Ukraine Never Should Have Made The Mistake Of Getting Invaded

By Rich Lowry on Feb 20, 2025

Ukraine got invaded by Russia. According to President Trump, it should never make that mistake again.

Miffed that Ukraine is miffed that it has been excluded from the early stages of negotiations over the war, Trump has blasted the embattled country for sticking up for its interests after being brutalized by Vladimir Putin for three years.

"Today I heard, 'Oh, well, we weren't invited.' Well, you've been there for three years," Trump said the other day. "You should have ended it -- three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal."

This would be a fair charge to lodge against Ukraine if it had attempted to seize by force Russia's Rostov and Belgorod Oblasts and gotten bogged down in a costly war of attrition with no clear exit plan.

In reality, as we all know, Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 (after the Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Putin president) and then followed up in 2022 with a more far-reaching attempt to decapitate Ukraine and render it a Russian satellite state.

Ukraine's offense is to have been victimized by an expansionist Russia, a quality it has historically in common with Poland, Finland and the Baltic states, among others.

If Ukraine had shown better judgment than to be located next door to a much larger, perpetually aggrieved and autocratic neighbor, with which it shares a complicated history, perhaps this never would have happened.

Skeptics of the Ukraine war want to say that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine -- missiling its cities, blowing up its hospitals, destroying its electricity grid -- by NATO's assurances that Ukraine was on the path to joining the alliance.

This wasn't in the offing anytime in the foreseeable future, though, and even if it had eventually happened, the idea that NATO would have used Ukraine as a launching pad for an invasion of Russia is phantasmagoric.

Vladimir Putin has set out his views on Ukraine at length, and they amount to the belief that Ukraine doesn't have a legitimate national identity separate from Russia. This is at the bottom of the conflict, as well as Putin's coveting of Ukrainian land and resources and his fear of a successful Slavic democracy next door giving his own people ideas.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy clapped back at Trump, the U.S. president responded with a contemptuous salvo on Truth Social. Trump deemed him a "moderately successful comedian" (Zelenskyy used to have a career in entertainment) and, more significantly, a "Dictator without Elections."

It is true that Ukraine has been under martial law since it (foolishly) got invaded by Russia. Yet, Zelenskyy's popularity has held up, and he has much more democratic credibility than his adversary, a Vladimir Putin, who poisons and imprisons his political opponents.

Another Trump count against Zelenskyy is that he talked us into supporting Ukraine in the war. If it hadn't been for this scam artist, Trump implies, a bipartisan majority in the U.S. -- and our European allies -- wouldn't have believed we should stop a nation hostile to the West from installing a puppet government in a neighboring, sovereign state.

All that said, Ukraine isn't going to succeed in reestablishing its pre-2014 or even pre-2022 borders, and any plausible cessation of hostilities will involve painful concessions by Kiev.

This doesn't justify adopting an ahistorical perspective on the war and blaming Ukraine for its plight. Realpolitik is one thing; needlessly insulting an ally and condemning it in perversely moralizing terms is another.

Perhaps Trump's blunderbuss attacks on Ukraine will soften it up to accept an unsatisfactory but unavoidable deal. Still, the Kremlin is surely taking note that the president of the United States can't disguise his bitterness toward the weaker, hard-pressed country that Putin wants to humiliate and dismember.

It used to be said that a liberal is too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight. Trump is too consumed with pursuing a deal to acknowledge Ukraine is on our side.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)