US stance on Ukraine sees dramatic shift

Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, DC, told China Daily that "while NATO will continue to be the premier Western defense body in the Euro-Atlantic space, a nucleus of autonomous Western and Central European defense — and defense industrial base — capability will also coalesce in the years ahead".

The Pew Research poll published on Feb 14 found that 37 percent of US citizens felt the country was doing too much to help Ukraine, 31 percent said it was doing the right amount, with 30 percent saying it's not enough.

There was a partisan divide in the US. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are far more likely than Democrats and their supporters to say the US is giving Ukraine too much support.

Gallup has conducted polls on the conflict six times since August 2022. For the first time, it saw 48 percent support (as of December) for the US in helping Ukraine reclaim its territory, slipping below the majority mark.

Ukrainian officials were not part of the Riyadh talks, and Zelensky has said Kyiv will not accept the results of negotiations that do not involve Ukraine.

On Feb 19, Trump called Zelensky a "dictator without elections" after the Ukrainian president said Trump was "living in this disinformation space".

US special envoy Keith Kellogg, however, met with Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday, but a scheduled news conference between the two was canceled. Zelensky later wrote on social media that he had a "productive meeting" with Kellogg.

Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics, said Trump's team faces significant challenges in advancing its plan to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.

He said Kellogg's plan involves a cease-fire, elections in Ukraine, and continued negotiations, but these are almost impossible to realize. "Zelensky does not want to hold elections, as this could mean the end of his political career," he said.

"Two things are certain though: Kyiv will have to sit directly across the table and be willing to negotiate with Moscow at some point of time," Gupta said. "And Europe will have to be involved too, given that European security architecture issues (which the Russians are keen to discuss also) cannot be established over the heads of the Europeans."

Gupta said US concerns about rare earth minerals in Ukraine "should be interpreted in exactly the same way as Trump has framed it: as a form of insurance payment for the security that would be provided to Ukraine in the form of security cooperation and arms sales by the US. Nothing more, nothing less".

Dmitry Novikov, associate professor at the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at the Higher School of Economics, believes that Trump is testing the waters, which explains the seemingly contradictory steps: pressuring Ukraine on territorial issues and elections while simultaneously pressuring Russia with promises to supply weapons to Kyiv.

"This is a war that never should have happened," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, in a Feb 18 panel discussion on the nonprofit news outlet Democracy Now.

"The Trump administration, for the first time, is telling the truth about the fundamental causes of this war," Sachs said. "The American role in this has been quite sordid for a very, very long time. The goal, starting back in 1994, was to expand NATO and surround Russia in the Black Sea region. President Clinton signed off on that in 1994."

In February 2014, the US "participated actively in a violent coup to overthrow Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, who favored neutrality", Sachs said. "This is very important to understand. The coup took place on Feb 22, 2014. US forces paid for this coup to an important extent. They stirred up this coup."

"In 2015, the war could have ended with the Minsk II agreements, but the US and Ukraine, despite the UN Security Council backing, said, 'No, you don't have to do that.' That was not a territorial claim on the Donbas by Russia. It was a claim for autonomy that the UN Security Council unanimously supported, and the US and the governments in Ukraine, at the US behest, to an important extent, completely dissed," Sachs said.

He said that in December 2021, Putin proposed a draft US-Russia security agreement. Sachs said the US rejected negotiation over the central point, "which was non-NATO enlargement to Ukraine. … It was a terrible mistake, terrible mistake of the Democrats… and of President Biden and his team".

In March 2022, just days after the start of the conflict, "they went to the negotiating table. And they came very close to an agreement, until the US and Britain stopped it", Sachs said.

"Boris Johnson (former UK prime minister)… said this is a war about preserving Western hegemony. Yes, this was a proxy war against Russia. This was the plan all along."

Ren Qi in Beijing and agencies contributed to this story.