By Ephraim Agbo
When Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders on 24 February 2022, much of the world saw a straightforward story: a powerful autocrat invaded a sovereign neighbour. That is partly true — the Kremlin’s use of force flagrantly breached the UN Charter and established norms of territorial integrity. But to treat February 2022 as a single, isolated act is to miss the structural backstory that made such a rupture thinkable. It also misses how that backstory is being reworked today by political actors — above all Donald Trump — who insist the war “should never have happened” and at times point the finger at Volodymyr Zelenskyy for failing to prevent it.
Below I trace the long arc — the diplomatic lines, treaty ruptures, military facts and political incentives — and show why Trump’s refrain matters: not because it rewrites what happened on the battlefield, but because it reframes the bargaining table for whatever peace comes next.
The verbal promise that never became law — and why it haunts diplomacy
In February 1990, during the fraught talks over German reunification, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” The phrase appears repeatedly in the contemporary record of those talks and in Gorbachev’s account; for many in Moscow it became a durable political symbol — a promise of restraint the West did not later codify. That symbolic breach became the seedbed for Russian narratives of betrayal.
Why this matters concretely: diplomatic promises that remain oral tend to ossify into grievance whenever later policy diverges. For Russian policymakers the memory of Baker’s line — whether fairly interpreted or not — added moral weight to strategic anxieties about Western intentions.
Enlargement, proximity, and the slow remapping of Europe’s security geography
NATO’s first post-Cold War enlargements (notably in 1999, when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined, and the major wave on 29 March 2004 that added seven more states: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia) shifted the alliance from an Atlantic collective into a pan-European security system that now reached Russia’s borders. For the new members, accession was a defensive strategy; for Moscow, the choreography looked like gradual encirclement. That perception hardened into political doctrine within the Russian security establishment.
This wasn’t only about flags on a map. Membership brought military exercises, interoperability programs, bases and forward infrastructure — all of which Russia interpreted as operational changes, not abstract politics. The strategic psychology — geography as destiny — revived historical Russian fears of invasion from the West and converted them into policy priorities.
The signal events: Kosovo, ABM, INF, and the erosion of mutual restraints
Three moments in particular recalibrated Russian threat calculations:
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Kosovo, 1999. NATO’s air campaign over Serbia, conducted without explicit UN Security Council authorization and including strikes on Belgrade, signalled to Moscow that NATO’s character had broadened toward expeditionary use of force. Many Russian analysts internalized Kosovo as evidence the Alliance was prepared to act unilaterally in Europe.
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U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty (2001–02). The decision to exit the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty removed a bedrock constraint on defensive systems that Moscow feared could, in the long run, degrade its nuclear deterrent.
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The collapse of the INF regime (2019). The U.S. formally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019; with it went a class of legally banned missiles and the political barrier to deploying shorter-range, rapid-reaction strike systems in Europe.
Taken together, these episodes narrowed the decision time available in crises and made worst-case calculations — about surprise, escalation, and counter-force options — more salient for Russian planners.
Ukraine as the faultline: Maidan, Crimea, and the lesson of quick operations
Ukraine’s Maidan uprising in 2014 and the Kremlin’s rapid seizure and annexation of Crimea (with a contested referendum on 16 March 2014) crystallized how quickly Russian power could produce facts on the ground. The UN General Assembly and many Western states condemned the referendum and subsequent annexation as inconsistent with international law. Crimea’s takeover demonstrated a modern playbook of ambiguity, speed and deniability (the so-called “little green men”) that altered defensive calculations in Kyiv and among Western planners.
A leaked phone call between U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, casually discussing preferred Ukrainian leaders, deepened Moscow’s suspicions. Within weeks, Russia annexed Crimea, securing its Black Sea Fleet base, and stirred conflict in Donbas. The line was drawn: Ukraine’s NATO future had become Moscow’s red line.
The message to Moscow’s strategic class was plain: limited, rapid operations could secure strategic objectives (like Sevastopol and the Black Sea Fleet) while creating political complications for a Western military response.
The immediate prelude: force posture and the scale of invasion
By late 2021 and into early 2022 U.S., NATO and independent analysts were publicly warning of substantial Russian force concentrations around Ukraine. Estimates that circulated during the crisis — typically in the 100,000–150,000 range (and in some classified intelligence estimates higher) — were sufficient to make invasion a credible scenario rather than a diplomatic bluff. When Russia moved on 24 February 2022, it did so with a major conventional campaign staged from multiple axes.
That fact — the scale and posture of the invasion force — is crucial because it distinguishes coercive signalling from a deliberate campaign of conquest. The latter, when executed at scale, imposes heavy moral and political costs on outside states that must decide whether to arm, sanction, or negotiate.
If NATO had written binding, Europe-wide security guarantees in the 1990s (e.g., a treaty addressing limits on permanent deployments or that included Russian security guarantees) some Russian security anxieties might have been institutionalized and managed; but those guarantees would have required equal moral and political buy-in from new democracies that feared Russian coercion.
If diplomatic channels in late 2021 had produced a negotiated compromise that delivered substantive, verifiable confidence measures (not absolute renunciation of membership, but limits on certain force postures and stepped transparency), the immediate pre-war escalatory window might have narrowed. But such compromises required political capital Western leaders were reluctant to spend and guarantees Moscow was unlikely to trust without enforcement mechanisms.
Enter Donald Trump: reframing blame, bargaining, and the politics of exit
Against this structural background, Donald Trump’s repeated refrain that the war “should never have happened” and his public suggestions that Zelenskyy could have made a deal perform several political functions simultaneously.
First, they refract the long-run narrative: if the origin story of the war can be told as a failure of Ukrainian choices (for example, a refusal to make concessions in 2014 or 2022), then the onus for peacemaking shifts away from external actors and away from the Kremlin’s decision to invade. That rhetorical move is potent because it recasts Ukraine from victim to agent of its fate.
Second, Trump’s posture is transactional and strategic. Multiple reports and his public statements show that his peace proposals — and those of envoys aligned with him — favour rapid negotiated settlements that would likely include Ukrainian concessions on NATO aspirations and possibly recognition of some territorial changes made by Russia. Those proposals appeal to an American political constituency that wants to reduce U.S. military exposure and costs, and to shorten America’s global commitments.
Third, the rhetoric has immediate diplomatic effect: it loosens the political will in Western capitals to sustain long-term military aid or sanctions if they fear the U.S. may pivot toward a negotiated deal that accepts Russian gains. In multilateral bargaining, the prospect of U.S. withdrawal is itself leverage for Moscow.
But why blame Zelenskyy? The politics behind the claim
Blaming Zelenskyy performs two domestic functions for Trump:
- It delegitimizes a leader who relied on U.S. support, thereby simplifying the political calculus of cutting aid or pressing for concessions.
- It offers a neat pro-Russian message: wars caused by avoidable mistakes are avoidable costs — and the president who caused should be blamed for the cost. So, blame the lost territory on Zelenskyy.
Internationally, the claim also dovetails with a pragmatic strand of diplomacy that values immediate cessation of hostilities over long-term restitution. But the legal and moral counterweight is stark: Russia’s invasion was an act of cross-border force; democratic restraint or political miscalculation in Kyiv did not give Moscow legal license to seize territory.
Where this rhetorical shift matters for outcomes
Framing the war as “preventable” through Ukrainian concessions does not change the battlefield facts, but it changes the bargaining architecture:
- If Western unity frays and the U.S. pursues a deal that accepts major Russian gains, the long-term price could be a weaker deterrent in Europe and a legitimization of territorial revision by force.
- If Western states hold firm on principles — non-recognition, sustained aid, sanctions — a negotiated settlement that restores core Ukrainian sovereignty becomes more plausible, but at the cost of prolonging conflict and further human suffering. It could also mean the lost of more territory for Kyiv.
- If the U.S. courts a separate détente with Russia that sidelines Ukraine, Kyiv’s leverage collapses and new regional arrangements will be written by the balance of force, not by multilateral, rights-based settlements. But it could also mean saving Zelenskyy from making more mistakes.
Trump’s stance matters not simply for its take on history or its claims about averting a world war, but because it opens up a realistic space where a settlement becomes possible.
The moral arithmetic of bargaining
The war’s root causes are structural and cumulative: unformalized promises, alliance enlargement, the erosion of arms-control regimes, and the Kremlin’s willingness to exploit ambiguity and speed. But the politics of blame — today personified by Trump’s refrain that the war “should never have happened” and by his public urging that Ukraine “make a deal” — are consequential. They don’t deny Russia’s responsibility for invasion, but they reshape the bargaining environment for an exit strategy.
If you must take away one lesson, let it be this: wars do not end merely on moral verdicts. They end by bargains. The content of those bargains will be shaped by facts on the ground, by multilateral unity, and by the dominant political narrative about who is responsible. If the dominant narrative slides toward blaming Kyiv, the price of peace will likely include territorial and political concessions that, once made, are hard to reverse. If the narrative remains focused on the initial aggression, sustained support for Ukrainian sovereignty, costly may be too high.
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