After his deal winning visit with Donald Trump in Alaska, Valdimir Putin spoke to his audience in Moscow about the “Ukraine Crisis”—not about “Russia’s War on Ukraine”. If Russia had invaded France or the United States, for example, would we be talking about the French crisis or the American crisis? No. Likewise, many journalists and commentators talk about the Ukraine “conflict”. But again, that is demeaning. Would we talk about the French conflict or the American conflict? No, we would not.
The war on Ukraine was not like a spontaneous eruption of conflict, or a tamping down of an armed insurrection in a colonial empire of by gone days. It has been a brutal armed invasion of the sovereign democratic nation of Ukraine, including the abduction of nearly 20,000 children, although some estimates are even larger.[i] And the people of Ukraine have valiantly defended themselves in innovative ways against a totalitarian dictatorship nearly four times the size of Ukraine for over a decade.
Nor should the war be blamed on Ukraine, or on President Obama, President Biden, NATO, or Trump — none of them started the war. This war was initiated as early as 2010 when Putin began to cite Ivan Ilyin, a Russian philosopher and conservative monarchist and ultra-nationalist. Ilyin was a proponent of Russia’s autocratic heritage and a strong critic of Western-style democracy. He advocated what some have called Christian fascism or a conservative monarchy. Beginning in the 2010s, Putin drew from Ilyin’s work to explain to the Russian Parliament why Russia had to invade Ukraine.[ii]
Putin’s somewhat mystical or pseudo-philosophical basis for erasing Ukraine as a sovereign nation is neither a legitimate or legal basis for its war and cannot be appeased by Donald Trump or Europe.
I am so pleased to see many of the leaders of European nations joining President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on his second visit to the White House that is scheduled for tomorrow, August 18th. This follows immediately on the unpredictable and threatening outcome of Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska on August 15th 2025. There is a serious need for all the adults to be in the room. This meeting offers some hope that a promising resolution of these discussions could emerge to protect the interests of the sovereign democratic nation of Ukraine.
An AI generated image of Trump and Putin meeting in Alaska:
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
[ii] A more developed perspective on overview of Ivan Ilyin’s ideas in the hands of Putin is provided by Timothy Snyder in The Road to Freedom (London: Penguin, 2018).