Third of a series

PART 1 of this Russo-Ukraine war series started with the humiliation of Zelenskyy by Trump and Vance at a White House press conference on Feb. 28, 2025. Victor Hanson, a political scientist, advanced the idea of a DMZ formula and a minerals agreement to end the war ("Hysteria at the White House..." TMT, March 5, 2025).

In part 2, Dr. Vladimir Brovkin's take is for Europe to take up the slack with the imminent US withdrawal from the war. This puts the onus on Europe to unify and defend Ukraine. This is now Europe's war — which it should have been in the first place if only they had a foreign policy independent from the US ("Trump-Zelenskyy fallout..." TMT, March 12, 2025).

This third part speculates on the endgame of this war, extracted from three renowned political scientists and economists: Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University ("Ukraine war is over"); Richard Wolff ("American empire is over"), University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and John Mearsheimer ("The tragedy of great power politics") of the University of Chicago.

Simply put, this war is over! Only the details of who lost and lost more will be speculated upon. But the repercussions on geopolitics are myriad. To understand this war better, it is important to dig into its political and historical antecedents.

The backdrop to all these is gleaned from the works of Sachs, Wolff and Mearsheimer, going back to the end of WW2, upon the rise of two hegemons, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States of America. The Cold War was dominated by these two nations — backstopped by their respective alliances — NATO of the West and the Warsaw Pact of the East. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991 presaged the ascendancy of America as the sole superpower.

America with a forked tongue

A prior agreement of Feb 9, 1990, hammered out between US Secretary of State James Baker and USSR Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, stated that NATO would not move "an inch eastward" as a condition to German unification formally ending WW2.

But in 1994, America reneged on its word. It cheated! President Clinton signed on to expand NATO all the way to Ukraine. The US enticed former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO; Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic became members in 1999; and 2004 saw Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia accepted into NATO.

In 2004-2005 the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukraine installing President Victor Yushchenko, who was oriented towards NATO. In 2010, President Viktor Yanukovych won but pushed for Ukraine's neutrality, antithetical to US championing NATO membership. On Feb. 2, 2014, Yanukovych was ousted in a CIA-instigated regime change, through the Revolution of Dignity. This gave Putin the alibi to annex Ukraine's southern Crimea peninsula and recognize the Russian-sponsored separatist states of Donetsk and Luhansk in the southeast, collectively known as the Donbas region.

It was only a matter of time before all these would come to a head. Thus, Putin made his move on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2023, a bloody war that Putin said was going to take a few days. It's now in its third year and counting.

Fast forward – crossroads

Early March last week, in the aftermath of the Trump-Zelenskyy reality TV confrontasi resulting in the public humiliation of Zelenskyy and his subsequent bending of the knee, Trump is once more in control of this proxy war.

In a meeting on March 11, 2025, hosted by Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the peace process was back on track, making an offer that Ukraine has accepted, for a 30-day ceasefire and immediate negotiations, touted as one that is enduring and sustainable to end the war. This has been transmitted to the Russians.

Putin rebuffed the offer. He believes that the war is going Russia's way, and the ceasefire just gives the losing Ukraine breathing space to regroup, especially in the wake of US unilateral decision to pause sending military aid to Ukraine (immediately reversed) — which for Putin, may look like an indication of weak US resolve or perhaps a signal from his buddy that Trump has his back.

Root causes for the war

But Putin's rejection of the ceasefire is based on some nuances, as the root cause of this war, revealing Putin's true intentions for naming this a "special military operations" instead of an invasion of Ukraine, with NATO encroachment as the immediate cause.

Putin framed this war in a historical context. In what historians consider as Putin's warped view of history, Lenin, the Bolshevik founder, created Ukraine artificially at the expense of southern Russian lands earlier in the formation of the USSR.

Prior to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that midwifed the USSR, the Russian empire that ended under Tsar Nicholas II included the region that is now Ukraine, with a significant portion also under Austro-Hungarian control. The Bolsheviks recognized the need to address the national aspirations of various ethnic groups within the former empire, including Ukrainians.

In 1917, Ukraine declared independence, followed by a tumultuous period of civil war and shifting control among various factions. In 1922, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was established as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. The borders of this republic were drawn in a way that included territories that were historically part of Ukraine but also included areas that had significant Russian-speaking populations.

In some oblique way, Lenin and the Bolsheviks played a significant role in shaping the modern political landscape of Ukraine. But the historical roots of Ukrainian identity and territory are much older and more complex than the idea of an "artificial" creation.

These facts did not deter Putin from inculcating these historical distortions into his narrative. At one time Putin even claimed that modern Ukraine was a creation of the CIA and the European Commission, in the wake of the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions, in his conversation with former EU commissioner Jose Manuel Barroso.

From where he sits, Ukraine should not exist as a sovereign state; and if it does now, it should not operate outside Russia's orbit. Marching his soldiers to Ukraine therefore was his special military operations to retain land that has always belonged to Russia — particularly the Russian-speaking oblasts.

America's offer for a ceasefire and negotiations therefore would be an overture for Russian capitulation. The bottom line for Putin now emerging is that Ukraine must exist only upon the sufferance of Russia and must therefore be part of the Russian Federation. It will not be a member of NATO, ever, nor will foreign troops be tolerated within its borders — peacekeepers or otherwise.

In the final analysis, Ukraine as a sovereign state is a concept that needs to go away. Putin is prepared to go through a protracted war to see this through. He knows the West does not have the stomach for this seeing that Trump is wavering.

Unlike Trump, the illiterate, Putin is a student of history. And he reads Sachs, Wolff and Mearsheimer. The American empire is over! It had peaked long before Trump. He just accelerates its downward spiral. And Putin is not intimidated.