↩︎

  17. See C Clark The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 London 2013.↩︎