On February 18, for the first time since the war in Ukraine began, high ranking U.S. and Russian officials met to begin talks on ending the war. The U.S. delegation included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East and a favorite negotiator Steve Witkoff and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. The Russian delegation included Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy advisor, Yury Ushakov.
Following the meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump stunned reporters at a press conference by blaming Ukraine, and not Russia, for the war in what The New York Times called “Trump’s Pivot Toward Putin’s Russia.” In its cross examination of Trump’s case, The Times gets some things very right. But they got some things very wrong.
As he walked out of the talks, Sergey Lavrov said, “We weren’t just listening to each other, but we heard each other. I have reason to believe that the American side started to better understand our positions.”
The position that the American side seems to have better understood is the Russian narrative that the war did not start on February 24, 2022 and that Russia did not start it. Russia has long insisted that the war began with the U.S. supported coup of 2014 and the failure to protect the linguistic, religious and cultural rights of the ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who felt abandoned and threatened by that coup.
Lavrov has consistently argued that Russia is not demanding preconditions but that they are demanding that the West fulfil its previous agreement not to expand NATO eastward to Russia’s border and its previous commitment to settle the crisis in Ukraine based on the UN Charter that stipulates the principle of equal rights and self-determination. The first was broken with the promise that Ukraine was on an irreversible path to NATO; the second was broken with Kiev’s “extermination of everything Russian, including language, mass media, culture, and even the use of the Russian language in everyday life.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to this narrative that the Americans now “better understand,” was intended to prevent the first and protect the second.
So, The New York Times complains that “[a]s far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Russia is not responsible for the war that has devastated its neighbor. Instead, he suggests that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion of it.” Following the meeting of the American and Russian delegations, The Times complains that “American officials did not dwell on Russia’s violation of international law in attacking Ukraine.”
About this, The Times is right. Trump is wrong more for what he did not say than for what he did. “By contrast,” The Times says, “Mr. Trump uttered not one word of reproach for Mr. Putin or for Russia.” Putin is to blame for the illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the discussions on ending the war must put this on the record and address it, at least in security guarantees for Ukraine.
Hellbound and Down 