How Biden Helped Bring War to Ukraine
Three years after Russia’s invasion, it’s time for the US to revisit the roots of the crisis.
Note: The article below is a kind of landmark—NZN’s first ever piece by an outside contributor. The contributor, Leonid Ragozin, is a journalist based in Latvia who has written for The Guardian, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and other outlets. We’ll be experimenting with outside contributions in the coming months—slowly, at first, but maybe the pace will pick up if readers like the idea. So tell us what you think in the comment section below! And if, after you read the piece, you want to learn more about Leonid, you can listen to two podcast conversations I’ve had with him—one of them a year ago and the other a bit earlier.
—Bob
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.
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