Uriel Araujo, PhD, anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts
During the first presidential debate on Tuesday night, the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris at some point confronted her Republican opponent Donald Trump by saying: “I did meet with Volodymyr Zelensky a few days before Russia invaded... I met with President Zelensky and shared with him American intelligence on how he can protect himself… Days later I went to NATO’s eastern flank - to Poland and Romania… we brought 50 countries together to support Ukraine.”
This prompted Trump to reply: “They sent her in to negotiate with Zelensky and Putin. And she did and the war started three days later.” Harris did not in fact meet with the Russian President (only with the Ukrainian one), but Trump’s point, implicitly, was that there is a cause-effect relationship between Harris’ trip to Eastern Europe and the crisis that followed it. While the so-called fact-checkers are busy analyzing every remark made by the two politicians, it might be worth delving into the role played by Democrats in the Ukrainian conflict.
While Harris made the aforementioned statement to boast that thanks to the actions of others and hers (as Joe Biden’s Vice President), Ukraine “stands as an independent and free country.” She sees, once again, a cause-effect relationship between Washington aiding and arming Kyiv “air defense, the ammunition, the artillery, the javelins, the Abrams tanks” and the fact that the Ukrainian still has military capabilities. Such causality is quite obvious and no one would deny it - so much so that the conflict has been described as an American “proxy attrition war” against Russia - by no less than former US ambassador to Finland, Earle Mack, among others.
However, Harris mixes up two things: her 2022 trip to Ukraine before a very important episode and the events after that. Of course there is some continuity between the American policies towards Ukraine before February 24, 2022 when the Russian military campaign started (all the way back to 2014 and even to the nineties) and American aid after the fact. However, February 24, 2022 was also a turning point that brought about major changes to the global scenario. It was not inevitable. It was not caused purely by the Russian President’s whim. The US-led West had a lot to do with it.
For one thing, military conflict is not really a novelty for Kyiv. One should also keep in mind that post-Soviet space in a lot of ways is like post-independence Africa where the border situation is not a done deal, and many frozen conflicts persist. Ukraine had been torn by a civil war in the Donbass region since 2014, following the US-aided Maidan coup (described as such by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs). The Americans (mostly during the Obama years) have been funding and arming the far-right and even neo-Nazi Ukrainian militias, some of which have been turned into regular regiments and battalions.
It might have become politically incorrect to say so, but the fact remains that for almost a decade the people of Donbass endured under heavy Ukrainian artillery, with no one but Moscow to help them. Moreover, according to a New York Times’ exposé (by Adam Entous, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and Michael Schwirtz), the CIA has been waging a secret war against Russia in Ukraine for over a decade, with a network of spy bases “along the Russian border”.
Before Russia launched its attack on February 24, 2022, Ukraine had started its own bombing campaign on the mostly pro-Russian and russophone Donbass border region on February 18, thereby targeting its own population (from Kyiv’s perspective), namely the people living in the very territories it claims as its own. Amid the mayhem, a kindergarten in the Stanytsia Luganska town was bombed, among 47 points, causing the deaths of civilians.
On February 22, an El Pais news report described the humanitarian crisis in Donbass, and on February 24, CNN in turn reported that the Ukrainian forces had “destroyed” much of the region, which caused many refugees to seek shelter in the Rostov Oblast (Russian Federation). Interestingly, the week before that, Moscow had withdrawn troops from the border region, which should have de-escalated tensions at least temporarily. Finding these reports among the flood of news about the Russian-Ukrainian crisis in the English-language media can be quite hard. To a large extent, they become “non-events”. Not to mention the whole topic of NATO’s enlargement, which is arguably one of the main reasons for the overall crisis.
In other words, if one considers context, Kamala Harris in the aforementioned remark was basically boasting that she (and the administration she is part of) encouraged Ukraine to provoke Russia, and then, when the conflict escalated, she and her colleagues further aided and armed the same country. It is like purposely giving one the flu and then giving the medicine. She mentioned that Ukraine is “free” and “independent” thanks to her. By November 2024, Former NATO’s Supreme Commander James Stavridis was saying that there is no future for Ukraine other than a land-for-peace deal based “on the lessons of South Korea”. So much for American help.
Talking about causality has its own philosophical intricacies. It would be simplistic to say Kamala Harris caused the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict by meeting with Zelensky. It would be more reasonable to compare it perhaps with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan and the way it fueled tensions. Daring moves (such as crossing red lines) and escalations of tensions can always have unintended and unpredictable consequences, which in turn may spiral out of control - and Washington seems to be quite fond of such a modus operandi, regardless of the risks for regional and global peace.
Of course Donald Trump himself, as I wrote, is no peacemaker (or an isolationist that would end NATO, for that matter). Republican Senator McCain (who passed away in 2018) also played a major role in the Ukrainian Maidan, and that still needs to be scrutinized for the historical record. However, it is still true that Democrats particularly, including Barack Obama, as well as Kamala Harris and the administration she is part of, have a lot of responsibility for the current situation in Eastern Europe. They have, among other things, consistently funded and armed the far-right in Ukraine, and thus have poured gasoline on the fire.
The embarrassment brought by each and every Ukrainian soldier’s helmet with Nazi symbols caught by cameras on Western TV is a constant reminder of that fact. This is rather ironic, considering how the Democrat Party is fond of throwing accusations of Nazism as a political weapon. Much blood (and swastikas) is on them.
