The NATO-Russia War in Ukraine: Causes and Drivers of the Conflict

The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is, at its foundation, a war between Russia and US-led NATO. This becomes clear if we contextualize it historically and politically as a concentrated attempt by the West to exert total political, economic, and social control over post-Soviet space; in short, to wage a project of neo-colonization. The effect of the implosion of the Soviet Union itself and its replacement by a number of smaller capitalist states (The Russian Federation and Ukraine, among others) on the periphery of the global capitalist system, thus created conditions for what could be understood as a civil war between Russia and Ukraine (successfully precipitated, after numerous tries since 1991, by the 2014 Maidan coup).

These dynamics would not be possible without powerful external forces intervening in the politics of post-Soviet space. The reconstitution of capitalism across post-Soviet space has resulted in neo-colonization by the imperialist core, namely, the combined forces of the United States, the European Union, and the UK. This has produced devastating demographic and sociopolitical effects in both Russia and Ukraine since 1991, comparable only to losing a major war in terms of its human cost (measured in the millions of lives prematurely lost to early death, massive structural impoverishment and intense capital theft). Overall, adult mortality rates surged rapidly after 1991 in post-Soviet states. In Russia’s case, mortality rates reached an increase of 12.8% in the first five years after the Soviet breakup.[1] Overall, mortality rate between 1991 and 1994 shows a catastrophic level of increase of nearly 40%.[2] Male life expectancy fell from close to 65 years to a low of 57 years, a decline of six years, in just four years after capitalism’s reintroduction. GDP declined precipitously as well by 40% between 1991 and 1998, while hyperinflation in 1992 alone went up to 2500% (once prices of goods were ‘liberalized’ and ‘freed’ from central planning control).[3] These are catastrophic and unprecedented numbers. Thus, it is not surprising that overall poverty rates in post-Soviet societies exploded from 1.7% in 1988 (itself one of the worst years of economic decline in Soviet history) to around 20% of the population by 1993. Current World Bank data shows that even between 1995 and 1999, the poverty measurement of surviving on $3 per day reached slightly over seven percent of the Russian population.[4] Such were the results of neo-colonization of Russia and Ukraine (in addition to the other post-Soviet states).

The scale of theft and plunder during the process of neo-colonization is illustrated by that fact that stripping Soviet society of its accumulated wealth was enough to lift the imperialist core out of the deep structural crises of the 1980s, giving the West at least fifteen to twenty years of a massive capital accumulation cycle. By the 1970s, the global capitalist market had been saturated, divided up, used up. For example, Ford could not find sufficient buyers for its next line of new cars, because there was an insufficient number of people willing to buy new cars (because they had already purchased one, or could not afford one in the first place). In addition, through a series of decades-long labor struggles, labor unions (often part of political parties officially sympathetic to the Soviet Union) had forced increasing concessions from the capitalist class globally. This is especially true in the two decades after 1945.Wages generally rose in the West, while profits declined in relation to wages. Thus, the reach of the capitalist global market faced its limits of growth when it bumped against the geopolitical presence of the Soviet socialist block. Even the 1980s it was not at all clear that this ‘limit to growth’ of capital could be decisively resolved or overcome.

It was precisely this structural crisis of the imperialist core economies that was ‘resolved’ by the collapse of the Soviet system and the subsequent incorporation of Soviet wealth into Western-dominated private capital flows. Capital cycles of wealth accumulation restarted in earnest (exploiting the vast new markets on the geographies of the former Soviet bloc) and brought two decades of record profits until the global financial crisis of 2008 marked another emerging structural crisis facing capitalism.

Within this context, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has the hallmarks of a civil war — an internal conflict within the ruins of the Soviet Union. Post-Soviet Ukrainian nationalism approaches the building of a new Ukrainian nation by positing the Russian and (the commonly held) Soviet identities as the enemy ‘Other’; under this ideology of nation-building, the erasure of Ukraine’s Soviet period is a necessary condition for the establishment of a new bourgeois, and uni-ethnic (meaning, cleansed of Russian identity) Ukrainian state.

With the common-to-all Soviet identity no longer the unifying glue, other political identities emerge as primary; contestation over identity and relations with Russia has been provoked by the West, in an attempt to push Ukraine away from Russia, thus furthering the goals of neo-colonizing strategy. This ethnic cleansing of Russian political identity in Ukraine includes banning of usage of the Russian language and Russian Orthodox Church across Ukraine, with the full approval of the ‘democratic West.’ By banning the Russian language, I am referring not only to proposed and actual legislative acts, but also to widespread practices across everyday life, where Russian-speakers are aggressively told (in public) to stop conversing in Russian.

It is in this context that one must also understand the actual start of the civil war in the Donbas. Long populated by ethnic Russians, and possessing the strongest possible Soviet identity, attempts to force an ethnically unitary Ukrainian nationalist identity by the 2014 Maidan coup were surely to lead to civil war. The coup itself was a brazen illustration of the extent to which neo-colonization is driving the West in the politics of Ukraine and Russia. Viktor Yanukovich twice won the presidential elections (in 2004 and 2010), yet he and his government were unconstitutionally removed from the violent coup of 2014. During the Maidan coup itself, the entire repertoire of regime change practices was on public display, from Western ambassadors and senior politicians publicly visiting and supporting the coup forces on the square, to the deployment of violence: there are public YouTube videos of protesters carrying guns and shooting against the police, to say nothing of the unidentified snipers who were filmed leaving an opposition controlled building around the Maidan square during the episode when a large number of square occupiers and police were shot dead by sniper fire. Thus, what had started as a series of protests by college students with specific grievances against the government, quickly transformed into a paramilitary armed coup against the elected Yanukovich government, fully and publicly backed by US, EU, and UK politicians. Most tellingly, the violent last phase of the coup erupted after a compromise dissolving tensions between the government and the opposition had been reached, brokered by the EU. Once the shooting started, the Western regimes forgot about the agreement and fully recognized the coup leadership as the new Ukrainian regime for the definite account on the Maidan coup.[5]

These machinations yielding the coup in 2014, precipitated the armed uprising in the Donbas. The new Ukrainian state responded by sending armored units and special forces in 2014 to the Donbas, to force what is essentially ethnic cleansing: forced Ukrainization in language and religion.

In the final analysis, the horrific loss of life that is affecting Ukrainian and Russian societies is the result of the intersection of two political processes: the decision by the late Soviet party elite to betray its people and dissolve the Soviet Union, thus opening the doors for neo-colonization by the imperialist forces. Today, the war in Ukraine grinds on, with continued support by the US, EU, and the UK, who have seen it as a way (so far unsuccessful) to weaken Russia, despite the ongoing death and destruction.

Arto Artinian is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York.

____________________________________________________________________________________ [1] Walberg, P., et al., ‘Economic change, crime, and mortality crisis in Russia: regional analysis,’ British Medical Journal 317 (1998), pp. 312-8.

[2] Gathmann, C., and M. Welsch, ‘The Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign and Russia’s mortality crisis,’ CESifo DICE Report 4/2012.

[3] Brainerd E., and D. M. Cutler, ‘Autopsy of the empire: understanding mortality in Russia and the former Soviet Union,’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19 (2005), pp. 107-130.

[4] World Bank Databank, ‘Poverty headcount ratio,’ Poverty and inequality platform 2025 [online] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?locations=RU .

[5] Kachanovski, I., The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine: the mass killing that changed the world (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).