I was born in a Jewish family in Leningrad – Russia and lived in Kharkiv – Ukraine for 30 years before emigrating to the United States 40 years ago. Back then, the war between Russia and Ukraine was unimaginable. Today, after hundreds of thousands on both sides are dead and memorable places of my youth have been reduced to rubble, I am trying to make sense of it and wonder how it is going to end.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine developed a desire to join the European Union rather than remain Russia’s little sister. The West and NATO saw it as an opportunity to strengthen its Eastern flank, which was the case with the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. However, Ukraine’s strong ethnic, cultural, economic, and historic ties to Russia made it more problematic. Watching the U.S. effort to convert Ukraine into an anti-Russian state through millions of dollars injected into Ukrainian politics by organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, Russia developed a strong mistrust of the U.S. intentions. Unfulfilled promises of the U.S. leaders that NATO would not be expanding to the East made Russians think that Ukraine was next on the list, and this was where Russia drew the red line.
The coup d’etat orchestrated in 2014 by Ukrainian nationalists with guidance from the Obama-Biden administration led to the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Russia was worried that with an anti-Russian government in Kyiv, Sevastopol – the home to the Russian Navy would become a NATO base. Crimea was crucial to Russia’s historic naval dominance in the Black Sea and its influence in the Middle East and Africa. From that time on, Russia’s relations with Ukraine and NATO countries went downhill. They were exacerbated by Ukraine’s effort to subdue militarily the Russian-speaking population of Donbas that refused to recognize the insurrectionist government in Kyiv. Following the 2014 coup d’etat, an estimated fourteen thousand people were killed in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Glorification of Nazi collaborators who fought against Russia in the Second World War, and the expulsion of Russian literature, music, and art from Ukrainian schools and cultural institutions deepened the divide between the two countries.
Meantime the U.S. and NATO began to openly pour weapons into Ukraine and train paramilitary units like the Azov battalion. These efforts were assisted by Ukrainian oligarchs who pocketed significant sums of Western money. In late 2021, Russia amassed troops on the Ukrainian border while Russian President Vladimir Putin desperately tried to obtain guarantees from U.S. President Joe Biden that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO. Had Biden made that promise the war could have been avoided but the Russian request fell on deaf ears — the U.S. foreign policy doctrine was to weaken Russia, and listening to Putin’s concerns was not on the table. Russia was told it was up to Ukraine to decide whether to join NATO. I wonder what would happen if during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev told U.S. President John F. Kennedy that it was up to Cuba to place Russian missiles on its territory. Wouldn’t the U.S. have invaded Cuba? Would it be considered unprovoked aggression? Isn’t that what happened in Ukraine? The result was death and destruction leading to the Russian annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces of Ukraine. One can only wonder what has happened to the wisdom that world leaders exercised in the 1960s.
The consequences of poor judgment often become irreversible. The brutality and illegality of Russia’s actions notwithstanding, the prospect that it will give back the annexed Ukrainian lands (now incorporated into the Russian Constitution) is next to none. Having developed a deep mistrust of the West, Russia considers these areas vital to its security, history, and geopolitical standing. In the minds of Russians, they belong to Russia because it owned and fought for them for a millennium. Ukraine became the sole owner of these territories following the chaotic disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. It could have kept them today if Ukrainian and Western leaders had the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln who once said: “The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend”. Ukraine as a flourishing democracy on the Russian border, whose bilingual people share history and traditions with Russia, would have been the best weapon against the oppressive Putin regime. Regretfully, the path that was chosen has led to the destruction of Ukraine.
Three years later, U.S. President Donald Trump appears willing to change the course. However, the dream of re-fighting the Crimean War of 1854-1856 is alive in London and Paris. European leaders cannot put to rest the fantasy that Ukraine can defeat a nuclear superpower five times its population and ten times its economy. They continue flooding Ukraine with arms that Russia is relentlessly destroying together with Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Millions of people don’t have heat in their apartments. Their conditions resemble those of their grandparents at the end of the Second World War. The country lives off the infusions of Western money. It has run out of soldiers capable of fighting, while Russia is taking new chunks of land from Ukraine by the day. The warmongers describe it as the Russian march on Europe, which must be stopped by all available means. They want NATO boots on the ground, forgetting that the prospect of NATO troops in Ukraine started this whole disaster in the first place. Putin has no desire to conquer Europe. He has not expressed any interest in placing non-Russian people under Moscow’s rule.
The Russian president may be a brutal dictator, but so far, he has shown more wisdom than his opponents by trying to avoid a direct military confrontation with the West. He has exercised amazing restraint in response to the use of U.S. and NATO weapons against targets in Russia. He fights a slow war of attrition that drains blood from Ukraine and weapons from the West. His hero is Tsar Peter the Great, who, responding to a concern about men lost in the Battle of Narva, famously said: “Russian mothers will produce more sons.”
Trump may have more common sense than his predecessors, but it is unclear what leverage he has, if any, to pull Ukraine and NATO out of the mess left by the previous U.S. administrations (Trump’s first term in office included). Western sanctions against Russia have failed, as they did after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Russia has demonstrated again that it can survive and prosper on its own. Its economy is growing faster than the U.S. and European economies. It is now the 4th largest in the world by purchasing power after the U.S., China, and India. Russian military machine is going full steam, producing more weapons than the U.S. and Europe combined. Rejected by the West, Russia has allied itself with the biggest U.S. adversary China. The economic sanctions imposed on Russia and countries that dared to do business with Russia have inspired numerous foreign states to seek independence from the American dollar through membership in the interstate economic association BRICS. Russian and Chinese influence in Africa is beginning to surpass that of the U.S.
In the ongoing negotiations with the Trump administration, Russia is demanding that it keeps the annexed territories, plus no NATO membership, no foreign peacekeepers, and no medium or long-range missiles for Ukraine that can reach Russian territory. It is not offering anything in exchange except for a promise of not swallowing the entire Ukraine. The sooner Ukraine accepts these demands, the less damage it will incur. Russia is a much greater military power, and it will fight to the last Ukrainian to achieve its goals. To sweeten the pill to Ukraine, Trump may press the European Union to provide accelerated EU membership to Ukraine, which it has been striving for since 2014. Russia has indicated that it will not object to it.
In the short run, the U.S. may benefit from re-establishing a dialog with Russia on topics from oil and natural gas to the Iran nuclear deal. In the long run, Russia will do whatever it deems necessary to ensure the security of its borders and economic stability. In that respect, Trump’s assault on BRICS is a nonstarter, as would be any effort to break Russia’s alliance with China. Putin will not sell BRICS or China for Ukraine or vice versa. He is confident in Russian military power, and he is not afraid of economic threats mentioned by Trump. He believes that most of it is a bluff and, even if it is not, Russia can survive the economic war better than its opponents. Russia has everything it needs without relying on the outside world: from energy to food to minerals to skillful workers and scientists. As to the European borders, if America wants Canada and Greenland, Putin surely can argue that Russia is entitled to the part of Ukraine it owned for centuries.
The bottom line is that U.S.-Russia and U.S.-Ukraine policies have failed miserably. One can only hope they will not be repeated in Armenia, Georgia, and other former Russian satellites. It is time to start anew. The advice of Abraham Lincoln quoted above can guide the way.
Eugene M. Chudnovsky is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the City University of New York. He has written on world affairs and human rights for The Washington Examiner, The Hill, and The Daily Caller.
