Ukraine: The War I Thought I Understood
What I saw in 2019, what I believed in 2022, and what I believe now
The Ukraine I Saw
I went to Ukraine in late 2019 to sell rubber hose.
That is not a metaphor. I run Crushproof Tubing, an industrial and automotive hose manufacturer in Ohio, and the Ohio Department of Development’s IMAGE grant program will pay to have someone on the ground identify potential distributors and customers for an Ohio manufacturer in a foreign market. The partner search came back with prospects in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Lviv, plus a few in Poland.
So I went.
I did not go as a neutral observer. I was already suspicious.
By 2019, Ukraine had become tangled up in American domestic politics, and the pieces of the story I had absorbed were not flattering. The vice president’s son was sitting on the board of a Ukrainian gas company despite having no background in Ukrainian energy and no Ukrainian language. His father had been the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. American loan guarantees were being used as leverage over Ukrainian officials. And this was the same administration that talked constantly about Russian aggression while its assistance to Ukraine stayed pointedly nonlethal. The White House’s own June 2014 fact sheet on security assistance to Ukraine listed meals ready to eat, sleeping bags, and sleeping mats, under a headline figure of more than $23 million in additional defensive assistance.
My working assumption was that Ukraine was less a country than a venue. A place where American political money went to become complicated.
Then I landed, and Ukraine refused to cooperate with my assumptions.
Kyiv was nice. I do not know how else to say it. The streets were paved, the metro worked, and there were restaurants I would have been perfectly happy to eat at in Chicago. A Christmas tree was going up in a park with workers assembling cartoon cutouts around the bottom. There were old churches and gold domes and streets full of people going about ordinary lives.
This was not the shattered post-Soviet husk I had half-expected. It was a functioning European capital that happened to be poorer than the European capitals I already knew.
My translator and guide was a man I will call Nick. My driver was Dave. Over the course of a week they became, in the way people sometimes do on business trips, something more than a service I had purchased.
Then we went to Dnipro, and there was the bridge.
The Central Bridge across the Dnieper had become one of those projects people had stopped believing would ever finish. Money went in, time passed, and the project remained a project. I know that story from manufacturing: the job that never closes, because staying open is worth more to somebody than finishing.
Volodymyr Zelensky had been president for a few months. In July 2019 he gave Dnipro’s mayor, Borys Filatov, a public ultimatum: finish the bridge repair by September 14 or resign. Filatov took the challenge. The bridge opened by the deadline — after which Zelensky called for a commission to assess the quality and safety of the work, which is its own small comment on the state of Ukrainian construction.
Nick told me about it later that year. He told it the way you tell a story you are slightly embarrassed to be moved by.
Corruption kept it unfinished. Zelensky finished it.
I heard versions of that in Kyiv too. Not worship — something more cautious. A comedian had become president on an anti-corruption platform, and people were watching to see whether anything would actually change. Some things visibly had.
Then I went to the Holodomor museum, and everything got harder.
There is a statue of a little girl, thin in a way statues are usually not allowed to be, holding stalks of wheat. Inside: farmers, mothers, children, bodies, hunger. The Holodomor was the famine of 1932–33 under Stalin’s government, and the documentary record shows deliberate grain seizures, movement restrictions, and policies that trapped starving people inside the affected areas. Ukraine recognizes it as genocide, and the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide is where that recognition is made physical.
What it did to me was simpler than an argument. It made one kind of dismissal unavailable afterward.
The lazy version of the story I had absorbed — that Ukrainian fear of Russia was manufactured by NATO and the State Department — cannot survive a walk through that building. Whatever Western governments later did with Ukrainian fear of Moscow, they did not invent it. They found it there.
Then we went to Lviv, and Lviv felt like another country.
Not literally — geographically it is obviously Ukraine. But the architecture is Habsburg, Polish influence is everywhere, and the Baroque façades and narrow streets belong to a Central European world rather than a Russian one. Nobody in Lviv mentioned Zelensky to me. Not once.
I was there a week, selling hose, not conducting fieldwork. But I noticed it. And I noticed something else.
I could not hear the difference.
Ukrainian and Russian are separate languages, and the choice between them in Ukraine carries regional, cultural, and political meaning. Kyiv, Dnipro, and Lviv do not sound the same to people who know what they are listening for. To me, they did.
It all sounded Russian.
I was an American businessman standing on a century of contested history and I could not detect the fault line with my ears. I have tried to remember that whenever I start to feel certain about Ukraine.
The people I talked to were not naïve about America. Burisma came up. The idea that Washington had its hands in Ukrainian politics struck nobody as a conspiracy theory — it was closer to weather. And they did not want Moscow running the country either.
What they wanted was simple to say and very hard to get: to actually be independent. Not Russian. Not American. Ukrainian.
I came home with my original suspicions intact and something new sitting on top of them. These were real people in a real country. They were not props.
February 24
On February 24, 2022, I woke up, turned on Euronews, and Russia had invaded Ukraine.
My first thought was Nick. Not NATO, not Biden, not Putin’s theory of Russian history. A specific man in a specific country who had spent a week showing me around while I tried to sell hose.
My second reaction was anger, and it was directed at Putin, because Putin ordered the invasion.
Over the following months Nick dealt with what millions of Ukrainians dealt with: an unreliable grid, the cold, the difficulty of doing ordinary work while missiles hit infrastructure. At one point he needed a generator. I had contacts in Poland. I made some calls, and it took some doing, but a generator got to him.
That story is not here to make me the hero of a war I did not fight. It is here because of what comes next. Some readers will finish this essay and decide I stopped caring about Ukrainians.
I did not. I paid to keep one of them warm.
The Sums Got Bigger and the Story Got Simpler
The war did not end. And as it went on, two things happened at the same time.
The sums got enormous. The story got simpler.
Those should move in opposite directions. When a commitment grows, the explanation should get more detailed, the controls tighter, the questions more numerous. Instead the public explanation compressed into something you could fit on a lawn sign. Ukraine good, Russia bad, keep sending money.
I run a manufacturing company, and twenty-five years around ISO 9001 has given me a reflex I cannot turn off. When the size of something goes up and the documentation gets weaker, that is where you look. Not because fraud must be happening, but because that is where fraud becomes possible. It is also where organizations start confusing questions with disloyalty.
Zelensky sounded different — the outsider people in Dnipro described as the guy who made things happen was now on television demanding more weapons, more money, more commitment. I understand why. He was the president of a country at war. But I started wondering where the endpoint was.
Elections stopped. Religious institutions came under state pressure. Mobilization became increasingly aggressive. And Nick — the same man I had traveled with in 2019 — told me he had become nervous about walking around outside because of military recruitment.
That is his testimony, and I cannot verify all of it. But it stuck with me, because I knew the man before the war.
Eventually the question in my head changed. I had been asking why Putin invaded. I started asking what happened before Putin invaded.
That is the pivot of this essay, and it needs a fence around it before somebody drives it into a ditch.
Explaining why a man pulled the trigger is not the same as saying he had the right to. Causes are not permissions.
Everything that follows operates inside that fence.
The War Before the War
The problem with beginning the Ukraine war in February 2022 is that you miss thirty years of people warning each other about what was coming.
So go back to 1990. The Soviet Union still exists. Germany is reunifying. And one of the central questions is what happens to NATO.
On February 9, Secretary of State James Baker sat down with Mikhail Gorbachev. In the specific context of German reunification, Baker floated the formulation that has been argued over ever since: NATO’s jurisdiction would move not one inch eastward. He repeated versions of it more than once, and other Western officials made similar security assurances during the same period. The declassified American, Soviet, German, British, and French record makes it difficult to maintain that Russian leaders simply invented the memory afterward.
Now the other half. There was no treaty saying NATO could never admit Poland, no document forbidding the Baltics from joining, no contract giving Moscow a veto over the alliance choices of countries still under Soviet domination. Gorbachev himself later emphasized that enlargement beyond Germany was not the subject of that discussion.
So the Russian position — there were assurances — is grounded in the record. And the Western position — there was no binding non-expansion treaty — is also correct. The Russians remember the sentence. NATO remembers the qualification. Inconveniently, both have a point.
Then came expansion. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004. Albania and Croatia, then Montenegro, then North Macedonia.
To be precise about what I am not arguing: Russia did not have a veto. Poland and Estonia are sovereign countries. The Baltic states had living memory of Soviet occupation and did not need the CIA to explain why they might prefer America standing behind them to Russia standing over them. They wanted in. That matters.
My argument is narrower. Western policymakers knew Russia regarded NATO’s eastward movement as threatening. They were warned that continued enlargement could feed Russian nationalism and hostility. They proceeded anyway.
This is where George Kennan matters. Kennan was not a Putin apologist — there was no Putin to apologize for yet. Kennan was one of the architects of American Cold War containment, and in 1997 he warned in the New York Times that NATO expansion would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era, inflaming Russian nationalism, damaging Russia’s democratic development, and pushing Russian foreign policy in directions the West would not like.
That is not hindsight. That is a warning.
And then, in 2008, NATO went further. At the Bucharest Summit the alliance declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members. It did not give either country a Membership Action Plan. No timetable, no Article 5 protection, just the promise.
To my eye that was the worst of both worlds. Enough to trigger the strategic reaction, not enough to protect the countries that would bear it.
Four months later, after escalating fighting in South Ossetia and Georgia’s attempt to retake Tskhinvali, Russia launched a far larger intervention in Georgia. That war had its own immediate causes. But it belongs in the sequence.
And the sequence is the thing I keep coming back to. Poke. Warning. Poke. Warning. Poke. Then surprise when the reaction finally comes.
Again: Russia did not have the right to invade Ukraine. That is not my argument. My question is what responsibility policymakers bear when they knowingly continue a policy whose reaction they have repeatedly been warned to expect.
I do not think the answer is all. I also do not think the answer is none. The dominant Western narrative has assigned that sequence almost nothing, and I do not think that is serious.
Did the West Need Russia to Remain an Enemy?
Somewhere in this history I ran into a question I did not especially want to ask. What if nobody needed to plan any of this?
I do not mean the invasion. Putin planned the invasion. I mean the larger system around it.
NATO did not need Lockheed Martin whispering in its ear, and Lockheed Martin did not need the State Department manufacturing crises. The Pentagon did not need to hold a secret meeting where everyone agreed that Russia staying dangerous would be good for business.
There does not need to be a room.
Institutions already know how to behave. They protect their mission, they protect their budgets, and they find work. NATO had been built around containing a Soviet threat that then disappeared. What does an institution constructed around a geopolitical reality do when the reality dissolves?
It does not evaporate. NATO found other missions — the Balkans, counterterrorism, Afghanistan. Enlargement itself became one. And then Russia became the better answer.
Follow the money. Defense spending does not prove the war was manufactured for contractors. It does show that war creates winners.
NATO reported that European allies and Canada added more than $600 billion in defense spending after the 2014 Defense Investment Pledge, with European members alone expected to spend roughly $380 billion in 2024. After the full-scale invasion the acceleration became dramatic: SIPRI reported that European military spending rose 17 percent in 2024, pushing it above the level recorded at the end of the Cold War. It has not slowed since. SIPRI reports European spending rose another 14 percent in 2025, with spending by European NATO members climbing faster than at any point since 1953, and NATO’s own March 2026 annual report recorded a 20 percent increase across European allies and Canada over the previous year.
NATO was not shy about the industrial consequences. On February 15, 2024, Jens Stoltenberg described moving ammunition production from the pace of peacetime to the pace demanded by conflict, noted roughly $10 billion in recently agreed contracts, and said plainly that those contracts helped Ukraine, strengthened NATO, and created skilled jobs in Europe and North America.
There is nothing scandalous about saying that. It is true. War is also a market.
Look at the winners without assigning any of them a secret motive. NATO gains purpose. Defense ministries gain budgets. Manufacturers gain order books stretching years out. Politicians gain a clear external enemy. Intelligence agencies gain missions. Eastern European governments gain the American guarantees they genuinely want. Think tanks gain relevance.
Nobody has to be corrupt. Nobody has to conspire. Everybody can behave rationally, and the aggregate is still a system with almost no incentive to find out whether Russia could ever be something other than the enemy.
Thomas Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map is useful here. Barnett divided the world into an integrated Core and a disconnected Gap, and gave America the job of shrinking the Gap by pulling more of the world into the Core’s rules and markets. Read one way it is optimistic. Read another, it describes a machine that cannot understand a country which does not want to be integrated on the terms offered.
Which brings me to the question I cannot answer. Was Russia ever actually going to be allowed in?
There was a window. Russia joined the Partnership for Peace, the NATO-Russia Founding Act followed, and across the 1990s Russia was drawn into the G7’s political discussions until the group was operating as the G8. Putin raised NATO membership early in his presidency, though no serious accession process ever existed. For a while a different European security structure looked imaginable.
Then it closed. Maybe Putin closed it, maybe Washington did, maybe Eastern Europe’s entirely understandable fear made it impossible. I do not know. What I know is that almost none of the institutions involved had any incentive to find out.
Ukraine Becomes the Fault Line
In December 2013, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland gave a speech describing more than $5 billion in American assistance to Ukraine since independence.
That figure gets abused constantly. The United States did not spend $5 billion buying protesters in Maidan Square, and that is not what Nuland said. The number covered more than two decades of spending on civil society, democratic institutions, economic reform, and Ukraine’s movement toward Europe.
So no, America did not buy a revolution for five billion dollars. But the number does establish something important: depth. The United States had spent two decades actively working to support and influence Ukraine’s institutional development and orientation.
Then came Maidan.
The version I used to believe — the simple CIA coup version — does not survive the evidence. Hundreds of thousands of people do not stand outside in a Ukrainian winter for months because somebody from Langley handed them bus fare. Yanukovych was corrupt and unpopular. His reversal on the European Union association agreement genuinely angered Ukrainians who wanted closer ties with Europe. Police violence enlarged the protests. There was real Ukrainian political energy there.
But the opposite version does not survive either. The idea that this was a pure spontaneous uprising unfolding in a vacuum, untouched by foreign power, is equally unserious.
Because there was the phone call. A recording surfaced in February 2014 of Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing Ukrainian opposition figures and how they wanted the political transition to develop. Yatsenyuk was their preferred choice for a leading role. Klitschko, not yet.
That conversation happened before Yanukovych fell.
I do not think the call proves the United States engineered the overthrow of the Ukrainian government. It does not. What it proves is more limited and more interesting: senior American officials had specific preferences about who should hold power in Ukraine after the crisis, and were discussing those preferences while the sitting president was still in office. That is documented.
So what was Maidan? A popular revolution, a coup, or foreign interference? The answer I have reached is irritating because it does not fit on a sign.
Yes.
Not in equal proportions and not under one command. But a real Ukrainian revolt against a corrupt government, foreign money, NGOs, diplomatic pressure, Russian and European influence, American strategic interest, local oligarchs and genuine public anger all existed at once. Power does not always need a mastermind. It works by convergence — different people pursuing different interests and pushing in roughly the same direction. The result is neither a people’s revolution nor a CIA stage play.
Yanukovych fled Kyiv in February 2014. The political agreement negotiated a day earlier collapsed almost immediately. Within days, Russian troops without insignia were taking control of Crimea.
Crimea
Crimea is one of those subjects where everybody starts the clock at the moment most convenient to their argument. So start earlier.
Russia’s connection to Crimea is not fictional. The Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783. Sevastopol became one of Russia’s great naval cities. The Crimean War was fought there, and the siege of Sevastopol in the Second World War occupies an enormous place in Russian historical memory.
Then the population, which I had wrong for years.
I used to believe Russia moved Russians into Crimea to build an artificial majority, then held a referendum and called it the popular will. That is not what happened, and the truth is uglier.
In May 1944, Stalin’s government deported virtually the entire Crimean Tatar population from the peninsula to Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted, large numbers died in deportation and exile, and Tatars were not permitted to return in substantial numbers until decades later. By Ukraine’s own 2001 census, ethnic Russians made up about 58 percent of the population of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
The Russian majority was real. It was not manufactured in 2014. Its origins run back to what the Soviet state did in 1944.
Then 1954, when Crimea was transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. The Soviet decree cited common economy, territorial proximity, and close ties. That made practical sense: Crimea attaches by land to Ukraine, and its transport, utilities and trade all ran north. Inside one Soviet state, moving an internal boundary did not look like a world-historical act. Nobody expected that line to become an international border.
Then came 2014. Russian soldiers took control of the peninsula. A referendum followed on March 16, and the Russian-backed authorities reported an overwhelming vote to join Russia. The ballot did not offer a simple status-quo option, and the vote occurred under Russian military control. The UN General Assembly subsequently affirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and called on states not to recognize a change in Crimea’s status based on that referendum.
Here is the question I think adults should be able to hold without screaming at each other.
Is it possible that a genuine majority of Crimeans preferred being part of Russia, while also acknowledging that a referendum held under foreign military occupation cannot be treated as an ordinary democratic vote?
Yes. Both things can be true. Popular preference and lawful procedure are not the same thing.
That distinction matters, because sooner or later any settlement to this war has to deal with it. You can insist a line on a map is legally sacred. You can insist the desires of the people living on one side of it matter more. The actual settlement will have to account for both.
The Agreement That Was Supposed to Stop the War
There is a seven-year hole in the way Americans usually remember Ukraine. Crimea happens in 2014. Then, somehow, it is February 2022.
But people were already fighting in eastern Ukraine during all of those years, and there was already an agreement that was supposed to stop it. Actually, there were two.
The first Minsk Protocol was signed on September 5, 2014, by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the OSCE, and the separatist-held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. It called for a ceasefire, monitoring, decentralization, local elections, amnesty, and measures concerning the Ukrainian-Russian border. The ceasefire did not hold.
So they tried again. Minsk II was negotiated in February 2015 after another round of heavy fighting, and this was not some fringe Russian proposal. Germany and France were directly involved. Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, and Putin backed the package. The United Nations Security Council endorsed it unanimously, the United States included.
The agreement called for a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, OSCE monitoring, constitutional reform in Ukraine, special arrangements for parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, local elections, restoration of Ukrainian control of the border, and withdrawal of foreign armed formations.
In other words, the basic shape of a settlement was already sitting on paper in 2015. Stop shooting. Give the disputed regions some political accommodation. Return the border to Ukrainian control. Work out the rest politically.
It never happened.
Everybody has an explanation for why. Ukraine said Russia and the separatists never met the security conditions that had to precede the political provisions. Russia said Kyiv refused the promised constitutional changes. The sequencing was the trap: Ukraine wanted security and the border first, Moscow wanted autonomy and elections first. Both could point at the agreement and blame the other.
For seven years.
That history matters to me because it changes the claim that nobody tried diplomacy. They did. The problem was that diplomacy produced an agreement neither side ultimately implemented.
Then, after the 2022 invasion, Angela Merkel said something that caused an uproar in Moscow. In a December 2022 interview with Die Zeit, she said the 2014 Minsk agreement had been an attempt to give Ukraine time, and that Ukraine had used that time to become stronger.
Russia seized on that remark as proof that Minsk had always been a deception. I do not think the sentence proves that. Merkel could just as reasonably be describing one consequence of the agreement rather than its sole purpose — the ceasefire arrangements froze enough of the conflict to let Ukraine rebuild a military that had been in terrible condition in 2014. She was also speaking about the 2014 protocol, not the broader framework as a whole.
But either reading creates an uncomfortable question. If one of the principal Western brokers later describes the agreement partly in terms of the time it bought Ukraine to strengthen itself, how seriously did anyone expect the agreement itself to become the permanent settlement?
That is not proof of a conspiracy. It is evidence that the diplomacy and the military preparation ran at the same time. Western leaders could genuinely have wanted the shooting to stop and also believed Ukraine needed the pause to prepare in case it resumed.
Russia was preparing too, which the clean narratives keep losing.
By 2022 there had been eight years of war, two Minsk agreements, repeated failed ceasefires, sanctions, buildup, and mutual accusations of bad faith.
February 24 was still Putin’s decision. But it did not happen after eight years of nothing. It happened after eight years of a peace process that had failed.
Follow the Money
Now back to the suspicion I carried onto the plane in 2019.
Ukraine’s corruption problem was real, and it was not invented by Russia. In 2019 Ukraine ranked 126th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. That is not proof that every Ukrainian is corrupt. It is context.
And then there was Burisma. Hunter Biden joined the board in 2014, reportedly paid tens of thousands of dollars a month. He had no obvious Ukrainian energy background and did not speak Ukrainian. His father was Vice President of the United States and deeply involved in American policy toward Ukraine.
I have never found a convincing explanation for what Burisma believed it was buying other than the Biden name and the access implied by it. That is my judgment, not a criminal conviction.
Then there is Viktor Shokin, and this is where I need to correct something I used to believe.
The story I believed went like this: Joe Biden withheld a billion dollars in loan guarantees until Ukraine fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, because Shokin was investigating Burisma and therefore Hunter Biden.
Parts of that are true. Biden absolutely used American leverage to demand Shokin’s removal. Shokin was fired. After a new prosecutor general was appointed, the administration moved forward with the loan guarantee.
But the strongest causal claim — that Shokin was fired because he was closing in on Hunter Biden — is not established. Biden was not the only person who wanted Shokin gone. The IMF, European officials, G7 representatives, and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists had all criticized him, and the complaint was generally that he was not prosecuting corruption aggressively enough. The Burisma matter itself was widely described as dormant rather than racing toward Hunter Biden.
I held the stronger version for years. I cannot keep asserting it just because I would like it to be true.
What survives is a different question. Why was the American vice president’s son collecting tens of thousands of dollars a month from a Ukrainian energy company while his father was running American policy toward Ukraine?
You do not need a bribery conviction to find that offensive. The arrangement tells you what Ukraine was in that period. Proximity to American power was a commodity. People bought it and people sold it.
That is what I thought I would find when I arrived in Kyiv. Of course I did not see it walking down the street. That is never where that kind of corruption lives.
The Aid Machine
Then February 2022 happened, and the numbers stopped being comparable to anything before.
Congress passed five Ukraine supplemental appropriations acts. GAO has consistently put the total at more than $174 billion appropriated in response to the war, a figure it was still using in its September 2025 reporting. That total is worth stating carefully. GAO notes it includes Ukraine supplemental funding for the Defense Department to replace weapons drawn from American stocks, and excludes the drawdown amounts themselves and annual appropriations used for Ukraine. It is money appropriated in response to the war, not money handed to Kyiv.
The easy claim is not good enough. Nobody knows where the money went is not true. GAO has investigated repeatedly, inspectors general have worked on it, the World Bank has oversight mechanisms, contractors have reviewed spending. People are counting.
The problem is what the counting keeps finding.
The United States has provided about $45 billion in direct budget support to the Ukrainian government through the World Bank, reimbursing eligible expenses such as salaries and social benefits. That $45 billion is itself two different things: roughly $30.2 billion in appropriated funds disbursed by USAID, and about $15 billion obtained through a loan to be serviced and repaid with revenues from immobilized Russian sovereign assets. In September 2025, GAO found that USAID had not consistently used important spending data in its oversight, identified unusual spending increases warranting review, and reported contractor findings of weaknesses in Ukraine’s management of funds. GAO also noted that layered oversight mitigated some of those risks.
That is not the same as saying $45 billion vanished. It did not. What it means, in my view, is that the level of accounting never became good enough for the scale of the commitment.
Which leads to a question I know how to ask from a much smaller world. What happens when very large sums move very fast through a system with known corruption problems and limited capacity, under conditions that make ordinary verification harder?
You do not automatically get theft. You get opacity, which is not proof of fraud but the environment fraud needs.
Run a line twice as fast with the same inspector and your defect rate does not go up. Your recorded defect rate does not go up. Those are two different sentences, and confusing them is how companies end up recalling product.
That is my objection. Not that every dollar was stolen. Not that Ukraine is one giant laundering operation. The evidence does not support those claims. The evidence supports something narrower: enormous sums moved through a government with known corruption and control problems, under enormous pressure, while American oversight bodies kept finding weaknesses.
That is enough to justify asking questions. And the response that asking them helps Putin is not an answer. It is a way to avoid one.
The Bridge and What Came After
Which brings me back to the bridge.
The Zelensky people talked about in 2019 was an outsider, and the point was not ideology. It was competence. He got something finished. He made somebody meet a deadline. He looked like the guy who might finally clean the place up.
There is something I did not know while I was standing on that bridge.
The television network that made Zelensky a household name, 1+1, was controlled by Ihor Kolomoisky — one of the most powerful oligarchs in the country, a man later designated by the United States over significant corruption and eventually taken into custody by Ukrainian authorities on fraud allegations. Servant of the People, the show in which Zelensky played an honest teacher who accidentally becomes president, aired on Kolomoisky’s channel. During the campaign, that same channel gave the candidate enormous exposure.
For a long time I carried a suspicion that the 2019 election itself was not clean — that there had been some manipulation, gentle or otherwise, in producing that result. I went looking. I did not find it. Zelensky won the runoff with roughly three-quarters of the vote, international observers characterized the election as competitive with fundamental freedoms broadly respected, and a margin that size is not what quiet rigging produces. So I am not making that claim. I had a hunch and the evidence did not support it.
But the Kolomoisky relationship is documented, and it complicates the story I was told in Dnipro. The anti-corruption outsider reached the public through infrastructure owned by one of the men the anti-corruption campaign was ostensibly aimed at. That is not fraud. It is Ukraine — a country where even the reform candidate arrives through an oligarch’s transmitter.
Then came the war, and wartime Ukraine became something different.
Start with elections. Ukraine has not held presidential or parliamentary elections since the full-scale invasion. The five-year term for which Zelensky was elected ended in May 2024, though Ukraine’s constitutional framework keeps a sitting president in office until a successor takes office.
Elections are not being cancelled by presidential whim. Martial law substantially restricts them and has been repeatedly extended by parliamentary vote. The practical obstacles are real: millions displaced, territory occupied, soldiers at the front, polling stations as targets.
But the consequence is still real. As long as martial law continues, national elections remain postponed, and there is no ordinary electoral mechanism currently available to replace the leadership. That deserves notice.
It is worth adding what has happened since I first drafted that paragraph. In October 2026, after Trump publicly called for Ukraine to replace Zelensky, Zelensky said Ukraine could hold elections if Russia agreed to a sixty-day ceasefire. So the postponement is no longer open-ended in principle. It is now conditional on something Moscow controls — which is either a genuine opening or a condition designed to be refused, and I do not know which.
Then political pluralism. Freedom House’s 2026 assessment still classifies government-controlled Ukraine as Partly Free, not a totalitarian state. It also documents restrictions that should trouble anyone calling Ukraine a model liberal democracy: more than a dozen parties identified as pro-Russian banned, television news consolidated into the United News platform which Freedom House says predominantly airs ruling-party voices, media laws expanding government authority, collaboration statutes broadened.
Freedom House also notes that criticism and opposition persist, especially online. This is not a closed dictatorship, and the distinction matters.
Now churches. The slogan version is that Zelensky is imprisoning Christians, and I do not think the evidence supports saying that.
The situation is more specific. Ukraine has targeted religious institutions it believes retain structural ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose senior hierarchy has openly supported the war, and enacted legislation allowing restrictions on them. Some clergy have been prosecuted on collaboration charges. UN human rights monitors have criticized aspects of those restrictions as potentially inconsistent with international standards.
That is not the Soviet Union. It is also not nothing. A government is deciding, under wartime security logic, which religious institutions may operate. That should trouble anyone who cares about religious liberty.
Then there is mobilization. Nick told me he became afraid to walk outside alone because of military recruitment. I am presenting that as what he told me rather than as a national statistic. Who he is matters to how much that testimony is worth, and I come to it below.
But it is no longer only his account. Ukraine’s own institutions have documented the problem. The State Bureau of Investigation uncovered a scheme at a district territorial recruitment center in Odesa region involving the illegal coercion of citizens into mobilization, with men illegally detained on the premises, beaten, and subjected to psychological pressure. Prosecutors charged ten officers from an Odesa TCC with kidnapping and torture, identifying at least eight victims subjected to physical force. Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, has publicly reported violations during mobilization and has said that a representative of his own office faced persecution after investigating abuses at a recruitment center in Zakarpattia.
Those are documented abuses, acknowledged and prosecuted by the Ukrainian state itself. They do not establish that such abuses are universal, or that they are policy rather than failure. That the prosecutions exist is itself evidence that Ukrainian institutions still work well enough to bring them.
Ukraine is fighting a much larger country and needs soldiers. Every country that runs out of volunteers eventually starts coercing people. That it may be necessary does not make it liberal, or invisible to the people living under it.
So I keep coming back to the same question. How much illiberalism is a democracy permitted in the name of defending democracy?
The answer cannot be zero. The United States has suspended liberties in wartime, censored information, interned people, drafted men. War changes states.
Which is exactly why somebody has to keep watching.
The people I met in Dnipro liked Zelensky because, as they saw it, he was making government accountable. I would like to sit with those same people now and ask what they think. Polls can tell me something and reporters can tell me something, but neither reproduces a dinner table in Dnipro with people talking when no camera is running.
What I Could Actually Find Out
All of that is what I know now. How I came to know any of it turned out to be the hardest part of this exercise, and it is the part nobody writes about.
I watched this war the way most Americans did. Network news in the morning — ABC, CBS. Cable through the day, CNN and Fox both, because I have never understood why you would only watch one. Politico and the wires online. Euronews most mornings, which was a habit I had before the war and kept after.
And what I remember is not reporting. It is advocacy. Why Ukraine needed help. Why more help was needed. Rarely how the war was actually going, and almost never a running count of what it was costing in human beings. I have lived through other wars as an adult American and this one did not sound like them.
For a long time I assumed I was imagining that. Then two things got my attention.
The first is that the convergence was total.
Fox and CNN agree on almost nothing. In 2022 they agreed on this. The editorial distance between those two newsrooms on every other subject in American life is enormous, and on Ukraine you could have swapped the scripts.
Then I traveled, and talked to friends in Poland, Italy, and Slovakia. Same thing. Staunchly pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin, and the news they were watching said what the news I was watching said. I had assumed Europe would be more varied, being closer to it. It was less varied.
There is an alternative explanation and it is a real one. Sometimes outlets converge because the facts are not in dispute. A country was invaded by its neighbor. That is not a matter of interpretation, and a press corps that said so was not being manipulated. It was being accurate.
So I cannot prove the convergence was manufactured. What I can say is what it cost. When every outlet shares a frame, the questions outside that frame stop being asked — not suppressed, just never raised. Nobody has to censor a question that nobody thinks to ask.
The second thing is what happened to people who did ask.
In October 2022, thirty House Democrats sent President Biden a letter urging him to pair continued military aid with a direct diplomatic push toward a negotiated settlement. It was a mild document. It did not propose cutting aid. It restated support for Ukraine and asked the administration to also pursue talks.
They withdrew it within about twenty-four hours under a wave of criticism from their own party. The caucus chair said it had been drafted months earlier and released without proper vetting. Whatever the internal explanation, the public lesson was legible to anyone watching: thirty members of Congress asked for diplomacy, got hit, and took it back by the next news cycle.
Nobody arrested them. They read the room and folded. That is how a narrow consensus enforces itself in a free country: not through a ministry, but through everyone understanding there is a cost and no constituency for paying it.
I felt it at a much smaller scale. For about two years the only people I said any of this to were my closest friends and my family. Nobody threatened me. I knew what the conversation would turn into and did not want to have it. If you have ever decided not to say something true at a dinner table, you understand the mechanism, and you do not need a conspiracy to explain it.
One detail, offered as interesting rather than explanatory.
Euronews, one of the channels I watched, was for years substantially financed by the European Union. The European Court of Auditors found the Commission had spent €122 million on it between 2014 and 2018 — roughly a third of the channel’s turnover — and that although Euronews had committed to editorial impartiality, the Commission never linked those commitments to the criteria for awarding the money.
That carries less weight than it looks like it should. The audit ends in 2018 and the channel was sold to a private investor in 2022. More to the point, it explains nothing about Fox, CBS, Politico, or my friend in Slovakia. If the pattern had been confined to one EU-funded broadcaster I would have an explanation. It wasn’t, so I don’t.
Then there is Gonzalo Lira, the hardest case here to write fairly.
Lira was an American citizen living in Kharkiv who spent the war posting video commentary wildly at odds with Western coverage. In May 2023 Ukraine’s security service arrested him at his home under Article 436-2 of Ukraine’s criminal code, which criminalizes justifying or denying Russian armed aggression. The stated basis for the charge was the content of what he had said — that Ukraine’s government was neo-Nazi, and that Russian forces had not murdered civilians. He was released on bail, detained again in August 2023 after attempting to leave the country in violation of that bail, and he died in Ukrainian custody in January 2024. The State Department confirmed the death and offered condolences to his family. No cause of death has ever been publicly documented.
Now the convenient version, given away first.
Lira was not a journalist whose account was accurate. Much of what he said was wrong, and one piece of it — that Russian forces had not murdered civilians — is contradicted by some of the most thoroughly documented evidence of the war. His family has said he was tortured. That claim reached the public through a single letter and has never been confirmed by anyone, so it does not appear here as fact.
What survives all of it is this.
A democracy fighting for its existence as a democracy wrote a law criminalizing a category of opinion. It used that law against an American citizen for things he said on camera. That citizen died in its custody and no cause of death was ever released. And the government underwriting that democracy’s war at a scale of $174 billion said condolences and nothing further.
You do not have to think Lira was right. A free society does not jail people for being wrong. That is most of what the freedom is for.
The comparison is the thing I cannot get past.
When Americans are detained by governments Washington considers adversaries, the machinery is visible and loud. The State Department has a designation — “wrongfully detained” — that moves a case out of consular channels and hands it to the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. Evan Gershkovich received it within about two weeks of his arrest in Russia. Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan got presidential statements, public campaigns, and prisoner exchanges negotiated at the top.
I can find no public record that Gonzalo Lira ever received that designation, or that any comparable effort was made on his behalf. The difference between those cases is not the severity of the detention. It is which government did the detaining.
That is the argument. Not that Ukraine is uniquely repressive — it is not, and Russia’s record in this war is incomparably worse. The argument is that the alliance structure determined which American got fought for.
Which brings me to Nick.
Through all of it, my most reliable source on what was happening in Ukraine was a man I met once, in 2019, because the State of Ohio paid for a translator so I could try to sell hose.
It would be easy to assume he told me what I wanted to hear. He didn’t. Nick despises Putin. He is not pro-Russian in any sense, and he never defended the invasion to me. He had business relationships in Russia before the war and the war destroyed that part of his income, so his material interests ran directly against the thing he was living through.
Early on I offered to help him get out. I said I would see what I could do about a work visa or some other route, and I meant it — I would have spent real effort on it.
He said no. He would rather stay and see it through.
That belongs on the record first, because it changes what everything else he told me means. He was not a man looking for an exit. He was offered one and turned it down.
And he was still afraid of the vans.
That is the whole mobilization argument in one fact, and it is better than any statistic I could put next to it. A man who voluntarily chose to remain in his own country during an invasion did not want to walk to the shop, because of his own government’s recruiters.
He was not confused about why. He knew people were dying. Not in the abstract — he understood what being put on a bus to the front actually meant, and the arithmetic of it did not look survivable to him. His fear was not of inconvenience or of service. It was of being taken off a street and delivered into something he did not expect to come back from.
What he described, in those early conversations, was infrastructure bombing. Power, heat, the grid. His sense of the dying was that it was concentrated among soldiers at the front and, after that, among civilians caught in strikes on infrastructure.
I want to be exact about the timing, because it would be easy to misread him. We were talking before Bucha, before Mariupol, before Izium. He was not dismissing those events or unaware of them. They had not happened yet, or had not yet come out. He was telling me what the war looked like from his window in the first weeks of it, and that is all he was telling me.
It is also all he could tell me. One man, one city, one angle of view. He was more trustworthy than the broadcasts because he was not performing, and he was unavoidably less complete.
An American citizen, reasonably well informed, trying in good faith to understand a war his own taxes were paying for. Four television networks and two continents’ worth of newspapers, all telling him the same thing. And the one source he had that wasn’t could see about as far as the end of a block.
That is the information environment. Not a lie. A set of channels, each of them partial in a different direction, and no good way from an office in Ohio to assemble them into a picture.
I am not inclined to be gentle about the institutions that built that, or about how confidently they asked me to pay for it.
Putin Without the Caricature
Somewhere in this process I did something I should have done years earlier. I read what Putin actually says.
Not the two-sentence characterization in a news segment. The speeches. The July 2021 essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. The February 2022 addresses. The September 2022 speech announcing the annexations. All of them published in official English translation on the Kremlin’s own website.
I had assumed the barrier was language. That is an excuse. The texts sit on a government website, in English, free, and almost nobody in the American conversation about this war has read them. That is not a translation problem but a reading problem, and I include myself in it for the first several years.
What I found was not the cartoon. Putin’s argument is civilizational. He describes a Western order that he believes imposes a moral framework on everyone else, and he casts Russia as defending traditional civilization against it. He talks about family, about religion, about what he regards as the West’s abandonment of both. In his telling, Ukraine is partly the vector — the place through which that order arrives at Russia’s border, culturally as much as militarily.
I do not disagree with all of the diagnosis. I live in the United States and I do not think this country is in good moral condition. A man can look at what we have become and understand why somebody else would not want it exported to his country.
But the diagnosis and the diagnostician are separate questions.
That same traditional-values framing is an instrument. It is the justification attached to laws used against Russian journalists and against anyone who dissents. A government that describes itself as defending the family is also a government that jails people for what they say about it. You can believe American culture has lost something important and still notice that the alternative on offer involves a man dying in a penal colony.
Reading him accurately does not require agreeing with him. It requires knowing what he actually claims, so the argument is with the real thing.
Which brings me to the rest of the ledger. None of what I have written should be mistaken for rehabilitation.
Understanding Russian strategic interests does not make Vladimir Putin a good man, and it does not make Russia the injured innocent.
Russia invaded a sovereign neighbor, in 2014 and on a vastly larger scale in 2022. Those were Putin’s choices. Crimea was seized by force before any referendum. His government is authoritarian: opponents jailed, exiled, poisoned, killed; Alexei Navalny dead in a penal colony after years of imprisonment; independent media constrained and civil society narrowed.
Russia’s conduct in occupied Ukrainian territory has included serious documented abuses. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova over the alleged unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children.
And the Russian occupation has not produced some freer alternative to Zelensky’s Ukraine. Freedom House describes Russian-controlled Ukrainian territories as places where Ukrainian parties are banned, opposition is suppressed through intimidation and violence, and activists and officials have been abducted, imprisoned, or killed.
The Holodomor happened. I walked through the museum. Ukrainian historical fear of Moscow does not need to be manufactured.
Modern Russia is not the Soviet Union and Putin is not a Bolshevik. Those distinctions matter historically. They do not absolve him.
So here is the sentence I keep coming back to.
If Western governments spent thirty years poking a bear, Putin still chose what to do when the bear moved.
He had agency and he had options, and he chose a full-scale invasion. That choice produced the exact NATO development he claimed to fear: Finland abandoned its longstanding military nonalignment and joined in 2023, with Sweden following in 2024 — both applications filed in direct response to the invasion.
That is quite an accomplishment if the objective was keeping NATO farther from Russia.
Causes are not permissions. Understanding the history before 2022 does not transfer Putin’s responsibility to Washington. It only means Washington has some history of its own to answer for.
What I Think Now
Everything above is history as best I can establish it. What follows is policy judgment. They are different things, and a reasonable reader could accept nearly every fact here and still conclude that Ukraine should be armed until every Russian soldier is pushed back to the 1991 border.
I do not.
I think this has become a proxy war. I do not mean Ukrainians are fake participants — they are fighting for their own homes and have shown courage I do not pretend I possess. I mean that a broader contest between Russia and the Western security system is being fought through Ukraine, with outside powers supplying much of the money, weapons, intelligence, strategy, and definition of acceptable outcomes. And Ukrainian lives are bearing a disproportionate share of the cost of that larger contest.
Before the reasons, a disclosure, because it does more work than either reason will.
I did not arrive at this war neutral on American intervention. I arrived at it already sour, and I had been getting there for twenty years.
Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Egypt. Syria. Sudan. Regime changes we pressed for, some of which worked and most of which produced something worse than what they replaced. That is a bipartisan list and I want it read that way — Bush the father, Bush the son, Obama with Hillary Clinton at State, Biden. The party label on the president changed and the policy did not.
What I kept asking, through all of it, was a question that sounds small next to grand strategy and isn’t. How does any of this help the people who work for me buy groceries? How does it help them put gas in the truck or put something aside? What I watched instead was the rich getting richer, the sons of ordinary men dying a long way from home, and my dollar buying less every year. Twenty years of that is an education.
People call this isolationism. I accept the label with one correction my own livelihood requires. I am not against engagement with the world. I make hose in Ohio and I went to Ukraine to sell it abroad on a trip my state helped pay for. Trade, travel, exchange — all of it, more of it. What I object to is the military and political version: the standing assumption that American money and American weapons should be shaping the internal arrangements of countries on the other side of the planet.
It is not a fringe position. It is roughly what Washington argued in his Farewell Address and what John Quincy Adams meant about going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. It has been a current in American thinking for two hundred and fifty years, including long stretches when it was the governing consensus rather than the dissent.
So I should be precise about what I supported in 2022, because the shorthand version of this essay would get it wrong. I supported humanitarian aid. Food, medicine, shelter, power, getting people out. I did not support arming one side of a war between two other countries, and I did not support what it became. What I wanted from Washington in 2022 was the thing I still want: diplomacy, urgently and in earnest.
That position has not moved. What moved is how confident I am that anybody in charge was ever pursuing it.
It is also a conclusion I arrived at, not a fact I proved. Nothing above establishes it. A reader who accepts every fact here and does not share it will land somewhere else, and will not be making an error.
That is the ground I am standing on. On top of it sit two specific reasons the military aid lost whatever benefit of the doubt I had left.
The first is accountability, and I made that case above rather than make it twice. The short version is that the controls never caught up to the size of the commitment, and that the standard response to anyone pointing this out was to question their loyalty instead of their arithmetic.
The second is what happened to negotiation as an idea.
We had already tried a negotiated framework once. Minsk existed for seven years and neither side implemented it — a real failure, not a promising instrument somebody merely neglected. But after the full-scale invasion, I watched negotiated compromise become less a failed instrument to be repaired than something increasingly treated as naïve.
Peace remained the word everyone used. Increasingly it seemed to mean military success first and negotiation afterward. The military objective required either Russia voluntarily abandoning territory it had decided to hold, or suffering enough battlefield defeat to be forced off it. Neither looked close.
So the solution became more weapons. Then more weapons. Then more sophisticated weapons. Then permission to use them differently. Then another appropriation.
At some point a process becomes its own strategy.
And then, while I was finishing this essay, the thing I had been asking for started happening. Then it started coming apart. Six weeks of it, in order, because the shape of those six weeks makes the argument better than I can.
September. On September 5, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin for roughly three hours, followed by dinner. The next day they were in Kyiv — the first visit to the Ukrainian capital by these envoys since the war began — meeting Zelensky and pressing for a return to trilateral talks. Witkoff said the Moscow discussions produced significant progress and new ideas. Zelensky confirmed that several new ideas were discussed but did not describe them. Ahead of the trip, both sides agreed to a three-day pause in shooting at Kyiv so the discussions could happen. It expired on schedule.
On September 8, Putin and Trump spoke by telephone. Russia’s account, via presidential aide Yury Ushakov, is that the call ran an hour and was constructive and candid and that both leaders assessed the envoys’ visit positively. Sergey Lavrov characterized the American position as including Ukraine not being drawn into NATO and an acknowledgment of the realities on the ground.
I quote Russian state media there deliberately. TASS is not neutral and I am not treating it as such. But Trump spins, Zelensky spins, Putin spins, and reading only one side’s press is not evaluating a negotiation — it is receiving one party’s version of it. What a government tells its own public is evidence, often the clearest statement of what it thinks it is getting. Lavrov saying out loud that the American position includes Ukraine staying out of NATO is worth more than another round of anonymous sourcing.
Early October. On October 4, Zelensky said the United States was proposing a technical-level trilateral meeting by the end of the month, possibly in the United Arab Emirates, with an energy ceasefire and a reopened Black Sea grain corridor on the agenda. Ukraine said yes and waited on Moscow.
On October 9, Putin told Trump that an immediate resumption of talks was unlikely, citing Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow during Russia’s parliamentary elections in September. Marco Rubio called the war a dangerous stalemate.
That is the test I set for myself, arriving. Ukraine accepted a format. Russia declined to show up. That moves responsibility toward Moscow, inconvenient to a thesis I have spent this long building.
What complicates it runs in both directions. Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign gave Putin the pretext, and a country that strikes an adversary’s capital during that adversary’s elections should not be surprised when the adversary cites it. But a pretext is what you reach for when you have already decided, and Russia’s price has not visibly moved since 2022.
Then the diesel deal, which is where this gets strange.
In early October, Trump announced an agreement under which Russia would begin releasing diesel into global markets, as part of an effort to bring American fuel prices down from record highs before the November 3 midterm elections. He simultaneously intensified his demands that Ukraine stop striking Russian refineries.
Read that again, because I had to. The United States is arming Ukraine against Russia and buying discounted fuel from Russia in the same month, and pressing Ukraine to stop hitting the refineries that produce it.
The reaction was close to universal. A bipartisan group of senators called on Trump to reverse course, saying the United States should not provide Putin a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the United States should be imposing sanctions, not lifting them. A 2022 law prohibits the United States from buying most Russian energy products, and it is not clear how the administration intends to get around it; Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican, said he does not expect the deal to go through at all.
And then the economics, which is the part I find most damning. The first release of 2.25 million barrels is 1.4 million barrels less than Americans consume in a single day. Shipments from Russia to the East Coast take more than two weeks, and record-high shipping costs would push prices up. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said export volumes near pre-drone-campaign levels will not be possible until after December. Bloomberg’s geoeconomics analyst wrote that there is no indication any diesel is making its way to the United States yet, and that it is not clear the arrangement will produce any net increase in global supply at all.
I argue below that sanctions should be leverage with an objective rather than a permanent condition. Here is what it looks like when sanctions relief is traded for something other than peace. The objective was the price of diesel in the month before an election, and on the available evidence it will not even accomplish that.
Zelensky’s response was the sharpest thing he has said about this White House. Russia, he said, expressed its thanks for the lifting of sanctions on diesel exports by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia. Twenty people were killed in Ukraine that day. One of them was six years old.
Then the ceasefire that may not exist. On October 11, Trump announced an immediate energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky told Axios the announcement “was news for me,” adding that if the Russians agreed, Ukraine would agree. Both sides kept hitting energy infrastructure.
Asked about it, Trump said: “They agreed. You know why? Because I said you agree. That’s why they agreed — because I said they agreed.”
He had also, the day before, called for Ukraine to replace Zelensky. Zelensky responded that Ukraine could hold elections if Russia agreed to a sixty-day ceasefire.
That is where things stood on October 13, 2026, which is when I stopped writing. This part of the story was moving while I wrote it and has probably moved again since.
So what do six weeks of that add up to?
It cuts against me in one place and for me in several.
Against: negotiation is not being treated as unthinkable and I should stop implying it is. Envoys flew to Moscow and to Kyiv. Heads of state are on the telephone. A trilateral format was proposed and Ukraine accepted. Somebody is trying. When I wrote that peace had stopped being a real objective, I was describing 2023 and 2024 better than now.
For: look at what the trying consists of. A ceasefire announced into existence by a president saying it exists. A sanctions concession extracted not for a settlement but for the price of fuel before an election, which analysts across the spectrum say will not move that price. A three-day pause in shelling a capital treated as an achievement, then allowed to lapse. An allied president learning about his own ceasefire from the news.
That is not a peace process. It is a peace process being used as an instrument of something else, and the something else is American domestic politics on a November timetable. Which is this essay’s argument, arriving in a form I did not predict and would not have chosen.
I say below that if a serious settlement were placed on the table and Moscow refused it, I would have to move responsibility toward Moscow. Part of that has happened: Russia declined the format. But I have to be equally honest that what has been placed on the table is not yet a serious settlement, and that the Russian refusal came alongside an American concession that strengthened Moscow’s hand and cost it nothing.
Both are true, and they do not resolve into a cleaner story.
None of this is new in kind. There were also negotiations in Istanbul in the spring of 2022. Enough is documented to say that Ukraine and Russia discussed neutrality, security guarantees, and possible terms for ending the war. Beyond that the story gets murky. Drafts and retrospective accounts conflict, and I do not think the evidence supports the popular claim that a completed peace agreement was sitting on the table until Boris Johnson arrived and ordered Zelensky to reject it. There were negotiations. They failed. That failure is not a conspiracy.
What I want is negotiation. A ceasefire. Serious discussion over the status of territory Russia currently controls, instead of the assumption that the only morally acceptable outcome is sending people to die until the line moves.
That does not mean drawing a map in Washington and handing Ukrainian territory to Moscow. The people living there matter. Any settlement needs real protections for residents who do not want to live under Russian rule: the right to relocate, citizenship choices, property rights or compensation, family reunification, security guarantees, and monitoring where practical.
And yes, territorial settlement has to be on the table. I understand the international-law objection. Russia acquired territory through military force, and the international community has overwhelmingly refused to recognize those annexations. A negotiated settlement recognizing some territorial change would be a compromise with the existing legal position rather than an enforcement of it.
I am willing to say that, because the alternative is not a law school seminar. It is more people dying.
I would also use sanctions as bargaining tools rather than as a permanent moral sacrament. And I am skeptical of sanctions generally, not only here.
The scholarship is less flattering than the policy consensus. The standard reference work, Hufbauer, Schott and Elliott’s Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, counted roughly a third of twentieth-century episodes as successful. Robert Pape reexamined the same cases and put the real figure near four percent. More recent work on expanded databases lands around forty. What I take from a literature that cannot decide between four and forty is that the confidence with which sanctions get announced is not earned.
There is a second problem the success rate misses. Broad regimes land hardest on people with the least protection from their own government, while the government absorbs the cost, controls the scarcity, and consolidates around the grievance. Iraq in the 1990s should haunt anyone who reaches for this casually — though even there the most-cited child mortality figures were later shown to have been falsified by the Iraqi government. The suffering was real. The numbers everyone quoted were not.
The other side exists. South Africa is the case advocates cite and they have a real argument. On Russia, the measures have constrained revenue and complicated military production, whatever they failed to do about the war. Someone who thinks they are working is not being unreasonable.
There is also a cost on the sanctioning end, and it rarely gets counted. Representative Thomas Massie voted against the Russia sanctions in 2022 on the grounds that American citizens would suffer from higher prices, and said this month that Trump had finally come around to that reality. He wants the relief extended to all petroleum products and to raw metals.
I do not think the diesel deal will lower anyone’s fuel bill anytime soon, and certainly not before the midterms, for the reasons above. But Massie’s 2022 point stands on its own, independent of this month’s arrangement, and it joins up with mine: the people who vote on sanctions do not feel them. That is true in Washington and it is true in Moscow.
My objection is narrower than sanctions never work. It is that they are frequently a way to demonstrate doing something, which is not the same as accomplishing something, and that an instrument this blunt should have to state what it is for.
So sanctions should have an objective. Financial restrictions should have an objective. Cutting Russian energy out of Europe should have an objective. If Russia meets agreed peace terms, normalization should be available. Otherwise sanctions stop being leverage and become punishment without an exit — and punishment without an exit gives the punished party very little reason to change.
I would end additional American aid as part of a negotiated settlement. Not by waking up tomorrow and telling Ukraine good luck. As part of the deal: security arrangements, territorial arrangements, sanctions relief, economic normalization, and an end to further military financing.
Sooner or later this war ends with terms, and those terms will describe some line on a map. My suspicion is that the eventual line will look much closer to the one that exists now than either side wants to admit publicly.
If I am right, then the question becomes awful and simple.
How many more people have to die before we negotiate over approximately the same line?
What Would Change My Mind
I owe the reader this, because an argument that cannot be moved by evidence is not an argument. It is a posture.
My position rests partly on two claims that can move.
If American oversight improved to the point where large-scale assistance was genuinely transparent and auditable — supported by clean oversight findings rather than repeatedly accompanied by control weaknesses — one of my two major objections would weaken substantially.
And if Ukraine and its backers put forward a settlement I regarded as serious and workable, and Moscow rejected it without a credible counteroffer, I would have to move considerably more responsibility for the continuation of this war onto Moscow. I would have to reconsider where I have landed.
That second condition is now partially in motion, and I have said so above. Ukraine accepted a trilateral format in October 2026 and Russia declined to attend. If the pattern holds — if Kyiv keeps saying yes to formats and Moscow keeps finding reasons not to appear — then the weight of my argument has to shift, and the reader should hold me to that.
But the prior I disclosed constrains what those two conditions can do. If the accounting were fixed and Moscow were plainly the obstacle to peace, I would owe Washington an apology on two specific counts and I would pay it. I would still not think the United States has a vital interest in Ukraine. The reasons would be gone and the position would mostly remain, held up by something the evidence in this essay does not touch.
That is worth saying plainly, because a reader is entitled to know which of my arguments are load-bearing and which are decoration. The accountability argument and the peace argument are real and they moved me. The thing underneath them was set by Iraq and Libya, not by Ukraine.
The strongest case against that view is the one I find hardest to answer. The 1930s. The United States stayed out of a European war on reasoning that sounded much like mine, and the delay did not prevent the war, did not keep Americans out of it, and raised the eventual price enormously. Anyone who believes what I believe has to carry that, and I do.
The best pro-aid argument on this specific war is also worth stating at full strength: that the United States has materially degraded the military of a peer adversary, strengthened its alliances, and revitalized its defense industrial base, at a cost of roughly 2 percent of the annual American defense budget per year and zero American combat deaths. On a pure ledger of national interest, proponents argue it is among the best returns on defense spending in modern history.
I think that argument treats Ukrainian lives as an input, which is my objection to it. But I do not think it is stupid, and anyone who waves it away is not being serious.
What I do not expect to change much is my reading of the thirty years before 2022. The warning-expansion-warning pattern is too well documented for me to expect it to be overturned.
Maybe I am interpreting that pattern incorrectly. If so, that is where the argument should be aimed, and I would rather be argued with there than anywhere else in this essay.
But I no longer believe this war can be understood honestly by beginning the story on February 24, 2022.
The Generator
I want to end where I started. With a man and a machine.
Nick is still in Ukraine. When the grid went down and the temperature dropped, I made some calls, a generator came from Poland, and he kept working and stayed warm.
If he called me tomorrow and told me his power was gone and he was freezing, I would do it again. Immediately. Nothing in this essay would enter into the decision.
Because none of this is his fault. He is not NATO. He is not the State Department. He is not Putin, or Zelensky, or Burisma, or a defense contractor, or the Government Accountability Office.
He is a guy who spent a week driving around Ukraine with an American who had come there to sell rubber hose. He told me about his family. He told me about his country. He showed me a bridge. And then his country became a battlefield for forces much larger than him.
That is the thing I cannot get away from. Every institution in this story had reasons. Washington, NATO, Kyiv, Moscow. Poland and the Baltics certainly had reasons. Defense ministries, Ukrainian protesters, Russian nationalists. Most of them believed those reasons were good.
A catastrophe does not require anyone to intend it. Millions of people pursuing their own interests sensibly will do.
That is the frightening part, because then there is nobody to expose and no single switch to throw. Just a chain of incentives, fears, memories, budgets and decisions.
And at the end of all those reasonable interests is a man like Nick sitting in a cold apartment waiting for the power to come back on.
In 2022 I wanted Ukraine helped. I still do. What I wanted was food and medicine and heat and a hard diplomatic push to end it early. What we got was four years of weapons and a front line that has barely moved.
I never argued any of this with Nick. I did not need to. I offered to get him out of the country and I sent him a generator, and that is the entire shape of what I think helping means.
It does not mean what we have been doing. What we have been doing is sold as weapons, aid, and the sovereignty of a nation state, and those words are all true as far as they go. But the engine underneath them is a contest between Washington and Moscow that Ukraine did not pick, cannot end on its own terms, and is paying for by the hundred thousand.
Call the thing by its name and the help looks different. It stops looking like shipments and starts looking like a table