Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, approximately 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 8,000 Ukrainian civilians have died and 30,000 Russian soldiers have died. Fourteen million Ukrainians have been displaced. This didn’t have to happen.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected President of Ukraine in 2019 on the promise he would make peace with Russia. But the U.S. and other NATO countries have not supported him in that and, in fact, they only urged Ukraine to stand up to Russia using Western arms. As shown below, the U.S. and NATO blocked every move toward peace between Russia and Ukraine:
1. The Minsk agreement II, if implemented, could have earlier averted the entire war. On Feb. 12, 2015, the Minsk II agreement was signed between Ukraine and Russia as brokered by France and Germany. It would have stopped the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine between Russian Separatists and the Ukrainian military and would have granted a degree of autonomy to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of the Donbas, which had voted for independence from Ukraine after the 2014 coup in Ukraine. The basic problem with Minsk II was that the Ukrainians refused either to let the Donbas republics become independent or to pass the laws on autonomy which were necessary in order to implement the Minsk agreement.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy defeated Petro Poroshenko in the 2019 election on a platform that included making peace with Russia by signing the Minsk II Agreement. Unfortunately, he came under intense pressure, to which he succumbed, not to implement Minsk II, pressure from the far right ultra-nationalists that have significant power disproportionate to their moderately small number. Zelenskyy abandoned his campaign peace promise and refused to talk to the leaders of the Donbas and implement the Minsk Agreement.
The United States and the UN both endorsed the Minsk agreement in 2015. But the West did nothing to push the Ukrainians into implementing it. And Ukraine also refused to offer a treaty of neutrality.
2. In December 2021, before the invasion, Russia submitted to the U.S. and NATO two draft mutual security treaties, one between Russia and the United States and one between Russia and NATO. The eight articles in the proposed Russia-U.S. treaty and the nine articles in the proposed NATO-Russia treaty addressed and rectified specific ways in which the Russian leaders believed Russia’s security was threatened by current U.S. and NATO policy. The issues Russia raised in these two draft treaties included:
a. NATO expansion
b. Positioning nuclear-capable weapons close to Russia’s borders
c. Arming Ukraine (for example the Biden administration gave Ukraine $275 million in military aid in 2021)
d. U.S. withdrawal from the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Force) treaty (The Trump administration suspended the U.S. compliance with the INF Treaty on 2 Feb. 2019).
e. Lack of a phone hotline between Russia and NATO to defuse tensions in a nuclear emergency.
Unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO dismissed Russia’s proposals.
3. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday Feb. 4, 2023 that the U.S. and its Western allies had blocked his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.
On March 5, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which he said he coordinated with the U.S., France, Germany and the UK.
Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort. For the Russian side, he said they dropped “denazification” as a requirement for a ceasefire. Bennett defined “denazification” as the removal of Zelenskyy. During his meeting in Moscow with Putin, Bennett said the Russian leader guaranteed that he wouldn’t try to kill Zelenskyy.
The other concession Russia made, according to Bennett, is that it wouldn’t seek the disarmament of Ukraine. For the Ukrainian side, Zelenskyy “renounced” that he would seek NATO membership, which Bennett said was the “reason” for Russia’s invasion.
Ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennett’s efforts.
4. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine were close to an agreement to end the war according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs journal. “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
But former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations were successful. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Zelenskyy to break off talks with Russia, in return for accepting arms shipments from the U.K. and presumably from the United States and other Western nations as well.
Nothing can excuse the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the U.S. and the Ukrainians tragically, inexcusably and intentionally missed numerous diplomatic chances of averting or stopping this war.
Andrew Mills lives in Lower Gwynedd.
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