Aclassic analysis of the Second World War defines it as the outcome of five different types of conflict.footnote¹ First, war between the top imperialist powers—Germany, Japan, the us, Britain—competing for the position of world hegemon. For this, the challenger powers had both to assert control over a key region—for Japan, China and Southeast Asia; for Germany, the western Soviet Union and Caucasus (‘our India’)—and inflict a crippling blow on any imperialist powers who tried to block them: in Japan’s case, the us, which had no intention of permitting a contender in the Pacific; in Germany’s, France and Britain, who had no wish to see Europe dominated by Berlin.

Initially this inter-imperialist war was fought in two separate theatres, Northern Europe—first Poland, then Belgium, Holland, France, Denmark and Norway falling to the Wehrmacht in 1940; Barbarossa launched the following summer—and the Pacific, where fdr’s embargo of oil supplies and intransigence in negotiations determined Tokyo in 1941 to add Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia to its conquests in China and French Indochina, and attempt to knock out the us fleet in Hawaii. The two theatres interlocked as the us came into the War and the uk, its debtor, having survived the Battle of Britain, shifted its forces to the Middle East to defend its oil fields in Iraq and Iran and the sprawling empire that stretched from Egypt and East Africa through India, Burma, Malaya and Singapore to Hong Kong and the Pacific. This inter-imperialist war was won decisively by the us, which crushed Germany and Japan and weakened Britain and France, to emerge as the world’s new hegemonic power.

The second type of warfare was the ussr’s self-defence against the German invasion, protecting the gains of 1917 from Nazi counter-revolution, rebuilding the Red Army and then—while the Western Allies were pinned down by surprisingly tough German defences in northern Italy and the Rhineland–Ardennes—sweeping west in 1944–45, as the Wehrmacht retreated and Nazi-collaborationist regimes crumbled in Bucharest, Sophia, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw, Budapest and Vienna. The ussr emerged from the War as the second world power, with control over Eastern Europe. Although Moscow allowed Western troops into Vienna and Berlin, once the Truman Doctrine had been put into action, Stalin pushed through military-bureaucratic ‘revolutions from above’, crushing independent left forces and bequeathing ‘an ugly political legacy’ that would mark the post-war situation.footnote²

Distinct from this was a third type of war, fought by the Chinese people against Japanese imperialism, which would develop into a social revolution once Allied support for the Kuomintang was cut off. Fourth, and distinct again, were the wars of national liberation waged by anti-colonial forces who refused to fight for their French, British, Dutch and American masters in Indochina, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines, joined by the Quit India movement; these struggles again turned towards social revolution in Indonesia and Indochina. Fifth, the armed-resistance movements of Nazi-occupied Europe, which in several cases—Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece—took on the character of national uprising, revolution or civil war, while parallel processes in France and Italy saw the emergence of mass communist parties. The entry of independent social forces from below into the maelstrom of the inter-imperialist conflict through these ‘just wars’ of national resistance and liberation would play a significant role in shaping the first thirty years of the post-war order.footnote³

Might this type of analytical perspective throw some light on the present war for Ukraine? The contrasts in scale and destructiveness between the two conflicts—80 million perished between 1939–45—hardly need to be stressed. More than that, the world-historical situation has not simply changed but been turned on its head. The rough equivalence of contending powers has given way to a world super-hegemon of a new kind, equipped with a powerful universalist ideology and wielding unprecedented military and financial might, for whom any state resistant to its economic and political penetration is by definition an adversary of some sort. Economically, the post-war boom has given way to the deindustrialization of the long downturn, lifted only by financial bubbles, monetary engineering and growing piles of debt. Socially, a us-led capitalist offensive has reversed the terms of the post-war era: in place of rising working-class militancy, industrial labour has been downgraded, outsourced and cast as a resentful loser. Impoverished revolutionary China is the second largest economy, under digitally enhanced ccp rule. The ussr dissolved itself and the us installed capitalism of a sort across the ex-Soviet Bloc. The hierarchy of powers at war in Ukraine, their economies and their classes, are in stark contrast to those of 1939–45.

Yet the 2022 war is also an international one, fought on economic and ideological as well as military fronts, dividing the world’s powers and mobilizing a wide array of states as participants or supporters, if not combatants.footnote⁴ As it enters its ninth month, it may be helpful to distinguish the different types of conflict involved—to look at their origins, as well as their immediate causes; at the belligerents’ aims, strategies, internal cohesion and material and ideological resources—and to think through how these feed into the dynamics of the wider conflagration. What follows is unavoidably schematic, scanting the complex character of the actors and no doubt clouded in places by the fog of war and the limited information available on key questions. It is offered in the spirit of a first cut that will surely need nuance and correction. But first, as with every war, analysis should take account of specific regional determinants.

The geographical and geopolitical setting of Ukraine, stretching for nearly a thousand miles across the marchlands of the Dnieper, has long left its territory prone to penetration by external powers—yet, as often as not, these outsiders have been summoned in by contending local forces. There is no need to go back to the Mongol invasions, or the imposition of aristocratic-Catholic rule under the seventeenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and appeal of rebel Cossacks to the Tsar. During the First World War, Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist-Kerenskian forces raged back and forth across these lands, one of the major theatres of the Eastern Front. From 1917–22, the region became the Southern Front of the Civil War: the Central Rada in Kiev summoned help from Berlin and Vienna to fight the soviets of Kharkiv, Odessa and the Donets, as well as Makhno’s anarchists in Zaporizhzhia; Poland annexed the Lviv region, with the blessing of the Paris Peace Conference; western-backed White forces and independentist insurgents of varied stripes, from socialist to neo-fascist, battled the Red Army from Kiev to Crimea. Before the 1920s were out, Stalin’s depredations began to pave the way for the Wehrmacht’s conquest and the life-or-death struggle of World War Two. The new-born state hatched from the furtive dissolution of the Soviet Union on the night of 8 December 1991 by the Belavezha troika, Yeltsin, Shushkevich and Kuchma, would not escape this logic. In a divided country, rival forces would invite outsiders in.