Statements from the Ukraine Solidarity Network US and from Ukraine’s left-wing Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement)
Ukraine Still Stands
As Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine enters its
fifth year on February 24, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls on
progressive and peace-minded people to renew their moral, political, and
material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s
invasion and their rights to self-defense and self-determination.
Ukraine Solidarity Network US
24/02/2026
We must remember Ukraine even as
we struggle against so many other outrages that rightly demand our attention:
the US-backed genocide in Gaza, US military strikes on Venezuela, Iran, Iraq,
Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and small civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea
and Pacific Ocean, and the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants,
health, the environment, and social and democratic rights.
Massive
Casualties
Russia’s war of aggression has
been as deadly as any war in the world over the last four years. Since Russia’s
full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, battlefield
casualties (killed, wounded, missing) reached an estimated 1.8
million by the end of 2025, including 1.2 million Russians and 600,000
Ukrainians. The battlefield death toll alone is estimated at around 460,000
combatants – 325,000 Russians and 140,000 Ukrainians.
In addition to battlefield
casualties, civilian
casualties in Ukraine have reached over 53,000, including over
14,500 killed. The civilian death rate in Ukraine rose 31% in 2025 as
Russia escalated its terrorist tactics of targeting civilian homes and energy
infrastructure far from frontline battlefields with missile and drone strikes.
Russia’s constant offensives on
the frontlines have been sending Russian soldiers to their deaths at a rate
of 1,000 or more a day for the last two years. At around 30,000 per
month, twice as many Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine every month as the
nearly 15,000 who died
in all of Russia’s 10-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The horrors in Ukraine join the
horrors of other wars and associated hunger and disease ravaging our planet
over the last four years in Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. People struggling for peace and democracy in all of
these countries deserve our active solidarity.
A
Stalemated War
Contrary to the Kremlin
narrative of inevitable Russian victory, Ukraine has fought Russia to a
standstill. In the first year of the war in 2022, Ukraine recovered nearly half
of the land that Russia occupied in its initial offensive, pushing Russia out of
the northern regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and most of Kharkiv and much of
Kherson in the south. Since then, the frontlines have been largely frozen.
Despite enormous losses of personnel and materiel, Russia has gained only 1.5% of
Ukrainian territory in the last three years.
Russia’s rulers are afflicting
their people with an endless war not of their own choosing. Russia has now
been attacking
Ukraine longer than it took the Soviet Union to push Hitler’s Nazi army back to
Berlin in World War II.
Russia’s war finances are in
trouble. Oil and gas revenues, 30% to 50% of
Russian state revenues over the last decade, dropped by nearly
50% in 2025 to a five-year low. Ukrainian “kinetic sanctions” have hit Russian
oil refineries, ports, and tankers, and have combined with declining global oil
prices and western sanctions to begin to defund Russia’s war machine. Russia’s 2025
military budget was 40% of its national budget, which means
that stronger sanctions might cripple Russia’s military.
Unspeakable
War Crimes
The war crimes committed by
Russia are unspeakable. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC)
issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and
his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova, for the war crime
of abducting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia for Russified
and militarized education. The ICC has issued further arrest warrants for four
top Russian military commanders for the war crime of bombing civilians. Russian
air strike terrorism on civilian homes and energy infrastructure in Ukraine has
increased since these ICC arrest warrants were issued.
In an ominous escalation,
Russian has been striking substations that feed power into the cooling systems
of nuclear power stations since November and
most recently earlier this February,
risking a deadly
Chornobyl-scale meltdown and radiation release.
Russia is training its drone
operators on “human safaris” that target
Ukrainian civilians in Kherson. One in twenty people
remaining in the city of Kherson were a casualty of Russian drones in 2025.
In the occupied territories,
Ukrainians are subjected to political
repression and forced Russification. If they refuse to take Russian
passports, they are denied access to public services and banking. Children are
often taken from parents who want to remain Ukrainian and their homes and
property are being confiscated. Many are subject to detention and interrogation, forced
conscription into Russia’s army, torture, sexual violence,
and/or summary
execution.
The
Trump-Putin Alliance
The Trump administration policy
has allied with Russia against Ukraine in its actions and negotiation posture.
Since the Trump administration came into office, military aid to Ukraine has
been cut by 99%.
It cut all humanitarian aid to Ukraine shortly
after taking office for education, healthcare, shelter, heat and power,
war-displaced persons, HIV drugs, mental health services for war-distressed
children, families, and veterans, and other services. In December, the US
restored a token $2 billion of
the former $63 billion USAID budget for humanitarian aid programs that is now
being spent through UN programs trying to aid Ukraine and other war-torn
countries like Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
Also immediately upon taking
office, the Trump administration closed US
Justice Department programs to monitor and enforce sanctions against
Russian frozen assets, influence operations in the US, and other sanctions
against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Trump defunded US
programs to document Russian war crimes, including cooperation with the
International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression Against
Ukraine and the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which had identified and
documented some 35,000 Ukrainian children forcibly abducted by Russia.
After repeatedly voting for UN
General Assembly resolutions since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on
February 24, 2022 that affirmed Ukraine’s sovereignty and demanded that Russia
halt its military operations and withdraw back to Russia, in February 2025, the
US reversed course under the Trump administration on the third anniversary of
Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. The US, and its
satellites including Israel, voted with Russia against a
similar resolution condemning Russia’s invasion and demanding that Russian
troops withdraw.
While Trump still allows
Europeans to buy weapons they can send on to Ukraine, US shipment delays have
left crucial Ukrainian air
defense missile launchers without missiles to fire against
incoming Russian missiles in recent weeks.
Trump’s alliance with Putin is
rooted in their far-right
ideological affinity for a world of imperial spheres of
influence, authoritarian rule, and racist, misogynistic, and homophobic
“traditional values.” Grifters on both sides have been bargaining to partition
Ukraine between them like a piece of real estate. The Russian side has been led
by Kirill Dmitriev,
a Stanford and Harvard trained veteran of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs who runs
Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and 15 years ago scammed
purchasers of apartments in a building development in Kyiv out
of their investments. On the US side are Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner,
and Donald Trump, all long
engaged in money laundering the real estate investments of Russian oligarchs
and other Russia business ties.
Russia is now pitching Trump’s
team on a $14 trillion
business deal that is contingent on the US forcing Ukraine to
accept Russia’s negotiation demands. It would involve lifting
Western sanctions on Russia, joint arctic oil and gas exploitation, Russia
returning to the dollar-based payments system, preferential US access to the
Russian market, compensation for US corporate assets lost in Russia during the
war, US aid for Russian aircraft modernization, joint mining of lithium,
copper, nickel, and platinum, and cooperation on nuclear power plants to power
AI data centers. All of this scheming is being conducted behind the backs
of the Ukrainians.
Negotiations
on the DimWit Plan
In the Trump-sponsored
negotiations, the US has pressured Ukraine to capitulate to Russia under what
has been dubbed the DimWit Plan (after Russian negotiator Dmitriev and US
negotiator Witkoff). Russia demands that
Ukraine cede occupied land in Crimea, plus land Russia does not control in
partially-occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces.
Furthermore, Russia demands deep cuts in Ukraine’s military, no international
security guarantees for Ukraine, and snap elections in hopes of seating a new
Ukrainian government that will become a Russian vassal.
President Zelensky has indicated
a reluctant willingness to compromise on a ceasefire and freeze at the current
frontlines and forgo joining NATO – but if and only if Ukraine receives
credible international security guarantees against further Russian aggression.
The Ukrainian public seems
to agree.
Despite Ukraine’s openness to
compromise and Russia’s intransigence, President Trump
repeatedly says Putin wants peace and Zelensky is the obstacle.
Trump’s year of negotiations has been the deadliest year yet in the war for
both Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s predominantly
poor and ethnic minority soldiers.
Campist
Contradictions
The Trump-Putin alliance puts to
rest the false proxy war narrative of those campist geopoliticians
and privileged pacifists on the Western left who are far away from the Russian
assault troops, missiles, and drones raining down terror on Ukraine.
The campists have claimed that
Ukraine is merely a proxy force fighting Russia on behalf of Western
imperialism as if the Ukrainians do not have their own reasons to fight for
their right to exist. The proxy war claim was always a canard. With Trump now aligning
the US with Putin, the narrative collapses on its own contractions. It is more
absurd than ever.
As Artem Chapeye, the
Ukrainian writer, progressive activist, and now soldier explained to an
American audience last August, “If this is a proxy war between Russia and US,
why are the Ukrainians still fighting after the Trump-Putin alliance?”
Ukrainian
Self-Determination
The Ukraine Solidarity Network
totally supports the Ukrainian struggle for self-defense, security, and
self-determination – as do most American people by a strong two to one margin
in recent polling.
It is up to the Ukrainians to democratically decide what is an acceptable
peace. We will not stand by while Russian and American oligarchs try to sell
out Ukraine and divide it between them for their own profits and far-right
ideological objectives.
We will continue our material
aid and public education in coordination with trade unions and progressive
organizations in Ukraine.
We will continue to work with
progressive Ukrainians and Russians and support their demands:
·
Full and
complete withdrawal of Russian troops from all of Ukraine.
·
International
support for the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian
invasion.
·
International
economic sanctions against Russia’s war machinery, including its political,
military, and economic elite, its access to the international financial system,
its imports of weapons-related technology, and its exports of fossil fuels that
fund and fuel Russia’s war machine.*
·
Return to
Ukraine of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred to
Russia and Belarus.
·
Freedom for
the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territories
incarcerated for opposition to the occupation and resistance to genocidal
Russification.
·
Freedom for
all Russians incarcerated for war resistance and political dissent.
·
Asylum in
countries abroad for Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Palestinians,
Sudanese, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, and all people seeking refuge from
political repression and war.
·
No amnesty
for Russian war criminals.
·
Cancellation
of Ukraine’s foreign debts.
·
Confiscation
of Russian assets abroad to be used to support Ukraine’s military self-defense,
social services, and post-war reconstruction.
·
Reparations
from Russia to help fund a full post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.
·
An end to
the Western imperialist policy of imposing a neoliberal program of
privatization, deregulation, debt dependence, exploitative mineral extraction,
and cuts to public services and labor rights on Ukraine today and for its
post-war reconstruction.
* The question of sanctions is
complicated and controversial among activists committed to Ukraine’s struggle.
It’s especially important in the US that we do not accept the predatory
politics of the imperialist US state. The Ukraine Solidarity Network will be
discussing these issues with our Ukrainian comrades whose lives and national
freedom are on the line.
How
can Ukraine survive, after leading a large-scale resistance for four years?
Sotsialnyi Rukh, February 24, 2026
For
twelve years, Ukraine has been fighting for its independence against imperial
aggression. For most of this period, the conflict has been in a hybrid form,
and exactly four years ago it took on the appearance of an open war, unleashed
by the Russian army shelling almost all Ukrainian border towns and launching
hundreds of missiles at military and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine has
chosen a difficult path to defend its freedom, which it is pursuing.
Over the years, it has become clear that this is neither a “conflict” nor a “misunderstanding,” but a targeted war of aggression aimed at destroying the Ukrainian state and establishing a puppet government. The Ukrainian army has been able to stop Putin’s blitzkrieg and prove its ability to resist the imperialist invasion. Behind this success lies the exploit of the working masses, who have often felt marginalized in their own countries, but who have in reality become the pillar of the army. At the same time, we owe our survival to the help of people from all over the world, who have made us aware of the extraordinary power of solidarity.
The present state of the war is determined by its prolonged and exhausting nature. Russia is waging a war of extermination, systematically committing war crimes: torture, deportations, abduction of children, targeted bombing of residential areas, hospitals, schools, energy infrastructure and transport. These are not side effects, but a deliberate strategy of terror, as the Russian army is unable to defeat the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the battlefield. Despite extreme fatigue and a lack of manpower, Ukrainian soldiers are repelling the occupiers’ offensive and, in places, counterattacking. But the invaders’ approach to cities like Zaporizhzhia can only be worrying. Unfortunately, the Kremlin still has far superior long-range strike capabilities, which it uses constantly.
At the same time, the war has profoundly affected the social sphere and civil society. The severe shortage of housing and decent jobs is accompanied by ineffective social protection. Millions of people, especially in frontline regions, suffer from inequality and social precariousness. Awareness of the profound shortcomings of the state’s social policy has sparked a surge of solidarity: solidarity initiatives have emerged, trade unions have mobilised and other social movements have taken on a significant part of the support for society. The energy of the mobilizations is focused not only on humanitarian aid, but also on conflicts with a strong social dimension that reveal the failures of the system.
In our quest for a quick victory for Ukraine, we take a critical look at the liberal market policies pursued by the ruling elite. The desire to immediately maximize corporate profits harms Ukraine’s strategic interests, which demand modernizing its industry, ensuring full employment and uniting society. Encouraging imports, deregulation and the free movement of capital will not build a sustainable economic system that can give an advantage over the occupiers.
The enemy has been and will be cruel, but the greatest risk for Ukraine is to renounce justice, as this will breed discord and despair. Peripheral capitalism, mired in corruption, produces injustice on a large scale. It allows selfishness to flourish and businesses to grow, but it does not create any common protection for all. Imposing controversial reforms like Ukraine’s new labor code will amplify the scale of social inequality, but will not bring stability.
We aspire to unity, but we refuse to condone the mistakes of the authorities. This is where our spirit of freedom and our difference with Russia are manifested. Ukrainian society has not disappeared in the face of the prevailing anxiety; It continues to act and defend democracy and its independence.
Ukraine is not only fighting for its territory, but also for the right to be a space of freedom, diversity and confrontation of ideas, and not an authoritarian dictatorship. People of diverse opinions, including representatives of the left-wing movement, participated in this fight. Among the dead are artist David Chychkan, anarchist Dmytro Petro, anarchist Lana “Sati” Chornohorska, Yevheniy Osievskyi, and many other heroes and heroines of the Ukrainian and international anti-authoritarian movement. The Sotsialnyi Rukh is also not indifferent to our history: some of us have been serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the first days of the invasion, and every year more and more of our activists join it. Being part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine means being close to the people, whose social liberation we are working for.
At the international level, this conflict has long since transcended national borders and does not concern us alone. Around the world, reactions to the events in Ukraine are distinguishing between progressive and internationalist movements and anti-democratic and isolationist movements. Because it is above all a question of protecting universal values, namely the right to individual freedom.
If Ukraine is forced to capitulate or is defeated, it will not mean peace, but the legitimization of a forced change of borders. This will pave the way for further aggression and bring the world closer to a world war that could claim billions of lives across the globe.
We have no confidence in individuals like Donald Trump, who flout international law. That is why we see his peace initiatives first and foremost as an attempt to abandon Ukraine to its fate. The time has come to restore the balance of power in Ukraine’s favour, by demanding that Western countries hand over their military arsenals and impose sanctions on Russia.
The Kremlin will not stop its violence against the Ukrainian people until it has suffered a significant defeat. It is the duty of humanists around the world to help Ukraine complete what it has started and defeat the invader.
Ukrainian workers have paid too high a price to return to the same social injustice in post-war Ukraine that prevailed before. It is not the oligarchs, nor their neoliberal politicians in their pay, nor the economic elites, but the workers who have taken up arms to defend Ukraine. For these people, the state must serve their interests!
Glory to the hard-working and steadfast Ukrainian people, to their defenders!
Glory
to international solidarity against imperialism!
Eternal
glory to our brothers and sisters who died at the hands of Russian forces!
