“Or what king would go to war against another king without first sitting down with his counselors to discuss whether his army of ten thousand men could defeat the twenty thousand soldiers marching against him? And if he can’t, he will send a delegation to discuss terms of peace while the enemy is still far away”

Jesus as quoted in Luke 14:31-32

John "Rosey" Rosenberger

The outcome now is indisputable. We, the U.S. and NATO, lost our proxy war in Ukraine, a war that will go down in history as one of our worst foreign policy disasters, even worse than our ignominious withdrawal from our 20-year war in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are dead, far more wounded and maimed. 1.72 million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or declared missing in action since the war began. Ukraine’s energy and transportation infrastructure has been decimated. Cities and villages leveled. The U.S. and NATO fought to the last Ukrainian soldier, with no skin in the game. Sorrow blankets the land. Russia is substantially stronger politically, economically, and militarily with stronger ties to Iran, North Korea, and China.

The paucity of NATO's military forces, capabilities, and industries has been exposed. Conservative political upheaval is growing across Europe. NATO’s viability and utility have been further diminished, having proved useless for deterring Russia for over a decade, its combat equipment decimated by Russian forces on the battlefield. Some $350 billion of U.S. taxpayer money given gratis to Ukraine—with no audit trail—proved a foolish investment, enriching the corrupt Zelensky regime, the U.S. defense industry, and served no purpose other than protracting the war and filling graveyards with brave men and women. Lest we forget, it was all borrowed money increasing U.S. annual deficits and the U.S. debt, which now exceeds $37 trillion.

Considering the immense scope of this avoidable human tragedy, the war demands a candid, unbiased examination of why this war started and why NATO, using Ukraine as its proxy, failed to achieve victory on the battlefield. Over the coming weeks, many explanations will undoubtedly emerge. It is unlikely that any will address the root cause of the war or elucidate the reasons for NATO and Ukraine’s military failure. This two-part essay aims to shed light on these critical issues, hoping that future generations of U.S. political and military leaders entrusted with the responsibility of committing our sons and daughters to war, have a clear understanding of the disastrous consequences of incompetence in both domains.

It Began with A Broken Promise

The path to Russia’s war against Ukraine began with a broken promise made by political leaders of the US and NATO over 30 years ago. On February 9, 1990, just three months after the end of the Cold War and demolition of the Berlin Wall, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker met with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his aides to chart a way forward after the Cold War and establish a lasting peace between Europe and what became the Russian Federation. During discussions surrounding the reunification of Germany, Premier Gorbachev made it unmistakably clear that “NATO expansion is unacceptable”, and its eastward expansion beyond Germany would be perceived as an existential threat to Russia’s national security. Secretary Baker acknowledged Gorbachev’s concern and assured him that “neither the President [George H.W. Bush] nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place” and that the United States understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well, it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction”. Not an inch.

Gorbachev made a grave mistake. He should have had Baker put that declaration in writing and amend the NATO charter accordingly.In less than a decade, U.S. and NATO political leaders reneged on this promise. In 1999, NATO extended membership to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland pushing NATO further east towards the Russian Federation, formed eight years earlier. NATO political leaders ignored Russia’s warning that this expansion would be perceived as a direct threat to Russia’s national security. The lesson for Russia? You cannot trust the word of the United States nor its subservient NATO members.

In his article, Why NATO Expansion Explains Russian Actions in Ukraine, Tom Switzer described the inherent danger this expansion spawned. “During the 1990’s debate over whether Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic should become alliance members, many military and foreign-policy experts argued that NATO expansion would lead to big trouble with Russia. It would create the very danger it was supposed to prevent: Russian aggression in reaction to what Moscow would deem a provocative and threatening Western policy…The list of opponents to NATO enlargement from three decades ago reads like a who’s who of that generation’s wise men.”

One of these esteemed foreign policy experts was former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, the architect of American Cold War strategy of containment that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse. In 1997, he prophetically warned “Bluntly stated…expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking”. Kennan was right. His foresight was ignored. By 2020, eleven additional nations joined the NATO alliance pushing NATO and NATO’s military capabilities further east to Russia’s western border.

Withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty

Coupled with the eastward expansion of NATO, on June 13, 2002, the U.S. abruptly withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty it signed with the Soviet Union in 1972. The ABM Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union (later the Russian Federation) barred both superpowers from deploying national defenses against long-range ballistic missiles and from building the foundation for such defenses. The treaty was based on the premise of mutual assured destruction, the belief that stability was ensured by each superpower having confidence in its ability to destroy the other, and the likelihood that if either power constructed a strategic defense, the other would build up its offensive nuclear forces to overwhelm it. The superpowers would therefore find themselves in a never-ending offensive-defensive arms race as each tried to assure the credibility of its offensive nuclear force. The treaty did, however, allow both sides to build defenses against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. The ABM Treaty was negotiated and signed concurrently with the Interim Agreement on strategic offensive arms (commonly known as SALT I), the first in what became a series of U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control agreements that first capped, and later reduced, the strategic nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. Both countries considered the treaty a cornerstone of strategic stability which it was for thirty years.

Two years later, the U.S. deployed its first anti-ballistic missile system to Ft. Greely, Alaska. Five years later, the U.S., on behalf of NATO, entered negotiations to place ten (10) additional anti-ballistic missile systems in Poland and an ABM missile radar system in Czechoslovakia expanding its ABM shield eastward towards Russia’s doorstep. Russia regarded this decision by the U.S. to deploy its global anti-missile defense system into Poland and Czechoslovakia as the most serious external threat to Russia’s security system since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Adding fuel to the fire, a year later, NATO began serious discussions aimed at admitting both Georgia and Ukraine into the military alliance. From Russia’s perspective, U.S. and NATO intentions were unambiguous.

NATO’s Change in Character

Meanwhile, while this expansion occurred, new reasons were forged by the political leaders of NATO member nations to justify and sustain NATO’s existence. Moreover, NATO morphed from a strictly defensive military alliance as it had been for forty years, into an offensive military alliance far removed from the purpose it was originally formed to achieve—and did achieve—deterring the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe after World War II. Yet, the treaty and its purpose were never changed.

The first evidence of this change in character emerged within a decade of the Soviet Union’s collapse. From March-June 1999, NATO launched an offensive air campaign attacking the armed forces of Serbia over a period of 78 days until Serbia agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and end its conflict with Kosovo Albanians. Political leaders of NATO nations, without the direct authorization of the United Nations Security Council, justified this war ostensibly to end and prevent egregious human rights abuses. Article 5 of the NATO treaty was not invoked. It was ignored. Not a single NATO country was attacked by Serbia.

Two years later, on September 11, 2001, a group of al-Queda terrorists commandeering four commercial airliners, attacked the U.S. killing over innocent citizens. Within days, NATO invoked Article 5, the first and only time in its history. A month later, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan to achieve three objectives: find and kill Osama-bin-Laden, the al-Qaeda leader and mastermind of the attack, dismantle al-Qaeda, and overthrow the Taliban regime that had harbored al-Queda. Two years later, in August 2003, NATO assumed command and the mission of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. This offensive military operation marked the first deployment of NATO forces outside Europe and North America.

By 2006, NATO forces were engaged in intensive combat to defeat Taliban insurgents across the entire nation. All thirty nations of NATO contributed forces to this effort in some capacity, fighting or supporting. ISAF continued combat operations to defeat the Taliban until December 2014 when the U.S. withdrew most of its forces. Thus ended eleven years of NATO-led combat operations—for naught. The Taliban were not destroyed. In August 2021, U.S. forces executed an incompetent, humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan followed immediately by the unexpected and rapid collapse of the Afghan National Security Force, a force whose capability and will to fight had been grossly inflated and mis-represented by U.S. commanding generals for years. Taliban forces stormed across the nation and retook control of Afghanistan. 3,606 NATO soldiers were killed during operations from 2001-2021, thousands more were grievously wounded: 68% of the casualties from the U.S, 12% by the United Kingdom, 4.5% by Canada, and the remainder from other NATO nations. The cost of the war was almost $1 trillion dollars, the majority paid by U.S. taxpayers on borrowed money, and achieved nothing.

Given NATO’s history of unmet assurances, the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, and NATO’s evolution from a defensive alliance to a more assertive military force, Russia had legitimate grounds for concern over NATO’s potential expansion into Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Path to War

Ukraine declared itself a neutral, independent nation when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and resolved to sustain this posture declaring itself a non-nuclear state. Yet, within a year, Ukrainian politicians were looking to the West. Ukraine joined NATO's Partnership for Peace in 1994. Later, in December 1994, Ukraine transferred its nuclear arsenal to Russia relieving itself of the financial cost to maintain it and the geopolitical risk, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty. In 1996, Ukraine adopted a new constitution as the country transitioned to a free market liberal democracy amid endemic political corruption and a legacy of state control. A year later, Ukraine joined the NATO-Ukraine Commission, followed by the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan in 2002, and entered NATO's Intensified Dialogue program in 2005. All the while, it touted its neutrality.

Three years later, in response to Ukraine’s growing engagement with NATO, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin—who had previously served two presidential terms from 2000 to 2008—echoed Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1990 warning to U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. On December 4, 2008, during a NATO-Russia Council meeting in Brussels, Putin formally expressed Russia’s staunch opposition to NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and Georgia. He underscored that such moves would be viewed as a direct threat to Russia’s national security, strongly implying that Russia would not hesitate to use military force to prevent them.

Two years later, in February 2010, Ukrainians elected Viktor Yanukovych, their former Prime Minister, as the President of Ukraine. Shortly after his election, Yanukovych stated “Ukraine’s integration with the EU [European Union] remains our strategic aim” and assured his people he would maintain a “balanced policy, which will protect our national interests both on our eastern border—I mean with Russia—and of course with the European Union” and that Ukraine “must be a “neutral state.” He went on to say, “The Ukrainian people don’t currently support Ukraine’s entry into NATO…We don’t want to join any military bloc.” Shortly thereafter, the Ukrainian parliament voted to abandon the goal of NATO membership and re-affirm Ukraine's neutral status, while continuing its cooperation with NATO. Three years later, in February 2014, this policy collapsed in what became known as the Revolution of Dignity—or the Maidan Revolution—a political revolution that led to the dissolution of the existing Ukrainian government, the ouster of Yanukovych, and a political transformation.

In November 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych ignited a nationwide uprising when he abruptly abandoned plans to sign a long-anticipated political association and free trade agreement with the European Union. This decision, made under economic pressure from Russia, defied years of parliamentary efforts and the expectations of millions of Ukrainians who saw EU integration as a path toward modernization and democratic reform.

Public outrage quickly escalated into mass protests, driven not only by disappointment over the EU reversal but also by deep-seated frustrations with government corruption, abuse of power, Russian influence, police brutality, and newly enacted anti-protest laws. Over the following three months, the Euromaidan movement gained momentum, with thousands of demonstrators occupying Kyiv’s Independence Square and other public spaces across the country.

Violent clashes between protesters and security forces intensified in January and February 2014, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries. By late February, the government collapsed, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and a new pro-Western interim administration took power.

The Donbas War and Minsk Agreements

The fall of Yanukovych, who was widely seen as pro-Russian, inflamed numerous legitimate concerns among ethnic Russians and the Russian speaking population in the eastern oblasts of Ukraine. In situations like this, perspectives matter and must be appreciated. To begin with, most citizens in the Donbass region saw Yanukovych’s removal as an unconstitutional coup orchestrated by Western powers, which eventually proved to be true. Moreover, most citizens living in the Donbass spoke Russian and historically had close cultural and economic ties to Russia. The attempt by the government to repeal the 2012 language law, which allowed Russian as the regional language, sparked outrage even though the repeal was vetoed. As Ukraine’s industrial heartland, Donbass relied heavily on trade with Russia. The government’s pivot toward a European Union Agreement raised fears of economic disruption, job losses, and austerity measures that would hit the region’s industry hard. Lastly, the visible role of ultra-right nationalist groups in the interim government alarmed the pro-Russian residents of the Donbass who feared attacks on their communities, a fear linked directly back to the World War II era, the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and Stepen Bandera an infamous Nazi-collaborator. As far as they were concerned, these groups were “neo-Nazis”.

Inflamed by these fears and concerns, Pro-Russian separatist groups formed in these eastern provinces, intent upon achieving independence from Ukraine. Supported by Russian intelligence sources, troops, and weaponry, they attacked and seized several towns and villages in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts igniting the war in the Donbas region. The Ukrainian Army responded. For six months, intense fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists devastated eastern Ukraine, resulting in thousands of casualties and displacing countless civilians.

Amid the turmoil, Russia—confident that the U.S. and NATO would not intervene—strategically deployed irregular troops into Crimea, swiftly seized control, and formally annexed the region. Crimea, a vital strategic asset providing access to the Black Sea, had been part of Russia for over two centuries before becoming part of Ukraine. By August, weary of the ongoing conflict, Ukraine and Russia entered diplomatic negotiations to end the hostilities. These talks, facilitated by Western European nations, culminated in the Minsk Agreements.

Following the Ukrainian military's defeat at Ilovaisk in August 2014, representatives from Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) convened in Minsk, Belarus, to negotiate a ceasefire and address the underlying causes of the conflict. These talks culminated in the signing of the Minsk Protocol—commonly referred to as Minsk I—in September 2014. However, the agreement quickly unraveled as both sides repeatedly violated its terms. Russia bolstered separatist forces to consolidate territorial gains, and by January 2015, the protocol had effectively collapsed, leading to a renewed escalation in hostilities.

The following month, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and French President Francois Hollande collaborated and offered a new peace plan. On February 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Donetsk People’s Republic leader Alexander Zakharchenko, and Luhansk People's Republic leader Igor Plotnitsky, met in Minsk and within twenty-four hours agreed to a package of peacekeeping measures called the Minsk II agreement. Though the warring parties agreed to the measures, skirmishes continued between the opponents, while both Ukraine and Russia strengthened their forces and reinforced their positions. In December 2017, President Donald Trump authorized the U.S. to ship lethal defensive weapons, ammunition, and other combat provisions to the Ukrainian Army intended to dissuade Russia from conducting further attacks. By December 2018, three years later, not a single provision of the Minsk II agreement had been implemented. By February 2022, the Ukrainian Army had grown to 200,000 active soldiers equipped with many of the most modern NATO weapons and weapon systems—all under the watchful eyes of Russian intelligence.

It turns out, the pursuit of peace was not the true purpose of Minsk II. In a 2022 interview, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel revealed treachery rife with catastrophic consequences. She stated the true purpose of the Minsk II agreement was to provide Ukraine with the time it needed to build up its armed forces to the point it could conduct counter-offensive operations and drive all Russian forces from Ukrainian soil. In other words, as early as 2015, the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—the major powers in NATO—were determined to use the Ukrainian conflict as a means of weakening Russia and extending NATO’s presence and forces to Russia’s western border. From Russia’s perspective, this treachery provided further evidence that Russia had no reason to trust anything said or promised by leaders of the United States, Germany, France, United Kingdom, and the NATO Secretary General.

Then came Ukraine’s fatal decision that provoked Russia to abandon its diplomatic efforts to achieve peace and resort to full scale conventional war, just the response George Keenan and President Putin warned would happen. On 8 June 2017, under President Poroshenko’s administration, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a law, making integration with NATO a foreign policy priority. In July 2017, Poroshenko announced that he would seek the opening of negotiations on a Member Action Plan (MAP) with NATO, and that same month, began proposing a "patronage system" that tied individual Ukrainian regions to various European States. In March 2018, NATO added Ukraine to the list of aspiring NATO members. Six months later, the Ukrainian Parliament approved amendments to the Constitution making accession to NATO and the European Union a central goal and main foreign policy objective. In February 2019, the Constitution was changed to codify this ambition. In May 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine and reiterated these two strategic goals for his government.

From President Putin’s perspective, this was the final straw, the unmistakable evidence that Ukraine intended to join NATO, and NATO intended to expand and position its military capabilities on the doorstep of Russia. Years of diplomacy and peace proposals proved fruitless. NATO and its Ukrainian proxy crossed Russia’s red line, a red line that had been repeatedly drawn by Russia for thirty years—and ignored. Nonetheless, Russia made one last diplomatic effort to avoid war.

During the latter months of 2021, Russia moved four Combined Arms Armies, one Tank Army, and another Tank Division into several positions along the Russia-Ukrainian border arrayed and poised to attack Ukrainian forces along multiple axes in the north, northeast, east, and south. On 17 December 2021, Russia provided a list of demands to the U.S. and NATO asking for security guarantees in the form of two draft treaties. In essence, it was an ultimatum.

In the first draft treaty, Russia demanded that NATO deploy no forces or weapons in countries that joined the NATO alliance after May 1997; ban deployment of intermediate-range missiles in areas where they could reach the other side's territory; and ban any NATO military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, or Central Asia. In the second draft treaty, titled "Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees", Russia included a requirement that both countries refrain from taking any security measures that could undermine core security interests of either party, for example, a requirement that the United States prevent further NATO enlargement; a ban on deployment of U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Europe; limits on the ability of heavy bombers and surface warships to operate in and over international waters in range of the other side; and a requirement that both side's nuclear weapons only be deployed on national territory.

On January 27, both draft treaties were rejected by the U.S. and NATO political leaders. Russia’s exhaustive diplomatic efforts to achieve a lasting peace for over a decade proved fruitless leaving only one recourse. Russia launched a large-scale ground invasion of Ukraine on February 22, 2022, aimed at destroying Ukraine’s armed forces, removing the Zelensky regime from power, and incorporating Crimea and the ethnic-Russian populations in the eastern oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia into the Russian federation—essential conditions Russia believed were necessary to prevent NATO from expanding into Ukraine.

George Keenan’s prophetic warning in 1997 was fulfilled. Decades of turning a deaf ear to Russia’s repeated warnings about NATO expansion, coupled with NATO’s pattern of deceit and string of broken promises, provoked Russia into the only option remaining to protect its national security and its citizens—war.