A year ago this week, Presidents Trump and Putin met in Alaska and reached a general agreement for ending the Ukraine War. But now it’s dead in the water.
Russia says it feels betrayed by the U.S. reneging on the agreement for a diplomatic settlement of this horrific war. Instead, the U.S. continues providing Ukraine with billions of dollars of military, financial, and intelligence assistance, including for its increased long-range drone attacks on Russia.
Russia is now responding by casting most restraints aside and going for an outright military victory. It is intensely bombing the major port facilities and transportation infrastructure of Odessa and nearby smaller port cities, as well as imposing a blockade in the Black Sea on shipping in and out of these ports. These actions will soon strangle what’s left of the Ukrainian export economy and restrict its flow of arms imports.
The Russians are also escalating their missile and drone attacks on military targets in Kiev and other cities. Ukraine has little effective air defense capability left after four and a half years of war.
So the damage done by Russia’s attacks far surpasses what Ukraine is able to do with its long-range drone strikes deep into Russia. And the U.S. and NATO don’t have any Patriot interceptor missiles to spare; our inventory has been emptied by sending Patriots to Ukraine for the past four and a half years and using them in the current war against Iran.
While the recent 81st anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should remind us of the horrors of these weapons and lead us to pursue diplomacy rather than military aggression to resolve differences, instead the world today is closer than ever to a civilization-ending apocalypse. The war in Ukraine remains the most dangerous potential flashpoint of international conflict that could escalate into nuclear war between the US/NATO and Russia.
In February, Trump refused the most important diplomatic step he could have taken to reduce tensions with Russia and the risk of nuclear war. The START Treaty was expiring after 40 years of successfully limiting the growth of nuclear weapons. Putin offered to extend the treaty by one year while negotiating a new one, but Trump didn’t even respond.
No matter what anyone thinks about the Ukraine War, Putin’s invasion, and Russia in general, we should all raise our voices in alarm and demand immediate talks between the U.S. and Russia. We must call on Trump and Congress to extend the START treaty limits rather than plunge us into an enormously expensive and dangerous nuclear arms race.
This month is also the 5th anniversary of the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, and the end of our 20-year debacle in attempted regime change there. We can recall that the sudden Taliban sweep across the country and the capture of the capital came as a shock, after years of being told that we were winning the war.
I fear the same is happening in Ukraine. We’re told that Ukraine’s drone attacks in Russia are turning the tide in its favor, when in reality Russia keeps slowly pushing the Ukrainian army out of the Donbas, while threatening to do the same in other regions of eastern and southern Ukraine, such as around the cities of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Odessa. For confirmation of this analysis, read/view anything recently by renowned Professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, or retired Col Daniel Davis.
Ukraine has suffered horrific losses of soldiers, millions of displaced refugees, and an increasingly devastated country. A recent Gallup poll showed that the majority of the population wants the war to end as soon as possible, through a negotiated settlement rather than continued escalation and war, even if such a peace agreement means significant concessions in the face of military reality.
Another sign of the Ukrainian people’s exhaustion is the serious desertion rate in the army, and the resistance of thousands of its men to the brutal forced conscription raids, by hiding in their homes, paying huge bribes, or trying to escape across the borders. (See reports by Ukrainian Professors Ivan Katchanovski, in Canada, and Marta Havryshko, in the U.S.)
It’s time to urge Ukraine and Russia to negotiate a peace agreement that respects the security concerns of both sides. The U.S. should stop supporting Ukraine with billions of dollars of arms, intelligence, targeting, and other military assistance that will prolong and escalate the war. We need those tax dollars for urgent domestic priorities, not for endless wars abroad.
At the same time, we should sit down at the table with the Russians and talk about how to live together, despite our differences, with far fewer – and eventually no – nuclear weapons and more cooperation to tackle the other common threats we face, such as the climate emergency and AI.
Contact your U.S. Senators, Representatives, and Trump, and call on them to act urgently, support peace through negotiations, and not risk nuclear war through escalation.
By John Berkowitz
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John Berkowitz is a member of MAPA’s Peace in Ukraine Campaign.