Understanding the Ukraine War

by Nicolas J. S. Davies

[I was born in a British naval family in Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, and spent my childhood growing up on British naval bases around the world, only one of which, Plymouth, in England, is still a British naval base. So I hope I can offer hope to anti-imperialists in the United States that empires do not last forever, and some of them end quite quickly and unexpectedly.]

In our book, War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, Medea Benjamin and I quoted retired US ambassador and diplomat Chas Freeman, who wrote, “This war in Ukraine is the most intense information war humanity has ever seen. There are so many lies flying about that it's totally impossible to perceive the truth.” Well, Medea, and I took that as our challenge. We set out to write a concise primer that would cut through the propaganda gushing out from all sides, Russia, Ukraine, and of course, the US and NATO, and give people the missing background and context that they're not getting from our political leaders and the corporate media.

Brian did a great job of explaining why Russia had rational security concerns over NATO expansion. US diplomats and elder statesmen like George Kennan warned successive administrations that this would lead to a new Cold War, as it has.

When NATO officially agreed that Ukraine would eventually join NATO in 2008, the US Ambassador to Moscow, William Burns, who is now the CIA director, warned that promising NATO membership to Ukraine could lead to a civil war, which also proved correct. In a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which he titled “Nyet Means Nyet,” Burns wrote that Russia, “would then have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

On our book tour and in discussions like this, we have found that Americans are split along a clear line in their views of this conflict. And what primarily divides them is what they believe about Russia and its war goals. But what is that based on? Why does one person see Russia driven to war by the dangers of a hostile military alliance gathering at its borders, and another person see it as an imperialist power, threatening to invade Europe? You are all part of the International Psychohistorical Association. So maybe some of you can take a serious look at why people are so clearly divided into these two camps, and what are the psychological factors involved in this?

At the heart of this question is a yawning gulf between what Western political leaders have claimed about Russia and its supposed ambitions to invade other countries in Europe, which some of the public have also come to embrace, and what Russia in fact agreed to at peace talks in Turkey in March 2022, a month after the beginning of the war, when it agreed to withdraw to its pre-war positions in return for a simple Ukrainian commitment to neutrality, giving up its its ambition to join NATO.

Our leaders did not tell us about that peace and neutrality agreement in 2022, or try to explain why they deliberately chose a long war, to weaken Russia as they said, over the chance to make this one of the shortest wars in history. So it has been left to the other parties to these negotiations to come out one by one and tell the world about them, and about the American and British roles in undermining them.

Ukrainian negotiator, Oleksiy Arestovych, has described how he and his colleagues returned to Kyiv to the popping of champagne corks, celebrating the favorable terms they negotiated, and which Russia agreed to. The Turkish foreign minister and Turkish diplomats expressed dismay at how the US and Britain undermined their mediation and chose to prolong and escalate the war.

Another mediator, then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, told an interviewer that Britain opposed the negotiations all along, and that the US eventually “blocked” or “stopped” them, depending how you translate the Hebrew. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who flew to Moscow to intercede with President Putin at Ukraine's request, told Berliner Zeitung, “In the end, nothing could happen. Because everything was decided in Washington. That was fatal.”

Two years later, there have been at least half a million casualties on both sides, and the real casualties may very well be much higher, because both sides have exaggerated their enemy's casualties and shrouded their own in secrecy.

After the US shipped tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine, its failed offensive in 2023 left it in a far weaker position than it was before, or than it was at the talks in 2022. The war has degenerated into a bloody war of attrition that many compare to the First World War, but one in which Russia is firing five times as many artillery shells as Ukraine, and producing five times as many shells as the US, NATO and Ukraine combined.

This is because, unlike western countries, Russia did not privatize its weapons industry after the end of the Cold War, and still had surplus industrial capacity, or wasted capacity according to neoliberal economic theory, that it has now reactivated. The West does not, despite spending trillions more than Russia on the most expensive war machine in history.

Even former Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who many regard as the architect of these policies, has compared the resulting war of attrition to the First World War, and she admitted in February that the US has no plan B. Secretary Blinken announced, on March 5th, that Under Secretary Nuland was taking early retirement at the age of 62, after the dangerous policy she championed has led to the disintegration and devastation of Ukraine in this terrible war.

After Ukraine's failed 2023 offensive, and with critical manpower and recruitment problems, one could say that Ukraine is losing, and Russia is winning. But that depends on what Russia's real war aims are. Which brings us back to the bifurcated view of Russia in our own society. Does Russia plan to invade Europe? Or would it still be ready to settle for an agreement in which Ukraine would simply commit to a future as a neutral country, as in the agreement they were negotiating two years ago?

How can we answer that question? Let's start by looking at what Russia is doing since the fall of Avdiivka. Russia is not racing toward Kyiv or even toward Kharkiv, Odessa, or the natural boundary of the Dnipro River, as many commentators expected. Reuters Moscow Bureau has reported that Russia spent months trying to open new negotiations with the United States in late 2023, but that, in January, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan slammed that door shut with a flat refusal to negotiate over Ukraine.

But the only way to actually find out what Russia really wants, and what it will settle for, is to return to the negotiating table. All sides have demonized each other and staked out maximalist positions. But that is what nations at war do, in order to justify the sacrifices they demand of their people and their rejection of diplomatic alternatives. Serious diplomatic negotiations are now essential to get down to the nitty gritty of what it will take to bring peace to Ukraine.

I am sure there are wiser heads within the US and other NATO governments who are saying this too behind closed doors. And that may be precisely why Nuland is out, and why France’s president Macron is talking so openly about where the current policy is leading, which is toward direct conflict between NATO and Russia - in other words, the World War Three that Biden has promised to avoid. I fervently hope that wiser heads will prevail, and that a new plan B will lead back to the negotiating table, and then forward to peace in Ukraine.