Did the Biden Administration Perpetuate Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine?

The Russia/Ukraine war has been a humanitarian disaster. Estimates vary, but somewhere around one million Russians and Ukrainians have been killed or wounded in the two and a half years since Russia’s invasion.

Like almost all Americans, I was on Ukraine’s side when Russia launched its invasion, and I still am. But two and a half years down the road, one can only wonder whether Western support for Ukraine has mostly had the effect of getting a lot of people killed, while very little has been accomplished on the ground. Some kind of settlement needs to be reached. The obvious question is, could an acceptable settlement have been accomplished a long time ago, and saved a great many lives?

At The American Conservative, Ted Snider, a libertarian who writes mostly at Antiwar.com, argues that the Ukrainian carnage is largely the fault of the Biden administration:

It was April 2022, and the diplomatic delegations from Ukraine and Russia were meeting in Istanbul just weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun. Although there were details—especially on the size of the Ukrainian armed forces after the war and on the nature of security guarantees for Ukraine—to be worked out, a draft agreement had been signed by both sides.

According to the Ukrainian delegation, Putin “demonstrated a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.” Oleksandr Chalyi, a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, said, “We managed to find a very real compromise. We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.”
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But instead of encouraging and nurturing the promising talks, the United States and Britain discouraged them. Davyd Arakhamiia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team, has confirmed that “when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” …

Rather than encourage Ukraine to pursue negotiations that would have satisfied their goals and potentially ended the war, the U.S. promised Ukraine whatever it needs for as long as it takes in the pursuit of “core principles” that made the war “bigger than Russia” and “bigger than Ukraine,” namely “the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze.” Instead of nurturing diplomacy, “the West ramped up military aid to Kyiv and increased the pressure on Russia,” according to a former U.S. official “who worked on Ukraine policy at the time.”

Criticism of the role played by the Biden administration isn’t just coming from squishes:

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder both acted as intermediaries to the talks at the request of Ukraine. Bennett says that “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire,” but the West “blocked it.” Schröder agrees: “Nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington… The Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed.”

There is much more at the link. Given how the Ukraine war has gone–Russia’s bargaining position is better now than it was when the proposed ceasefire was first being negotiated–it is hard to see that anything has been gained.

Someone wrote–I can’t find the quote on Google–that elites think the Ukraine/Russia war is simple and the Israel/terrorists war is complicated, while normal Americans think the Israel/terrorists war is simple and the Ukraine/Russia war is complicated. Those normal Americans were ahead of me, but I now think it likely that Western intransigence has multiplied the humanitarian disaster in Ukraine by an order of magnitude or more, while yielding little or no geopolitical advantage.