By Dr. David Phillips

As predicted by many who have, or want to have, a genuine understanding of the dynamics of the Ukraine war, the US negotiation effort in Moscow in the hands of Kushner and Witkoff has been a failure and has left us if anything in a weaker, more compromised and confused position than at any time over the past three years, having thrown away our leverage. Meanwhile, Putin, playing his usual tactic of trying to split the Western alliance, stated after the meeting that the Europeans “don’t have a peace agenda, they’re on the side of the war.” This would imply that Putin is on the side of the peace? No! That could only be true under totally unacceptable conditions that involve the virtual surrender and submission of Ukraine, and it is therefore, in fact, simply a lie.

So let us once more reiterate the issues.

1. Putin’s long-game plan as implied in a key speech to the Duma many years ago, is to recreate all or part of the Western end of the 19th Century Russian empire, including particularly Ukraine, and some other former satellite countries in Eastern Europe, as a bloc under Russian control. This is intended to restore elements of an obsolete and exploitative imperial system that the rest of Europe abandoned nearly a hundred years ago.

2. In addition Putin has claimed, as a key pretext for invading Ukraine, that the US agreed in 1991 to stop all Eastward expansion of NATO at Ukraine’s Western border. That is false – no agreement was ever made, just a recorded diplomatic discussion of options.

3. Putin fancies himself to be a historian. This is exemplified in a long essay that he published a few months before the Ukraine invasion. His version of history is that Ukraine has been a client State of Russia without its own independent culture, identity or history. Ukraine, he claims, does not really exist; its independence according to him is ‘artificial,’ resulting from errors by the Soviet Government (Krushchev), the accident of the Soviet Union breakup, and Western duplicity.

4. For its part Ukraine totally rejects that narrative. In reality Kyiv was a leading city and government/cultural center of the Eastern European region for about two hundred years before the first emergence of Moscow. Kyiv lost power after being sacked by the Mongol invaders in the 13th century and passed under the control of Poland/Lithuania for the next several hundred years. (Moscow was largely bypassed by the Mongols because it was not considered important at that time). Only in the late 18th century under Catherine ll did Kyiv finally come under the formal control of the ascendant Russian empire, and then after a brief independence over 1917 to 1921 it was corralled by Lenin into the Soviet Union.

5. During the period of Polish-Lithuanian and later Russian control Ukrainians rebelled many times under the leadership of the Cossacks. Russian control involved attempts to crush the culture, language and identity of Ukraine. An extreme event was Stalin’s attempt to destroy the Ukrainian farming population through an engineered famine (Holodomor) which killed around 4 million people in 1931. The current attack on Ukraine by Russia is within that barbaric tradition.

6. Ukraine finally got independence in 1991 with the breakup of the Soviet Union. As part of the arrangements, under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, it gave up its nuclear arsenal in return for assurances from Russia, as well as UK and US, that it would never be attacked. The Memorandum was a formal international agreement of far more power and validity than the diplomatic discussion about stopping Eastward expansion of NATO that Putin uses as an excuse for invasion.

7. Regarding NATO, Putin has also claimed that Russia has to have a security perimeter which includes Ukraine to protect it. But this is another unlikely pretext. In reality NATO has never invaded any part of Russia in 75 years while Russia has invaded former satellite states such as Moldova, Georgia, and now Ukraine, and carried out security interference in other former satellite countries. There is no reasonable case for such a buffer zone. Free nations such as those that emerged when the Soviet Union folded up are free to join alliances in their own interest, and that is what they did.

8. Putin’s believes that all the Russian speaking nations would willingly come together again under Russian hegemony. But this is a fantasy at least in the case of the Ukrainians who largely hate the Russians and have shown that they are prepared to fight to the death for their freedom and independence.

Putin, using tactics learned as a child in a gang-infested part of Leningrad and during his seventeen years in the Soviet KGB, has blatantly exploited the disunity of the US and Europe, which has also been seriously compromised by the tactical errors of the US.

While there are reasoned differences about the level of responsibility of the US for a ‘distant war’, there remains a majority view that it is a global threat. If we walk away from responsibility after so much damage has been done history will see it as a major stain on the integrity of the US, completely incomprehensible given the position of the US at the time of the Russian invasion as an essentially unchallenged World power and highly successful economy, described by ‘The Economist’ when Biden left office as ‘the envy of the world’.

Well over a million people have now died including tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians. 20,000 children have been effectively kidnapped by Russia for ‘re-education’. Extensive civilian infrastructure has been destroyed. Children go to school underground. The US Government, either ignorant or unconcerned about Ukraine’s historic interests and seemingly oblivious to their peril, has exerted extreme pressure on a people fighting for their existence to ‘come to the table’ nicely dressed.

What has been needed right from the start has been a sustained show of strength and resolve by the West that convinced Putin that he was never going to win while incurring excessive costs in his own blood and treasure and the sordid reputation of a pariah state. Biden tried it too hesitantly. Trump has not tried it. Europe has generally been M.I.A. Yet true leadership might still be able to do it.