Ukraine: Beyond Tragedy and Self-Defeating Manichaeism

The largest part of the political class in the Western world, and a significant segment of public opinion as well, remains deeply committed to “project Ukraine.” The mix of neoconservatives and neoliberals, among others, who have driven this commitment to “proxy war” in Ukraine (and to NATO expansion to include Ukraine long before the war broke out) see enmity with Russia as inevitable and as essential to the defense of democracy in the Western world. The thought of a negotiated settlement to a conflict that is not going well for Ukraine (to say the least) and rather better for Russia strikes them as dishonorable even if it is necessary to put an end to massive bloodshed and to save Ukraine from becoming a thoroughly defeated and dispirited “rump” state. In my judgment, the reduction of Ukraine to a “rump” state is much more likely to occur if the war continues indefinitely than if a peace settlement, however imperfect or distasteful, is mutually agreed upon. On this, Trump is more right than his diehard European and American critics.

The commitment to Ukraine by many has taken on a passionate, quasi-religious intensity, with many who are negligent about the integrity of borders at home defending Ukraine’s borders with a zeal that belies the deep-seated postnational, post-religious convictions of Western, especially European, elites. Many who support Ukraine do so by equating Putin with Hitler or Stalin and see Russia’s imperial ambitions as truly limitless (rooted less in specific geopolitical concerns or grievances but in a profound defect of the Russian or Slavic “soul”). But contemporary Russia is far more of a regional than a global power and cannot sustain the burden of empire, whether of the Tsarist or Soviet type. But if one challenges the regnant narrative, even on well-supported empirical and moral grounds, one risks being charged with appeasement, cowardice, dishonor, and “fellow-traveling” like the Neville Chamberlains and Walter Durantys of old.  

Many of his critics assume that President Trump has “switched sides,” abandoned Ukraine, and is shamelessly kowtowing to Moscow. That Trump wants an honorable peace given the circumstances as they are and given the “pre-history” of the conflict as he understands it, that he hopes to be an honorable broker for peace (despite his often careless rhetoric), and that he is not simply doing Moscow’s bidding, is not even considered to be a possibility by those who are committed to continuing the war in perpetuity. But if the assumptions and presuppositions of Trump’s critics are wrong, or at least one-sided and misleading, then perhaps paths to peace might open up that are not coextensive with a dishonorable “spirit of Munich.”

Western public opinion was understandably shocked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 22, 2022, and from that date forward (and even long before it) has been prone to see the conflict as a battle royale between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Legitimate dismay at Russia for unleashing a deeply destructive military conflict, has however, gotten in the way of the introspection that might allow the Western powers to acknowledge our own mistakes and misjudgments that helped provoke the conflict, including ignoring legitimate Russian concerns (and not just from the ruling circle around Putin) about the seemimgly inexorable movement of NATO eastward beginning in the years after 1994 (which took a more dangerous and ominous turn for the Russians with President George W. Bush’s decision in 2007 to push for Ukrainian membership in NATO).

More fundamentally, perhaps, there has yet to be an acknowledgement of the most relevant fact on the ground, namely the deep divide in Ukraine between the Galician Party, rooted in the west of the country and now dominant in Kiev, which is committed to expunging any Russian cultural and spiritual presence in Ukraine, and the Muscovite Party, which sees Russia and Ukraine not as enemies but as spiritual, if not exactly political, brothers. The deepest source of the Ukrainian tragedy is that the Galician party sees in Russia “the eternal enemy,” and the Maloross of the east see in Russia only “the Eternal Partner,” as the political scientist Nicolai N. Petro has so aptly put it. When people in western democracies speak of coming to the aid of Ukraine, they mean, intentionally or not, helping exclusively that half of Ukraine that has long sought to sever any meaningful cultural, historic, or political ties with Russia. We need to face up to that fact.

Since the Maidan Revolution (or coup) of 2014, secretly encouraged and strongly supported by the United States, the Galician Party has been triumphant, encouraging the comprehensive de-Russification of Ukraine, even if Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians and the majority of them speak Russian at home. Compounding matters, the new Ukrainian government made no serious effort to implement the Minsk II agreements of 2015. These would have given language rights and some cultural autonomy to the Donbass (and other Russian-oriented regions in the east of the country) and might have helped diffuse the situation. But Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have both admitted that they approached Minsk II cynically, seeing in their admittedly insincere promises a chance to buy time to “militarize” a Ukraine now exclusively dominated by the anti-Russian Galician party (on this point, see Angela Merkel’s Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021). This approach did not aid the cause of peace. To his credit, Zelensky ran as a “peace” candidate in the 2019 presidential election, vowing to implement Minsk II with vigor and honesty. But once elected, he quickly backed down under immense pressure from the ultra-nationalists.

The mainstream narrative passes over all of this in silence, or near silence, when its purveyors talk about the sources of the present conflict. The truth, however, is much more complicated. As Nicolai Petro lays out with impressive equanimity in his 2023 book The Tragedy of Ukraine, the Galician Party has its roots in the nationalist ideology of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). This underground organization formed the basis of Stepan Bandera’s anti-Soviet resistance movement during and after World War II. As Petro demonstrates, that movement advocated what its chief ideologue called “Ukrainian spiritual totalitarianism.” It hated Russia far more passionately than it opposed Communism. The Russian government’s constant claim about Ukraine being dominated by Nazis is undoubtedly crude and hyperbolic (a claim repeated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again in an interview with Channel One in Moscow on March 25, 2025). But important currents of Ukrainian nationalism then and now continue to have unsavory political views and connections. Most disturbingly, many Ukrainian liberals (and Western liberals, too) have unquestionably adopted the claims—and point of view—of Ukrainian ultranationalists. Soviet crimes against the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, such as collectivization and the murderous famines that accompanied them—are blamed on “Russia” (in this vulgate, there seem to be precious few Russian victims of Communist totalitarianism).

As for Russia, to draw on a famous remark by Talleyrand, its invasion of Ukraine was “worse than a crime, it’s a mistake.” This point was made brilliantly in a series of essays by the foreign policy analyst Srdja Trifkovic in Chronicles magazine in 2023 and 2024. Trifkovic is not insensitive to Moscow’s legitimate grievances, including reckless efforts to expand NATO to include Ukraine, which run counter to the deep historical and cultural connections between Russia and Ukraine, not to mention Russia’s legitimate security interests in that part of the world. But as Trifkovic points out, if Russia’s goal remains the “demilitarization” of Ukraine, the invasion has hardly served that purpose. Christopher Caldwell has made the same point quite effectively in the pages of the Claremont Review of Books.

Russian misjudgments (and crimes) aside, there are consequences for these precipitous and frenzied moralistic judgments I have aimed at. The indefinite continuation of the conflict in Ukraine risks leaving that country as a charnel house, a victim of Western moralism as much as Russian aggression. In Russia itself, the regime has hardened with draconian (and ultimately counterproductive) punishments for open opposition to the war and a growing fixation with “enemy” efforts to surround and subvert historic Russia. The rhetoric of Russia’s ruling political class has grown more brutal and crass.

We in the United States (and the West more broadly) must not associate legitimate opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with enduring animosity to all things Russian or support for the exclusion of Russia from the community of nations. That is a much-needed first step in avoiding a fatal fall into the abyss. Perhaps an effort to end the war, however imperfectly, will allow the division between the two halves of Ukraine to heal over time, aided by mutual exhaustion and a hoped for turn away from the most intractable Galician and Maloross approaches to the conflict. NATO membership (but not membership in the EU) remains a non-starter for a Ukraine that wishes to avoid a permanent state of war with Russia, whether Russia is led by Putin or significantly more liberal elements in the future. Crimea will remain Russian because of its vital strategic significance, historical Russian value, and arbitrariness in being given to Ukraine in 1954 by Soviet Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev when borders didn’t matter. In due time, the fate of the eastern provinces should be decided by plebiscites under international, not Russian, supervision.

We in the West are morally and civically obliged to work to ensure that tragedy and inexpiable conflict do not have the final word.

Daniel J. Mahoney is Professor Emeritus at Assumption University and Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute. His latest book, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Lie, was published by Encounter Books on April 15, 2025.