As the Ukraine war drags on, more attention is being paid to the real reason for Putin’s attack on his neighbour -the desire of Russia’s capitalist class, backed by its government, to control Ukraine’s mineral and agricultural wealth. That wealth was an inevitable temptation to a large power whose monopoly on trading such resources on the world market was increasingly at risk.
The course of the war suggests that Putin misjudged the readiness of the capitalist classes and governments in Ukraine and the West to allow this monopoly to be extended.
The whole scenario illustrates perfectly the Socialist Party’s argument that wars in capitalism are caused by competition for global domination of resources, markets and trade routes.