Editor’s Note: Donald Trump has shown his worst side in his second ascension to the presidency. Because of that, it is now fashionable to reject his approach to ending the Ukraine War, embrace Ukraine’s leader, and focus on the self-serving aspects of what Trump proposes. However, as Jack Matlock explains, it may be that Trump will find a way to end the killing and destruction in Ukraine by using some of the very tools we have been pressing for since the war began. Consider what MATLOCK says (first article) and review JOE LURIA’S timeline of the events that led us to where we are now (second article). You may change your mind – not about Trump as a whole – but perhaps about what he is doing with regard to Ukraine.
Trump and the Viable Road to Peace in Ukraine
By Jack F. Matlock Jr.
‘I did not vote for him and have been critical of most of his moves. But in regard to the war…I believe he is on the right track’
Finally, there is a prospect for bringing the war in Ukraine to an end. President Trump and his foreign policy team have created the conditions for a negotiated end to the war, replacing a fundamentally flawed and dangerous set of policies adopted by his predecessors including, ironically, the Donald Trump of his first administration.
This is true even after the very public blowout in the Oval Office on Feb. 28. What brought on Trump’s ire was Zelensky’s comments on the minerals deal and then his repeated complaints about negotiating with Putin, something Trump has made clear he will do. Trump had apparently expected a quick signing ceremony to convince Ukraine supporters in his own party like Senator Lindsey Graham — who were invited to witness — that a negotiated peace would be advantageous to the United States. When Zelensky turned the meeting into a debating session and aroused Trump’s memories of the bogus “Russiagate” charges that plagued his first administration, Trump reacted predictably.
Indeed, anyone interested in peace rather than the threat of nuclear war should be congratulating President Trump. After all, if the war does end and Russia is brought back into cooperative economic relations with Europe and the United States, everyone will benefit. If the war and the attempted isolation of Russia continues, all will suffer and cooperation to deal with common problems such as environmental degradation, mass migration and international financial crime will become impossible.
I say this not as a Trump supporter — I did not vote for him and have been critical of most of his moves. But in regard to the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia, I believe he is on the right track.
My judgments are based on decades of diplomatic experience negotiating the end of the Cold War and on a close knowledge of both Ukraine and Russia, their languages and their history. I am proud that my generation of diplomats achieved a Europe whole and free by peaceful negotiation. I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.
President Trump’s restoration of the diplomacy that President Reagan and the first President Bush used to end the Cold War should be welcomed. Reestablishment of direct communication between the Russian and American presidents is an essential precondition for any settlement.
The agenda announced by Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov after their meeting in Riyadh makes sense: (1) expansion of diplomatic capacity between the U.S. and Russia, dangerously eroded by a series of mutual expulsions, (2) cooperation on common geopolitical and commercial interests, and (3) ending the war in Ukraine.
Days before the agreement was announced in Riyadh, Vice President Vance and Secretary of Defense Hegseth made policy statements at the Wehrkunde conference in Munich that raised the ire of some European allies and prominent politicians and journalists in the United States.
In fact, these comments were either statements of fact (Ukraine is not a member of NATO) or of policy adjustments that are not only essential if the war is to end but in fact would have prevented the war if they had been adopted by earlier presidents: (Ukraine will not become a member of NATO; direct American involvement in the fighting will end; the U.S. will not act to protect European NATO forces deployed in Ukraine.)
If these had been the policies of previous American administrations, the war in Ukraine would not have occurred. They are not capitulations in advance or appeasement as some critics have charged. They get at the roots of the war.
President Zelensky, French president Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, among others have objected to Trump’s plan to negotiate with Russia first, then bring in the others. Actually, bilateral talks between the U.S. and Russia make sense. Former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin let the cat out of the bag when he observed that the purpose of supporting Ukraine was to weaken Russia. That policy has to end if there is to be peace in Europe in the future and it must be negotiated by the U.S. and Russia.
This is exactly the procedure used by the first Bush administration to negotiate the unification of Germany. In 1990 the United States first engaged in bilateral talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before referring the agreements to the other four parties involved in German unification: Britain and France because of their rights in agreements that ended World War II, and the two German states directly affected. The other parties were kept informed of these negotiations as they progressed and all accepted the outcome.
As a participant in these negotiations, I can testify that assurances were given to Gorbachev orally by the American secretary of state, James Baker, that NATO jurisdiction would not move to the east if the Soviets agreed to let East Germany join West Germany on conditions specified by West Germany. Soviet approval was required because of agreements that ended
World War II. Declassified documents now available also show that British prime minister, John Major, and also the West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, gave similar assurances. In fact, it had been Genscher’s idea.
It is these assurances to which President Vladimir Putin refers repeatedly as broken promises. Although they were not formalized in a treaty, they were promises and they have been broken. President Putin is neither lying nor engaging in baseless propaganda when he says so.
It is often alleged that Russia has nothing to fear from NATO because it is purely a defensive alliance. Yes, it was conceived as a defensive alliance to protect Western Europe from an attack by the Soviet Union. But, after Eastern Europe was liberated and the Soviet Union shattered into fifteen countries, Russia was not a threat or even a potential threat. In the late 1990s NATO began to be used as an offensive alliance.
Proposals to construct a security structure for Europe that would protect all countries were simply sidelined by the United States and its allies. None seemed to ask what they would do if the shoe were on the other foot and how they would react to the prospect of military bases by a hostile alliance on their borders.
If American behavior throughout its history as an independent state is any guide, the prospect of military bases controlled by a foreign power near its borders — in fact, anywhere in the Western Hemisphere — has been a casus belli if not removed.
The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 provided an illustration of how the United States reacts to a perceived threat from abroad. I was stationed in the American Embassy in Moscow when the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba and have vivid memories of this crisis.
I translated some of the messages Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent to President John F. Kennedy. If Khrushchev had not backed down and removed the missiles, Kennedy would have attacked, but if he did local commanders could have launched nuclear missiles against Miami and other cities with the U.S. responding with strikes on the Soviet Union. So Kennedy made a deal: you take your missiles off Cuba and I will remove ours in Turkey. It worked, and the world breathed easier.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was initiated by President Putin because he believed, with reason, that the United States was trying to draw Ukraine into a hostile military alliance. Therefore, in his eyes it was provoked. In 2003 the United States invaded, devastated and occupied Iraq when Iraq posed no threat to the United States. So now, how is it that the U.S. and its allies are conducting an all-but-declared war against Russia for crimes they themselves have not only committed, but have committed with less provocation? The pot is calling the kettle black and trying to damage it.
This is not to justify the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Far from it. It is a catastrophe for both nations and its effects will be felt for generations, but the killing must stop if Europe is to deal effectively with the many challenges it confronts now.
We cannot know what deal President Trump has in mind or how President Putin will respond. The negotiations will be difficult and, most likely, lengthy. But, at last, the American president has defined a viable road to peace and the Russian president has greeted this effort. This is a welcome start of a process Americans and Europeans should support.
Jack F. Matlock, Jr. is a career diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991. Prior to that he was Senior Director for European and Soviet Affairs on President Reagan’s National Security Council staff and was U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1981-1983.
This article was published on March 3, 2025 at Responsible Statecraft.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale
Without historical context, which is buried by corporate media, it’s impossible to understand Ukraine. Historians will tell the story, but journalists are cut short for trying to tell it now.
May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.
Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets.
It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.
Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.
But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded these same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.
THE UKRAINE TIMELINE
World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.
1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.
November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.
Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.
1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.
1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”
New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.
Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.
Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.
He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.
2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”
April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,
“Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”
A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.
November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.
“I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.
2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.
2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.
February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.
Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)
March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turn out. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”
April 12, 2014: Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.
May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.
Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.
Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.
2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.
May 12, 2016: U.S. activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.
June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.
German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”
Instead Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”
December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO reject them essentially out of hand.
February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.
Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.
March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
May 2023: Ukraine begins counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.
June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.
September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.
Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance in a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.
February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents, and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.
This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
This article was published on Februrary 25, 2025 at Consortium News.