The recent pronouncements of Ukrainian president Zelensky—regarding his inability to cede Ukrainian territory to Russia—sound increasingly like the response of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who, deprived of the use of his arms and legs (which were chopped off by King Arthur), continues to invoke the ridiculous syllable “Ni,” as a defense until Arthur finally gets bored and marches on by.
Whether Russia’s isolation of the key Ukrainian hub of Pokrovsk counts as an arm or a leg in the body of Ukraine’s defense, it certainly represents Russia’s capability to make grinding progress toward a complete control of at least Donetsk and Luhansk (and Crimea), if not all five oblasts including Zaporizhzhia and Kherson claimed by Russia. These five oblasts correspond, in part if not in all, to the obvious political split shown in the voting for Ukraine’s president in 2010. (For more, see map at https://tinyurl.com/
This map may be taken as the last accepted polling of the Ukrainian population. It can be used as guide to establish a politically stable division of the country, which seems to be a necessary prelude to ending the war. In 2014, the inspiriting but less-than-representative Maidan protests in Kyiv led to a government takeover by European-leaning western Ukrainians. The protests were encouraged by US officials and supported with US funding distributed by the National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs. After escalating violence and a series of phone calls between him and US Vice President Biden in February 2014 (“it was over” and “walk away” Biden advised), president Viktor Yanukovych stepped down, thereby disenfranchising the majority of Ukrainians in the eastern regions who had elected him.
The political coup of the Maidan protests continued a geopolitical misadventure that dated back at least to the Clinton Administration. This history included the idea of NATO expansion beyond a reunified Germany in the late 1990s and progressed through the color revolutions promoting Western-style democracy among Russia’s Eastern European neighbors. Then the Maidan coup led to a civil war pitting separatists in the east supported by Russia against the nationalist forces supported by the West and to Russia’s reabsorption of Crimea to protect its warm-water port on the Black Sea. The deceptively negotiated Minsk agreements in 2015 allowed the fortification of Ukraine as a NATO and CIA spearhead in the years 2015-2021, culminating with Russia’s exasperated invasion when the US refused to discuss proposals to deal with these clearly confrontational moves.
This history is suppressed and excluded in the story told by mainstream Western media but is available through various Substack and international blogs (like this one), as well as in books like Scott Horton’s Provoked: How Washington started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine (2024) and Jonathan Haslam’s Hubris: The Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine (2025).
The summit with Trump and Putin in Alaska and the followup meeting in Washington with Zelensky and European leaders were welcome departures from the diplomatic snubbing of the Biden Administration, and the news that the three presidents—Trump, Putin, and Zelensky—may be meeting in the near future is a positive development if an uncertain one. This may be the deus ex machina role President Trump has been imagining for himself since the time during the 2024 campaign when he began predicting that he could end the conflict in his first 24 hours in office.
But because the president has not yet acknowledged the full history of US involvement in Ukraine, nor apologized to both Ukraine and Russia for US involvement in the Maidan coup and in aborting promising negotiations to end the conflict in early 2022, his role as a peace mediator is necessarily conflicted. What has changed is Trump’s willingness to regard an end to the war as a benefit—for Ukraine, for Russia, for the United States and the world in general—rather than as an abdication of a post-Cold War, zero-sum goal of US unipolar dominance. If achieved, it will put an end to a decades-old initiative by neocon think tanks and US government officials to capitalize on Ukraine’s divided social and political history in the hope of weakening Russia as an international rival.
In President Trump’s imagined role as a deus ex machina, a god floats down at the end of an a Baroque opera to arbitrarily resolve a protracted dispute in which he (or she) has been a protagonist. Like a Greek god, President Trump has demonstrated to both allies and opponents his mercurial capabilities to run roughshod over expected norms in the pursuit of promised goals. Professor Nicolai Petro has likened the Ukrainian conflict to a classical Greek tragedy, so it may be appropriate to expect a deus ex machina solution.
If Ukraine is unwilling to cede territory directly to Russia, such a god might impose a settlement calling for the creation, somewhat to the right of the Dnieper River, of a neutral East Ukraine, a country incorporating the five oblasts claimed by Russia, to which both Ukraine and Russia would cede territory (of course, other issues would also have to be addressed). The history of the 20th Century coughs up many such solutions for irreconcilable national divisions—think South Sudan, South Korea, East Timor, and Northern Ireland, not to mention Kosovo, Slovakia, Eritrea, Bangledesh, even Pakistan and India!
Russia is still fighting for the principles enumerated in the security proposals rejected by the US in January 2022 just before the start of the “special military operation”—basically, these envision Ukraine as a neutral neighbor without NATO and other threatening military and espionage installations—and discussing those principles might be a good place to start.
But in a deus ex machina scenario, such technicalities may not matter. The idea of a god descending from the clouds to solve a contentious problem at least answers the needs of restive audience members in a Baroque opera house who are tired of listening to arias endlessly repeating the unattainable hopes and fears of various human characters and willing to applaud with relief the arbitrary resolution of an erratic divinity.
© 2025 Benjamin S. Dunham