US mum on Russian invasion of Ukraine as Trump seeks deals
Walking from the State Department yesterday, I had the unsettling feeling that we had entered the plot of one of those dystopian alternate history novels, like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
That daily life could look recognizably the same from what we were used to. The buildings, the weather, the traffic activity.
But there was a disturbing sense of fundamental change in the central consciousness of the government, from one that previously possessed a value system of recognizing good versus evil, allies versus adversaries; to one that now denied or eschewed moral values, and increasingly was open to siding with evil and adversaries, in the interest of supposed “peace” and the prospective acquisition of mineral rights.
What prompted the acute sense of a moral chasm in the U.S. government was a background briefing that State Department officials had given to explain why the United States was pushing a three paragraph resolution at the United Nations that day that did not recognize the central fact that Russia had launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
“Mourning the tragic loss of life throughout the Russian Federation-Ukraine conflict,” the United Nations “implores a swift end to the conflict and further urges a lasting peace between Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” the U.S.-drafted text, entitled “the Path to Peace,” said.
The United States would veto any proposed amendments to the resolution, including those by Ukraine and European allies that sought to condemn Russia for starting it and recognizing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the U.S. officials said.
“The intent is to keep the resolution noise free, thin, and to the basics of what the President wants us to do, which is use the United Nations to find a way to peace,” a State Department official said.
“So while our partners…would like to debate the entire situation now, we are much more focused on just getting the parties to the table, so that whatever the next step is can be undertaken,” the official said.
After I left the State Department, I went to the White House to attend the press conference of visiting French President Emmanuel Macron and President Trump.
“My administration is making a decisive break with the foreign policy failures of the past administration, and frankly the past,” Trump said. “I ran against a very foolish foreign policy establishment, and their recklessness has led to the death of many, many people.”
“Under our administration, we are forging a new path that promotes peace around the world,” he said.
Trump repeated that he thinks, without evidence, that Russian President Putin wants peace. And he said he was working on economic deals with Putin.
[Putin, in a state TV interview Monday, dangled an offer for US-Russian “joint projects” to mine minerals and other resources in Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation. Russia “undoubtedly has, I want to emphasize, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine,” Putin said.]
“I’ve spoken to President Putin, and my people are dealing with them constantly, and his people in particular, and they want to do something,” Trump said at the news conference with Macron, referring to economic deals with Russia in the works. “They want to end this war. …And we’re working on deals right now, transactions right now, and…to get the war stopped, whether a ceasefire or direct to an agreement.”
Macron said while he normally favors discussions with other leaders including when they have disagreements, he cut off talks with Putin after Russia committed war crimes in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in 2022, because the talks were not producing anything positive.
Now, with the new US administration, there is a new context. “So, there is a good reason for President Trump to reengage with President Putin,” he said.
But, Macron continued, he also shared with President Trump and his team his experience when France and Germany helped oversee implementation of the Minsk accords after Russian-backed separatists seized territory in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Russia violated the agreements because of the lack of credible security guarantees, he said.
“Because of the lack of…security guarantees, President Putin violated the deal,” Macron said. “And I had several discussions, especially at the beginning of 2022,… with President Putin. Fifteen days before launching the attack, he denied everything.”
“So this is why, being strong and having [lethal] capacities is the only way to be sure it will be respected,” Macron said of any future peace agreement reached with Russia.
As Macron and Trump met in Washington, the UN held votes in New York on resolutions connected to the third anniversary of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine.
At the UN General Assembly yesterday morning, the United States was among only 11 mostly rogue states like North Korea, Russia and Belarus that voted against a European resolution that blamed Russia for the invasion and which reaffirmed support for Ukraine’s sovereignty. In the afternoon, the United States voted with Russia and China to see its resolution pass in the UN Security Council 10 to 0, with five European allies abstaining.
“This is a war that Putin said would take three days,” Britain’s ambassador to the UN Barbara Woodward told the UN Security Council. “Three years on, Ukrainians have paid a terrible price.”
While Britain would support the negotiation and implementation of a robust peace agreement that protects Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, “there needs to be a lasting and just peace…that shows that aggression does not pay,” Woodward said. “Putin, by contrast, only wants capitulation.”
“Putin has repeatedly shown that he will break a weak deal,” she warned.
Creeping U.S. neutrality
By contrast, the language from U.S. officials under the Trump administration has a disturbing kind of moral erasure, and amnesia about it. There is a creeping neutrality in the language that the briefing reinforced was deliberate and apparently seen to be in the interest of advancing a peace process.
Note that American officials no longer say the “Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
They talk about the “Russia-Ukraine war.”
“This Monday, February 24, will mark three years of the Russia-Ukraine war,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement last Friday.
“This war has now dragged on for far long, and at far too terrible a cost to Ukraine and Russia,” Rubio continued, in language that posits the victim and aggressor as equally suffering and morally equal. That removes any sense of agency for the war at all.
Contrast that with Rubio three years ago:
“The world will become a very scary place if we allow thugs like Putin to invade sovereign nations without severe consequence,” then Senator Rubio said in 2022 when introducing a bill to sanction Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. “We must be clear and unyielding in our support for the Ukrainian people’s fight against a merciless tyrant, and that begins with calling his actions for what they are—an act of terrorism.”
The world has indeed become a scarier place as the Trump administration appears to be on course to allow thugs like Putin to invade sovereign nations without severe consequence, and as Trump openly mulls making new business deals with Putin.
(Photo: French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Donald Trump met at the White House on February 24, 2025, the third anniversary of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine. Brian Snyder/Reuters.)
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