On February 18, for the first time since the war in Ukraine began, high ranking U.S. and Russian officials met to begin talks on ending the war. The U.S. delegation included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East and a favorite negotiator Steve Witkoff and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. The Russian delegation included Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy advisor, Yury Ushakov.
Following the meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump stunned reporters at a press conference by blaming Ukraine, and not Russia, for the war in what The New York Times called “Trump’s Pivot Toward Putin’s Russia.” In its cross examination of Trump’s case, The Times gets some things very right. But they got some things very wrong.
As he walked out of the talks, Sergey Lavrov said, “We weren’t just listening to each other, but we heard each other. I have reason to believe that the American side started to better understand our positions.”
The position that the American side seems to have better understood is the Russian narrative that the war did not start on February 24, 2022 and that Russia did not start it. Russia has long insisted that the war began with the U.S. supported coup of 2014 and the failure to protect the linguistic, religious and cultural rights of the ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who felt abandoned and threatened by that coup.
Lavrov has consistently argued that Russia is not demanding preconditions but that they are demanding that the West fulfil its previous agreement not to expand NATO eastward to Russia’s border and its previous commitment to settle the crisis in Ukraine based on the UN Charter that stipulates the principle of equal rights and self-determination. The first was broken with the promise that Ukraine was on an irreversible path to NATO; the second was broken with Kiev’s “extermination of everything Russian, including language, mass media, culture, and even the use of the Russian language in everyday life.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to this narrative that the Americans now “better understand,” was intended to prevent the first and protect the second.
So, The New York Times complains that “[a]s far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Russia is not responsible for the war that has devastated its neighbor. Instead, he suggests that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion of it.” Following the meeting of the American and Russian delegations, The Times complains that “American officials did not dwell on Russia’s violation of international law in attacking Ukraine.”
About this, The Times is right. Trump is wrong more for what he did not say than for what he did. “By contrast,” The Times says, “Mr. Trump uttered not one word of reproach for Mr. Putin or for Russia.” Putin is to blame for the illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the discussions on ending the war must put this on the record and address it, at least in security guarantees for Ukraine.
But The Times is wrong to present the current war in Ukraine as a simple, discrete event that emerged ahistorically out of nothing. There are at least three wars being fought in Ukraine. There is a civil war in Ukraine that has been being fought for a long time. There is a war between NATO and Russia. And there is a war between Russia and Ukraine. The last is Russia’s fault. But the first is Ukraine’s and the second is America’s.
Trump should not have erased Russia’s blame for the current war in Ukraine. But that Russia is to blame does not mean that he is wrong that Ukraine and the U.S. have to bear some of the historical blame.
The Times begins its case against Trump with the claim that “In Mr. Trump’s telling, Ukrainian leaders were at fault for the war for not agreeing to surrender territory.” That claim is misleading. With the exception of Crimea, which rejoined Russia in 2014, the negotiations in the first weeks of the war did not demand that Ukraine give up additional territory. At that time, the possibility of an autonomous Donbas remaining part of Ukraine, as set out in the Minsk Agreements, still existed. There was at least a possibility to explore that Ukraine could have helped prevent the expansion of the war without having to agree to surrender territory.
Trump then says that Ukraine “should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” The first sentence is unfair. Though Russia had legitimate security concerns that went unaddressed, that NATO was extending membership to Ukraine, that there were 60,000 elite Ukrainian troops massed on the eastern border with Donbas and that Ukrainian artillery shelling into the Donbas had dramatically increased, it is, nonetheless, unfair to say that Ukraine started the war. For this, Russia has to admit to the blame.
But it is not unfair to say that Ukraine could have made a deal. The historical record is now unambiguous that, in the early months of the war, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators had arrived at a draft agreement and that there was a possible diplomatic path to ending the war that should, at least, have been explored. Because Ukraine walked away from the negotiating table and pursued, instead, the path of war, Trump is not wrong to say that the Ukrainian leadership “allowed a war to go on.”
Though it does not entail that Ukraine should not, eventually, have a seat at the current table, Trump is not wholly wrong to say that “they’ve had a seat for three years” and that “[t]his could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land. Without the loss of any lives.” Some lives and land had been lost at that point, but had the Istanbul agreement been explored and pursued, the war may have ended with the loss of little land and little life. Trump may be right that he “could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land” because that was the deal that was actually on the table.
But Trump seems to ignore, or to be unaware of, a history that that reveals that not all the blame for that failure can be laid on the leadership of Ukraine. The historical record is now equally unambiguous that it was the United States, the UK, Poland and their NATO allies that, at best, did not support and discouraged exploring the diplomatic path and, at worst, pushed Ukraine off the diplomatic path.
The Times then argues that Trump is naïve for trustingly entering into negotiations with Russia. They argue that he has not “said how Mr. Putin could be trusted to keep an agreement given that he violated a 1994 pact guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty and two cease-fire deals negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2014 and 2015.”
The first piece of evidence entered by The Times is conveniently simplified; the second it conveniently wrong.
Russia did violate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum under which Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine relinquishing the Russian nuclear weapons on its now independent soil. But it is also true that that agreement was made with a country whose Declaration of Independence and whose constitution – on the basis of which Russia recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine at the break up of the Soviet Union – enshrined Ukrainian neutrality, which includes not courting NATO membership.
It is simply misleading to say that Russia violated the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015. The Minsk Agreements represented the best opportunity for peace in Ukraine and between Russia and Ukraine. The Minsk agreements were brokered by France and Germany, agreed to by Ukraine and Russia, and accepted by the U.S. and UN. They promised to peacefully return the Donbas to Ukraine while granting it full autonomy.
Though it is true that Russia failed to fully implement their commitments under the agreement, it is also true that they were not committed to do so until after Ukraine had implemented theirs. But Ukraine did not implement theirs, and it became clear that they were never going to. And the U.S. failed to support Ukraine in implementing it, while Germany and France failed to pressure them.
Worse than that, the historical record is now clear that Germany and France proffered the Minsk agreement as a deception. Recent statements by each of Putin’s partners in negotiating the Accords, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, have unmasked the Minsk Accords as a deceptive soporific designed to lull Russia into a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful settlement while actually buying Ukraine the time it needed to build up an armed forces capable of achieving a military solution.
In his book A Misfit in Moscow, Ian Proud, who served in the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014-2019, introduces another motivation for Ukraine not to implement the Minsk agreements that has been little discussed. Proud says it was a mistake by the European Council to link the removal of sanctions against Russia with full implementation of the Minsk Agreements. That provided Ukraine with a motivation for not implementing their commitments under the agreement because, as long as they held out, the agreement would not be fully implemented, and Russia would remain under massive sanctions.
The Times singles Trump out for talking in a way that “certainly would never have been heard from any other American president.” They point out that “[e]ver since the end of World War II, a long parade of American presidents saw first the Soviet Union and then, after a brief and illusory interregnum, its successor Russia as a force to be wary of, at the very least.” They cite Celeste Wallander, who worked on Russia and Ukraine issues as assistant secretary of defense under President Biden as recommending that “[w]e should be talking to them in the same way that we talked to Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War.”
But that, too, is a misreading of history. The Russian people were also victims who suffered under the Soviet Union. And it was the Russian people, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, who peacefully dismantled the Soviet Union. Successive leaders, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin, then turned to the West in hopes of an improved relationship and a re-engineered security architecture that transcended the Cold War blocs. It was the American refusal to even consider negotiating that new relationship that locked “the West” into “fac[ing] off against the East again in what was widely called a new cold war.” There is no a priori reason to be treating Russia the way the U.S. treated the Soviet Union, and that regrettable result may have been avoided.
Finally, it is not clear where Trump came up with his 4% figure for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s approval rating. The Times is right to call him on that while acknowledging that Zelensky’s approval ratings have dropped to “around 50%” from their “once-stratospheric heights.”
After hearing Trump’s comments on who is to blame for the war in Ukraine, Ukraine or Russia, Zelensky responded, “I would like to have more truth with the Trump team.” And he’s right. But there is a need for “more truth” for both answers to the question.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
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