Biden’s Ukraine disaster was decades in the making Russian-Ukrainian war

President Joe Biden is about to wrap up what many see as a disastrous presidency. His departure from the White House could potentially be a turning point in both the Russia-Ukraine conflict and 30 years of ill-conceived Western policy that has resulted in Russia’s alienation and the collapse of its democratic project. But it depends on the ability of the future president Donald Trump not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors.

It is Russian President Vladimir Putin who decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the groundwork for this conflict was prepared by the US securocrats in the 1990s. At the time, Russia was still weaker and disoriented from the collapse of the USSR, and the then idealistic and incompetent Russian leadership operated on the assumption that full integration with the West was inevitable.

The decisions made at that time led to a confrontation between Russia and the West, which reached its logical climax during the Biden presidency.

The problem was never the eastward expansion of NATO, the security pact created to confront the Soviet Union and the European Union, but Russia’s exclusion from the process.

Crucially, this approach has put Ukraine on the course of Euro-Atlantic integration, while Russia has stayed out of it – creating a rift between two nations closely linked by history, economy and interpersonal relations. It also accelerated Russia’s securitization and retreat from democracy under Putin.

This outcome was never predetermined, and it took the relentless efforts of America’s securocrats to bring it about.

One lost chance for a different path was the Partnership for Peace program, officially launched by the Clinton administration in 1994. It was designed to balance the important goal of keeping Russia on board with the desire of former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO. as a new democracy with a major nuclear power and an overtly pro-Western government.

Russia joined in, but as American historian Mary Sarotte writes in Not an Inch, this useful framework was undermined at its inception by a small number of securocrats in Washington.

He specifically mentions the “pro-enlargement troika” of Daniel Fried, Alexander Vershbow, and Richard Holbrooke, who pushed for aggressive NATO expansion despite Moscow’s objections.

Sarotte also cites John Herbst as the author of a later report on informal promises to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO. decades to come.

The unreflective arrogance and triumphalism embodied by these securocrats can be seen in Biden himself, a prominent member of Congress at the time. a 1997 videohe mocked Moscow’s objections to NATO expansion and said Russia would have to embrace China and Iran if it showed intransigence. He clearly assumed that this was an absurd and unrealistic scenario—perhaps believing that Russia had no choice but to remain in the Western orbit. But what he thought was a clever joke went right along the line.

In his hawkish policy on Russia, Biden found a willing partner in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is no coincidence that Zelensky’s massive turnaround in relations with Russia began with Biden’s rise to power.

The president of Ukraine was elected in 2014 based on his promise to end the heated conflict that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He met with Putin in Paris in December 2019 and the two agreed on a ceasefire in the Donbas region. the parties were largely respectful, reducing the number of deaths to near zero.

But since Biden stepped into the White House, Zelensky has ordered a crackdown on Putin’s Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk, while campaigning for Ukraine’s NATO membership, the return of Crimea, and the derailment of Russia-Germany’s Nord Stream 2 began. . gas pipeline project.

Two factors may have played a role in Zelensky’s decisions. Azerbaijan’s victory over Russian-backed Armenian forces in the fall of 2020, largely thanks to Turkey’s Bayraktar drones, raised hopes that a high-tech war against Russia would be successful. Another factor was that polls in December 2020 showed Medvedchuk’s party ahead of Zelensky’s.

A few days after Biden’s inauguration, Zelensky gave an interview to the American publication Axios, where he asked his American colleague a famous question: “Why is Ukraine still not in NATO?” This was followed by an article by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba asking the same question, published by the Atlantic Council – a think tank that receives most of its funding from the US government and Pentagon contractors.

Not surprisingly, some of the same figures who shaped US policy toward Russia in the 1990s rushed the Biden administration to adopt aggressive policies that contributed to the invasion.

On March 5, Fried, Vershbow, and Herbst, along with three others, a report With a list of recommendations on Ukraine and Russia for the Biden administration at the Atlantic Council. These have ranged from offering Ukraine a plan to join NATO, to derailing Nord Stream 2, to “strengthening security” in the Black Sea, and intensifying pressure on Putin on all fronts.

Three weeks after this publication, Putin began sending troops to the Ukrainian border and began an 11-month haircut. This period saw the British warship HMS Defender enter Russia’s declared territorial waters off the coast of occupied Crimea in June, the US begin covert arms deliveries to Ukraine in September, and finally the US and Ukraine announcing a strategic partnership in November. A move that is clearly a spy in the eyes of Kremlin hawks.

It was around this time that Putin began preparing for the invasion in earnest before the February 2022 invasion. As a result, the war is now approaching its third anniversary.

Despite massive Western support, Ukraine suffered terrible losses and gained nothing from challenging Putin. The war has brought Ukraine to the brink, causing a massive refugee crisis, economic collapse, social fragmentation and an ever-increasing death toll.

If peace is reached in Ukraine this year, it will likely be within the framework of the failed Istanbul accords of 2022, which envisioned an Austrian-style neutral Ukraine with limits on the size of its military. Russia will likely insist on keeping most of the territory it gained as punishment for Ukraine’s intransigence. It will technically be a defeat for Ukraine, but it will be a clear victory for the people of Ukraine, who, like the rest of the world, have borne the brunt of this war.

It will also be a major defeat for the securocratic class, which is eager for a new confrontation with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Attempting to expand aggressively at Russia’s expense clearly failed as a strategy. It’s time for Western politicians to figure out how to turn things around and begin the slow slide back toward rapprochement with Moscow.

It is not about absolving Putin’s government of responsibility for the crime of aggression, as well as war crimes committed by Russian troops. It is about eliminating the conditions that led Russia to become a militarized dictatorship and ending the conflict that will sustain the Putin regime as long as it exists.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.