The Robbers' Peace in Ukraine
Why does a section of the international left advocate it?
The concrete terms of the Trump-Putin settlement reveal what three years of ‘anti-war’ posturing has actually enabled: the territorial dismemberment of Ukraine, the extraction of its mineral wealth, and the rehabilitation of a war criminal. No theory required. The facts condemn themselves.
On 15 August 2025, Vladimir Putin stepped onto American soil for the first time since the invasion. A red carpet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. An honour guard. F-35s overhead. Donald Trump greeted him as a neighbour. The two men climbed into ‘The Beast’ together, alone in the back seat, while Volodymyr Zelensky watched from Kyiv, excluded from negotiations over his own country’s dismemberment.
In 1918, Lenin described the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a ‘robber’s peace’: territory surrendered under duress to an aggressor whose appetite would only grow. A century later, we are watching the terms of another such peace take shape. Five months after Alaska, the architecture of dismemberment has become visible. The 28-point plan. The minerals deal. The ‘free economic zone’ proposal. What a section of the international left has been demanding for three years is now being delivered.
As of Christmas Day 2025, negotiations continue. Zelensky has presented a revised 20-point counter-proposal; the Kremlin is "forming its position." Whether this particular iteration of the settlement is signed next week or collapses into renewed fighting matters less than what it reveals. The terms documented in the Dmitriev-Witkoff plan represent what American and Russian negotiators considered acceptable. Sadly, they also represent what a section of the international left spent three years demanding. The trajectory is clear, even if the destination remains contested.
The Territorial Settlement
The Trump administration’s 28-point plan, developed by Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff in consultation with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, establishes the following territorial framework. Crimea: recognised as Russian. The Donbas, comprising Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts: recognised as Russian. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia: frozen along current lines of contact, under indefinite Russian administrative control.
The plan uses language such as ‘internationally recognized as territories belonging to the Russian Federation’, moving from de facto occupation to de jure recognition. It rewards territorial conquest by military aggression. It establishes the precedent that borders in Europe can be redrawn by force.
Ukraine, under this framework, would be constitutionally prohibited from joining NATO. NATO itself would be required to amend its bylaws to formally bar Ukrainian membership. The Ukrainian armed forces would be capped at 600,000 personnel, down from approximately 850,000. Security guarantees offered by Washington would be forfeit if Ukraine used Western-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory.
A ‘Board of Peace’, chaired personally by Donald Trump, would oversee enforcement. Russia would be invited back into the G8. Twenty thousand sanctions would be lifted.
The negotiating premise was stated explicitly by a US official to CBS News: ‘Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to believe that he will take the Donetsk region of Ukraine one way or the other, either through a negotiated settlement or on the battlefield. The Trump administration’s negotiations began from the premise that Putin is correct.’
Putin Says the Quiet Part Loud
On 20 June 2025, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin addressed the question of Russia’s ultimate objectives directly.
‘I have said many times that I consider the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to be one people. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours. We have an old rule. Wherever a Russian soldier sets foot is ours.’
The statement was met with laughter and applause from forum attendees. Asked whether Russia’s forces might advance on the Ukrainian border city of Sumy, beyond the territories Moscow claims to have annexed, Putin replied: ‘We don’t have the objective of taking Sumy, but in principle I don’t rule it out.’
This is not diplomatic posturing. It is the explicit assertion of imperial claims over the entirety of Ukrainian territory. It is the denial of Ukrainian nationhood itself. In July 2021, Putin published an essay titled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, claiming there was ‘no historical basis’ for Ukrainian national identity. The June 2025 statement confirms that nothing in his war aims has changed.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha responded that Putin was demonstrating ‘complete disdain’ for ongoing peace efforts. Zelensky noted that Putin ‘spoke completely openly. Yes, he wants all of Ukraine. He is also speaking about Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, the Caucasus, countries like Kazakhstan.’
The timing matters. Putin made these remarks while American negotiators were actively pressing Ukraine to accept territorial concessions. He said the quiet part loud because he could. The Trump administration’s approach suggested no consequence for doing so.
The Minerals Heist
On 30 April 2025, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko signed the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund agreement in Washington. Ukraine will contribute 50 percent of all revenues from new natural resource licences into a joint fund. Fifty-five critical minerals are covered: lithium, titanium, graphite, uranium, rare earths. The United States receives first-refusal rights on any new mining or infrastructure contracts. No third party, including the European Union, may receive better terms.
Trump initially demanded $500 billion in mineral rights as ‘repayment’ for American military aid. He claimed the US had provided $350 billion to Ukraine; actual disbursements through 2024 were $183 billion, roughly a third of which was spent domestically in American weapons factories. The arithmetic was never the point. The point was extraction.
Here is what makes the arrangement obscene. On 23 February 2025, at the ‘Ukraine. Year 2025’ forum in Kyiv, Svyrydenko revealed that approximately $350 billion worth of critical minerals are located in Russian-occupied territory. Russia now controls Europe’s largest lithium reserves: 500,000 tons in the Donbas. The Dobra and Krutovolozhskoye deposits near Mariupol, essential for battery production, are under Russian administration. Russian authorities have already begun distributing mining permits in captured territory.
The ‘peace’ settlement would formalise Russian control over these deposits while the United States extracts revenue from whatever remains under Ukrainian sovereignty. Ed Verona of the Atlantic Council observed that Kyiv appeared to have ‘little choice but to acquiesce to terms that reduce it to the status of a virtual colony.’ The phrase is precise. Ukraine would be stripped of its industrial heartland in the east while paying tribute to Washington from its remaining resources. Weapons in exchange for mineral concessions: the classic colonial bargain.
The ‘Free Economic Zone’ Fig Leaf
By December 2025, with Zelensky refusing to simply hand over the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk still under Ukrainian control, American negotiators invented a new formula: the ‘free economic zone’.
The proposal envisions Ukrainian forces withdrawing from Kyiv-held parts of the Donbas. The vacated territory would become a ‘demilitarised buffer’, nominally open to American business interests. Russia would not be permitted to station troops there. In exchange, Ukraine would receive security guarantees.
Zelensky immediately identified the problem. Who administers this zone? Who prevents Russian forces from moving in? Who stops ‘infiltrations disguised as civilians’? The proposal contains no enforcement mechanism. It offers no designated managing entity. It requires Ukraine to abandon territory on the promise that Russia will respect a demilitarised status that Russia has never agreed to respect.
‘A free economic zone does not mean under the control of the Russian Federation,’ Zelensky insisted. But without enforcement, it means exactly that. Russian Foreign Ministry aide Yury Ushakov dismissed the entire concept, asserting that ‘Donbass is Russian’ under the Russian Constitution. No ambiguity there.
The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for surrendering its nuclear arsenal. Russia violated it. Any security guarantee that lacks Congressional ratification and depends on Russian good faith will meet the same fate. The ‘free economic zone’ exists to provide diplomatic cover for territorial concession, nothing more.
The Robber’s Peace
This is the robber’s peace. Territory surrendered under duress. Resources extracted by the victor. Security guarantees that will prove worthless the moment they are tested. Putin has stated openly that all of Ukraine belongs to Russia. Trump has made clear that Ukrainian resistance was never the priority; American access to minerals was. The 28-point plan, the minerals deal, the ‘free economic zone’: these are the instruments of partition dressed in the language of diplomacy.
The Kremlin may yet reject even these terms as insufficiently favourable. Russian analyst Georgi Bovt dismissed the latest Ukrainian counter-proposal as "a nonstarter." Putin confirmed on December 19 that Moscow remains "willing to continue fighting to fully occupy the Donetsk region." The robber wants more than the robbery currently on offer. But this changes nothing about what was proposed, what was welcomed, and by whom. The original Dmitriev-Witkoff framework, the minerals deal signed in April, the "free economic zone" floated in December: these are the terms that emerged from three years of "negotiations now" advocacy. That Russia may reject them as too generous to Ukraine only underscores the bankruptcy of the position.
How did a section of the international left end up advocating for precisely this outcome?
That question requires its own answer. The organisations. The statements. The trajectory from ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’ to accommodation with both. The political lineage that connects contemporary ‘anti-war’ posturing to decades of campist deformation.
Additional Sources
28-point plan analysis: CSIS, ‘The Unfinished Plan for Peace in Ukraine: Provision by Provision’, July 2025. https://www.csis.org/analysis/unfinished-plan-peace-ukraine-provision-provision
Minerals deal: Wikipedia, ‘Ukraine–United States Mineral Resources Agreement’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine–United_States_Mineral_Resources_Agreement
Free economic zone proposal: CNN, ‘Ukraine’s Zelensky proposes free economic zone in Donbas’, 11 December 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/11/europe/ukraine-zelensky-free-economic-zone-donbas-intl
Stop the War position: Andrew Murray, ‘Will there be peace at last for Ukraine?’, Stop the War Coalition, 25 April 2025. https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/will-there-be-peace-at-last-for-ukraine/
About this series
“With Washington and Moscow” examines how a section of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documents the settlement terms, traces the political trajectory of organisations that enabled this outcome, amplifies Ukrainian socialist voices, and argues for an internationalism that sides with the oppressed against all imperialisms.
All parts of the series will be posted at “With Washington and Moscow”