Most wars, perhaps all of them, are unnecessary; the Ukraine-Russia war tragically and egregiously so. From James Carden at antiwar.com:
Asked about the state of the war in Ukraine during a press gaggle last night on Air Force One, President Trump responded that the war is “a horrible thing that never should have started.”
That war is horrible is an idea that seems lost on the Democratic foreign policy elite which, since Obama’s election in 2008, has gotten us into one foreign war after another. And the war in Ukraine has been particularly horrible – the largest and deadliest war in Europe since the Second World War, it has taken the lives of roughly a million Ukrainians and Russians.
That it was entirely preventable only compounds the horror.
So what happened?
Vladislav Surkov has an answer that is as good as any. In a rare interview with the French newspaper L’Express last week, Surkov, once counted as among Putin’s closest and most influential aides, noted that, with regard to relations between Russia and Ukraine,
…Peaceful cooperation was prevented by two Western-backed coups in Ukraine, in 2005 and 2014. In both cases, Ukrainians were illegally subjected to the rule of an aggressive minority, motivated by the legends of a politicized ethnography and the mirages of European integration. This minority led Ukraine into war.”
After 8 years (2014-2022) of fighting between the Western-backed junta government in Kiev and Russian-backed insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk, the Russian president launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine.
But, as Trump noted, the war did not have to happen. That it did happen is a remarkable failure of diplomacy, imagination and strategic empathy on the part of President Biden and his national security team. It is a failure one hopes history will hold against them, should they be remembered at all.
