Notes on Ukraine (late March 2022)

In light of the current events in Ukraine we have decided to make the Notes From the Editors for the May 2022 issue of Monthly Review immediately available. —Eds.

The Editors of Monthly Review

As we write these notes in late March 2022, the war in Ukraine continues to escalate, threatening to mutate instantaneously into a global thermonuclear war, which would result in the extermination of virtually the entire population of the earth.

To get a firm grasp on the current situation in Ukraine, we must understand the central role that the United States and NATO have played in the conflict from the start, beginning in 2014 with the U.S.-engineered Maidan coup. This was followed by the breaking apart of Ukraine, during which the Russian- speaking Crimea was incorporated into Russia after obtaining the population’s support in a referendum, while a civil war emerged between Kyiv, supported by the United States, and the breakaway republics in Russian-speaking Donbass in the eastern part of Ukraine, supported by Russia. Following eight years of civil war—which was again escalating in late 2021 and early 2022, with massive increases in military support and training from the United States and continued attacks by Kyiv on Donbass, in violation of the 2014 Minsk agreements—Russia entered directly into the civil war, transforming it into a full-scale war, with further horrendous results. This brought to the fore the reality that what was being played out in Ukraine was not simply a civil war between Kyiv and Donbass, which has set the stage, but rather a much larger proxy war between the United States/NATO and Russia, which has been developing for decades and lies at the root of the conflict.

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