By SheerPost-Joe Lauria -February 25, 2025  

The outcry spread quickly across the Western world: Donald Trump dared say Ukraine started the war.  The New York Times accused Trump of “rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.” The paper’s White House correspondent wrote: 

“When Russian forces crashed over the borders into Ukraine in 2022 determined to wipe it off the map as an independent state, the United States rushed to aid the beleaguered nation and cast its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a hero of resistance.

Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a ‘dictator without elections’ who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping.”

The BBC reported: 

“Ukraine didn’t start the war. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014.

The annexation came after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was ousted by popular demonstrations.”

CNN howled: “President Donald Trump has now fully adopted Russia’s false propaganda on Ukraine, turning against a sovereign democracy that was invaded in favor of the invader. … Trump wrongly accused Ukraine of starting the conflict.”

“In comments to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world,” complained the Financial Times. 

It was pretty much the same thing across the Western media landscape, which spoke with one voice.

The media takes speaking with one voice as confirmation that they are right. But it’s often just massive confirmation bias for the story Western intelligence services and political leaders tell them, rather than an independent examination of the facts. 

In this case the facts show that Trump is right. 

The central question in all this is: when did the Ukraine war actually start? The Western mainstream leads masses of people to believe it began Feb. 24, 2022, when the Russian regular army intervened in what was already an eight-year old civil war that was very much begun by Ukraine, with U.S. help. 

That’s the part they don’t tell you.   

The key to the falsehood is what the BBC calls “Ukraine’s pro-Russian president” being “ousted by popular demonstrations.” [Emphasis added.]

Of course Trump didn’t explain that. He’s not a great public speaker. He too often fails to lay out the context needed to understand what he’s talking about. 

Trump’s fleeting remark at a press encounter at his Florida estate last Tuesday set off the international furor.

“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’ [to the talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia],” Trump said about Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky. “Well, you’ve been there for three years … you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

It was those six italicized words that ignited the firestorm. The rest of what he said in that sentence was ignored. 

He was condemned by European leaders for those few words. Zelensky, who still leads Ukraine, accused Trump of spreading “a lot of disinformation coming from Russia.”

“Unfortunately, President Trump, with all due respect for him as the leader of a nation that we respect greatly, is living in this disinformation bubble,” Zelensky said.

The only way the West can deal with this is to call what happened Russian propaganda. As if a narrative is wrong, not because the facts are wrong, but because Russia is saying it.  Essentially, Russia is never right, and the U.S. and its allies are never wrong.

It’s like the story of the American sitting next to a Russian on a flight from Moscow to Washington. “What brings you to Washington?” the American asks.

“I’m traveling to do research on American propaganda,” the Russian says.

“What American propaganda?”

“Exactly,” says the Russian.     

Blowing a Deal

What was left out of the mainstream reporting was that Trump was highlighting opportunities to negotiate peace that Zelensky and Ukraine had squandered. “You could have made a deal,” he said.

But Trump fundamentally failed to explain how the Ukraine war began in 2014 and not on Feb. 22, 2022, three years ago Monday. That’s when Russia directly entered a war that had already been started by Ukraine and especially, Trump didn’t mention, by the United States.  

[See: Biden Confirms Why US Needed This War]

‘Popular Demonstrations’

On Feb 20, 2014, Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected president of Ukraine in 2010 in a popular vote certified by the OSCE, was violently overthrown.

Yanukovych’s base in the Russian-speaking parts of Eastern and Southern Ukraine refused to recognize the unconstitutional government that took over, defending their democratic rights. 

Majority ethnic-Russian Crimea, a huge base of Yanukovych’s support, voted little more than a month later, on March 16, 2014, to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia. The Ukrainian government had also declared that it would not extend beyond 2017 Russia’s lease on a Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea.

Street violence broke out in other parts of Ukraine. Five days after extreme right-wing Ukrainian gangs burned alive 48 Russian speakers in a trades union building in Odessa, two of the Eastern provinces declared independence from Ukraine and took over government buildings. 

With U.S. backing, the unconstitutional government on April 16, 2014 launched a military attack against those two provinces in the Donbass region. 

This is how Ukraine stated the war and the date they did it on.

Trump didn’t mention the instrumental part the U.S. played in Yanukoych’s ouster and Kiev’s subsequent war on Donbass.

US Role in Starting the War

Think of an encampment of protesters in Lafayette Park, some of whom are violent. They are calling for the ouster of the U.S. president from the White House across the street.

Two senior Russian lawmakers then show up in the park. They appear with protest leaders and address the crowd, encouraging them, telling them Russia is with them.

Then the Russian deputy foreign minister in charge of North American affairs appears in Lafayette Park handing out food to the encamped demonstrators. 

Later the minister is caught on an open telephone line discussing with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. the composition of the new American government once the president is overthrown. This minister had also made a speech saying Russia spent $5 billion to bring democracy to the United States.

The elected American president is then overthrown violently and flees the country. Russia installs the government it has selected. California rejects the Russian-installed regime and says it is breaking away from the United States. The new coup government then launches a war against California.

If this actually happened in Washington, do you think anyone in the U.S. would say that Russia had anything to do with overthrowing the U.S. government? Or would they have just said he was ousted by “popular demonstrations?”  

But this is precisely what happened in Ukraine in 2014. The role of the legislators was played in real life by Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy. The deputy foreign minister was played by Victoria Nuland, the then U.S. assistant secretary of state for Eurasian affairs.

Obama Tries to Contain the War 

Russia came to Donbass’ defense with arms, equipment, ammunition and the quasi-independent Wagner mercenaries. To cover up Kiev’s aggression,  and to justify it, Western governments and their media falsely called Moscow’s help to ethnic Russians an “invasion.”

After the illegitimate government began its attack on the breakaway Russian regions, President Barack Obama tried to limit its escalation. The New York Times reported on March 10, 2015:

“The president has signaled privately that despite all the pressure, he remains reluctant to send arms. In part, he has told aides and visitors that arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow.

Mr. Obama continues to pose questions indicating his doubts. ‘O.K., what happens if we send in equipment — do we have to send in trainers?’ said one person paraphrasing the discussion on the condition of anonymity. ‘What if it ends up in the hands of thugs? What if Putin escalates?’”

First, Obama is talking about a war that was ongoing, that had started the year before, not seven years later. Second, Obama is keenly aware that U.S. lethal aid to Ukraine, while fighting a civil war against Russian-speakers, would provoke Russia.

And third, Obama admits here what Western orthodoxy now denies, (but which was widely reported in the mainstream at the time), namely that “thugs” were a big problem in Ukraine.  By thugs Obama clearly meant extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi groups fighting for Ukraine. [See: On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine]

Trump Gives In to Pressure

During the 2016 Republican Convention a plank in the Republican party platform was found by Democrats that said no lethal aid to Ukraine. Under the deranged influence of Russiagate, this was trumpeted as evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia, even though it was only the continuation of Obama’s exact policy. 

Trying to escape the pressure of Russiagate, Trump listened to his treacherous advisers and armed the Ukrainians, greatly exacerbating the war and provoking the Russians, as Obama feared.

Trump said last Tuesday that Ukraine had many chances to make a deal with Russia. To try to end the war, Russia backed the Minsk accords, which grew out of a Kremlin meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in May 2015.  The accords, which were endorsed by the U.N. Security Council with U.S. assent, would have left the breakaway eastern provinces inside Ukraine with autonomy. 

However, France, Germany and Ukraine, including three years under Zelensky, blocked its implementation. Merkel, former French President Francois Hollande and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko all admitted they strung Russia along in buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine.

This is what Trump apparently meant when he said Zelensky had three years to do a deal, or rather to implement a deal already made.

With signs of a renewed Ukrainian offensive against Donbass, Russia presented NATO and the U.S. two treaty proposals in December 2021. They called for a new security architecture in Europe, namely the withdrawal of NATO troops from former Warsaw Pact countries and U.S. missiles from Poland and Romania minutes away from Moscow. 

Trump keeps repeating that the Russian intervention would never have happened had he been president. Perhaps he would have negotiated these treaties.A Daily Mail story last week said Trump is considering withdrawing U.S. troops from the Baltics, part of what Russia wants in a new security arrangement in Europe. It’s part of what Russia has been arguing for decades. 

Moscow told the Biden administration that if the treaties were rejected, Moscow could resort to “technical/military means” in Ukraine.

Fully understanding that this meant a new, more deadly phase of the war, Biden rejected the treaties, provoking Russia’s direct intervention in the civil war.  Biden needed this to happen to become the “start” of the war — as if history began on Feb. 24, 2022. 

Biden and his defense secretary made plain the U.S. aim was to “weaken” and to overthrow the Putin government and return to the dominance the U.S. enjoyed over Russia in the 1990s.

To do this, Biden needed Russia’s invasion in order to launch an information, economic and ground proxy war against Russia. Three years later, the West has lost all three and is still lying about when it all began. 

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Joe Lauria

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on X @unjoe.