The Ukraine War is a Business Model: It’s Time to End It

Zelensky Receives Draft Peace Plan: Negotiation is the Only Path Out

How many more must die before we admit the obvious? The war in Ukraine, now grinding through its fourth year, has become something far more sinister than a struggle between democracy and autocracy. It has become a business model. With claims of up to a million dead, civilian casualties have risen by 27 per cent this year compared to 2024, and yet the machinery of war churns on, feeding an insatiable appetite for profit that has little to do with the welfare of ordinary Ukrainians, Russians, or Europeans.

The latest peace proposal, a 28-point plan reportedly drafted by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian adviser Kirill Dmitriev, has provoked predictable outrage from European capitals and Ukrainian officials. Ukraine did not take part in shaping the proposed peace plan, we are told, and the terms are weighted toward Moscow’s demands. The plan would require Ukraine to cede territory, limit its military to 600,000 personnel, and constitutionally renounce NATO membership. Critics call it capitulation. They may be right. But I ask you this: what do we call the alternative?

Let me be blunt about who benefits from this war’s continuation. The world’s largest 100 defence contractors amassed $632 billion in combined revenue in 2023, a bonanza built on Ukrainian and Russian corpses. Gregory Hayes, CEO of Raytheon, told investors a month before the invasion: “I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it”. When questioned about profiting from bloodshed, he remained defiant, refusing to apologise for making weapons that are now tearing through human flesh daily.

This is not conjecture. This is not left-wing paranoia. This is capitalism functioning exactly as designed: the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of death. While defence contractor share prices soar and executives collect obscene bonuses, it is working-class Ukrainians and Russians who fill the body bags. It is ordinary families who huddle in bomb shelters, who bury their children, who watch their communities disintegrate. The elites who profit from this carnage will never send their children to die in trenches. They will never know hunger or cold or the terror of incoming artillery.

I can already hear the objections. “But Putin is an aggressor!” Yes, he is. “But Ukraine has a right to self-defence!” Indeed it does. “But territorial concessions reward imperialism!” Perhaps they do. These are not trivial concerns. Putin’s invasion was unjustifiable, a violation of international law and basic human decency. Ukraine’s resistance has been heroic. The principle of territorial integrity matters.

But let us speak honestly about the history that preceded February 2022. The Donbas has been a war zone since 2014, when the Western-backed Maidan revolution toppled a democratically elected government, prompting Russian-backed separatist movements in the east. That earlier conflict, which killed over 14,000 people before the 2022 invasion, was itself a proxy war, with NATO powers arming and training Ukrainian forces while Russia supported the separatist republics. The Biden administration, along with European allies, poured weapons into this regional civil war for years, transforming eastern Ukraine into a testing ground for Western military hardware and geopolitical ambitions.

NATO's Stoltenberg: "The war didn't start in February last year, the war started in 2014."
Stoltenberg is right. The war started in 2014 with a US so-called regime change commonly known as a coup and we are all paying the price now… #WWWIII pic.twitter.com/xggofm5OE5

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) February 24, 2023

Now we must ask uncomfortable questions. If Russia withdraws entirely and Ukraine reasserts control over Donbas, what becomes of the populations there who sided with the separatists? Will they face reprisals? The grim history of civil wars suggests they will. Ukrainian nationalism, while understandable given Russian aggression, has its own revanchist elements. Those who fought for or supported the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, rightly or wrongly, fear what Ukrainian victory would mean for them. These are not abstract geopolitical questions. These are questions about whether people live or die, whether they keep their homes or become refugees, whether they face prosecution or persecution.

The peace proposal’s territorial provisions, whatever their moral deficiencies, at least acknowledge this reality. The alternative, total Ukrainian victory and reconquest of the Donbas, likely means renewed civil conflict and possibly ethnic cleansing. We can call that justice for territorial integrity, but the people on the ground will simply call it more death.

But principles do not bleed. Principles do not scream when shrapnel tears through their bodies. Principles do not orphan children or widow spouses. And while we debate principles in comfortable offices and conference rooms, Russian armed forces struck at least five hospitals directly, some with multiple loitering munitions, suggesting potential deliberate targeting. While we pontificate about geopolitical norms, a missile strike on a hospital in Kamianske killed two patients, including a pregnant woman, and injured at least 22 others.

The harsh truth is that Europe cannot sustain Ukraine militarily without American support, and America under Trump has made clear it will not maintain current aid levels indefinitely. Only a third of Spaniards and Britons believe European and other Western countries would be able to provide enough support to Ukraine to enable it to keep defending itself, falling to just a quarter in France, Germany and Italy (YouGov). The fantasy that Ukraine can achieve total victory and restore its 2014 borders collides daily with the reality of Russian military capacity and Western war fatigue.

Meanwhile, the war has become a windfall for American defence contractors selling weapons and liquefied natural gas to Europe at inflated prices. An unnamed EU official told Politico: “The country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons” (Analyst News). This is not peace. This is not justice. This is profiteering wrapped in the flag of democratic values.

NEW: The BIDENS are entangled in a Ukrainian corruption scandal:@JoeBiden pushed Ukraine to fire a prosecutor seen as corrupt.
BUT the prosecutor had opened a case into a company that was paying HUNTER BIDEN.
The Bidens say they never discussed it. https://t.co/tblUPYPJMG

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) May 2, 2019

I write this not to defend Trump, whose motivations are as transparently self-serving as any arms dealer’s, nor to excuse Putin’s brutal imperialism. I write this because the left has lost its way on this question. We have allowed ourselves to be trapped in a binary where opposing the war means siding with Russian aggression, where advocating for negotiated settlement becomes tantamount to appeasement. This is precisely the trap that serves elite interests.

A genuine left-wing position on Ukraine must center the material conditions and lived experiences of ordinary people, not the abstract principles that so conveniently align with defence contractor profit margins. It must ask who dies and who profits. It must recognise that prolonging a war that cannot be won militarily serves no one except those who manufacture the instruments of death.

The Trump-Witkoff plan is imperfect, possibly even terrible. It rewards aggression and may well embolden future imperialism. But show me the alternative that does not involve years more slaughter. Show me the path to Ukrainian victory that does not require hundreds of thousands more deaths. Show me how continuing this war serves the interests of working-class Ukrainians who must fight it, rather than the interests of Western defence contractors who profit from it.

Kirill Dmitriev expressed optimism about the deal’s chances of success because, unlike past efforts, “we feel the Russian position is really being heard”. Of course Russia’s position is being heard. Russia has leverage. That is how negotiations work. Ukraine and its European allies can either accept this reality and negotiate the best possible terms, or they can continue fighting a war that grows bloodier by the day while defence contractors toast their quarterly earnings.

The European response has been predictably muddled. French Foreign Minister Barrot insists “peace cannot be capitulation,” while his government contemplates sending troops to Ukraine. German officials express frustration at being excluded from talks. Polish ministers demand Ukraine face no restrictions on its defence capabilities. All of this sounds principled until you remember that these same European powers lack the military capacity to sustain Ukraine without American support and lack the political will to implement the massive defence spending increases that would require.

What they do have is a thriving arms industry eager to maintain the current arrangement. German defence companies recorded a 7.5 percent increase in revenue, while UK-based defence companies also recorded revenue growth. The war has become too profitable to end, at least for those who will never have to fight it.

I imagine Tony Benn would have grasped this immediately. He understood that wars are fought by the poor and funded by their taxes, while the wealthy reap the benefits. He understood that the military-industrial complex requires enemies to justify its existence and profits. He would have recognised the Ukraine war for what it has become: a proxy conflict where working-class lives are expendable inputs in a capitalist equation.

The dead cannot be resurrected, but the living can be saved. According to Ohchr, since 2022, at least 13,883 civilians have been killed, including 726 children. Every day this war continues adds to that toll. Every day we delay negotiations because the terms are imperfect is another day of parents burying children, of homes destroyed, of lives shattered.

There will be no perfect peace. There will be no justice that satisfies everyone. There will only be an end to the killing, or the continuation of it. The choice before us is not between a flawed peace and a noble war. It is between imperfect life and certain death.

Those who profit from war’s continuation will tell you that peace on these terms is unconscionable. They will invoke principles and precedents. They will speak of slippery slopes and dangerous signals. And all the while, their stock portfolios will grow fatter on the blood of people they will never meet.

We must choose differently. We must demand an end to this slaughter, even if the terms are bitter. We must refuse to sacrifice more working-class lives on the altar of geopolitical abstractions. We must recognise that the only victory worth pursuing is the one that stops the dying.

The dead care nothing for our principles. The living deserve better than to become the next quarterly earnings report for Raytheon.