Spodaj je dobra kronologija dogodkov, ki so vodili do začetka vojne v Ukrajini. Napisal jo je Leonid Ragozin, novinar iz Latvije, ki je pisal za The Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeero itd. Splača se prebrati, ker pomaga razumeti, kdaj in zakaj je prišlo do preobrata v politiki Zelenskega glede mirne rešitve državljanske vojne v Donbasu in kakšna je bila vloga Trumpa in Bidna pri tem ter zakaj je Trump glede Ukrajine mirovnik. Vse stvari, ki se zgodijo, imajo zelo dolg rep.

(Drugje v slovenskih medijih tega seveda ne boste zasledili. Z razlogom)

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Last month, Donald Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the war in Ukraine “would never have started” if he’d been president. At first blush, this seemed like a classic Trumpian boast—yet another off-hand exaggeration from the mind that brought us statements like “I alone can fix it” and “nobody’s ever done a better job than I’m doing as president.” But, in this case, Trump may well be right. A close examination of the events leading up to the Ukraine war suggests that the conflict would have been avoided if Trump had defeated Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Trump pursued plenty of tough policies toward Moscow during his first term, including the imposition of new sanctions and expulsion of a number of Russian diplomats, but he also acted as a restraint on the hawkishness of Washington’s security establishment. Such moderation ceased under Trump’s successor. As soon as Joe Biden moved into the White House, Washington adopted a far more confrontational stance toward Russia. Kyiv followed suit. This was a fateful pivot, one that has received too little attention in stories of the conflict. By insisting on a policy of high-handed intransigence, Biden and the hawks in Washington led millions of people into disaster.

In April 2019, during the third year of Trump’s first presidency, Ukrainians elected Volodymyr Zelensky as their new president. The former comedian had no background in government, but he ran on a clear and popular promise: to end a grinding, low-intensity war in eastern Ukraine. That war had begun in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea, and pro-Russian separatists—backed by Moscow—seized control of parts of eastern Ukraine. Unlike his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, a favorite of the Washington foreign policy establishment, Zelensky presented himself as a peacemaker and pragmatist. He promised to respect the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population (of which he was part) and pledged to negotiate directly with Moscow to bring about an end to the fighting.

For his first year and a half in office, Zelensky acted on those promises. In July of 2019, he spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone and pushed for negotiations with European mediation. The two men also discussed a potential exchange of prisoners. In December 2019, Zelensky met with Putin in Paris, and the two agreed to negotiate a comprehensive ceasefire. By March of 2020, Zelensky was so optimistic about reaching a settlement that he told the Guardian he would end the conflict by December of that year.

From the start, though, Zelensky’s peacemaking faced resistance, both within Ukraine and abroad. At home, nationalist paramilitary groups and parts of the state security establishment regarded any concessions to Russia as betrayal. Overseas, Zelensky’s outreach to Moscow alarmed parts of the US national security establishment. Washington had developed deep ties to Kyiv in the years since 2015, when the CIA began helping to rebuild Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as HUR, from the ground up. (The Washington Post published an extensive report on the collaboration in 2023, and the New York Times did so in 2024.) By 2020, Ukraine had established CIA-supported listening stations along its borders with Russia. As soon as Zelensky came into office, officials from Washington discouraged him from reaching out to Moscow. “Don’t get sucked in,” came the warning in 2019 from US Ambassador William Taylor.

In this mix of forces, Trump was a wildcard. Unlike most of the hawks who surrounded him, Trump had no great fear of Russia and had no objection to Zelensky and Putin reaching a deal. But he took little interest in Ukraine for its own sake and could not be relied upon for military or economic support. Then, in his first extended phone call with Zelensky, in July of 2019, President Trump used the occasion to pressure Zelensky into opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, over their dealings in Ukraine. This exchange leaked and triggered an impeachment of Trump, who was accused of abusing his power. (Trump was acquitted by a Republican-controlled Senate in February of 2020.)

While Zelensky stayed out of US politics as much as he could, the impeachment trial created hostility between himself and Trump. It also pushed Zelensky toward Washington’s hawks, who, while hostile to Zelensky’s peace agenda, were also Ukraine’s strongest advocates. These included people like former US Army officer Alexander Vindman, then the director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, and former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who had been removed from her post by Trump in 2019. They had Zelensky’s ear, because they had significant influence on US policy toward Ukraine and had spent a lot of their time there.

Nevertheless, Zelensky stuck to his approach of pursuing peace up until Trump’s final weeks in office. In the summer of 2020, after restraining military intelligence from launching a covert operation to capture Russian mercenaries, Zelensky led Ukraine into a ceasefire with Russia. Although Russian proxies occasionally violated the terms of the ceasefire, and Zelensky was becoming more distrustful of Moscow, fighting in eastern Ukraine slowed dramatically, and the number of casualties plummeted.

By the end of 2020, there were no signs that a major war would break out between Russia and Ukraine, and Putin had good reasons to be optimistic about the big picture. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which was designed to transport Russian natural gas directly to Germany and bypass Ukraine, was nearing completion, potentially depriving Kyiv of transit fees and giving Moscow more leverage in its relationship with Ukraine. An opposition party led by Viktor Medvedchuk, a Putin ally, was also gaining in popularity, polling ahead of Zelensky’s party. Three television stations owned by Medvedchuk operated freely, broadcasting content favorable to their owner. In short, things were going Russia’s way. Putin had no incentive to take on a large-scale invasion and risk sacrificing his country’s political, economic and security interests in the bargain.

Enter Joe Biden.

Months before assuming the presidency in January 2021, Biden had signaled that he would take a more confrontational stance toward Russia, garnering headlines like “Biden’s hardline Russia reset.” In his first foreign policy speech on February 4, 2021, Biden declared an end to the “days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions.” Washington’s hawks were also riding high in the wake of a key development in late 2020, when Azerbaijan emerged victorious from its war against Russian-backed Armenia, thanks largely to drones supplied to Azerbaijan by NATO member Turkey. Armenia’s defeat made a proxy war against Russia look winnable.

Zelensky’s political calculations were changing, too. Medvedchuk’s party posed a threat on one side, and Ukrainian nationalists did so on the other side. With Washington also sympathetic to Ukraine’s nationalists, Zelensky decided that he needed a new approach. This took the form of an abrupt U-turn in his stance toward Russia. In January of 2021, Zelensky launched a campaign to join NATO, pushing for a clear membership plan. “Why is Ukraine still not in NATO?” Zelensky asked in an HBO interview, appealing directly to Biden. Shortly after that, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba reinforced Zelensky’s argument in an op-ed published by the Atlantic Council that argued for a definitive path to NATO membership.

In early February, Zelensky took another dramatic action, imposing sanctions that effectively shut down three television channels associated with Medvedchuk—112 Ukraine, NewsOne, and ZIK. The channels, it was alleged, were spreading Russian disinformation, and Zelensky enacted the measures through the National Security and Defense Council, bypassing the judicial system. The Kremlin criticized Zelensky’s moves as extrajudicial and contrary to the rule of law. The US Embassy in Kyiv, by contrast, tweeted out its support for the sanctions, applauding what it called the “efforts yesterday to counter Russia’s malign influence.” Zelensky also announced the launch of the Crimea Platform, an international initiative aimed at coordinating efforts to end Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

In late March 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin began massing troops along Ukraine’s border and setting off alarm bells internationally. The tensions appeared to ease after Biden met with Putin on June 16 at the Geneva Summit, a high-level diplomatic effort aimed at reducing hostilities. Just a week later, though, tensions flared once more, when the British warship HMS Defender sailed near Russian-occupied Crimea in an area that Moscow claimed as its own territorial waters. The UK described the move as a freedom of navigation operation, while Russia saw it as a deliberate provocation.

In the coming months, the US and Ukraine further strengthened their military ties. In late August, the two countries’ defense ministers signed a “Defense Framework” agreement, which emphasized greater interoperability between Ukrainian and NATO forces. In September (as recently revealed by Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken), the United States began secretly sending weapons to Ukraine, a decision that increased Ukraine’s defensive capabilities but undoubtedly heightened Moscow’s agitation. Meanwhile, Ukraine, the US, and Poland appeared to be working together to block the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which kept running into legal and technical delays.

The biggest escalation came in November 2021, when the United States and Ukraine signed a new Strategic Partnership Charter, in which the US reaffirmed its support for Ukraine’s goal of NATO membership, pledging to back its aspirations “free from foreign interference.” The eminent historian of Russia Robert Service would later tell the Wall Street Journal that this declaration was “the last straw” for Putin and the crowning example of the West’s “shambolic mismanagement” of the NATO issue in the year prior to the invasion. The Kremlin had long declared Ukraine’s potential NATO membership to be a red line, and Putin now launched a massive escalation of the troop buildup at the border, preparing in earnest for war. In December 2021, when Putin demanded that Ukraine be barred from joining NATO and sought legal guarantees to that effect, the Biden administration rejected his demands. It was the point of no return. Less than three months later, all discussion was over.

Americans can reasonably say that Putin bears ultimate responsibility for having launched his invasion of Ukraine, a clear violation of international law. But that doesn’t absolve other parties of all blame, especially when prudence on their part could have prevented the full-scale war from erupting in the first place. From his very first days in office, Biden did things that encouraged events in Ukraine to spin out of control. He persisted in an experiment to coerce Putin into accepting geopolitical shifts he viewed as both threatening and humiliating. Trump would almost certainly not have done this. Beyond his desire to have friendlier relations with Moscow, Trump also felt antagonism toward the Ukraine-focused hawks in Washington—tensions that would only have grown in the wake of efforts to impeach him. And Trump’s relationship with Zelensky would have been strained at best. Absent backing from Washington, Zelensky would never have dared to make a U-turn and pursue a belligerent approach toward Russia. The trajectory toward a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow might well have been sustained.

Now that Trump, improbably, is back in the White House, a way out of the war is likelier than it was before. The terms, however, are unlikely to favor Kyiv. Trump’s administration has indicated that Ukraine will have to accept a major loss of territory, dashing the hopes of millions of Ukrainians, especially the families of those who died to prevent such an outcome. Zelensky cannot count much on the power of personal chemistry with Trump, either. In recent weeks, Trump has called Zelensky “no angel” and suggested that the Ukrainian leader’s “poll numbers aren’t particularly great, to put it mildly,” while Zelensky, in a clear swipe at Trump, told the Munich Security Conference that he would reject any “deals made behind our backs.”

In short, whatever arrangement winds up ending the war will feel like a bitter defeat for Ukraine, which has lost so much and gained so little. The alternative approach, however, is to keep fighting in the hope that Russia will somehow collapse from strain in a conflict that it is now winning. That would be a mad strategy, only prolonging a catastrophe that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed the infrastructure of Ukraine. Any sort of peace, however imperfect, would be a welcome relief from the carnage—a three-year bloodbath that Trump’s predecessor should have prevented.

Vir: Leonid Ragozin; NonZero