Protests

Brussels Une manifestation d'urgence contre le chantage du ‘plan de paix’ que l'administration Trump veut imposer à l'Ukraine, lundi 24 novembre à Bruxelles

Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland

Un collectif d'activistes ukrainiens et de sympathisants belges organise une manifestation urgente le lundi 24 novembre à 17h30. Rassemblement face à l'ambassade des Etats-Unis, 31 avenue des Arts, 1000 Bruxelles.

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Voici l'appel pour le rassemblement:

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L'Europe a sa dignité, et notre sécurité ne peut être négociée dans notre dos.

Aujourd'hui, Washington et Moscou discutent de l'avenir de l'Europe comme si nous n'étions pas à la table des négociations. Pire encore, ils envisagent un plan de « paix» qui oblige l'Ukraine à abandonner ses positions défensives et répartit les avoirs russes gelés en Europe comme s'il s'agissait de monnaies d'échange. C'est inacceptable pour l'Europe, pour la Belgique et surtout pour l'Ukraine, qui défend notre continent depuis près de 12 ans.

Soyons clairs :

Ce n'est pas la paix. C'est la voie vers une nouvelle guerre.

Nous avons déjà connu cela : Munich en 1938, lorsque la Tchécoslovaquie a été contrainte de céder des territoires en échange de promesses vaines. Les concessions faites aux agresseurs n'ont jamais apporté la paix, ni à l'époque, ni en 2025.

Forcer l'Ukraine à faire des concessions revient à forcer l'Europe à faire des concessions. Cela donne à la Russie un drapeau de victoire et le feu vert pour continuer à étendre son empire et à menacer nos voisins, y compris les pays de l'UE et de l'OTAN.

L'Europe doit se réveiller. Nous devons reprendre le contrôle de notre propre sécurité : approuver le prêt de réparation, renforcer la défense aérienne commune et fournir à l'Ukraine tout ce dont elle a besoin pour se protéger et protéger notre continent.

Rejoignez-nous pour montrer que Bruxelles soutient l'Ukraine, défend la dignité de l'Europe et s'oppose fermement à tout accord conclu dans notre dos.

Washington, November 23

In Washington, a rally was held for the "eliminating the regime" of Trump and against the peaceful plan for Ukraine, which, according to the protesters, involves significant concessions to Russia (see photos at top of page and below).

CNBC is reporting this.

The action started near the Lincoln Memorial, where participants listened to speeches and performances by musicians. The protesters then marched along the National Alley.

In addition to demands to remove Trump from power, protesters have expressed disagreement with the new US peace plan to end Russia's war against Ukraine, which they say involves significant Russian concessions.

Analysis

I was wrong. It's worse than Munich.

Sometimes the evil has no historic parallel

Colin Long

Nov 23, 2025

I was wrong. Sometimes events move so quickly that you have to reconsider what you wrote only a day or so before. Yesterday I used the Munich Agreement that surrendered the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in 1938 as an analogy for the Trump-Putin 28 point “peace plan”. After getting to read the full plan and watching Trump make even more threats to Ukraine to hasten its surrender, I realise that the analogy was a far from adequate one. A more appropriate one would be the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocol, that green-lit the Nazi invasion of Poland and divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.

But I have to stop myself there. It is a very human thing to seek historical precedent for contemporary events. It is somehow reassuring, as if knowing what happened in the past eliminates the uncertainty of the present. But even the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is inadequate for understanding the depth of infamy to which the US President is prepared to sink. It is possible to see and understand the very difficult situation in which Stalin found himself in 1939, unsure of the reliability of the western allies as opponents of Nazi Germany, and aware of the Soviet Union’s lack of preparedness for war (a lack of preparedness caused, to a considerable degree, by Stalin’s purges of his own army, it must be said).

But the USA is in no sense in a difficult position in relation to Russia. Ukraine is struggling, but this is largely because of the weakness of European support and the hesitancy of the Biden administration followed by the outright pro-Putin stance of the Trump regime. A concerted western effort to stop Russian imperialism, with Ukraine as its first line of defence, could have been successful by now. But that would have required a European political elite that wasn’t either pathetic, obsequious or – on parts of the left as well as the far-right – beholden to Putin. It now needs to be acknowledged that if Ukraine is forced to surrender by the US then the European project is over, an abject failure of a rotten, hollow civilisation. It would also have required a USA that wasn’t run by a fascist demagogue, but that’s where we are. If the European project is teetering on the edge, the US has already plunged into the abyss, its wretched political system dragging it down to new depths every day.

No historical analogy is adequate to contemplate the depths to which the USA has plunged with Trump’s plan for Putin’s victory. At the end of WWII, the victors prosecuted the Nazi leadership for their war crimes and genocide. A whole architecture of human rights and international cooperation was built to prevent anything like the horrors of the war occurring again, with the centrepiece the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide were codified. Trump proposes in his “peace plan”, on the other hand, that “all parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future”. Full immunity, in other words, for war criminals and advocates of genocide, just as Trump ensures full immunity for the Israeli genocidaires, war criminals and killers of children. This is Trump’s foreign policy: everything is a real estate deal, and, in typical mobster fashion, it doesn’t matter how you get to the deal and who gets hurt in the process. The US has essentially become the largest mob gang in the world, with threats, blackmail and standover tactics its entire modus operandi. We thought the old style of US imperialism was bad!

Ukraine is struggling, but the US has the upper hand with Russia. It has an economy many times its size. But Ukraine is still prepared to fight and is still holding its own on the battlefield. With proper support from the US and Europe it would be winning. So why is Trump so determined to force Ukraine to surrender? The 28 point surrender plan makes it clear. Just as the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact allowed the Soviet Union to take its piece of the Polish pie alongside Germany, the Trump-Putin Pact envisages Russia getting what it wants (Ukrainian land) and the US getting its cut – which means the US overseeing the pillaging of Ukraine’s resources, and corporate profiteering in the rebuilding of Ukraine’s shattered infrastructure and cities. Perhaps the most egregious element of the surrender plan is that the US “will receive 50% of the profits” from the investment of $100 billion of frozen Russian assets in “US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine”. The Europeans will also be required to tip in $100 billion to the effort, boosting the US’s profits, while the US is required to contribute nothing. How about giving all of Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine and letting Ukraine lead its own efforts to rebuild?

The surrender plan, in other words, rewards Russia for its aggression, gives Russian war criminals – including its President – immunity from accountability, and then allows the US to profit from Russia’s dirty work. I’m not sure either Molotov or von Ribbentrop were so brazen.

Elements of the surrender plan are vile in the way they seek to impose Putin’s agenda on Ukraine and in the way they try to equate the actions of Russia and Ukraine. The surrender plan talks about a “US guarantee”, but it is unclear what this is. It then goes on to say that “If Ukraine invades Russia, it will lose the guarantee”. What?! If Ukraine invades Russia?? When would that ever be a threat? Then, “if Ukraine launches a missile at Moscow or St Petersburg without cause, the security guarantee will be deemed invalid.” If there was peace, why would Ukraine launch a missile at those two cities? (As an aside, the wording of this clause shows the deep idiocy of the Trump regime. It only rules out Ukraine firing missiles at St Petersburg and Moscow. So, presumably Ukraine could fire missiles at other parts of Russia.) Ukraine is not going to fire missiles at Russia at a time of peace. Russia started the war, Russia invaded Ukraine. There aren’t two equally wronged sides here. Russia was never threatened by Ukraine, never mind invaded by it.

Perhaps even more offensively (and hypocritically), the Trump-Putin Pact requires “both countries undertake to implement educational programs in schools and society aimed at promoting understanding and tolerance of different cultures and eliminating racism and prejudice”. What!? This coming from the Trump regime! I’d agree to this if Trump and co agreed to do the same thing first. And how offensive to suggest that Ukraine needs this sort of education program. What would the Trump morons know about Ukrainian culture and education? But there’s more: “Ukraine will adopt EU rules on religious tolerance and the protection of linguistic minorities”. Would they be the same sorts of rules that Vance and Musk have been demanding the EU get rid of so that the European far-right can advance its agenda of intolerance towards religious, linguistic and ethnic minorities? Who said Ukraine is intolerant of other religions? It is well to be intolerant of the Russian Orthodox church, which is merely a front organisation for the Putin regime, a cheer leader for the war and for genocide of the Ukrainian nation. But that doesn’t make it intolerant of religions in general. Coming from the Trump regime, with its concerted Islamophobia, it’s a more than a bit rich.

The surrender plan also requires that “both countries will agree to abolish the discriminatory measures and guarantee the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education”. But this ignores the truth that Ukraine doesn’t deny the existence of Russia or of a Russian culture, state, nation. Ukraine doesn’t use its media to try to eradicate Russian identity. Putin’s Russia, on the other hand, does deny that Ukraine is an independent state, a people with its own interests, its own culture, its own language, its own right to exist. Ukraine has the right to create and encourage its own sense of national identity and to incorporate all parts of the nation into the national culture, without allowing foreign nations to undermine this. Ukraine doesn’t have a media operation working in Russia trying to break it up and to deny its right to exist. Given the chance, the Russians would do exactly this in Ukraine.

When Trump’s lips move, Putin’s words come out. Here is another of the surrender plan’s clauses: “All Nazi ideology and activities must be rejected and prohibited”. This is just repeating Putin’s propaganda. The bitter irony of it, though, is that it would be very hard for the Russian regime to honour. It would be almost impossible for the US regime to.

But the true character of the surrender plan is revealed by what it envisages for a future Russia-US relationship. It says: “The United States will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities”. Ukraine must surrender its territory, give up its sovereignty and demand no accountability for the brutal way it has been treated so that Trump and Putin, the leaders of two fascist petro-states, can take techno-extractivism to a new level. Anyone who reads that and doesn’t tremble in fear at what these two vicious regimes want to unleash on the rest of the world is either on board with it or stupid.

I was wrong to compare the Trump-Putin Pact with the Munich Agreement. I wish I could compare it with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The truth is that it is worse even than that. It is hard to imagine a worse “peace agreement”. But that’s because it’s not a peace agreement. It’s a surrender agreement. The war that always follows such agreements – as it did Munich and Molotov-Ribbentrop – will be a war of the ethno-nationalist, techno-feudalist, petro-oligarchs against the people of the world. Which side are you on?