You don’t have to have a sneaking crush on thuggish Russian President Vladimir Putin or mistake him as a guardian of “Christian values” to realize that the war in Ukraine has many fathers beside him. Western elites and their handmaidens in the Deep State have been playing Chicken Kyiv with Russia since the early 1990s. Among their actions:

• Pointlessly expanding the obsolete suicide pact called NATO right up to Russia’s borders — a perfect parallel to the Soviets putting nuclear missiles in Castro’s Cuba in 1962, which almost led President John F. Kennedy to initiate World War III.
• Encouraging the most quixotic nationalists in Ukraine to hold onto territories that Russia would never renounce, especially Crimea.
• Honeycombing Ukraine with abortion providers, LGBTQ evangelists, and CIA spies, all funded via USAID programs in pastel, “humanitarian” wrapping.
• Hijacking Ukraine’s 2013 revolution and filling its government and civil service with CIA appointees, as Victoria Nuland boasted about doing in front of Congress in 2016.
• Scheming to cut off cheap Russian energy exports to Europe and replacing them with pricier exports that would enrich companies like Burisma, with directors like Hunter Biden.
• Falsely scapegoating the Russian government for “rigging the 2016 election,” “colluding with Donald Trump,” and “faking the Hunter Biden laptop” contents.

Who Caused the Ukraine War? In Part, Joe Biden

Worst of all, the Biden administration took direct actions that helped ensure the launching of a grinding, pointless war in Ukraine that has claimed over a million casualties. As Prof. Alan Kuperman writes at The Hill:

In late 2021, when Putin mobilized forces on Ukraine’s border and demanded implementation of the Minsk deals, it seemed obvious that unless Zelensky relented, Russia would invade to at least form a land bridge between Donbas and Crimea.

Considering that Ukraine already was existentially dependent on U.S. military assistance, if President Biden had insisted that Zelensky comply with Putin’s request, it would have happened. Instead, Biden lamentably left the decision to Zelensky and pledged that if Russia invaded, the U.S. would respond “swiftly and decisively,” which Zelensky read as a green light to defy Putin.

Had Trump been president, he likely would not have provided such a blank check, so Zelensky would have had little choice but to implement the Minsk deals to avert war. Even if Zelensky had still refused and provoked Russia to invade, Trump would have denied him a veto over peace negotiations, which Biden recklessly gave by declaring, “There’s nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

That pledge tragically emboldened Ukraine to prolong the war in expectation of eventually decisive U.S. military aid, which Biden then refused to supply due to fear of nuclear escalation. In that way, Biden raised false hopes in Ukraine, needlessly perpetuating a war that has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands in the last two years alone during which the frontlines have shifted by less than 1% of Ukraine’s territory.

In other words, our past leaders helped make this mess, so it’s not a betrayal of “America First” foreign policy for Donald Trump to help clean it up. In fact, it’s the least we owe the suffering people of Ukraine, who’ve been victimized by one government after another for almost 100 years.

An Honest Broker, Not a Puppeteer

Defying the mandarins of the Beltway and the Deep State spokesmen who honeycomb the Mainstream Media, Trump has stepped forward as an honest broker to end this tragic war, and try to reset U.S. relations with a nuclear-armed Russia — instead of recklessly driving it into Beijing’s welcoming arms.

Trump had a fruitful 90-minute phone conversation with Putin himself, commenting on via social media:

JUST IN
President Donald Trump says he just concluded a one hour call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The President says the call was centered around his discussions with Putin. pic.twitter.com/QIZVonSNjX

— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) March 19, 2025

The Russian government praised the call:

BREAKING: President Trump has concluded a 90 min phone call with Vladimir Putin where “many elements” of a peace deal with Ukraine have been agreed to.

A Russian government official stated after the call, “Under the leadership of president Putin and president Trump, the world… pic.twitter.com/qTEfFaY2v1

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 18, 2025

Trump followed this conversation by speaking to Ukraine’s President Volodmyr Zelenskyy, who reported on their talk:

I had a positive, very substantive, and frank conversation with President of the United States Donald Trump @POTUS. I thanked him for a good and productive start to the work of the Ukrainian and American teams in Jeddah on March 11—this meeting of the teams significantly helped… pic.twitter.com/JFBd5EeIkg

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) March 19, 2025

Peace … What Is It Good For?

All this news is very hopeful to those of us who seek peace and a rational compromise outcome to this tragic mutual slaughter.

What can we hope would emerge from a peace deal in Ukraine? What might an end to the conflict offer? We’d like to speculate on some of those benefits, while noting which powerful interests oppose such happy outcomes for their own selfish or ideological reasons.

• An end to the killing. As Christians, we ought to be strongly motivated by this result alone. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is a phrase that came from Jesus’s own lips. Shrug it off at your peril. Both Ukraine and Russia have low birthrates and tragically shrunken lifespans, with high abortion rates. They urgently need to end a war that’s savaging their futures and encouraging many Ukrainians to flee to other countries. Of course, those globalists who see each newborn child as a threat to the Climate aren’t concerned about population decline. Their attitude instead is “Faster, please.”
• A return of affordable energy to Western Europe, with the end of wartime sanctions. This is especially important given Germany’s rash 2011 decision to phase out all its nuclear plants — but it runs directly counter to the new policy of the globalist German government to abandon modern energy production in pursuit of radical “green” policies that would likely deindustrialize Europe’s economic powerhouse.
• An end to the massive waste of wealth on bombs, bullets, drones, and high-tech weapons. Both Ukraine and Russia were devastated by 70 years of economic insanity in the form of Soviet Communism. Both were looted by oligarchs in the wake of that system’s end. Neither country has had a chance to really rebuild or empower its citizens to prosper under a normal, honest economic system. The constant drumbeat of radical nationalism and the emergency conditions of war only slow down hopes for prosperity and stability of ordinary citizens. Of course, the Western arms companies that have made hundreds of billions off the conflict Joe Biden enabled won’t welcome this prospect. Remember how GOP senators lectured the country about the billions we sent to Ukraine, which really ended up in the pockets of arms merchants such as Blackrock. Don’t expect such senators to welcome Trump’s peace plan.

The loudest objections to any peace plan won’t mention the private agendas of those who profit from ongoing war. Instead, the voices objecting to any end to the fighting short of an impossible reconquest of all Ukraine’s old territory will speak in moralistic phrases, invoking our highest ideals and pretending that a “rules-based international order” which benefits the West is the only alternative to a revival of Nazi crimes.

The War Party will scream that we cannot let Putin “profit from aggression,” and insist that borders are never “determined by force of arms.” They’ll hope that we don’t look closely at U.S. borders, which include whole states such as Texas and California that we conquered from Mexico — or the borders of Poland, Germany, and France, each of which takes its shape from the result of military conflicts. The hawks will insist we must pretend that the fiber of reality changed utterly in 1945, and any recognition of the grim facts of our fallen world is a “surrender to aggression.” And they will be well-paid by their friends at Blackrock for saying such things.

We who care for ordinary people, for peace, and for a livable future will need to see through such deceptive rhetoric, and keep in mind the real interests of the actual human beings, our brothers in Christ, who live in both Russia and Ukraine.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.