Biden's disaster in Ukraine was decades in the making | Russian-Ukrainian war

President Joe Biden is about to end what many see as a disastrous presidency. His departure from the White House could potentially mark a turning point in both the Russia-Ukraine conflict and three decades of ill-conceived Western policy that has alienated Russia and collapsed its democratic project. But that depends on the ability of incoming President Donald Trump not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors.

Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the ground for this conflict was prepared by American securocrats in the 1990s. Back then, Russia had just emerged from the collapse of the USSR much weaker and disoriented, while the Russian leadership, idealistic and inept as it was at the time, operated on the assumption that full integration with the West was inevitable.

The decisions taken then caused a confrontation between Russia and the West, which reached its logical climax during the Biden presidency.

The problem has never been the eastward expansion of NATO—a security pact created to counter the Soviet Union—and the European Union per se, but the exclusion of Russia from that process.

Most importantly, this approach steered Ukraine toward Euro-Atlantic integration while Russia was kept out of it—creating a rift between two nations closely linked by history, economics, and interpersonal relations. It also accelerated Russia's securitization and retreat from democracy under Putin.

This outcome was never predetermined, and it took tireless efforts by American securocrats to achieve it.

One missed chance for a different path was the Partnership for Peace program, formally launched by the Clinton administration in 1994. It was designed to balance the desire of the former Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO and the key goal of keeping Russia on board as a major nuclear power and a new democracy with a distinctly pro-Western government.

Russia joined it, but, as the American historian Mary Sarott writes in her book Not an Inch, this useful framework was derailed at its inception by a small number of securocrats in Washington.

She specifically spoke of the “enlargement troika,” consisting of Daniel Fried, Alexander Vershbow, and Richard Holbrooke, who pushed for aggressive NATO expansion, ignoring protests from Moscow.

Sarot also mentions John Herbst as the author of a later report on informal promises of non-NATO expansion made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which she suggests shaped US policy to ignore Russian complaints about NATO expansion until its limits for decades to come.

The unreflective arrogance and triumphalism these securocrats embody can also be seen in Biden himself, who was then a prominent member of Congress. In a Video from 1997he mocked Moscow's protests against NATO expansion, saying Russia would have to embrace China and Iran if it remained intransigent. Then he clearly accepts that this is an absurd and unrealistic scenario – perhaps believing that Russia has no choice but to remain in the Western orbit. But it turned out to be right along the lines of what he thought was a clever joke.

In his hawkish policy towards Russia, Biden found a willing partner in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is hardly a coincidence that Zelensky's massive U-turn in relations with Russia began with Biden's inauguration.

The Ukrainian president was elected on a promise to end the simmering conflict that began with Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. He met Putin in Paris in December 2019. both agreed to a ceasefire in the Donbas region, which both sides have largely respected, reducing the number of deaths to almost zero.

But after Biden stepped into the White House, Zelensky ordered a crackdown on Putin's Ukrainian ally Viktor Medvedchuk, while simultaneously launching high-profile campaigns for Ukraine's NATO membership, the return of Crimea, and the derailment of the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.

Two factors may have influenced Zelensky's decisions. Azerbaijan's victory over Russian-backed Armenian forces in the fall of 2020, thanks in large part to Turkey's Bayraktar drones, raised hopes that high-tech warfare against Russia could be successful. The other factor was that in December 2020 polls showed that Medvedchuk's party was ahead of Zelensky's party.

Just days after Biden's inauguration, Zelenskyy gave an interview to the American publication Axios in which he asked his American counterpart: “Why is Ukraine still not in NATO?” This was followed by a comment with the same question in the headline from the Ukrainian foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, published by the Atlantic Council, a think tank that receives much of its funding from the US government and Pentagon contractors.

Not surprisingly, some of the same individuals who shaped US Russia policy in the 1990s also encouraged the Biden administration to adopt aggressive policies that helped bring about the invasion.

On March 5, Fried, Werschbow, and Herbst, along with three others, published a report at the Atlantic Council with a list of recommendations for the Biden administration regarding Ukraine and Russia. They amounted to putting pressure on Putin by escalating on all fronts, from offering Ukraine a NATO membership plan to derailing Nord Stream 2 and “strengthening security” in the Black Sea.

Three weeks after that publication, Putin began deploying troops to Ukraine's border, beginning an 11-month-long standoff. During this period, the British warship HMS Defender entered what Russia had declared its territorial waters off the coast of occupied Crimea in June, the US began covert arms shipments to Ukraine in September, and finally the US and Ukraine announced a strategic partnership in November – a move , which amounted to a casus belli in the eyes of Kremlin hawks.

At that time, Putin began seriously preparing for the invasion before eventually launching it in February 2022. As a result, the war is now approaching its third anniversary.

Despite massive Western support, Ukraine suffered terrible losses and gained nothing from challenging Putin to a fight. The war has brought Ukraine to the brink, causing a massive refugee crisis, economic collapse, social disintegration and an ever-increasing death toll.

If peace in Ukraine is achieved this year, it is likely to be along the lines of the failed Istanbul accords of 2022, which envisioned an Austrian-style neutral Ukraine with limits on the size of its military. Russia is likely to insist on keeping much of the territory it won as punishment for Ukrainian intransigence. This will technically represent a defeat for Ukraine, but it will be a clear victory for the Ukrainian people who have borne the brunt of this war, as well as for the rest of the world.

It will also be a major defeat for the securocratic class, which has been pushing for a new confrontation with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The aggressive pursuit of expansion at the expense of Russia has clearly failed as a strategy. It is time for Western politicians to think about how to turn the situation around and begin a slow return to rapprochement with Moscow.

It is not about exonerating Putin's government from responsibility for the crime of aggression, as well as for the war crimes committed by Russian troops. It is about removing the conditions that have turned Russia into a militarized dictatorship and ending a conflict that will sustain Putin's regime as long as it exists.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.