President Trump has shocked European and Ukrainian leaders by appearing to blame Ukraine for starting the war with Russia and failing to negotiate an end to it over the past three years. His account of events is misleading and oversimple, but so too is the narrative peddled by Europeans who now accuse him of betraying Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin started the war on 24 February, 2022 by ordering his armed forces to invade Ukraine in the delusion that he would win an easy victory. Instead, his invasion failed humiliatingly and soon a frontline hundreds of miles long snaked across eastern Ukraine.
Despite the best efforts of both sides, this Verdun-type trench warfare has seen no decisive breakthrough by either side, though over one million Russians and Ukrainians have been killed or maimed in the fighting.
Arguments about who originally started any war tend to be never-ending and inconclusive because each side claims that their aggressive actions were in response to a gross provocation by their enemy. Who can ultimately be held responsible for initiating the First World War remains a matter of dispute a century after it ended.
This is not to imply that blame for the slaughter is always equally divided, but rather that the combatants in any serious conflict are propelled by powerful motives and forces that cannot be ignored if peace is ever to be re-established.
In the case of Ukraine, if we take the time frame of the past decade it is easy to see Russia as the aggressor. But, if we go back 30 years to the period immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many predicted that Russia would in all likelihood respond militarily to the threat of a hostile Ukraine backed by Nato.
Russia’s status as a great power has always depended on Ukraine not being held by its enemies ever since Peter the Great defeated Charles XII of Sweden in the battle of Poltava in the heart of Ukraine in 1709.
Could a ceasefire have been agreed earlier in the present war, as Trump suggests, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives? Towards the end of 2022, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said that the war had stalemated, Ukraine was at peak power, and it was time to seek a diplomatic solution. He was swiftly slapped down by the Biden White House, but his analysis has proved accurate.
European leaders are now paying the price of not having realistic objectives in the war. Somehow the Russian army was so strong that it threatened central Europe just like the old Red Army at the height of the Cold War. But at the same time, it was so weak that Ukraine could have as a war aim the recapture of Crimea and the Donbas through a military victory. Nobody really believed this was going to happen and the Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023 failed dismally.
Critics of Trump now say that he has betrayed Ukraine by conceding that regaining territory lost in 2014 and the admission of Ukraine to Nato will not happen. But, given that neither of these goals were achievable, Trump’s démarche simply punctures illusions that this was realistic.
European leaders have not had to worry about contradictions in their position hitherto because important decisions about Ukraine were made – or not made – in Washington, where Biden was reportedly far gone in senility and eschewed diplomacy.
The US and its Nato allies have failed to develop a policy not only towards Ukraine, but also towards Russia. Without Russian military defeat, Western leaders must work out what they envisage Russia’s position to be in any future European order. If this were to be settled – no easy task – then the long-term security and sovereignty of Ukraine becomes easier to determine peacefully.
Remember that 40 per cent of the European land mass is in Russia and Russia is the largest single European state. It cannot be ignored. Once Russia’s long term status in Europe is resolved, then the crisis in Ukraine becomes soluble. But, if it is not, then any Ukrainian ceasefire is likely to prove unstable and temporary.
Jibes about Trump being hoodwinked by the evil demon Putin are juvenile. So too is the offer by Sir Keir Starmer to send British troops to Ukraine, so long as they have guaranteed American military backing. This was described by one expert on Russia as “la-la land”, since Russia says it will not accept Nato troops in Ukraine and the US is determined not to be dragged into a military conflict there.
Much better than perpetually sneering at Trump would be for European leaders to emerge from one of their incessant conferences with an achievable peace plan of their own.
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