Ukraine: the war nobody saw coming (except everyone who warned about it)

Let's start with the part that should be uncontroversial and somehow isn't: recognising that this war was provoked is not the same as justifying it. Understanding how the fire started is usually considered helpful for putting it out. Usually. For years the Russian government warned the West about red lines that were not negotiable — warnings that collided head-on with Washington's standing imperial habit and its project of influencing and steering every 'democracy' on the planet.

The archives are unambiguous: American and German officials repeatedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move 'not one inch eastward' when the Warsaw Pact dissolved. US planning for NATO expansion then began in the early 1990s — years before anyone in Washington had heard the name Vladimir Putin. By 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski had published the expansion timetable with impressive precision. A promise, a plan to break it, and a schedule. Efficient.

Nor was this some fringe Russian talking point. George Kennan — the architect of containment, hardly a Kremlin romantic — called expansion 'a fateful error' in the New York Times, predicting it would inflame nationalist and anti-Western currents in Russia, damage Russian democracy and restore the Cold War. In 2008, the US ambassador in Moscow — a certain William Burns, today the director of the CIA — cabled Washington that pushing NATO membership for Ukraine could split the country and, in the worst case, force Russia to decide on intervention. The men who best understood the risk kept writing it down, and the policy kept sailing on. Curious.

Kyiv understood too. Zelensky's own adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said flatly in 2019 that 'our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.' Yanukovych ran a policy of neutrality in line with Ukrainian opinion at the time — until the leaked Nuland–Pyatt call captured Washington sketching the composition of the post-Yanukovych government weeks before Yanukovych fell, with Nuland coordinating, on tape, with then vice-president Biden and his adviser Jake Sullivan. The same trio later ran Ukraine policy from the White House. Small world.

After 2014 came war in the Donbass, Crimea annexed, NATO weapons and training flowing in, and in 2021 a fresh reaffirmation that Ukraine's future was in the alliance. Putin's draft treaty of December 2021 demanded a halt to enlargement; his speeches in February 2022 named it as a central casus belli. You may consider that pretext rather than reason — but nobody can claim the subject arrived out of nowhere.

Then the detail that deserves its own chapter: in March 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators reported real progress towards a quick end built on Ukrainian neutrality. Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister who mediated, has said an agreement was close before the US, UK and France chose to block it — Kyiv's Western friends deciding the war should continue, presumably out of deep concern for Ukrainians. The historian Geoffrey Roberts asks whether an agreement suspending enlargement and neutralising Ukraine, with solid guarantees of its sovereignty, could have avoided the whole thing, and answers: quite possibly.

Why won't Washington discuss any of this? Three unappealing consequences. Admitting the war might have been avoided — or stopped in month one — invites questions about the devastation since, and about the several hundred billion dollars in Western spending, a sum audited with all the rigour you'd expect. It shines a light on the current president's decades as NATO expansion's cheerleader and on his team's fingerprints from 2014. And it would put everyone at a negotiating table, which is terrible news if your business model is an arms industry with a permanent war to point at. Follow the incentives; they rarely lie.

The official adjective for the invasion is 'unprovoked' — a word chosen with the care of a legal team rather than a historian. Yet through 2021 it was Moscow tabling diplomatic options to avoid war while Washington waved them off, insisting Russia had no say whatsoever in the question of NATO enlargement — its own security environment being, apparently, none of its business. And in March 2022 it was the Russian and Ukrainian delegations producing a draft, while Biden's team helped bury it. Twice offered a diplomatic exit, twice preferring the highway: at some point the pattern becomes the policy.

Accept that enlargement sits at the centre of this war and one conclusion follows uncomfortably: American weaponry will not end it. Russia has shown it will escalate as far as it must to keep Ukraine out of NATO — that is what a core security interest means. The road to peace runs through negotiations built on Ukrainian neutrality and non-enlargement, with real guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty. Washington's insistence on the opposite has made Ukraine the victim of ill-conceived and unachievable military ambitions dressed up as solidarity. It is time for the provocations to stop and for negotiation to restore the peace — a proposal so radical it merely reflects what the negotiators themselves nearly signed in month one.

To be fair to the other side of the argument: serious people maintain that Putin's imperial ambitions, not NATO, drove this war, and that enlargement was the free choice of sovereign nations who know their neighbour. Weigh both. My point is narrower — the men who warned this exact scenario into the record for thirty years were not Russian propagandists; they were American diplomats, strategists and ambassadors. Read them, then decide who was doing the propaganda.