Ukraine – a colossal blunder by NATO

“… the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.” – John Mearsheimer.

AFTER THE DISSOLUTION of the Soviet Union and the unification of Germany, Russia repeatedly engineered frozen conflicts as a strategy to block the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet sphere of influence. In these frozen conflicts, fighting stopped, but no political resolution was achieved.

The Donbas war was first fought between Russian-speaking Ukrainian separatist militias and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, including Kyiv-controlled neo-Nazi forces which recovered significant territory from the separatists up to August 2014, when Russia intervened with conventional forces, After a defeat at Ilovaisk at the end of August 2014, Ukraine signed the first Minsk Protocol, or the Minsk I, drafted by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format.

On 23 September 2014 Russian media reported the discoveries of “mass graves” in Komunar and Nyzhnya Krynka, two adjacent villages in the Donetsk Region, which until two days previously, had been held by Kyiv-controlled neo-Nazi forces. An Amnesty International delegation visited the area on 26 September 2014. The delegation found strong evidence implicating Kyiv-controlled forces in the extrajudicial executions of four men buried in two graves near the village of Komunar. Five further bodies buried in a single grave nearby were revealed to belong to separatist fighters. Amnesty International spoke to members of their unit who said they had been killed in the course of hostilities. According to John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International: “The reality behind Russian claims of ‘mass graves’ in Nyzhnya Krynka is grizzly enough. It points to extra-judicial killing of four local residents by either regular Ukrainian armed forces or volunteer battalions operating in the area.

The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 had potential to freeze the conflict, but sporadic fighting between the Russia-backed separatists and the Ukrainian forces continued, until July 2021 when Russia’s president Vladimir Putin appears to have given up on a negotiated settlement. In his July 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, Putin claimed there is “no historical basis” for the “idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians”. On 24 February 2022, Russia began its invasion which Putin called a  “Special Military Operation, to defend the Russian-speaking territories in eastern Ukraine—the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic—under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter”, yet subsequently engaging in several rounds of peace talks to end the invasion.

The first meeting aimed at freezing the conflict took place between Russian and Ukrainian officials four days after the invasion began, on 28 February 2022, in Belarus, and concluded without result. Later rounds of talks took place in March 2022 on the Belarus–Ukraine border and in Antalya, Turkey. Negotiations in Turkey created an agreement in which Ukraine would abandon plans to join NATO and have limits placed on its military, while having security guarantees from Western countries, and not being required to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The draft treaty was almost agreed to, but disagreements over security guarantees ultimately halted negotiations. Professor Jeffrey Sachs stated that U.S. government insiders told him that it was U.S. pressure on Ukrainian negotiators that ended the negotiations, pressuring them into a situation that Russian negotiators regarded as having finally ceded Ukrainian sovereignty to “globalist groups”, which according to Dmitry Orlov, control much of the EU and half of the US”.

Renewed negotiations began in 2025 after Donald Trump became president of the United States, but the Russians made it clear that Russian negotiators would henceforth only deal directly with the U.S. as they no longer viewed Ukraine as sufficiently sovereign to be able to negotiate peace with Russia independently of the U.S.A. Trump held a phone call with Putin on 12 February 2025 and U.S. officials met with Zelenskyy shortly after. Saudi Arabia emerged as the primary host country for peace talks. After a U.S.–Russia summit, the relationship between Trump and Zelenskyy deteriorated further, culminating in a 28 February meeting between the two in which U.S. officials asked the Ukrainians to leave midway through and abandoned a planned Ukraine–U.S. mineral revenue deal. After the meeting, British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron created a plan for a ceasefire protected by a “coalition of the willing” with troops in Ukraine.

From 18 March to 18 April, a pause on energy infrastructure strikes was in place between Russia and Ukraine; a joint American-Ukrainian proposal for a thirty-day total ceasefire was meanwhile rejected by Russia. On 19 and 20 April, an Easter truce was formally in place, though both sides alleged violations. That’s where we are today!

Ray Bergmann

25 April 2025