It’s Past Time For The Ukraine-Russia War Obama Started To End

The proposed Ukraine peace deal has shaken the political class that insisted escalation with Moscow was the only acceptable course. How, they ask, can Russia possibly walk away with concessions? Part of this is simply material: Russia has ground out battlefield gains and retains the manpower and resources to sustain the war indefinitely. But that is only one dimension of it.

The fuller answer reaches back long before the first tanks crossed the border. It began a decade earlier, when a small clique of Washington insiders decided Russia would be the villain in every story and Ukraine the instrument to make it so. From the 2014 Kiev coup to the Russia-collusion hoax to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco, the same actors built a narrative architecture that rewired the entire geopolitical landscape and made war not just possible but almost inevitable. The peace deal now taking shape is, at least in part, the price of that deception.

While Donald Trump was the primary target of the collusion smear, Russia and its 144 million citizens were relentlessly vilified in the process, making them, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, victims in their own right. That reality has been almost entirely erased from mainstream discussion of both the war and the negotiations over its end. But it cannot be wished away. It will have to be reckoned with, whether people like it or not.

To understand why, we need to revisit the past 12 years. For many Americans, Ukraine entered the political spotlight in early 2014, when the Obama administration encouraged and facilitated a revolution in Kiev. Neocon stalwarts like John McCain and Lindsey Graham happily joined in, treating regime change as a moral crusade rather than the geopolitical dynamite that it was.

At the time, Ukraine had a democratically elected government led by President Viktor Yanukovych. He was lazily caricatured as a Russian puppet, but in reality, he was doing what any Ukrainian leader should be doing: balancing Ukraine’s existence as a buffer state between Western Europe and Russia. That role requires strategic calibration, not ideological zealotry. Yanukovych understood that.

The problem for the D.C. establishment, its foreign policy elite, and its deep-state networks was precisely that balance. They wanted Ukraine permanently locked into the Western orbit, tethered to the European Union (EU) and eventually NATO. When Yanukovych declined to sign an EU association agreement — wisely given that at least half his country was economically, culturally, and historically bound to Russia — he became a marked man.

Following violent unrest and a narrative falsely blaming Yanukovych for the deaths of protesters, he was ousted and replaced by a government effectively selected by U.S. officials. This is not conjecture. It is confirmed by the infamous leaked call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, in which they calmly plotted who would be installed in the Ukrainian government once Yanukovych was removed. This was not democracy. It was orchestration led by the Obama administration.

From Moscow’s perspective, it was a direct assault on Russia’s strategic perimeter. In response, President Vladimir Putin moved to secure Crimea, historically Russian and home to the Black Sea Fleet, a strategic asset that could not be left in the hands of a hostile, NATO-aligned regime. And he was right, as a decade later we learned that, immediately after the Kiev coup in 2014, the CIA began building bases with Ukrainian security services. In total, the CIA built 12 such bases in secret locations along the Russian border.

The 2014 coup also shattered Ukraine’s internal equilibrium. Officials who supported a balanced posture or favored preserving ties with Russia were purged, and anti-Russia dogma hardened into state doctrine. And it is at this point that Ukraine’s story folds directly into the origins of Russiagate.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Trump committed an unforgivable sin: He suggested the United States should pursue stable relations with Russia rather than perpetual hostility. For the new Ukrainian elite and their Western patrons, this posture was existentially threatening. They needed Washington permanently locked into an adversarial stance toward Moscow. So Ukraine became an active player in the Russia-collusion narrative.

High-ranking Ukrainian officials, including the prime minister, the interior minister, and the ambassador in Washington, took deliberate steps in 2016 to sabotage Trump’s campaign and boost Hillary Clinton. They spread anti-Trump narratives, coordinated messaging with Western media, and orchestrated the fake black ledger used to destroy Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The ledger was later acknowledged by Ukraine’s own former intelligence chief to have likely been fabricated. Even Politico admitted the interference in a post-election piece describing Ukraine’s efforts to help Clinton. But that inconvenient truth was buried because the collusion narrative had to dominate.

Not coincidentally, just as Politico ran its post-election piece, CNN was launching the Steele dossier story, falsely presenting it as part of official U.S. intelligence assessments. From that moment, the narrative was cemented that Trump was a Russian asset and Russia was America’s prime villain. This was Russiagate.

Then came the Ukraine impeachment farce, engineered to preserve the anti-Russia doctrine after Robert Mueller’s testimony demolished the collusion narrative. It was no coincidence that the impeachment push began the very morning after Mueller’s disastrous congressional testimony. The same figures who had enabled Ukraine’s interference and played central roles in Russiagate were now at the heart of yet another operation aimed at crippling Trump.

In this context, the war was not spontaneous aggression. It was the terminal phase of a long cycle of Western destabilization, deception, and strategic encroachment.

None of this excuses war. But it demolishes the cartoon morality play. Russia was not simply a villain acting in isolation. It was sanctioned, isolated, economically targeted, and strategically provoked, in part to service internal political warfare in the United States.

Now the West confronts the reality it created. Years of narrative warfare and institutional deception rewired the geopolitical landscape and left Russia with both leverage and grievance. Stability cannot be restored by ignoring history; it requires addressing the distortions that produced this conflict.

This is why the proposed peace agreement appears generous to Moscow. But it is not generosity, and it is not capitulation. It is a correction. It is the belated recognition that the instability engineered by Western elites must be unwound, not moralized away. What looks like concession is, in truth, the unavoidable reckoning with a crisis the West itself set in motion.