The Ukraine Negotiations Should Have Happened Before The War Started

It seems like the Ukraine proxy war may finally come to an end. Current U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth said “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of any negotiated settlement” signaling support for Russia’s main concession demanded for ending the war.

President Donald Trump today had a phone conversation with Russian president Vladamir Putin where he wrote on social media that: “we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine.” He said they both agreed to begin negotiations saying:

We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now. I have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, to lead the negotiations which, I feel strongly, will be successful.

Donald Trump also spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who Trump said on social media also agreed to the peace negotiations writing:

I just spoke to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. The conversation went very well. He, like President Putin, wants to make PEACE. We discussed a variety of topics having to do with the War, but mostly, the meeting that is being set up on Friday in Munich, where Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the Delegation. I am hopeful that the results of that meeting will be positive. It is time to stop this ridiculous War, where there has been massive, and totally unnecessary, DEATH and DESTRUCTION. God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine!

While this is certainly a positive step towards ending the bloody proxy war, it begs the obvious question, where was this diplomacy earlier? In the article, I will explain why diplomacy was needed much sooner and how it could have prevented hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians from dying.

How Both Political Parties Provoked The War.

Going back as far as 1997, legendary U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan warned that expanding NATO closer to Russia’s border would increase tensions between the U.S. and Russia and result in a new cold war.

In a 1997 Op-ed in The New York Times, he warned that he- along with many Russia experts -believed NATO expansion towards Russia would be disastrous, writing:

And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Kennan prophetically warned that this policy would weaken relations between the West and Russia, halt diplomacy and create a new cold war atmosphere writing:

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure the Russian Duma’s ratification of the Start II agreement and to achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry.

Despite this warning, both parties continued to expand NATO eastwards, adding The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999 under Clinton and Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia as members in 2004 under Bush.

Similarly, in 1999 NATO bombed Belgrade with the intention of creating a U.S. military base in the Balkans and the United States withdrew from the “Anti-Nuclear Ballistic Missile Treaty” in 2004 against Russia’s wishes. As Professor Jeffery Sachs wrote in Drop Site News:

In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans. In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections

By 2008 this new cold war with Russia became so dangerous that Willian J. Burns, the previous CIA director who was serving as the United States ambassador to Russia warned that it would lead to war over Ukraine. In a diplomatic cable published on WikiLeaks titled “Nyet means Nyet” Burns warned that expanding NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia would “affect Russian security interests” writing:

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests.

Burns also prophetically warned that calling for Ukraine to join NATO could lead to a Russian invasion writing:

Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Despite this warning, the Obama administration continued to escalate tensions with Russia, launching a covert CIA regime change war against Bashar- Al Assad- the Russian-backed Syrian dictator- which eventually led to Russia intervening on the government side in 2015.

The U.S. also backed a far-right coup against Ukraine’s more Russia-friendly leader Viktor Yannakovitch in 2014 and helped install a more U.S.-friendly one which included explicitly anti-Russian far-right figures in high government positions.

As William Burns had warned, this coup led to civil war between pro-Russia and pro-West Ukrainians.

In May of 2014, clashes erupted in Odessa, where a fight between pro-Russia and Pro-West Ukrainians led to 42 pro-Russia Ukranians being killed in a fire set to the city’s trade union building.

This tension eventually culminated in a civil war in Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine armed by Russia and the pro-Western Ukrainian government backed by the West. The UN found that there was violence on both sides saying:

armed groups mainly executed individuals who had, or were believed to have, vocal ‘pro-unity’ views or to support Ukrainian forces, while Ukrainian forces targeted people based on their alleged affiliation with, or support for, armed groups, or for their “separatist” or “pro-Russian” views.

When Donald Trump ran for President in 2016 he actively campaigned on repairing relations between the United States and Russia.

However, once elected his entire presidency was subsumed by a ridiculous conspiracy theory that alleged Russia swung the election in his favor through Facebook memes and that he was a secret Russian asset being blackmailed by the Kremlin.

This neo-McCarthyite conspiracy theory caused him to repeatedly be extremely hawkish towards Russia to prove he was not a Russian asset.

As President, he approved lethal arms to Ukraine which massively ramped up the war in the Donbas.

Trump’s approval of lethal weapons to Ukraine massively increased the number of civilian casualties on the pro-Russia separatist side of the Ukraine conflict, according to the UN, from 2018-2021 81.4 percent of the civilian casualties occurred “In territory controlled by the self-proclaimed ‘republics”, referring to the Russian backed separatist regions.

Trump also blocked the chance to end this conflict through the implementation of the Minsk Accords. For context in 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed implementing the “Minsk accords” when he was elected president of Ukraine, a peace agreement that would have halted the fighting in Eastern Ukraine.

Zelensky was not able to implement the Minsk Accords due to threats he received from far-right groups. The Finnish NGO “Finnish Peace Defenders” reported that:

While President Zelensky is trying to follow commitments given to his electorate and international obligations in implementation of the Minsk Agreements, he has to overcome obstacles placed by irregular armed groups who identify themselves as patriots of Ukraine.

The outlet went on to report that these groups were “blackmailing” Zelensky to not end the Donbas war writing:

On October 7, the Ukrainian Army should have withdrawn from the settlements at the frontline, Zolote and nearby Katerynivka, in the Luhansk Region. The 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which is currently deployed to the area, should have received the order in the morning that day. The same should have been done by the units of the opposing side controlling part of the villages. The OSCE SMM should have overseen the pullback.

It didn’t happen, due to the open threats and blackmail by far-right military circles in Ukraine, including the National Corps led by Andrii Biletski.

The President of Ukraine (Zelensky) went to a frontline in Donbas to personally convince far-right military formation members, reportedly from the neo-Nazi-led Azov regiment, to stop blocking implementation of the Minsk agreement to withdraw troops along with the militants of the self-proclaimed entities.

Andrii Biletsky is reported to continue threatening the president with thousands of volunteers engaged in “defending the last checkpoint” of Zolote if the president goes on with the disengagement plan.

As Stephen F. Cohen, a professor of Russian studies noted in 2019, instead of siding with the elected president of Ukraine, the United States was backing the “quasi-fascist movement” that was blackmailing Zelensky through threats to not implement the Minsk accords.

Cohen warned that “[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back,” and said “Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war”.

Furthermore, Trump also pulled out of the “INF treaty”,-an important cold war era nuclear treaty which “banned missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km”-against the wishes of Russia.

In 2022 all of this reached a boiling point where Russia was threatening to do a full-scale illegal invasion of Ukraine if the U.S. was not willing to negotiate on these issues.

Russia laid out five demands at the UN that the U.S would need to fulfill in order to prevent the invasion. They were as summarized by the late journalist John Pilger:

-NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)

-NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.

=Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.

-the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.

– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons (the aforementioned INF treaty) to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)

The Biden administration refused to negotiate on a single one of these issues.

As Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson wrote in their most recent book:

The United States … declined to push for a settlement. It Refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO. In fact, in December 2021, NATO reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate Ukraine.

Robinson and Chomsky pointed out that the U.S. “took steps that weakened any possibility for a negotiated settlement” because “a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be much worse for Russia than for the United States” and because it would allow the United States to “weaken Russia to the point where it was militarily incapable of aggression”.

The Ukrainian news outlet Stranaura also noted that the Biden administration actively wanted Putin to invade Ukraine, as they believed it would be beneficial to their geopolitical goals writing:

Biden and his key advisers, Nuland and Blinken, apparently imagined themselves to be great “geopolitical combinators” and decided to play a “cunning game”, actually pushing Putin to invade, hoping that it would lead to his collapse.

How The United States and Britain Blocked A Peace Proposal In April Of 2022

After the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun and the United States was hellbent on fueling it to weaken Russia in the words of then defense Secretary Loyd Austin, the U.S. and U.K. actively blocked a peace deal that would have ended the war two months in.

The Ukrainian outlet “Pravda” reported in April of 2022 UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to block a peace deal that was taking place in Istanbul, Turkey.

The outlet reported that Boris Jhonson blocked the peace agreement after refusing to sign on to a deal and said the collective West wanted Ukraine to “press” Russia instead. As the outlet wrote:

According to Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.

Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that there was a chance to “press him.”

Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine “had turned into a dead end”.

This story was confirmed by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett -who took part in the peace process- and told a podcast that he “was under the impression that both sides very much wanted a ceasefire” but then the West “blocked it”.

David Arakhamia, the leader of Ukraine’s “Servant of the People” party also said that

Russia’s goal was to put pressure on us so that we would take neutrality. This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality, as Finland once did. And we will give a commitment that we will not join NATO. This is the main thing

Arakhamia also confirmed that:

Boris Johnson then came to Kyiv and said that he did not want to sign anything with the Russians and (said) “let’s just fight.”

Victoria Nuland, Biden’s undersecretary of State for political affairs confirmed America’s involvement in this when she was pressed on it.

When asked by a Russian journalist about this story she responded by admitting that the deal “fell apart” because the United States and the UK opposed the fact that the deal included “limits on the precise kinds of weapons systems that Ukraine could have”.

Pointless Bloodshed

From a purely geo-political standpoint, there was no point in prolonging this war.

Recently, an official on Biden’s National Security Council named Eric Green admitted to Time magazine that the United States never actually thought Ukraine would be able to get any territory back. As the magazine wrote:

“We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” says Eric Green, who served on Biden’s National Security Council at the time, overseeing Russia policy. The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014. The reason was simple, Green says: in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West. “That was not going to be a success story ultimately.

Green still somehow claimed that the Ukraine proxy war was a “success” for the United States but admitted that “it’s unfortunately the kind of success where you don’t feel great about it” because “there is so much suffering for Ukraine and so much uncertainty about where it’s ultimately going to land.”.

The Ukrainian outlet Strana noted that even the West’s stated goals of “weakening Russia” were not successful and that the only outcome of this proxy war is that Ukraine is “drenched in blood”. As they wrote:

But if there was such a calculation (That the proxy war would weaken Russia), then in the summer and autumn of 2023 it collapsed – the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine ended in failure, the initiative at the front was seized by the Russian army, Prigozhin’s rebellion failed, and he himself died, Putin’s power within the Russian Federation is currently stable, Russia has become even closer to China, the anti-Western and anti-American alliance in the world has become even stronger.

And Ukraine is drenched in blood.

War Is A Racket

The only point of this war was to make massive profits for the military-industrial complex and other American corporate interests.

As Noam Chomsky noted in his aforementioned book, the Wall Street Journal boasted about how good the war was for the American military-industrial complex. As he said:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Ukraine war has been good for the U.S economy, a huge boost to arms manufacturers with the Biden administration pointing to Ukraine aid’s effect in building America’s defense industrial base, jump starting and expanding production lines for weapons and ammunition and supporting jobs in 40 states.

Zelesnky also openly boasted about the opportunity that BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase and Goldamn Sachs could have profiting from the rebuilding efforts of Ukraine after the war was over.

Trump’s national security advisor Mike Waltz accidentally let the quiet part slip and recently admitted that the proxy war was intended to gain access to Ukraine’s natural resources. He recently told NBC news that “We need to recoup those costs” of U.S. arms and funding to Ukraine by “a partnership with the Ukrainians, in terms of their rare earths, their natural resources, and their oil and gas, and also buying ours.”

I hope the Ukraine war ends, but it was one of the most easily preventable conflicts in history and could have ended far earlier had the West not blocked diplomacy at every turn. In the end, it is another country destroyed in service of the military industrial complex and big business.