Ukraine Is Not the Problem

National Review Online

Thursday, February 20, 2025

 

Predictably enough, the Ukrainian government has objected to its exclusion from the peace talks Trump administration officials held with their Russian counterparts this week in Riyadh and, for its trouble, is getting slammed by what is supposed to be its ally, the United States.

 

In breathtaking remarks to reporters, President Trump poured contempt on Ukraine for its frustration. “But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine. “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

 

Uh, Ukraine didn’t fire Russian missiles at itself or direct a Russian armed column at its own capital in 2022. There’s moral equivalence, and then there’s a total moral inversion.

 

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed back, Trump came back at him harder, calling him a “Dictator without Elections” who “probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”

 

Ukraine is indeed under martial law at the moment because (see above) it’s been invaded by a hostile power and there’s a war on. You don’t need to portray Ukraine as a shining city on a hill to acknowledge that it is much more committed to democracy and the rule of law than is Russia, whose malign autocratic leader Trump never thinks to call “a dictator.”

 

Needless to say, Ukraine is not the problem here. As far as the Kremlin is concerned, its sins are its existence as a sovereign state with a national identity distinct from Russia’s, and its failure to roll over and accept its assigned role as a defenseless satellite state of Mother Russia.

 

That a large, partially Russian-speaking neighbor was embracing democracy only compounded its offense in the eyes of the Kremlin, which worried about a potentially dangerous example for its own people.

 

And so, Ukraine has been twice invaded by a Russia eager to grab its territory and resources and bring it to heel. Since 2014, Ukraine has been subjected to a level of violence and criminality that reflects Russia’s utter contempt for the laws of armed conflict.

 

The anti-Ukraine influencers and advisers in Trump’s ear contend that Ukraine antagonized Russia by seeking to join the Atlantic Alliance. In reality, Russia’s efforts to destabilize Ukraine began with the January 2005 “Orange Revolution,” in which pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko (who had been “mysteriously” poisoned with dioxin during the campaign) captured the presidency.

 

By 2010, Yushchenko was replaced by the “non-aligned” (read: pro-Putin) Viktor Yanukovych. But Yanukovych’s efforts to placate the Kremlin soon ran afoul of Ukraine’s parliament. In late 2013, he unilaterally abrogated a deal passed by the Ukrainian Rada that would have established free trade and travel relations with the European Union. Yanukovych’s maneuver ignited protests that culminated in the Maidan Revolution, in which over 100 civilians were killed by security forces before Yanukovych fled to exile in Russia.

 

It was Ukraine’s integration with the European Union, not NATO, that inflamed Moscow, and it was the ouster of their puppet in Kyiv that occasioned the first invasion of Crimea and the Donbas in early 2014.

 

The fact that Russia failed in its subsequent attempt to swallow Ukraine whole in 2022 is a testament both to the determination of the country’s defenders as well as Moscow’s atrophied military and dated tactics. But Moscow’s adventurism still poses a real threat to U.S. security and that of its treaty-bound allies on NATO’s frontiers.

 

It is certainly true, as we noted the other day, that Ukraine isn’t going to get all of its territory back or join NATO. Acknowledging this is cold-eyed realism; humiliating and undercutting an ally, perhaps with worse to come in the form of a sweetheart deal for Moscow, is not.