Whose Is the Black Soil? The History and Class of the Ukraine Question, and Türkiye

Dear Young Comrades,

Today, 31 October 2026, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is meeting President Erdoğan in Istanbul, at the Dolmabahçe working office. The news is short: the Russia–Ukraine war, Black Sea security and bilateral cooperation are on the agenda; the results had not yet been announced when these lines were written. But to understand what a meeting means, one needs to know less what is said in that room than which history, which class relations and which balance of forces have been carried into it. This essay tries to do that: first a short summary, then the detail.

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First, the Summary

Today's meeting. Zelenskyy came to Istanbul at Erdoğan's invitation. Ankara has put three headings on the table: (1) a proposal to stop attacks on commercial ships in the Black Sea — in September, at the UN General Assembly, Erdoğan had called these attacks "unacceptable" and said he was waiting for an answer from Moscow and Kyiv; (2) Türkiye's proposal to host a summit that would bring the leaders of Russia and Ukraine together — Zelenskyy had said he was open to this after the New York meeting of 23 September; (3) bilateral cooperation in the defence industry, trade and reconstruction. The meeting comes immediately after Erdoğan, in a phone call with Trump on 28 October, promised to contribute to the negotiations, and after the Kremlin said it expected a new round in mid-November in Abu Dhabi, mediated by the United States.

The state of the war. The war is in its fifth year. Russia holds about a fifth of Ukraine's territory; it wants all of Donetsk and Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, and Crimea. Kyiv wants the front line frozen first, and negotiation after that; Moscow will not accept a ceasefire without a comprehensive agreement. In 2026 the only serious ceasefire was the 32-hour Easter truce in April.

The root of the question. The Ukraine question is not "a quarrel of two brother peoples" or "Putin's madness". It has three layers:

1. The historical layer: a common but contested past since Kyivan Rus'; Tsarist Russia's suppression of the Ukrainian language and identity; a land divided among Poland, Lithuania, Austria and Russia.
2. The revolutionary layer: in the civil war of 1917–1921 Ukraine was one of the bloodiest fronts, among the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the nationalist Rada and Directory, the German occupation, Poland and Makhno's anarchists. The miners of the Donbas were the Bolsheviks' firmest base; the Don Cossacks were split in two — their rich became the cradle of the White Army, their poor and the "outsider" peasants filled the Red Cavalry. Soviet power gave Ukraine, for the first time, education, literacy and industry in its own language; but the famine of forced collectivisation in 1932–33, and the destruction of the Second World War, were also lived on this land.
3. The layer of capitalist restoration and imperialist rivalry: with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine became a semi-peripheral country looted by oligarchs and caught between the West and Russia. NATO's expansion eastward, the European Union's demand for a market, Russian capital's claim to a "near abroad", and the internal fight of the Ukrainian oligarchy led to Maidan, Crimea and the Donbas war in 2014, and in 2022 to a full-scale invasion.

Our class position. This war is not a war of two peoples but of two blocs of capital: on one side Western imperialism organised around NATO and the EU, on the other Russian monopoly capitalism imposing its own regional imperialist claim by force of arms. Russia's invasion is an aggressive imperialist war and cannot be justified; but this does not acquit NATO's expansion or the Ukrainian oligarchy. The people of Ukraine are the victim both of the occupation and of their own rulers, of the IMF, and of the capital that is dividing their land under the name of "reconstruction". The common interest of the Russian and Ukrainian workers driven to the front is peace.

Türkiye's role. As a NATO member Türkiye sells Bayraktars to Ukraine, does not apply sanctions to Russia, has Rosatom build Akkuyu, takes Russian gas through TurkStream, closes the straits to warships by applying Montreux, mediates with the grain corridor and prisoner exchanges, and in July 2026 hosted the NATO Summit in Ankara. This "balancing" policy is born not of a love of peace but of the interest of Turkish capital in gaining from both markets and in taking a place at the bargaining table as a regional power. We want peace; but we also ask whose peace it will be.

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What Is Being Discussed at Dolmabahçe Today?

According to the announcement of Burhanettin Duran, the Presidency's Director of Communications, the visit is a "working visit". Erdoğan is receiving Zelenskyy at Dolmabahçe; a joint press conference will follow the meeting (sol.org.tr, Turkish Minute).

Four developments lie behind the meeting:

• Ship attacks in the Black Sea. Both sides of the war are striking each other's ports, energy infrastructure and commercial ships. Ankara has proposed that attacks on civilian ships be stopped mutually; it is waiting for an answer from the two capitals.
• The proposal for a leaders' summit. Since the Istanbul talks of 2022 and the direct Istanbul rounds of 2025, Türkiye has presented itself as "the address of peace". Zelenskyy says he is ready for a Putin–Zelenskyy summit; the Kremlin says openly that "the situation on the ground" will determine the timing of negotiation (Kyiv Independent).
• The United States line. The Trump administration is conducting negotiation through the Witkoff channel; the fourth US-mediated round is expected in mid-November in Abu Dhabi. The same United States made an agreement allowing the purchase of diesel from Russia and rejected new sanctions; the Trump–Zelenskyy relationship is at rock bottom (MPR News / AP).
• The promise Ankara gave Washington. On 28 October, in a phone call with Trump, Erdoğan said he was ready to support the revival of Moscow–Kyiv diplomacy.

So today's meeting is Türkiye's attempt to guarantee itself a chair in the bargaining of the great powers. When the concrete results (lists of prisoner exchanges, a Black Sea arrangement, defence-industry agreements) are announced, we will update this essay.

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Section I: The Long History — The Birth of the "Borderland"

The word "Ukraine" comes from a root that in the Slavic languages means "border region, edge". The name itself summarises the history: for centuries these lands were the edge of empires.

Kyivan Rus' and the debate on a common origin

Kyivan Rus', founded in the ninth century along the Dnieper, is counted the common ancestor of today's Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. The acceptance of Orthodoxy in 988, and the destruction of Kyiv by the Mongol invasion in 1240, are the milestones of this common history. Today the Kremlin turns this commonality into the thesis that "Russians and Ukrainians are one people"; Ukrainian nationalism reads the same history as "Moscow stole it from us". Both readings speak less from history itself than from today's need for power. From a Marxist point of view nations are the product of the modern age, in which feudal fragmentation was overcome by the capitalist market; to project today's national borders onto the tenth century is not history but ideology.

The Cossacks, Khmelnytsky and Pereiaslav

In the period after the Mongols, most of today's Ukraine passed to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Under the serfdom of the Polish nobility and Catholic pressure, fugitive peasants founded a free community lower down the Dnieper, at Zaporizhzhia: the Cossacks. The great rising of 1648 led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky shook Polish rule, but it also contained great massacres directed at Jewish communities — one of history's first great examples of class anger turned onto the wrong target.

In 1654, by the Treaty of Pereiaslav, the Cossack hetmanate entered the protection of the Tsardom of Moscow. Russian historiography reads this as "reunification", Ukrainian nationalist historiography as "a temporary military alliance". In 1667 the east of the Dnieper remained with Russia, the west with Poland. In 1709 the defeat at Poltava of Hetman Mazepa, together with King Charles XII of Sweden, was the beginning of the end of Cossack autonomy. Catherine II dispersed the Zaporizhian Sich in 1775 and annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783; the north of the Black Sea was opened to Russian nobles and colonisers under the name "Novorossiya" (New Russia).

Let this name "Novorossiya" not be forgotten; in 2014 it returned to the language of the separatists in the Donbas and of the Kremlin.

Tsarism: a ban on the language, and the prison of peoples

In the nineteenth century the Ukrainian peasantry was one of the poorest layers of the Russian Empire; western Ukraine (Galicia) was in Austria-Hungary. Tsarism declared Ukrainian "a dialect of the Russian language": the Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876 banned the printing of Ukrainian books, the theatre, even the words of songs. This is why Lenin called the Russian Empire "the prison of peoples".

The Donbas: the basin into which a proletariat was imported

In the same century coal and iron were found in the Donets basin (the Donbas). In 1869 the Welsh industrialist John Hughes founded Yuzovka, the core of today's Donetsk. French, Belgian and British capital flowed into the basin. An important part of the workers who filled the mines and the factories came from the central governorates of Russia. A classic picture thus formed: a Ukrainian-speaking peasantry in the villages, a Russian-speaking proletariat in the towns and the mines. The root of why the Donbas is today a Russian-speaking region, and why it has a political culture different from the rest of Ukraine, is here — and this root is not ethnic. It is of class.

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Section II: 1917–1921 — Revolution and Civil War in Ukraine

The civil war in Ukraine was more complicated than in any region of Russia. Between 1917 and 1920 Kyiv changed hands fourteen times.

From the Central Rada to the Hetmanate

After the February Revolution the Central Rada was founded in Kyiv under the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky; petty-bourgeois socialist-nationalists such as Vynnychenko and Petliura came to the fore. After the October Revolution the Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian People's Republic in November 1917, but did not recognise Soviet power. In December 1917 a Congress of Soviets gathered in Kharkiv proclaimed a counter Soviet Ukraine.

In January 1918 the Rada proclaimed full independence, and in February 1918, while Bolshevik units were entering Kyiv, it signed a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Germany and Austria occupied the country in exchange for Ukraine's grain. In April 1918 the Germans pushed the Rada aside and made the landowner General Pavlo Skoropadsky Hetman: large landed property was brought back, and the lands the peasants had seized were taken back. A process that began as "national independence" turned, within a few months, into a landlord regime resting on a foreign bayonet. This lesson matters: national independence without a class content opens the door to the tutelage of the strongest foreign capital.

After Germany's defeat in November 1918, Petliura's Directory took power; but it could not hold against the Red Army, or the Whites, or Poland. In 1920 Petliura allied with Piłsudski, accepting that western Ukraine (Galicia) be left to Poland. The Polish–Soviet war ended with the Treaty of Riga in 1921; western Ukraine remained in Poland until 1939.

The White Army: "Russia one and indivisible"

One of the forces that soaked Ukraine most in blood was the White Army. The Armed Forces of South Russia, under General Denikin, took Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odesa in the summer of 1919 and marched on Moscow. The Whites' slogan was "Russia, one and indivisible": they recognised no nation called Ukraine, they closed Ukrainian schools, they gave the lands back to their old owners. For this reason neither the peasants nor the Ukrainian nationalists could make a lasting alliance with the Whites. In the pogroms directed at Jews in Ukraine in 1919, tens of thousands of people died; the greater part of these massacres was the work of units attached to Petliura, of the Whites, and of various ataman bands (including some former Red units that changed sides, such as Grigoriev). Soviet power defined the pogrom as an instrument of counter-revolution and made the struggle against antisemitism a principle.

The Whites' last fortress was Crimea. General Wrangel's army was defeated at Perekop in November 1920; tens of thousands of White officers and their families fled by ship to Istanbul. In Galata, in Pera, in the camps at Gallipoli, the "White Russians" left their mark on a period of Istanbul life. The city in which today's meeting is held has a bond with this history too.

Makhno: peasant anarchism

In south-eastern Ukraine, around Huliaipole, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army led by Nestor Makhno fought the landlords, the Germans, the Hetman and the Whites. Makhno allied with the Red Army several times against Denikin; his collapse of Denikin's rear in the autumn of 1919 played an important part in the Whites' defeat. But because he rejected the central order of the Soviet state, the grain-collection policy and the leadership of the party, he clashed with the Red Army at the end of 1920 and was defeated in 1921. The Makhno experience shows both the strength and the limit of unorganised peasant revolutionism: it can destroy the enemy, but it cannot found a lasting social order.

The Bolsheviks of the Donbas and the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic

In the civil war Ukraine's firmest Bolshevik base was the Donbas. The miners and metalworkers had been organised since 1905. Kliment Voroshilov, a metalworker from Luhansk, led the 5th Army, which in 1918 withdrew as far as Tsaritsyn against the Germans and the Cossacks, with a detachment he formed of Luhansk workers.

In February 1918, in Kharkiv, the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic was proclaimed under the Bolshevik Fyodor Sergeyev, known as Artem. The leaders of this republic wanted to separate the industrial basin from "peasant Ukraine" and tie it directly to Soviet Russia. Lenin and the party leadership opposed this: tearing the Donbas from Ukraine would leave Ukrainian Soviet power without its proletarian base. In March 1918 it was decided that the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic would join Soviet Ukraine; in July 1918 the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolshevik) was founded in Moscow.

The principle here is instructive for today too: the Bolsheviks did not annex the Donbas to Russia because it was "Russian"; on the contrary, by uniting the Russian-speaking proletariat with the Ukrainian peasantry in the same republic they tried to found the material basis of the worker–peasant alliance. In 2014 the "Donetsk People's Republic" referred to this historical republic; but between Artem's workers' soviets and the 2014 formations that protected oligarch property there is no common ground but a similarity of name.

The Don Cossacks: a community split in two

The Don region in the east of Ukraine (Rostov, Novocherkassk) is in Russia today, but the fate of the civil war was decided here. The Don Cossacks were an estate that had received land and privilege in return for military service to tsarism. In the same region there also lived the "inogorodnie" — peasants and workers called "outsiders", who owned no land and were not counted as Cossacks. In the civil war the Don was split in two along this class line:

• The rich Cossacks and the atamans became the cradle of the counter-revolution. Ataman Kaledin rose against the Bolsheviks immediately after October. In November–December 1917, at Novocherkassk, Alekseyev and Kornilov founded the Volunteer Army, that is, the core of the White Army. After Kaledin's suicide, Ataman Krasnov, with German support, founded a Cossack state under the name "the Great Don Host".
• The poor Cossacks and the "outsider" peasants took their stand with the Reds. In March 1918 the Don Soviet Republic was proclaimed under Fyodor Podtelkov and Mikhail Krivoshlykov; but it fell within a few months, and Podtelkov and his comrades were executed in May 1918 by counter-revolutionary Cossacks. Red Cossack commanders such as Filipp Mironov, and cavalrymen of inogorodnie origin such as Semyon Budyonny, founded the famous First Cavalry Army and drove Denikin from the Don as far as Crimea.

This history must be told honestly: the harsh policy of "decossackisation" begun in January 1919 by a directive of the Bolshevik leadership, with practices that counted the Cossack estate collectively as an enemy, led to the Veshenskaya rising and also frightened the Red Cossacks; the policy was withdrawn within a short time. Mikhail Sholokhov's Nobel-winning novel And Quiet Flows the Don is the strongest literary account of this split, of a class war in which, in the same village, in the same family, brother drew a gun on brother. Our suggestion to young comrades: read this novel. No history book tells so well how the Cossacks were split in two not as "an ethnic community" but as an estate that had its rich, its poor, its landlord and its labourer.

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Section III: Soviet Ukraine — Gains and Wounds

A union of equal republics

When the USSR was founded in December 1922, the Ukrainian SSR was one of the founding republics, together with Russia, Belarus and Transcaucasia. In the process of foundation Lenin had opposed the idea that the republics should join Russia as "autonomous regions", and had insisted on a union of equal republics; he counted Great Russian chauvinism one of socialism's most dangerous internal enemies. The constitution recognised each republic's right to secede. It is not for nothing that, in his invasion speech of February 2022, Putin accused Ukraine of being "a state created by Lenin": Russian nationalism still does not forgive the Bolshevik policy that recognised a national right for Ukraine.

Ukrainisation and a civilisational leap

The korenizatsiya (indigenisation) policy applied in the 1920s took the form of "Ukrainisation" in Ukraine: Ukrainian schools, newspapers, theatres and publishing houses were opened; state and party cadres were Ukrainised. The language tsarism had banned became, for the first time, a state language. Literacy rose quickly; Kharkiv (the capital until 1934) became a centre of art and science. The period of industrialisation brought Ukraine the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (DniproHES, 1932), the Kharkiv Tractor Factory and Zaporizhstal. A peasant country became, in a few decades, one of the industrialised regions of Europe.

The famine of 1932–33

Together with these gains, the famine of 1932–33, caused by collectivisation and the grain-procurement policy, must also be remembered openly. In this famine millions of people died in Ukraine (the estimates are mostly between 3.5 and 5 million); Kazakhstan and the Kuban and Volga regions also suffered heavy losses. Today the Ukrainian state defines this as a genocide under the name "Holodomor"; many historians argue that it was less a plan of annihilation aimed at a nation than the destructive result of the class war against the kulaks, of excessive procurement targets, and of the relation established with the peasantry. This debate is still used politically today. Our position is clear: it is wrong both to deny this tragedy and to make it an instrument for condemning socialism as a whole. To settle accounts with our past with maturity means learning from this experience that socialism cannot be built without protecting the worker–peasant alliance.

The war against fascism

In 1939 western Ukraine joined Soviet Ukraine. In 1941 Nazi Germany occupied the country. Ukraine was one of the lands that lived the heaviest destruction of the Second World War: millions of dead, a part of the Holocaust in which about 1.5 million Jews were murdered — at Babi Yar in Kyiv, in September 1941, more than 33,000 Jews were shot in two days.

The second face of this period is a wound that still bleeds today. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), led by Stepan Bandera, proclaimed "independence" in Lviv in June 1941 together with the German occupation; the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) born of this organisation massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia in 1943; with Galician volunteers the 14th Waffen-SS "Galizien" Division was formed. On the other side, millions of Ukrainians fought fascism in the Red Army and in partisan units; Kyiv was liberated on 6 November 1943. The UPA's armed resistance continued until the early 1950s.

In post-Soviet Ukraine, Bandera's being declared a national hero, and his name being given to streets and squares, became material for the Kremlin's "denazification" propaganda. Two truths must be said together: in Ukraine there is a strong far right fed by a fascist tradition; but this does not legitimise declaring a people of 40 million "Nazi" and invading them. The people of Ukraine are among the peoples who paid the greatest price against fascism.

The transfer of Crimea and the late Soviet period

In 1954, on the 300th year of Pereiaslav, the Khrushchev administration transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. On that day this was an administrative arrangement inside the same state; after 1991 it became a border question between two states. Brezhnev too governed with cadres of Ukrainian origin; the Ukrainian SSR was one of the founding members of the United Nations. In 1986 the Chernobyl disaster became the symbol of a late Soviet bureaucracy lacking transparency and cut off from the people, and it sped the rise of the nationalist movement (Rukh) in Ukraine.

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Section IV: Dissolution — From the Nomenklatura to the Oligarchy

The referendums and Belavezha

Ukraine played the decisive role in the dissolution of the USSR. In the all-Union referendum of March 1991, about 70 per cent of Ukrainian voters said yes to preserving "a renewed Union". After the August coup attempt, on 24 August 1991 the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine proclaimed independence. On 1 December 1991 this decision was approved by a vote above 90 per cent, and Leonid Kravchuk was elected president. Kravchuk had been the ideology secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine: that is, independence was carried by yesterday's nomenklatura transforming itself overnight into a "national bourgeoisie". On 8 December 1991 Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich from Belarus ended the existence of the USSR in the Belavezha Forest.

This scene is the plain picture of capitalist restoration: in March the people wanted to preserve the union; in December the top of the party bureaucracy dissolved the union in order to share out the property. What carried Ukraine to independence was not a national liberation movement. It was the interest of a new class that wanted to seize state property through privatisation.

The decade of plunder

What followed was a disaster. Throughout the 1990s the Ukrainian economy shrank by more than half; in 1993 inflation reached thousands of per cent. Soviet industry was sold piece by piece. The oligarchs who emerged — Rinat Akhmetov in the Donbas, Kolomoisky and Pinchuk in Dnipro, Firtash in gas, Poroshenko in sugar — turned the state into an extension of their own companies. The thirty years of Ukrainian politics can be read as the fight of oligarch cliques that split into "pro-Western" and "pro-Russian"; each clique polarised its own electoral base through language, religion and identity.

By the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine transferred to Russia the weapons left from the USSR, counted the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal; in return the United States, Britain and Russia promised to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. In 2014 it was seen how worthless this promise was. The Black Sea Fleet was divided in 1997; Russia leased Sevastopol.

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Section V: NATO, the EU, and Between Two Imperialisms

"Not one inch eastward"

It is now known from archival documents that in February 1990 the US Secretary of State, James Baker, told Gorbachev that if Germany were united, NATO would expand "not one inch eastward" (National Security Archive). This word did not become a written treaty; NATO took Poland, Hungary and Czechia in 1999, and in 2004 seven countries including the Baltic states. At the Bucharest Summit of April 2008 it was said of Ukraine and Georgia that "they will become NATO members", but no timetable was given. Four months later Russia fought a war with Georgia.

Two mistaken readings must be avoided here. The first is the reading that "Russia is only defending itself": Russia too wants, for its own monopolies (Gazprom, Rosneft, Rosatom, the metal and grain giants), a sphere of influence, a market and a belt of raw materials. The second is the reading that "NATO is only a defensive alliance protecting democracies": NATO is the military apparatus of Western capital under US leadership, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan and Libya (we treated this history in detail in our essay From the Nuremberg Stage to NATO's Barricades). Lenin's analysis in "Imperialism" is exactly this: the world has been shared out, and a new sharing can happen only by force; small countries are the stage and the victim of this sharing.

From the Orange Revolution to Maidan

The Orange Revolution of 2004 carried the Yushchenko–Tymoshenko clique to power against the Yanukovych clique. In 2010 Yanukovych won the election; by the Kharkiv Accords he extended the lease of the Russian fleet at Sevastopol to 2042, and in return received cheap gas. His suspension at the last moment, in November 2013, of the Association Agreement with the EU started the Maidan protests in Kyiv.

The anger against corruption and the oligarch dictatorship of the tens of thousands of people who joined Maidan was real. But the movement soon came under the influence of two forces: on one side organised and armed far-right groups in the street (Svoboda, Right Sector), on the other US diplomacy discussing the new government in Washington — Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland determining, in a leaked phone call, who would be prime minister was the barest proof of this intervention. In February 2014 Yanukovych fled.

Crimea, the Donbas and Odesa

In March 2014 Russia annexed Crimea by a disputed referendum. In April 2014 "people's republics" were proclaimed in Donetsk and Luhansk with Russian support; Kyiv started an "anti-terrorist operation". On 2 May 2014, in the fire that broke out in the Odesa House of Trade Unions, in a building surrounded by far-right groups, more than 40 federalist and left activists died; this massacre was never truly tried. Between 2014 and 2022, according to UN figures, nearly 14,000 people died in the Donbas war. The Minsk I (2014) and Minsk II (2015) agreements were not applied; the former Chancellor of Germany, Merkel, said openly in 2022 that Minsk had "gained time" for Ukraine.

In these years "decommunisation laws" were passed in Ukraine: Soviet symbols were banned, the Communist Party of Ukraine was barred from elections, and in 2022 it was closed completely. In 2019 the aim of NATO and EU membership was written into the constitution. The same year Zelenskyy took 73 per cent of the vote with a promise of peace in the Donbas — the people's will for peace was plain; but neither the Ukrainian oligarchy, nor the Western allies, nor the Kremlin put this will into practice.

24 February 2022 and after

On 24 February 2022 Russia began a full-scale invasion. In the talks held at Dolmabahçe in Istanbul in March 2022, the parties approached a framework that included security guarantees in exchange for Ukraine's neutrality; the talks collapsed between the news of the Bucha massacre and the pressure from Western capitals to "keep fighting". In September 2022 Russia announced that it had annexed four regions. The Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 failed. The war became a war of attrition that cost both sides hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded.

In 2025 the negotiation process started again with the Trump administration: in May, June and July 2025 direct Russia–Ukraine talks were held in Istanbul, and large prisoner exchanges took place. In August 2025 a Trump–Putin summit was held in Alaska. In 2026 rounds continued in Geneva and Abu Dhabi through US mediation; in April a 32-hour Easter ceasefire was made and immediately broken (Wikipedia). The NATO Summit in Ankara in July 2026 pledged 70 billion euros of military support to Ukraine for 2026 (Enab Baladi).

The class balance sheet of the war

Who pays the bill of this war, and who gains?

• In Ukraine: Changes to the labour law passed in 2022 on the grounds of wartime conditions pushed workers in small and medium enterprises outside the guarantee of collective agreements and narrowed union rights. Mobilisation drove mainly the poor, the peasants and the workers of small towns to the front; the wealthy found a way to go abroad. Ukraine's black soil was opened to international agricultural monopolies (the land-market reform of 2021 was an IMF condition); the US–Ukraine minerals agreement of 2025 was the mortgaging of the country's underground wealth as the price of arms aid. The "reconstruction" conferences mean the sharing out, to construction and finance capital, of a country that has been destroyed.
• In Russia: The war economy enriched the arms monopolies and the oligarchs tied to them; those sent to the front were mostly from poor regions, from the minority republics, contract soldiers with a high signing bonus. Every voice against the war was silenced by prison.
• In the West: US and European arms monopolies (Lockheed Martin, Rheinmetall, BAE) took record orders; US liquefied natural gas took the place of Russian gas in the European market. European workers pay for this with the energy bill, with austerity, and with a budget shifted from social spending to arms.

	The Kremlin's narrative	The West's narrative	From the class window
The cause of the war	NATO's expansion, the attack of "the Nazis" on the Donbas	Putin's imperial ambition, an attack on democracy	The fight of two imperialist blocs to share Ukraine; the Ukrainian oligarchy taking a side in this fight
Who is Ukraine?	"An artificial state created by Lenin", "one people"	The front line of the free world	A people caught between their own rulers, the invader and the IMF
The Donbas	An oppressed Russian people	Occupied lands	A mining basin looted and turned to ruin in the oligarchs' fight, and its workers
What does peace mean?	The surrender of the lands, the disarming of Ukraine	Russia's defeat, a security guarantee	A ceasefire, the end of the occupation, peoples determining their own future, war capital being called to account
Who is gaining?	"The Russian world"	"The free world"	The monopolies of arms, energy, agriculture and finance
Who is paying?	It stays silent	It stays silent	The workers at the front, the peasants, the refugees, the workers of Europe and of the world who pay the energy bill

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Section VI: Türkiye — Whose Balance Is "Balancing"?

Montreux and the straits

Türkiye's most concrete power in this war is its geography. On 28 February 2022 Ankara, by officially recognising the war, applied the relevant articles of the Montreux Convention and closed the straits to the warships of the belligerents. This decision meant that Russia could not reinforce the Black Sea Fleet from the Mediterranean; at the same time it limited the entry of NATO warships into the Black Sea. Montreux gives Türkiye a bargaining counter against both sides.

Gaining from both markets at once

On the one hand Türkiye sold Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles to Ukraine, decided that a Baykar factory would be built in Ukraine, and deepened defence-industry cooperation. On the other hand it did not join the Western sanctions on Russia; the doors stayed open for Russian tourists, Russian capital and Russian gas. The TurkStream pipeline, the Akkuyu Nuclear Plant built by Rosatom, the S-400 missiles, and the export and "re-export" traffic that exploded in the war years are the signs of Turkish capital's tie to the Russian market.

The stage of mediation

Türkiye hosted the Istanbul talks of 2022, the Black Sea Grain Initiative of 2022–2023 together with the UN (about 33 million tonnes of grain), many prisoner exchanges, and the direct Istanbul talks of 2025. Together with Romania and Bulgaria it set up a mine-clearing task group in the Black Sea. Today's meeting is the continuation of this line.

Türkiye in NATO

Türkiye has NATO's second-largest army. Between 2022 and 2024 it used the membership of Sweden and Finland as a bargaining counter: it approved Finland in March 2023 and Sweden in January 2024; in return it took concessions from the United States on the purchase of F-16s, and from the Scandinavian countries under the heading of "the fight against terrorism". In July 2026 it hosted the NATO Summit in Ankara; the summit decided on Europe's rearmament and on the removal of obstacles in the defence-industry trade — this means a new market for the growing Turkish defence industry.

The class reading

Türkiye's "balancing foreign policy" is often presented as a peace policy. In reality it is the bargaining strategy of a capitalist class trying to become a regional power:

• Construction capital wants a share in Ukraine's reconstruction.
• The defence industry sells both to Ukraine, and to NATO, and to the Gulf.
• Energy and tourism capital does not want to give up the Russian market.
• Political power uses the stage of mediation as a source of legitimacy at home and abroad.

This balancing is less a way of ending the war than a way of gaining from both sides on every day the war continues. For Türkiye to be able to be a force for peace, it must rest not on NATO, not on the Kremlin, and not on its own arms and construction monopolies, but on the peoples who pay the price of the war. We do not expect this from today's government; only the organised peace struggle of the working class of Türkiye can impose it.

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Lessons for Today

1. The national question cannot be separated from the class question. That the Donbas speaks Russian is not ethnic. It is the product of nineteenth-century industrialisation. Every polarisation built today through language and identity serves the oligarchs and the imperialists.
2. Independence without a class content opens the door to the tutelage of the strongest foreign capital. The Rada's turning into the Hetmanate in 1918 on a German bayonet, and the mortgaging of Ukrainian land in the 2020s by the IMF and by minerals agreements, give the same lesson.
3. The chauvinism of a great nation is the language of counter-revolution. The Whites' "Russia one and indivisible" and Putin's accusation of "a state created by Lenin" come from the same ideological line. The principle of national equality that the October Revolution brought to these lands (What Did the October Revolution Give the World?) still holds today.
4. The struggle against fascism cannot be selective. Opposing the Bandera cult in Ukraine and opposing Russia's invasion do not exclude each other; the far right and religious reaction in Russia are subjects of the same struggle.
5. Peace is founded not at the table of the great powers but in the organisation of peoples. We treated the imperialist character of Russia in our dossier The Real Russia, and the new power blocs in our essay on BRICS: whichever bloc wins does not bring the liberation of the working class.

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Concrete Tasks

• Read, and have others read: Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism; Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don; Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered (it tells the Ukraine of the civil war through the eyes of a young worker).
• Be alert against disinformation: The propaganda apparatuses of both sides of the war, and their echoes in Türkiye ("Putin is anti-imperialist", and also "NATO is freedom"), are the two ends of the same trap. While reading the news, always ask the same three questions: in whose hands, under whose control, for whose benefit?
• Build solidarity with those who oppose the war: The war opponents imprisoned in Russia, the workers in Ukraine who defend union rights, the Belarusian and Russian conscientious objectors, the refugees who have taken shelter in Türkiye — our solidarity is with them.
• Question Türkiye's arms trade: Show that the money the Turkish defence industry gains from wars is transferred not to the wage, the education and the health of the worker in Türkiye, but to capital. The organisation of the workers in the defence industry is part of this questioning.
• Make the demand for peace concrete: An immediate ceasefire; withdrawal from occupied lands and peoples determining their own future under international supervision; the exchange of all prisoners; the demilitarisation of the Black Sea; the withdrawal of NATO and of foreign bases from the region; the taxation of the monopolies that profit from the war, and reconstruction carried out under public supervision.

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Dear young comrades,

Today at Dolmabahçe two presidents will shake hands, photographs will be taken, and the word "peace" will be used many times. But peace will be decided not in front of the cameras, but in the mines of the Donbas, in the factories of Kharkiv, in the homes of the young people hiding in Rostov so as not to be sent to the front, and in the lives of the Ukrainian and Russian migrants in Istanbul who have fallen into the struggle to get by.

A hundred years ago, on the same land, the poor Cossacks of the Don, the miners of the Donbas, the workers of Kyiv and the peasants of Ukraine fought together against the tsar's generals, the German occupation and the landlords; they won, for the first time, a school in their own languages, bread on their own land, and a say in their own factories. These gains were lost with capitalist restoration; but the memory was not lost. To defend the common interest of the workers on both sides of the border, against those who set peoples to break one another — this is our task today too.

The machine is new, the chain is old. The war is new, the class is old.

For peace, for the fraternity of peoples, for a more beautiful world.

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