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U.S. military providing arms for Ukraine.
The defenders of Ukraine are bravely resisting Russian aggression. It’s an encouraging sign that the Russians and Ukrainians are holding talks in Belarus that may lead to a ceasefire. All efforts must be made to bring an end to this war before the Russian war machine kills thousands more of Ukraine’s defenders and civilians, forcing hundreds of thousands more to flee.
But there is a more insidious reality at work beneath the surface of this classic morality play, and that is the role of the United States and NATO in setting the stage for this crisis.
The world must do whatever it takes to obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine and make it stick.
President Joe Biden has called the Russian invasion “unprovoked,” but that is far from the truth. In the four days leading up to the invasion, ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe documented a dangerous increase in ceasefire violations in Eastern Ukraine, with 5,667 violations and 4,093 explosions.
Most were inside the de facto borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, consistent with incoming shell fire from Ukraine government forces. With nearly 700 ceasefire monitors on the ground, it is not credible that these were all “false flag” incidents staged by separatist forces, as U.S. and British officials claimed.
Whether the shell fire was just another escalation in the long-running civil war or the opening salvos of a new government offensive, it was certainly a provocation. But the Russian invasion has far exceeded any proportionate action to defend Donetsk and Luhansk from those attacks, making it clearly disproportionate and illegal.
In the larger context, Ukraine has become an unwitting victim and a proxy in the resurgent U.S. Cold War against Russia and China. The United States has surrounded both countries with military forces and offensive weapons, withdrawn from a whole series of arms control treaties, and refused to negotiate resolutions to rational security concerns raised by Russia.
In December 2021, after a summit between Presidents Biden and Putin, Russia submitted draft proposals for new U.S.-Russia and NATO-Russia mutual security agreements. A critical provision was that NATO should not accept Ukraine as a new member, which was not on the table in the foreseeable future anyway. But the United States and NATO have refused to reconsider their 2008 declaration that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.”
At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s Eastern European counterpart, was dissolved, and NATO should have been as well, since it had achieved its purpose. Instead, NATO has lived on as a dangerous, out-of-control military alliance dedicated mainly to expanding its sphere of operations and justifying its own existence.
In 1991, as part of a Soviet-era agreement to accept the reunification of East and West Germany, Western leaders assured their Soviet counterparts that they would not expand NATO any closer to Russia than the border of a united Germany. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO would not advance “one inch” beyond the German border. The West’s broken promises are spelled out for all to see in a series of thirty declassified documents published on the National Security Archive website.
Instead, NATO has expanded from sixteen countries in 1991 to a total of thirty countries today, incorporating most of Eastern Europe, at the same time as it has committed aggression, bombings of civilians, and other war crimes.
In 1999, NATO launched an illegal war to militarily carve out an independent Kosovo from the remnants of Yugoslavia. NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo War killed hundreds of civilians, and its leading ally in the war, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, is now on trial in an international court for the appalling war crimes he committed under the cover of NATO bombing.
Far from the North Atlantic, NATO joined the United States in its twenty-year war in Afghanistan, and then attacked and destroyed Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed state, a continuing refugee crisis, and violence and chaos across the region.
After expanding across Eastern Europe and waging wars in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO has come full circle to once again view Russia as its principal enemy. U.S. nuclear weapons are now based in five NATO countries in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey, while France and the U.K. already have their own nuclear arsenals. The United States has installed “missile defense” systems, which could be converted to fire offensive nuclear missiles, in Poland and Romania, including at a base in Poland only 100 miles from the Russian border.
Another Russian request in its December proposals was for the United States to rejoin the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), under which both sides agreed not to deploy short- or intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Like the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran, Trump abandoned the INF Treaty in 2019 on the advice of his National Security Adviser, John Bolton. Biden’s failure to quickly reverse these and other regressive initiatives has effectively perpetuated Trump’s foreign policy, now vastly complicated by the war in Ukraine.
None of this can justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the world should take Russia seriously when it says that its conditions for ending the war and returning to diplomacy are Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament. While no country can be expected to completely disarm in today’s armed-to-the-teeth world, neutrality could be a serious long-term option for Ukraine.
The world must do whatever it takes to obtain a ceasefire in Ukraine and make it stick. Maybe U.N. Secretary General António Guterres or a U.N. special representative could act as a mediator, possibly with a peacekeeping role for the United Nations. This will not be easy—one of the still-unlearned lessons of other wars is that it is easier to prevent war through serious diplomacy and a genuine commitment to peace than to end a war once it has started.
If and when there is a ceasefire, all parties must be prepared to start afresh to negotiate lasting diplomatic solutions that will allow the people of the Donbas region, Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and other NATO members to all live in peace. Security is not a zero-sum game, and no country or group of countries can achieve lasting security by undermining the security of others.
The United States and Russia must also finally assume the responsibility that comes with stockpiling 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and agree on a plan to start dismantling them, in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the new U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Lastly, as the United States condemns Russia’s aggression, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to forget or ignore the many recent wars in which the United States and its allies have been the aggressors: in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
We sincerely hope that Russia will end its illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine long before it commits a fraction of the massive killing and destruction that the United States has committed in its illegal wars.