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Russia is finally coming in from the cold.
One couldn't have imagined this situation till recently. President Donald Trump, despite the many complaints people have over the nature of his politics in various fields, has dramatically altered conditions where the Russia-Ukraine war is concerned. In the three years since President Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine, diplomacy was conspicuous by its absence.
No effort was expended by the Biden administration or the European Commission or NATO to bring about a negotiated end to the conflict or to engage Moscow in steps toward a rolling back of the situation. Donald Trump is now doing precisely what should have been done in the past three years. In all this time, the West should have exercised diplomatic wisdom but didn't. People like Ursula von der Leyen and Jens Stoltenberg through their abrasive attitude toward Putin only helped to worsen conditions.
It is indeed deplorable that NATO and the West in general paid little heed to Russian concerns about the threats to its security in the form of Ukraine becoming part of NATO. In these three years, the West, led by Washington, went into systematically arming President Volodymyr Zelensky in the belief that Ukraine could beat Russia on the battlefield. That Putin committed a grave error in launching his war against Ukraine is a truth no one denies or looks away from. Both Moscow and Kyiv have paid the price, with thousands of their soldiers dying in battle. Villages and cities in Ukraine have borne the terror engendered by war. Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow have led to the death of important Russian officials and the destruction of property.
In modern times, it is the nature of politics to identify the aggressor and those aggressed against. It is only proper that nations or leaders responsible for initiating a process of calamity in a region be condemned. But with that also comes the idea that conflicts which break out must not be escalated by the actions of those who condemn such conflicts. In our times, it is of the gravest importance that every move be directed toward a de-escalation of conflict between and among nations. It is a serious offence for states and organisations to provoke an intensification of a conflict that is already affecting lives in the countries involved in the conflict.
In these three years, no effort was expended by the West toward addressing the core issues responsible for the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as also the leading political figures in Europe went into overdrive to arm Ukraine with the most sophisticated of weapons in the belief that Russia could be punished, that Zelensky needed to be propped up every step of the way. And into that process came the controversial decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to impose sanctions on President Putin, thereby restricting his right to travel. The ICC act was a grave mistake and should not have happened. In simple terms, since February 2022, the West went no-holds-barred into presiding over a worsening of the situation. No one was ready or willing to engage the Russians in a dialogue.
And that was a blunder. The European Commission and NATO never demonstrated any inclination for a diplomatic approach to the issue. It is inconceivable that in these times the need for diplomacy was discarded in such cavalier fashion. Every move made in the West, every summit of Western leaders had a target: punish Moscow. It was a replay of regional politics dating back to the times before Metternich, Castlereagh and Talleyrand. Diplomacy is never a means of insulting the enemy but keeping the door open for him to negotiate with those he has offended by his behaviour. On Ukraine, the West believed, naively, that President Putin would bite the dust in the face of its consistent and unwise arming of Ukraine.
Now that President Trump is keen on reversing the situation, through what is obviously dramatic diplomacy on his part, one expects a resolution of the crisis. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have met in Riyadh, which is again a breakthrough given that in the recent past, every time Russian's top diplomat rose to address a global gathering of eminent people, representatives of nations opposed to Moscow walked out of the hall. That is no more the situation, though one can't at this point quite fathom the nature of a possible resolution of the conflict in Ukraine. One does expect, though, this Moscow-Washington interaction to continue and in fact deepened through a Putin-Trump summit in the near future.
Moscow has to date given no hint of any concessions it might be willing to come forth with as part of a settlement. It is quite possible, in light of statements by US Vice President JD Vance and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, that Ukraine will have little option other than giving up slices of territory already under Russian control to Moscow. More significantly, Moscow will insist --- and Washington appears to agree --- that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO. A chastened NATO has in these past few days appeared to come round to the realisation that Ukraine's NATO ambitions will need to be put aside if the war must be brought to a close.
Ukraine and Europe were not invited to the Riyadh talks, which certainly has them miffed. But for both Trump and Putin, a point of note is that any negotiations on ending the war cannot but ensure that President Zelensky, NATO and the European Commission have seats at the table, the better for a durable peace agreement to be worked out. For the Trump administration, in light of the diplomacy it has initiated on Ukraine, it will be wise to go the whole stretch of the road if the requirement is indeed a total winding down of and closure to the conflict. And, yes, the ICC must move in to lift the sanctions it has imposed on President Putin.
President Trump's decisive action over Ukraine is an encouraging reassertion of diplomacy, a reality which had been put in cold storage in Washington and Brussels and other Western capitals in the last three years. It is an opportunity for the world to draw back from brinkmanship, be the brinkmanship initiated by Moscow or the West. The bridge to conflict resolution is diplomacy. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin owe it to the world to prove the validity of this statement.