Two unpleasant anniversaries fall in the final days of February. The seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region by “little green men”—Russian military, masked and wearing uniforms without military insignia—began on Feb. 20, 2014. And on Feb. 24, 2022, those same forces—this time using vehicles marked by the letter Z and no longer hiding their national identity—launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a “special military operation” that represented the culmination of almost a decade of conflict.
President Donald J. Trump said nothing about those grim commemorations this week as he abruptly overturned U.S. policy on Ukraine and indeed the U.S. relationship with its European allies. The White House began a startling effort to restore relations with Russia that had been suspended by the Biden administration after Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. And in a series of comments on social media and before reporters in Washington, the president appeared to endorse Russia’s narrative and talking points about the origins of the conflict.
Meanwhile, U.S. diplomats, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, met with Russian officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to begin negotiations toward ending the war. Completely left out of those discussions were representatives from Ukraine and the European Union.
Critics say the president and his team gave up ground on key issues before serious negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin even began, among them conceding Russia’s claim to territory taken from Ukraine and ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine. After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that Mr. Trump had been caught up in a “Russian disinformation space,” the U.S. president stunned America’s Ukrainian partners and diplomats across Europe by accusing Ukraine of starting the war and describing Mr. Zelensky as a dictator.
Speaking during a webinar on Feb. 20 hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, “Will the War End? Trump, Russia, and the Future of Ukraine,” Stephen Sestanovich of Columbia University, a Russian scholar and former State Department official, said the week’s turnabouts provoked celebration in the Kremlin, “dizzy with success,” and gloom in Kyiv, noting, “Ukrainians are angry and confused about what has been said to and about them.”
Mr. Sestanovich said that Mr. Putin’s call for elections in Ukraine “was a jesting and mischievous suggestion,” but that mischievous demand appears to have been fully embraced by Mr. Trump. Vice President JD Vance said this week that pressing for new elections in Ukraine going forward will be U.S. policy. Meanwhile in Ukraine, politicians across the spectrum supported the Zelensky policy of suspending elections until martial law conditions could be lifted.
Georgetown University’s Charles Kupchan, speaking during the same webinar, said he supported efforts to open a direct dialogue with Moscow and described the war from the Ukraine side as unwinnable. He suggested that “reasonable people” needed to come together to redefine a successful outcome to the war. In his opinion, that would mean “that the 80 percent of Ukraine that is still free emerges as a success story, as a defensible, secure, prosperous democracy.”
But he struggled to make sense of the White House’s sudden lurch toward Russia, which he described as “mystifying.” The Trump administration did not appear to have a strategy toward a sustainable peace that would lead to a restored and secure Ukraine as much as an “impulse…to end the war—‘Let’s talk to the Russians,’” Mr. Kupchan said.
“I appreciate what Trump is trying to do in principle,” he added, “but in practice, it has been a big hot mess,” suggesting that the president and his team were “giving away the store before negotiations have even begun.”
The week has included “an enormous amount of unnecessary damage” and “own goals,” Mr. Kupchan said, particularly the spectacle of the tit-for-tat insults over social media between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump.
The administration has proceeded almost completely backward, according to Mr. Kupchan, by first meeting unilaterally with the Russians. He believes the White House should have “done its homework” on the conflict and jointly authored a cease-fire and security plan together with European allies and the Zelensky government that could have been jointly delivered to the Russians.
Speaking before faculty and students at the Catholic University of America in Washington on Feb. 18, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, offered a counternarrative of the source of the conflict to the one apparently accepted by Mr. Trump. “To forge a just peace,” he said, “we must understand the root causes of this horrible aggression. To believe that the cause is NATO expansion or Russia’s security concerns is to repeat the Russian narrative and propaganda.”
Archbishop Shevchuk pointed out that “NATO did not exist when Russia invaded Ukraine in the 17th and 18th centuries or at the beginning of the 20th century.… Ukraine was not a threat to Russian culture when the 1932-33 Holodomor was deliberately engineered, killing at least four million people through an artificially engineered famine. Ukrainian Catholic bishops, priests, monks, nuns and faithful persecuted and arrested during the liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the 1940s were not a threat to the church in Russia. They simply wanted to practice their faith. Yet this fundamental right was denied to them.”
The latest aggression, he said, “was motivated by a Russian imperial and eventually totalitarian mentality.” He described the modern Russia that emerged from the nihilist ruins of the Soviet Union as an expression of “hybrid but also post-modern totalitarianism.”
Contemporary Russia, he warned, has made powerful use of digital technology to bend truth and distort reality to propel its imperialist, ahistorical ambition of a “greater Russia.” Effecting that vision, he believes, will mean subsuming Ukraine and other now-independent nations that once represented the margins of czarist Russia.
“No one wants peace more than Ukrainians do,” Archbishop Shevchuk concluded. “We didn’t start this war. Ukrainians need peace, but we want a just peace. We need a peace that will allow us to live in dignity, as Ukrainians, to be free, to worship in our churches.”
He cautioned that some of the calls he hears for peace now “are simply unrealistic: a compromise cannot be reached if one of the parties denies the very existence of the other.” Despite February’s Russian diplomatic flurry, planning among European allies and the United States and Ukrainian officials appears sure to continue. The desirability of some kind of civil and martial respite for Ukraine only became clearer this month. Situation reports from humanitarian agencies and United Nations sources testify to the horrific toll the war has taken.
According to assessments from the U.N., verified civilian casualties in Ukraine had reached nearly 41,000 by December 2024, including nearly 12,500 noncombatant deaths. More than 2,500 children have been killed or injured. (Ukraine’s military casualties have not been reported under martial law, but in an interview with NBC news on Feb. 14, Mr. Zelensky acknowledged 46,000 combat deaths and 380,000 wounded.) Almost 13 million Ukranians will have to rely on humanitarian assistance in 2025.
Almost four million people have been displaced from their homes and communities inside Ukraine, while another 6.9 million Ukrainians have fled abroad, including 6.3 million scattered across Europe. Nearly 500,000 Ukranians have found refuge in the United States since the fighting escalated in 2022. Temporary Protected Status for Ukraine was extended in January through April 19, 2025.
The U.N. reports that damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure has been widespread and catastrophic, with Russian missiles, aircraft and artillery illegally targeting civilian power grids, water supplies and transport systems. Russian forces have also struck more than 3,600 educational institutions.
In a report released in February on the impact of the war and religious persecution that has been hidden within the conflict, “Faith Under Russian Terror,” researchers from the Religious Freedom Initiative of Mission Eurasia found that nearly 700 religious sites, including Ukrainian Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim places of worship, have been damaged or destroyed. The intensity of the attacks on religious sites was on the rise in 2024, according to Mission Eurasia, as Russia attempted to press its advantage in military numbers and materiel.
The report’s authors add: “The Russian army’s practice of seizing religious buildings and using them as military bases or cover for firing positions has led to even greater destruction of churches and other religious sites in Ukraine.”
The Rev. Mykhailo Brytsyn, the initiative’s director and the Baptist pastor of Grace Church in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, writes: “The so-called ‘special military operation,’ declared by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, aims to obliterate Ukraine’s statehood and its people as a nation and ethnicity, in alignment with the chauvinistic ideology of the ‘Russian World.’” That effort at obliterating cultural distinctiveness has included the targeting of Ukrainian religious sites and the persecution of “clergy and devout believers.”
“Statements and actions by Russian officials in the occupied territories of Ukraine clearly demonstrate their intent to eradicate religious freedom in favor of a monopoly by the Russian Orthodox Church,” he said.
The reality of the widespread religious persecution in Russian-occupied territories, Rev. Brytsyn added, remains hidden “due to the swirl of distorted news, accusations from unscrupulous lobbyists, and outright false statements from pro-Russian politicians and propagandists.”
Russian forces now control almost 20 percent of Ukraine and about 3.5 million Ukrainians are living under occupation. The Mission Eurasia report concludes that “any freezing of the conflict and continued Russian control over Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions, as well as Crimea, would have catastrophic consequences for the local population.”
In an interview with local church media in July, Archbishop Shevchuk reported that in the territories now controlled by Russia “our church has been liquidated…. Institutions of social service of our church, such as Caritas Ukraine or such a community of Catholic men as the Knights of Columbus, are also prohibited there. In the occupied territories today, there is virtually no Catholic priest—either Greek Catholic or Roman Catholic…. Wherever Russia arrives, Stalinist times return and clergy face repression.”
The religious freedom report also explored the impact of controversial new prohibitions signed into law in August by Mr. Zelensky that seek to contain or completely ban religious organizations linked to the Russian Orthodox Church from operating in Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has been a consistent supporter of Mr. Putin and the war against Ukraine.
The Kyiv School of Economics reports that the direct damages inflicted on Ukraine’s infrastructure reached $170 billion in 2024. Housing, transport, energy and agriculture were among the most affected sectors. According to the school’s analysis, Ukraine’s housing sector has suffered the most, with direct damages estimated at $60 billion. “As of November 2024, 236,000 residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed, including 209,000 private houses, 27,000 apartment buildings, and 600 dormitories,” it reported.
According to some estimates, it may take as much as $1 trillion to make Ukraine whole again and hundreds of years to rid the country of millions of landmines and anti-personnel devices now scattered across its landscape.
More from America
- A Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest on 1,000 days of war
- Why a ‘just peace’ in Ukraine will require more than defeating Putin
- ‘The world’s on fire’: How the Catholic Church is responding to global warfare
- Ukraine and the troubling future of A.I. warfare
- ‘Do not forget us’: Catholics in Ukraine mark a year of war
A deeper dive
- War in Ukraine
- Russia’s War in Ukraine: Identity, History, and Conflict
- Securing Ukraine’s future
- The Real Reason Putin Targets Schools
- Article by Vladimir Putin “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”
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