By Ángeles Maestro
November 25, 2025

A former member of Spain’s federal parliament, author Ángeles Maestro is a leading spokesperson of the Coordinación Núcleos Comunistas. 

Translation: John Catalinotto

November 22, 2025

Twenty-four hours after Trump’s Peace Plan for Ukraine was made public, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed his people in a message in which he practically announced that the U.S. had given him an ultimatum: “Either accept a loss of dignity or risk losing a key partner; 28 complicated points or an extremely harsh winter.” The overall message suggests that “as hard as it may be,” it would be worse to reject it.

In this regard, the dissemination of information, precisely now, about corruption among Ukraine’s leadership, including Zelensky, when this corruption has been a well-known fact for years, has served as political blackmail to sway the leadership in Kiev toward accepting the agreement.

There is no mystery about Russia’s position. Its red lines are those it set out in Istanbul in 2022. Russia has repeated them ever since as non-negotiable objectives of the Special Military Operation: protection of the population of Donbass and other Russian-speaking and Russian-culture communities and demilitarization, neutrality and denazification of Ukraine. All this is within the framework of guaranteeing the security of Russia, which has been progressively surrounded militarily by NATO since the disappearance of the USSR in 1991.

Despite the Kremlin’s cautious silence on the proposal, or precisely because of it, it is clear that the plan is in line with what was agreed between Putin and Trump in Alaska at their meeting last August.

Then as now, neither Ukraine nor the European Union has participated in the negotiations; they have been presented with a fait accompli.

The agreement puts the EU in a particularly complicated situation, as the central axis of its policy revolves around prolonging the war in Ukraine “until the last Ukrainian,” while arming itself to the teeth for a NATO war against Russia within a few years.

In reality, one of the cornerstones of this strategy is to inject huge amounts of public money into the arms industry in an attempt to ease the deindustrialization that is ravaging the EU. The other is the militarization and intensification of repression of some people who are beginning to rebel against growing unemployment and the deterioration of their lives and to target the war economy with general strikes.

Demonization of Russia

To justify such folly, a suffocating war propaganda campaign based on the demonization of Russia has been launched. Just yesterday, EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said, “In two or three years, Russia could attack Spanish airports and seriously affect tourism.” (as.com, Nov. 21) And two days ago, the French Chief of Staff declared that the population should prepare to see their children die in the war against Russia.

There is no doubt that the Peace Plan in Ukraine is a powerful torpedo headed at the EU’s waterline. The collapse of arms companies’ stock market prices reflects the seriousness of the matter. The European Commission and its governments are left without the central argument that “Russia is going to attack us all,” which they used to justify the absolute priority of “security” over pensions, public services, jobs and even the lives of young people.

But what reasons are there for the United States to have put decisive pressure on Ukraine to implement a peace plan that, broadly speaking, accepts Russia’s fundamental objectives?

Certainly, they have nothing to do with the supposed pacifism of Trump wanting to win the Nobel Peace Prize next year.

The reasons are as follows:

The first is the confirmation of Russia’s resounding victory on the battlefield despite the huge amounts of weapons, military instructors and special troops supplied by NATO. Confronted with this evidence of defeat, the Kiev regime and the EU have been inventing “victories,” which the media repeats like parrots. Zelensky’s people needed these lies to continue receiving money, and the EU needed them to justify these same transfusions of weapons and public funds.

The second is that the U.S., immersed in a very serious economic crisis, cannot continue to maintain military and economic support for a war at the expense of the public budget. Not only does the war not suit U.S. interests, but, as we will see later, is contrary to them. On the other hand, the business of its military-industrial complex is well secured with an EU that has already pledged to Trump that it will buy weapons on a massive scale from the U.S. military industry. Whether or not they use them is not Washington’s problem.

Political last resort for transnational firms

The third is the one that has probably exerted the most direct pressure to end the conflict as soon as possible. Trump, like the EU governments, is the political last resort for the interests of large multinationals. The difference is that the U.S. has the capacity to subjugate the EU and impose its objectives.

Once the profits of the big U.S. arms manufacturers have been guaranteed with European budgets, the big investment funds are preparing to pounce on Ukraine.

Some, like Blackrock, to “rebuild” it. Remember Iraq?

Others own large tracts of land in Ukraine, the exploitation of which is not compatible with war. This Oakland Institute report “identifies many prominent investors, including Vanguard Group, Kopernik Global Investors, BNP Asset Management Holding, NN Investment Partners Holdings, owned by Goldman Sachs, and Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. Several large U.S. pension funds, foundations, and university endowments have also invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital, a U.S.-based private equity fund.” (“War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land,” oaklandinstitute.org, 2023.)

Large multinationals such as Bayer-Monsanto, Cargill, and Dupont have major interests in the production of seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Finally, last July, the U.S. and Ukraine signed an agreement for the exploitation of strategic minerals by U.S. companies. To this end, a mutual investment fund was created, with financial contributions from both countries, aimed at promoting investment by U.S. companies. This agreement on “rare earths,” which is key for the U.S., would serve as a “reimbursement” for the billions of dollars transferred by Washington to Ukraine.

The above data clearly explains that the dominant faction of the imperialist oligarchy considers that, at present, it is more profitable to exploit Ukrainian resources. To do this they need Russian missiles to stop falling on Ukrainian infrastructure, rather than continuing the war. The oligarchy’s political representative, the Republican administration, has thus also played the role of removing potential European competitors interested in a supposed division of Ukraine, such as Poland.