It has been exactly three years since Russia invaded Ukraine. U.S. President Donald Trump, who has begun negotiations with Russia to end the war, says that the Russian invasion was “avoidable,” a remark that has been viewed by Democratic Senators like Sen. Richard Blumenthal to be “utterly despicable,” “pathetic,” and “weak.”
For them, what Trump is doing is a betrayal of Ukraine, a country that has fought for its freedom. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer adds that Trump is talking “straight from a Russian propaganda playbook.”
It is Trump’s critics whose view or narrative on Ukraine is shared by the mainstream strategic elites all over the Western world.
They lend total support to Ukraine in the war that is increasingly becoming unwinnable after resulting in millions of deaths and injuries, millions of displaced people, the destruction of thousands of schools, health facilities, and infrastructures, and the impoverishment of millions.
However, there seems to be elements of truth in what Trump and his officials are saying. The war could have been avoided had the Biden Administration assured Russian President Putin that Ukraine would not be made a member of NATO and stopped military and economic supplies to that country well in advance.
Though the Russian invasion of Ukraine could be analyzed in many ways, there are strong merits in the argument that President Vladimir Putin found it hard to tolerate the persistent humiliation of Moscow by the United States ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The EurAsian Times once explained how all the important agreements on arms control and confidence-building measures, such as the CFE (Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe) Treaty, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and Open Skies Treaty, concluded between Russia and Western countries, led by the United States, since 1991 have been broken not by Moscow but by Washington.
However, Moscow has found NATO’s expansion and the plan to grant Ukraine membership the most unacceptable. Moscow’s principal worry, even at the time of Germany’s reunification in 1990 (the then USSR had to agree to East Germany’s merger with West Germany to become a unified Germany), was NATO’s enlargement.
While Moscow conceded that a unified Germany would remain in NATO, it had to be assured that NATO would not expand into the Warsaw Pact countries that the Soviet Union led. Warsaw Pact eventually dissolved.
The declassified documents available today clearly show that Soviet leaders received security assurances against NATO expansion from James Baker (US Secretary of State), Geroge H.W. Bush (US President), West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, French President Francois Mitterrand, and British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, among others.
Obviously, this assurance to Moscow has not been kept. In 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—all members of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact—were allowed to join NATO despite about 50 military, political, and academic leaders, including Paul Nitze and Jack Matlock, writing to then-President Bill Clinton that this would be “a policy error of historic proportions.”
Even George Kernan, the U.S. Diplomat who fathered the “containment strategy” to fight the Soviet Union during the Cold War, wrote in 1997 that “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy. Such a decision may be expected to impel Russian foreign policy in directions not to our liking.”
Clinton’s successor, George Bush, allowed seven more—including the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had been part of the former Soviet Union—to join in 2004. President Bush was all set to bring Georgia and Ukraine, both former constituents of the USSR, into the fold in 2008. However, the plan was not realized as Russia invaded Georgia.
Professor Anatol Lieven makes a lot of sense when he argues that with the end of the Cold War, “NATO prudence evaporated. The Soviet collapse was seen as the unconditional triumph of the West. The resulting ‘End of History’ mentality led to strategic and ideological hubris, which then combined to disastrous effect with other factors. Among these, the newly independent east European states (and their lobbies in the U.S.), obsessed with the fear of Russia, clamored for (NATO) membership.”
This happened because Moscow was too weak to counter the NATO hubris, something Putin started resisting. He realized that Western support for the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, U.S. intelligence and arming activities in Ukraine for years, and the deployment of U.S. missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic were all meant to deny Russia any sense of security, honor, unity, and integrity.
It may be noted here that when the then Soviet President Gorbachev agreed with his American counterpart, George Bush, to end the Cold War, it was said that this would transform East-West Relations.
Bush had told Gorbachev very clearly in December 1989: ‘We don’t consider you an enemy anymore’ – a sentiment shared by a wide political spectrum of Western commentators. Gorbachev had offered unconditional removal of Soviet military forces from Eastern Europe.
In return for agreeing to Germany’s unification, he received a ‘promise’ from Western negotiators that NATO would not move ‘one inch’ to the East. While the Warsaw Pact was quickly dissolved, NATO continued and expanded to include the former republics of the USSR.
This happened when there was a school of thought that both the Warsaw Pact and NATO should dissolve simultaneously in favor of “a new security agreement for Europe,” which could have come under the auspices of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This could have entailed a form of collective security for all the European countries, including Russia.
Putin’s angst is all the more understandable given the fact that the US still follows “the Monroe Doctrine” of 1823, which defined ‘areas of influence’ of the American influence where nothing that constituted a threat to Washington would be tolerated. After all, the U.S. did not allow Cuba to secure Soviet missiles in 1962, nor would it ever allow Mexico or Panama to join a military alliance led by China or Russia.
In fact, in order to avert even plausible long-distance threats to America, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq, and President Nixon authorized a bombing campaign against Vietnam. The argument here has been that countries do not have an uncontested right to strengthen their security when it involves a threat to or is at the expense of the security of other countries.
Thus, Putin could legitimately argue that a similar situation occurred for Russia when Ukraine applied to join NATO, which, if granted, would have advanced NATO to Russian borders.
Seen thus, Daniel L. Davis, the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America,” has a point when he argues that the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24, 2022, when Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory, but on April 3, 2008, in Bucharest when NATO officially declared, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
The very next day, Putin declared that Russia would view any attempt to expand NATO into Ukraine as “a direct threat.” Naturally, the West and the U.S. ignored his warnings and continued to declare that Ukraine would be invited into the alliance.
Between 2008 and 2022, Davis adds how the U.S. played an active role in openly supporting protesters seeking to overthrow the legally elected Ukrainian government while covertly conspiring to select pro-Western Ukrainian leaders to replace pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich.
It was only when civil war broke out in 2014 following the ouster of Yanukovich that Putin helped the ethnic Russian rebels who resisted the new U.S.-selected Ukrainian leaders and then annexed Crimea in March 2014.
It may be noted here that Ukraine has not been able to resolve its ethnic and linguistic contradictions since becoming an independent country in 1992 after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Because it was an important part of the Russian empire for centuries, there are a significant number of Russian-speaking and pro-Moscow Ukrainians in the eastern parts of the country, including Crimea (which, incidentally, was made a part of Ukraine in 1954 for administrative convenience by the then Soviet President K Nikita Kruschev, who was himself a Ukrainian).
In the post-Soviet period, the incumbent Ukrainian governments faced the challenge of melding these different and often incompatible communities into a nation-state. Those of Russian ethnicity resisted, particularly in the two regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, what was called the ‘Ukrainianization’ policy of West-supported governments, which tried to give Ukraine a “European identity” by negating the centuries-old Russian heritage or connection.
It was against this background that at the time of the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin explained that the West had crossed “a red line” in supporting what he considered the illegal overthrow of the Ukrainian government. The West, he argued, “cheated us (Russia) again and again.”
And yet, in 2015, representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the leaders of two pro-Russian separatist regions signed a 13-point agreement in February 2015 at Minsk.
The leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine, gathered in Minsk at the same time, also issued a declaration of support for the deal that called, among other things, to start a dialogue on interim self-government for the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in accordance with Ukrainian law and acknowledge their special status by parliamentary resolution.
However, that was not done, and in 2021, Zelensky talked of recovering every inch of the country, including Crimea, with the U.S. and Europe promising him military and economic help and rekindling his hope of joining NATO.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. increased pre-positioned weapons stocks in Poland and moved a helicopter battalion there from Greece. Paratroops from the 173rd Airborne were deployed to the Baltic states. More troops were sent from Italy to eastern Romania, and others went to Hungary and Bulgaria.
The U.S. military presence in Europe also increased from 74,000 to 100,000 troops. Four airborne fighter squadrons became 12, and the number of surface combatant ships in the region increased from five to 26. Combat air patrols and surveillance were flying 24/7 missions over the alliance’s eastern flank, with visibility deep inside Ukraine.
It is against this background that Russia was amassing troops in the bordering region of Ukraine, as large as 100,000 if Western reports are to be believed. But at the same time, it is important to note that on December 17, 2021, Putin proposed a treaty between the United States and Russia that could have prevented war. Its principal clauses were that the US would prevent the further eastward expansion of NATO.
As Davis rightly explains, “This treaty would not have required any territorial concessions to Russia, would not have constrained Ukraine or any European state from engaging in bilateral military or economic engagement with Kyiv, or threatened any other state. War could have been avoided with the mere “concession” of acknowledging what everyone in the West already knew: no NATO for Ukraine.”
But it seems that Biden was not impressed. In subsequent talks with Russians in January 2022 in Geneva, his officials rejected the Russian proposal to close NATO’s doors. Instead, they offered talks and trust-building measures in a number of security areas, including the deployment of troops and the placement of weapons on NATO’s eastern flank along the border with Russia. But the offer was “conditioned on de-escalation of the military threat to Ukraine.”
As if all this was not enough, with National Security Agency authorization, the U.S. established a direct communication line from the Ukrainian military to the U.S. European Command. The highly secure system would keep the Americans in direct contact with their Ukrainian counterparts as events unfolded.
The administration was also sending arms to Ukraine. In December 2021, Biden had authorized an additional US$200 million in weapons to be drawn from U.S. inventories.
Viewed thus, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was possibly the result of Putin being provoked relentlessly by the Biden Administration. In that sense, Trump has a point when he says the Ukraine war was avoidable.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
