The war in Ukraine is not ending the way the U.S.-led West had hoped. Russia has not been defeated, and Ukraine will not enter NATO or reclaim all its captured territory. Ukraine, Europe, Canada, and even some members of the Republican party have responded with fury to President Donald Trump’s effort to resolve the conflict. But with whom should they be upset?

Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine cannot be justified. But, from their perspective, the war became inevitable when three factors collided.

The first was NATO expansion eastward right up to Russia’s borders, including the promise of an irreversible path to membership for Ukraine. The second was Ukraine’s failure to implement the Minsk Agreements and to protect the rights of ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine. The third was the 60,000 elite Ukrainian troops massed on the eastern border with Donbas and the dramatic increase in Ukrainian artillery shelling into the Donbas.

There was genuine alarm in Russia that Ukraine was about to invade the Donbas. “Suppose Ukraine is a NATO member,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in the days before the war. “Suppose it starts operations in Crimea, not to mention Donbas… Imagine that Ukraine is a NATO country and starts these military operations. What are we supposed to do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought to this?”

Putin certainly didn’t believe that Ukraine’s Western partners had benign intentions. NATO had broken its promise not to expand eastward after the Cold War, but that was just one reason the Kremlin distrusted the West. When Ukrainian ultranationalists opposed the implementation of the Minsk Agreements, the U.S. failed to support Zelensky, and France and Germany failed to pressure him. It would later become evident that Paris and Berlin saw the Minsk agreement as a means to buy Ukraine time to build its military—not as an opportunity to resolve the bitter conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Still, diplomacy might have averted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On December 17, 2021, Russia proposed negotiations with the U.S. and NATO over security guarantees and a new security architecture in Europe. This moment was the opportunity for Washington to consider Russia’s concerns and prevent war. Instead, the U.S. and NATO rejected Russia’s key demands and insisted that NATO expansion into Ukraine was not even on the table for negotiations.

Two months later, Russia invaded.

But there was still hope that the conflict would be short and destruction constrained. In the early weeks of the war, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators headed down a promising diplomatic path to end the war. But instead of encouraging and supporting Ukraine on that path, Washington pushed them off it with promises of whatever they need for as long as they need it if they would agree to fight with Russia instead of signing a peace deal.

Three years later, despite the most advanced Western military and intelligence aid, Ukraine has lost the war and will almost certainly settle for a worse peace deal than it could have gotten in 2022. Russia likely won’t sign an agreement until there is a written guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. Nor are they going to stop the war until there is de facto, if not formal, recognition that a portion of the territory that is now home to ethnic Russian Ukrainians is now part of Russia.

Whatever Trump’s motivation, he is simply recognizing reality and aligning U.S. policy to it. It has long been obvious that Ukraine was going to have to give up its NATO aspirations. Russia has been clear that they would not stop the war without that guarantee. And NATO was clear that they were not going to grant membership: the proof was in the refusal to formally and concretely begin the process throughout the war and in the refusal of the Biden administration to commit troops to Ukraine precisely because of the necessity of avoiding the very confrontation with Russia that NATO’s article five would commit them to. 

It has also become clear that Ukraine is incapable of reclaiming the territory it has lost since February 2022—let alone Crimea, which it lost in 2014—and that, despairing of the Minsk Agreement’s failure, Russia is not going to return it. Russia only continues to advance further as the talks begin.

Unfair as it may be, not recognizing these realities and continuing to support Ukraine in the war does not help Ukraine; it condemns it only to further loss of life and land.

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Russia should be blamed for giving up on diplomacy and illegally invading Ukraine. But we should also be upset with generations of American presidents who pushed NATO east and ignored Russian concerns. And we should be upset with the United States for rejecting a final diplomatic chance to avoid the war and for derailing an opportunity to stop it early. 

For those who love peace and long for justice in world affairs, Ukraine’s situation today is distressing. We should be upset with former President Biden and other Western leaders who ignored Russia’s security concerns in favor of pursuing their own foreign policy interests and made Putin’s invasion more likely. Let us hope the current president succeeds in bringing peace where his successor helped bring a bloody war.