War as Law

Why did the war in Ukraine happen — and why was it bound to happen?

This book brings together Alex Battler’s lectures on the war between Russia and Ukraine, delivered from 2021 to 2026 and published here for the first time as a single volume. Taken as a whole, they add up not to a chronicle of events but to an understanding of the war’s nature and causes. The author regards the war not as a chance collision of two states but as a law-governed product of the epoch — its economy, ideology, and political regimes.

A dying formation does not leave the stage quietly, with a bow to its heirs. It clings to life all the more desperately the more clearly it senses its end. And the only means by which capitalism knows how to prolong its existence is the very one with which it began and by which it has always lived: war. Once, war was its way of getting rich; now it has become its way of surviving.

In the author’s view, there will be no victors in this war, and its true end is possible only with a change of power on both sides of the front.