The White House showdown on Friday will be remembered as a major spectacle of the 21st century. What began as a ceremonial Oval Office photo-op turned farcical when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confronted Vice President J.D. Vance. After Vance called for diplomacy over Biden’s empty bluster, Zelensky catalogued Putin’s broken agreements and finally asked, “What kind of diplomacy are you talking about?”
A shouting match was only narrowly avoided, with President Donald Trump telling Zelensky, “you have no cards” and “you’re risking World War III.” Behind closed doors things went from bad to worse, and the Ukrainian delegation was summarily dismissed with lunch ready. The White House press pool was invited to enjoy the lunch that had been served for the visiting Ukrainians, leading to the headline, “White House Press Corps Eats Zelensky’s Lunch.”
The public humiliation of Zelensky was perhaps avoidable, but the net result was not. It was a necessary corrective to the mountain of lies on which U.S. aid to Ukraine has been predicated since Russia’s invasion. Biden early on promised to “give Ukraine what it needs to succeed on the battlefield … as long as it takes.” But what did “success on the battlefield” mean? When pressed, administration officials never wavered: the military objective was the complete liberation of Ukraine to its internationally recognized border.
Americans have spent perhaps $300 billion chasing this objective, but it was never remotely plausible. A proper understanding of Russian interests in Ukraine should have led Western leaders to realize that Russia was willing to sacrifice many more people to achieve its minimum territorial aims than the U.S. or any blustering European government was willing to sacrifice to stop them.
Moreover, as I pointed out in these pages weeks before the fighting started in 2022, Ukraine’s nationalists realized in the months after the Euromaidan revolution of 2014 that they faced a choice between territorial integrity and political independence. At every turn since then, they have chosen the latter. Hence, the West was pouring weapons into Ukraine to help it achieve an objective that had long since become a secondary to Kiev.
Since 2014, the West had treated Russian grievances as mere propaganda, not to be taken seriously. Instead, western governments have been operating on a “domino theory” that never made any sense. Kiev, which understood full well Russia’s true motives, played along and even encouraged Western governments in their misappraisal — indeed is still doing so even now. This terrible mistake could yet be Ukraine’s undoing, for it was only a matter of time before the Americans demanded an accounting of how their own vital interests justified the extravagant costs of supporting Ukraine.
Biden had written Ukraine a blank check. It was only a matter of time before it bounced.
Why America Went to War
It’s hard to believe that anyone could take the aim of liberating the whole of Ukraine’s territory seriously. It would mean Russian capitulation on every major issue of the war. But outnumbered three-to-one, Ukraine by itself would never be able to compel a Russian surrender, no matter how many weapons it got from NATO. There was all along only one way to impose such a defeat on Russia, and that was for NATO to attack Russia directly.
Of course, neither Biden nor any other NATO government had the slightest intention of attacking Russia in order to compel its surrender. Indeed, Biden only gave weapons to Ukraine subject to laughable constraints on their use inside Russia. The stated aim of U.S. aid was just “chest-thumping” as Vice President Vance put it — an extravagant farce.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, arms suppliers to an active conflict are considered de facto belligerents — that’s in the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual. We are arguably already at war with Russia, but most people don’t know it because Russia isn’t fighting back: The last thing Putin wants is war with NATO. Still, the sheer scale of NATO’s military assistance to Ukraine has been staggering — perhaps $400 billion all told. The U.S. alone has been spending almost as much per year on Ukraine as it was spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of the fighting.
So if we are basically at war with Russia, but the stated military objective is a complete fabrication, what are we fighting for?
Let’s peel back a few layers of the onion and think about the substance of the dispute between Russia and Ukraine. Suppose the two countries had peacefully agreed to restore a pro-Russian government in Kiev shortly after 2014 or that Ukraine had peacefully agreed to sell Russia 20% of its territory. Would any vital U.S. interests have been adversely affected?
There is no reason to think so. After Russia and Ukraine both declared independence from the Soviet Union, American presidents of both parties were perfectly happy to leave Ukraine under Russian domination. And as for what side of the border the disputed territories of Crimea and Donbas should be on, the U.S. never had a position on that either. It recognized the post-Soviet borders of Ukraine only because the Russians did. (That’s the famous Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which, incidentally, does not contain meaningful “security guarantees;” that’s another lie.)
Simply put, the U.S. has virtually nothing at stake in the substance of the dispute between Russia and Ukraine. The entirety of the U.S. position is that Ukraine’s borders should be respected because, for whatever reason, everyone agreed to respect them in 1991, in tumultuous circumstances that nobody even remembers. All that matters now, apparently, is that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is the victim.
To be sure, there is a vital U.S. interest in the principle that borders should not be changed by violent means. Failing to vindicate that principle could make a wide range of vital U.S. interests far more difficult to defend. Russia has engaged in a war of aggression and must be made to pay an onerous penalty. But to eliminate U.S. interests from the calculus — or, worse, to pretend that there are vital U.S. interests at stake when there aren’t, is to risk calamity for both Ukraine and the U.S.
Consider the Vietnam War. What were we doing there? The French had spent years fighting to protect their colonists living on plantations across Vietnam, with roots in the land and a wonderful culture of their own to defend. The U.S., on the other hand, was pursuing nothing but a gravely flawed application of containment strategy, based on John F. Kennedy’s silly promise to “pay any price” and “oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” As the French colonist Hubert de Marais tells Captain Willard in the director’s cut of “Apocalypse Now,” “You, American, you are fighting for the biggest nothing in history.”
In the Oval Office spectacle, Zelensky repeated yet another lie we’ve often heard (apologies if you’re losing count), namely that if Putin is not defeated now he will come after NATO countries next. This contention, repeated on infinite loop by our intelligentsia, is laughably stupid. This is not 1938, and Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia. Appeasing Hitler at Munich was a death sentence for Europe, because it instantly transformed Nazi Germany’s position from defense to one of overwhelming offensive advantage.
By contrast, advancing in Ukraine doesn’t help Russia threaten NATO in any way. The Kremlin knows that every inch of NATO territory is hopelessly beyond Russia’s reach. Again, if Putin thought he could risk war with NATO, he would have retaliated for NATO’s belligerence by now, but he hasn’t even tried to establish a credible deterrent. And Zelensky surely understands all of this but has pretended otherwise in order to trick NATO governments into treating Ukraine as a vital defensive bulwark. But it simply isn’t.
A more interesting question is what message a wavering U.S. stance in Ukraine sends to China on Taiwan. That is another inapposite analogy. While the U.S. couldn’t care less what side of the border Crimea ends up on, it has an overwhelming interest in ensuring Taiwan’s political and economic independence from the Chinese Communist Party. Taiwan contains 80% of the world’s semiconductor industry, on which America’s economy vitally depends for everything from cars and airliners to computers and cellphones. The U.S. will resist Chinese domination of Taiwan regardless how peacefully the CCP goes about it. In other words, unlike in Ukraine, the U.S. has a vital interest in the substance of the dispute between Taiwan and China.
Support for Ukraine has also been sold on the idea of a shining symbol of democracy fighting a cruel dictatorship. This, too, is a myth. Russia and Ukraine both declared independence from the Soviet Union at the same time; institutionally, they are virtually identical, and share similar institutional pathologies: corruption, human rights abuses, electoral irregularities, and weak rule of law. Indeed, while Russia holds regular elections, Ukraine’s duly elected government was deposed in 2014, with subsequent elections taking place only in non-rebel areas, and none at all since 2022. A large majority of Ukrainians — even in heavily Russian areas — wants to be free of Russia and join Europe. That’s a lovely aspiration, and we should support it, but it doesn’t make Ukraine a shining democracy.
Histories of the Cold War—I’m thinking of classics like John Lewis Gaddis’ Strategies of Containment and Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy — showed that the dilemma between idealism and realism was often tricky, and Ukraine is very tricky. American foreign policy should always be principled, but the excessive emphasis on legalism and abstract principle that has come to characterize America’s approach to foreign affairs risks the confusion of vital and peripheral interests that led to calamities such as Vietnam.
Untethered from reality, America’s open-ended support for Ukraine has been pushing us towards another calamity. This becomes clear when you understand what’s at stake for Russia.
Why Russia Went to War
In 2005, Putin shocked Western governments by declaring, “The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the century.” It was not out of any nostalgia for Communism, which Putin blames for many of Russia’s ills. Rather, he was referring to the borders the Soviets left behind: “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”
There is no denying that Vladimir Putin is a criminal and a despot. And it is obvious that he would reconstitute the Russian Empire if he could, including the Baltic States and many other areas. But Ukraine is different.
East of the Dnipro River, Ukraine had been part of Russia since the time of Peter the Great, with the rest of modern-day Ukraine acquired in phases in the ensuing century. The ports of Odessa in southern Ukraine and Sevastopol in Crimea were captured from the Ottoman Turks in 1792 and built up by Russia starting under Catherine the Great. By the middle of the 19th century, Odessa was considered Russia’s third city, after St. Petersburg and Moscow, and Sevastopol had become the home port of its Black Sea fleet.
During the Soviet period, the borders of the individual Soviet Socialist Republics were drawn to create the outward appearance of multipolarity. But of course this was all a show because absolute power was concentrated in Moscow. The borders of the Ukrainian S.S.R. were a true Potemkin village, containing millions of ethnic Russians and areas in the east and south that had never been considered part of Ukraine. These included the Crimean Peninsula, which was transferred to the Ukrainian S.S.R. only in 1954 by Nikita Khrushchev and is home to few ethnic Ukrainians even now.
A 2015 Russian movie, “The Battle for Sevastopol,” chronicles the fall of both Odessa and Sevastopol to the advancing Nazis in World War II. Released just a year after the Euromaidan revolution and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, it was an obvious propaganda movie, meant to remind Russians and Ukrainians of their shared sacrifice fighting the Nazis. It’s worth watching because the events it recounts are seared into Russia’s memory, like D-Day is into America’s. It is a vivid window into how Russians see their history — and how seriously they take the issue of Ukraine.
Americans who lived through the Cold War, like Sen. John McCain, were excited by the Euromaidan revolution of 2014. They vaguely assumed that it was a continuation of the revolutions that had swept away Communism in Europe, though a quarter century already separated the two events, and supported it both overtly and covertly. They were scarcely aware of the powder keg they were helping to ignite.
For Russia, the Euromaidan Revolution was a geopolitical disaster of the highest order. The quarter century since the fall of the Soviet Union had made plain to leaders in the Kremlin that Russia could not accept Ukraine being oriented toward Europe under the sway of Ukrainian nationalists, certainly not as long as Ukraine continued to claim Crimea and the heavily Russian areas of eastern Ukraine.
The hard truth is that today’s Ukraine was born within borders that were toxic and had conflict baked into them, one last ticking time bomb left behind by the Soviets. The new Ukraine contained enough Russians to more or less guarantee Russian hegemony in the short term, which is why pro-Russia presidential candidates won almost every election in Ukraine from 1991 until the Euromaidan revolution of 2014.
Of course, Ukrainians had plenty of grievances against Russia. True, they had fought together to defeat the Nazis, but Ukrainians couldn’t forget the unspeakable terror famine of 1932-33, in which Stalin intentionally starved some seven million Ukrainians, as harrowingly recounted in Robert Conquest’s brilliant Harvest of Sorrow.
What if Ukrainians became increasingly nationalistic and oriented toward Europe? That long brewing question finally came to a head when Viktor Yanukovych, the last pro-Russian president of Ukraine, was deposed in the midst of the Euromaidan protests in 2014. He was replaced by a provisional government after a parliamentary vote of dubious validity, and the country was plunged into civil war.
After an all-night session of the Russian national security council, Putin decided to annex the Crimean Peninsula. The 20-year lease on Sevastopol was expiring soon, and now almost certainly would not be renewed. Russia couldn’t risk losing the home base of its Black Sea fleet on a territory that had never been considered part of Ukraine.
Along the Russian frontier in eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, Russia took a very different tact. Most of the Donbas region declared independence almost at the same time as Crimea, but it was not annexed. On the contrary, in the subsequent Minsk ceasefire agreements of 2014 and 2015, Russia insisted on the reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine under a special status law, with guarantees of local autonomy and a general amnesty. In exchange, the separatists agreed to allow Ukraine to regain control of all the territory to the Russian border.
The agreements were vehemently opposed by the more hardline Ukrainian nationalists, and never fully implemented. The ensuing years made clear that excluding the heavily Russian areas of Crimea and eastern Donbas from Ukrainian elections had a major silver lining for the nationalists. There would henceforth be virtually no chance of a pro-Russian party winning an election in Ukraine. The nationalists decided to focus on consolidating their power in Kiev. They started walking away from the Minsk agreements.
In 2017, Ukraine imposed an economic embargo on the separatist areas of Donbas, leading to their total economic collapse. In 2019, a new law made Ukrainian the sole official language, banishing Russian from airwaves and workplaces. In May 2021, the most prominent Putin ally in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, was put under house arrest, his television stations and other enterprises shuttered. On the eve of war, Ukraine’s parliament was advancing a draft law “On the Principles of State Policy of the Transition Period” that would make the implementation of Minsk all but impossible.
At that point the Russians gave up on Ukraine and shifted their focus to NATO. They presented the U.S. and NATO with an ultimatum in the form of draft treaties that would have kept Ukraine a neutral buffer state between Russia and NATO.
Needless to say, the Americans rejected the proposals out of hand. Germany and France now staked everything on one last push to get Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements. But the U.S. encouraged the Ukrainians to dig in their heels and dare Russia to do something about it. It was an implicit blank check and had the same effect as when Kaiser Wilhelm II had offered one to Austria-Hungary in 1914, namely, to entice the recipient to risk a catastrophic war with Russia.
Ukraine remained defiant, and on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded on six different axes. The evident strategy was to shatter the cohesion of Ukraine’s military in a campaign of “shock and awe.” However, Russian forces, numbering only 190,000, proved unable to make up in speed or firepower what they lacked in numbers, as American forces had done in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (One Marine Corps study estimates that given the size of Ukraine and its armed forces, Russia would have needed an invasion force of 590,000 to overrun Ukraine and seize control of the government).
Due mainly to the massive increase in military support begun under President Trump, Ukraine was better prepared than the Russians expected. In many areas, the invasion quickly became a fiasco. After just a few months, the Russians retreated in the north and focused on capturing territory in the south and east.
This shift in emphasis is crucial to understanding both the course of the war and Russia’s priorities. Russia early on gave up on its apparent Plan A, the political goal of seizing control of Ukraine, and defaulted to a Plan B, the territorial goal of capturing as much of eastern and southern Ukraine as possible, in the apparent hope of establishing a secure land bridge to Crimea.
Russia’s perceived need to control the north coast of the Black Sea, long one of the central drivers of European history, explains the focus of Russian efforts since 2022. When the war began, the Russian occupied Donbas and Crimea were still separated by a large chunk of Ukrainian territory. The Kremlin apparently decided that, at all costs, it had to seize that territory: The roughly 30,000 square miles between the west coast of the Sea of Azov and the Dnipro River between Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The keys to this region lay in the cities of Mariupol and Melitopol, which Putin likely ordered the Russian military to seize at any cost, maybe even including the use of nuclear weapons.
That is crucial to keep in mind in the weeks ahead, for it strongly suggests that the Russians will never agree to give up the territory they have seized in southeastern Ukraine since 2022, establishing a defensible land bridge to Crimea. Hence a ceasefire on the basis of a return to status quo ante 2022 is almost certainly out of the question. The Russians will insist on a ceasefire in place, and at least de facto recognition of their annexation of all the territory they are now occupying.
On the other hand, notice how quickly Russia forsook its initial aim of conquering Ukraine outright, and defaulted to a far less attractive Plan B — that of seizing marginal territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, at stupefying cost, with results that can only lead to the permanent consolidation of Ukrainian nationalist power in Kiev. That strongly suggests that Russia’s insistence on keeping Ukraine neutral and out of NATO is a bluff. They have almost certainly accepted that they have lost Ukraine to Europe for good — and that, eventually, Ukraine will be part of NATO.
Why Ukraine Went to War
International law guarantees the “territorial integrity and political independence” of sovereign states. But the 1991 borders of Ukraine created a painful dilemma for the newly independent state: In the long run, it could have territorial integrity, or it could have political independence, but it almost certainly could not have both, at least not without fighting and winning a major war.
That is because Ukraine’s 1991 borders really only made sense for a Russian puppet state. Should Ukraine try to seek true independence from Russia, for example by joining a military alliance poised against Russia, it would create an existential conflict for both Russia and Ukraine. That is the Ukraine War.
Russia’s insistence on reintegrating Donbas into Ukraine under the terms of the Minsk agreements, which it saw as vitally necessary to restoring its control over the whole of Ukraine, didn’t make much sense without also reintegrating Crimea, which Russia had already annexed. But it would have allowed Russia to regain at least a powerful foothold inside Ukrainian politics again.
For the same reason, Ukraine’s nationalists soured on the Minsk agreements. With those Donbas territories in limbo, the nationalists had been able to achieve a degree of independence and political control that would have been impossible otherwise. Ukraine’s nationalists apparently decided that leaving the separatist areas under Russian control indefinitely may be preferable to implementing the Minsk agreements and giving Russia a powerful lever over Kiev again.
Kiev knew that leaving those areas in limbo was not something Russia could live with. But Ukraine’s nationalists had what they really needed — consolidated political control in Kiev, and an increasingly powerful arsenal. Battle-tested from years of skirmishes in Donbas and armed with increasingly powerful weapons (like Javelin missiles), it seemed as if Russia’s overwhelming military advantage was quickly waning. Along the way, Ukraine’s sense of nationalism had strengthened, even in ethnically Russian areas. Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, was 80% ethnic Russian, but the population had turned strongly supportive of joining the European Union. War with Russia was a terrifying gamble, but with NATO supporting Ukraine, it might even be able to turn back Russia’s advances.
The Ukrainians decided to take their chances on the battlefield and braced for invasion. That choice, too, has helped to clarify Kiev’s real priorities. They would like their whole territory back, but what they really need is political independence from Russia.
The Straight Path to Peace: Land for Independence
In the era before the United Nations, when we still had peace treaties, many conflicts were averted or ended by compromise settlements. These often involved territorial adjustments and monetary compensation.
For example, the Mexican-American War (which has followed a course eerily similar to that of the Ukraine War, starting with the annexation of Texas in in 1845) ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. According to the terms of that treaty, Mexico ceded most of what is today the western United States in exchange for $15 million. In 1867, with potential conflict brewing in far northwest North America among two rising world powers, Russia ceded Alaska to the U.S. for $7.2 million.
The choices that Russia and Ukraine have made over the last decade clarify the outlines of a viable settlement. Ukraine would like to have all its territory back, but its real priority is political independence within secure boundaries. Russia would like to have Ukraine back, but its real priority is the heavily Russian territory that it now occupies along southern and eastern Ukraine.
The best way to avoid the current conflict would have been to include a mechanism for territorial adjustments into the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, given that this entire conflict could have been foreseen by then. After the Euromaidan revolution, a full-blown war in Ukraine was probably only a matter of time. The simplest way to prevent it would have been a negotiated settlement that combined territorial adjustments and secret or informal assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO anytime soon, with formal security guarantees and a large indemnity for Ukraine.
Such a settlement is still the most likely outcome. In other words, the Ukraine war and all its carnage were not just avoidable, but totally pointless, as was the $300 billion dollars we just wasted on it.
Mario Loyola, a professor at Florida International University and a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University, is a former defense policy adviser at the Pentagon and in the U.S. Senate.
