The U.S. Empire’s Motivations in the Ukraine War

3 May 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Ukrainians were lured into wanting EU membership in 2013, and this goal led to the EuroMaidan demonstrations in Kiev that produced the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and his forced replacement by a new and rabidly anti-Russian government that has the closest of all borders to Moscow, only a five-minute missile flight-time away, just 300 miles, from blitz-bombing The Kremlin and so decapitating Russia’s Government. The brilliant plan for doing this was drawn up in the U.S. White House starting by no later than June of 2011, after first President Obama on 12 April 2010 had met privately with Yanukovych at the White House to seek Ukraine’s bid for membership in the CIA-created European Union, and then, on 2 July 2010, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated this effort by meeting with Yanukovych in Kiev. On both occasions, Yanukovych said no. That ended up sealing his fate; and, so, in June 2011, Google’s chief Eric Schmidt and one of his top employees, Jared Cohen, who had previously worked directly under both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton on the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning staff, flew to England to speak privately with Julian Assange during Assange’s house arrest there. Whereas Assange could have thought that this meeting might help him to regain his freedom, he came to recognize afterward that they had just wanted to understand better how to use the internet in order to create a movement that can then be used (like the U.S. State Department did starting on 1 March 2013 inside its Embassy in Kiev) to help overthrow Governments, such as in Syria and in Ukraine. In September 2014, just months after Obama’s successful February 2014 coup had installed the Russia-hating government in Ukraine, Assange headlined, “Google Is Not What It Seems”, documenting all this and presenting a retrospective portrayal of Schmidt and Cohen as extremely competent psychopaths. On 1 March 2013, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev posted to its website “U.S. Embassy Hosted TechCamp Kyiv 2.0 to Build Technological Capacity of Civil Society”, at which, members of Ukraine’s rabidly anti-Russian nazis (members of Ukraine’s two nazi parties, the Right Sector, and the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine — renamed the “Freedom Party” by the CIA) started the training in the techniques that organized their other members for the EuroMaidan demonstrations that started on the night of 21 November 2013 and ended with the 20-26 February 2014 U.S. coup in Kiev. On 12 March 2013 (11 days after the training sessions had started inside the U.S. Embassy), the Yanukovych Government commenced its formal consideration of the EU’s offer. In September 2013, some leaders in those two nazi parties were also secretly sent to a U.S. Government facility in Poland for additional training for the upcoming operation in Ukraine. On 21 November 2013, Yanukovych publicly rejected the EU’s offer, and the EuroMaidan demonstrations started that night. Things rose to a climax in late January of 2014, leading up to Obama’s coup, which started on 20 February 2014 — which immediately started the rebellions and breakaways first of Crimea, and then of almost all of the Donbass — in both of which regions, Yanukovych had won more than 75% of the vote.

Yanukovych had represented the vast majority of Ukrainians when on 21 November 2013 he announced that the offer that the EU had made for Ukraine to become an EU member was a bad one (which his council of economic advisors had estimated would require Ukraine to spend $160 billion dollars it didn’t have). The U.S. Government had hired Gallup to do a poll of Ukrainians during 16-30 May 2013, and it included (p. 14) the question “If Ukraine was able to enter only one international economic union, which entity should it be with?”. 17% said “The European Union.” 53% said “The Customs Union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan,” of which Ukraine had long been a member. Russia’s position to Ukraine about this was that if Yanukovych would decide to go with the EU, that would be okay if Ukraine also remained in the Customs Union, but the EU’s offer excluded that option for Ukraine. So, Ukrainians were 3-to-1 against Ukraine’s accepting the EU’s offer. In other woords: the EuroMaidan demonstrations were overwhelmingly NOT representative of public opinion in Ukraine at the time. However, because of Obama’s coup in February 2014, Ukraine — now under the Obama Government — did finally accept the EU’s offer. Quickly thereafter, Ukrainian public opinion (because all of the billionaires-controlled media favored Ukraine being a U.S. colony) switched to being overwhelmingly anti-Russian and pro-U.S.-EU-NATO. (Similarly, in 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

On 30 April 2026, the empire’s Financial Times headlined: “Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s push for EU membership strains ties with allies: Ukrainian president ‘had to hear some harsh truths’ from leaders at Cyprus summit”, and opened:

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hard push for Ukraine to swiftly join the EU is raising tensions with European capitals at a time when Washington weighs continued support for Kyiv.

A refusal by EU leaders to fast-track Ukraine’s accession has fuelled frustration in Kyiv, with the increasingly Eurosceptic rhetoric from the Zelenskyy administration undermining efforts to find a compromise.

Senior Ukrainian officials have used recent meetings with EU and US counterparts to criticise the European Commission’s handling of enlargement and press for a faster timetable, insisting that Brussels needs Ukraine in the bloc as much as Kyiv wants to join, according to seven officials present in those talks.

“Membership is not a gift,” said one of the officials, who declined to be identified, revealing private discussions. “Maybe there’s some misunderstanding in Kyiv about that.”

“They say: ‘You owe us’,” said a second. “And that’s not helpful.”

“We have a real problem there,” said a third official. “Zelenskyy and his entourage have never had a real understanding of how [enlargement] works.”

EU leaders earlier this month gave their green light to a €90bn loan to Kyiv to stabilise its finances and allow it to purchase more weapons in its defence against Russia’s war. The loan was unblocked after the election defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who was holding up the money.

While the loan agreement and Zelenskyy’s participation in a summit in Cyprus last week helped to partially lower tensions, there remains a large disconnect between Kyiv and Brussels over the accession process.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz this week said Kyiv’s hopes for a quick entry were “not realistic”, adding that the price of any peace deal resulting in EU membership “may be that part of Ukraine’s territory is no longer Ukrainian”.

While Zelenskyy’s participation in the Cyprus summit last week helped to lower tensions, there remains a disconnect between Kyiv and Brussels over the accession process © George Christoforou/EPA/Shutterstock

Ukraine was granted EU candidate status in June 2022, four months after Russia’s invasion. Zelenskyy demanded 2027 as an accession date, but EU capitals have balked at that idea. They equally rejected a “reverse enlargement” proposal from the Commission granting Kyiv membership status in name only, and then gradually giving it access to benefits when it enacts outstanding reforms.

France and Germany in recent weeks have suggested a staged process where Ukraine would get “symbolic” benefits and incremental access to EU mechanisms in exchange for meeting reform milestones. Officials said that would mean at least a decade before gaining full membership.

Asked by reporters in Kyiv last week about the Franco-German idea, Zelenskyy called on the EU to “be fair”, saying: “Ukraine does not need symbolic membership in the EU.

“Ukraine is defending itself and is definitely defending Europe. And it is not defending Europe symbolically — people are really dying,” he said. “We are defending it with everything we have, with all our strength . . . We are defending shared European values. I believe we deserve full membership in the European Union.”

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Ukraine’s ‘existential’ battle with Russia

Zelenskyy had instructed his diplomats not to entertain or even engage with any discussions with EU governments regarding such proposals and to talk only about full EU membership, two senior Ukrainian officials told the FT. “We won’t even discuss it,” said one of the Ukrainian officials. …

On April 23rd, the FT headlined an editorial “The welcome return of German military might: A defence strategy sets the right direction for dealing with the Russian threat” and assumed that the aggressor in this war is Russia, which is getting dangerously close to NATO, and not NATO, which has already expanded up to Russia’s borders and which is determined to get even closer to Moscow than it already is:

The German strategy presented this week by defence minister Boris Pistorius is commendably clear. Unlike the UK and France, which still hold pretensions to project power globally while lacking the military and financial means to do so, Germany’s strategy is laser-focused on the Russian threat. Berlin sees Moscow preparing for confrontation with Nato while already waging a campaign of “hybrid” war tactics to destabilise and damage European countries. Russia provided another demonstration this week when it moved to cut off supplies of Kazakh oil to a German refinery.

Germany’s strategy is to build up its national military strength and ability to wield force independently in order to assume a special responsibility for the conventional defence of Europe. That means becoming the strongest conventional army in Europe, although for the foreseeable future Ukraine will have the greatest number of troops.

Clearly, the empire has been virtually nonstop trying to conquer Russia ever since U.S. President Truman started the Cold War on 25 July 1945. Its motivations in the Ukraine war are precisely that — it took up Hitler’s fallen banner to control the entire world, but whether it will carry it all the way up to an actual WW3 is not, as yet, known. Only its motive is yet clear.

Of curse, Russia is not the only country that the U.S. empire targets ultimately to capture. For example, on May 2nd the AP headlined “President Trump says he is reviewing a new Iranian proposal to end the war”, and reported that he wrote on social media that he he “can’t imagine that it would be acceptable [to stop his aggression against Iran] in that they have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years.”

The empire starts with the assumption that it is not evil and aggressive but that its targets for conquest (by sanctions, coups, invasions, etc.) are, and have no right to defend themselves against the empire — the world belongs to the U.S. Government, except what it allows its colonies (such as Germany) to do on its behalf. Ever since 25 July 1945, this has been the U.S. Government’s supposition.

There is no real mystery as to what its most basic goal is.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.