I saw a piece in the liberal press which reported that Trump “wrongly said that Ukraine was responsible for the war”. This was about Trump’s surprisingly intelligent remarks when he said that Kiev could have made a deal and avoided the war. That deal would have meant: implementing Minsk, giving up Crimea (majority ethnic Russian population, and strong support for the annexation according to multiple Western polls), agreeing not to be in NATO and keeping its military below a level where it could be a threat to the Russian Federation. Obviously these would have been a bitter pill for the Kiev regime but are not in fact unrealistic. Highly ironically, if they are to join the European Union they will have to learn to treat the Russia orientated population in Eastern Ukraine better – because respecting minorities is a requirement for EU membership! [1] Other countries have been neutral very successfully. And, in reality, before the war there was not a huge public desire in Ukraine for NATO membership. They could still have joined the EU. And still can.
I was struck by the “wrongly” said… This is going even further than “Trump falsely claimed”. You say “wrongly” when e.g. someone makes a basic error of fact. E.g. Musk wrongly claimed that he had saved $9 billion dollars on a government contract, when as a matter of simple fact it was $9 million. How a war starts, however, is not ever, simply a matter of fact. How wars start is a matter of history, even if we are doing history in real time. That means there are contending interpretations. Different points of view can be argued, citing evidence and using theories of history or politics of international relations. Some points of view are not at all credible and are discounted by scholars. Typically in scholarship, and history is a form of scholarship, you end up with one or two serious theories. (Sometimes three). Here, I am not specifically agreeing or not agreeing with Trump, (though I do think what he said is an overwhelmingly obvious conclusion supported by the recent historical record), but commenting on this new epistemology in the West. This new epistemology collapses complex matters which are subject to interpretation into simple black and white matters of fact. These contemporary journalists need the world to be simple and to conform to their simplistic descriptions. They cannot cope with a complex world. This is just what happens in a cult.
The Guardian even has an ‘Explainer’ where two cult members, journalists, “fact-check”, Trump’s interpretation of the causes and background to the war. I won’t go through it. But to give a flavour, for their “source” for why Trump is ‘factually wrong’ about Ukraine “starting the war”, they cite the UK’s former defence minister Ben Wallace, a fervent Russia basher. He has just written a piece in the Telegraph where he talks about how “We must put Russia in a prison and build the walls high”. * Not an inconvertible source of fact in the usual sense of the word.
On another page on the Guardian I also see this: “(And if you prefer a video of a factcheck by the former UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, it’s here [link]). I have nothing against Ben Wallace writing an opinion piece or editorial in the press. He is more than entitled to express his point of view. But this is not a ‘factcheck’. This is because Trump’s comments about how the war started are simply not remarks made in the field of knowledge of ‘facts’. Facts are thing like: the 10.20 from Oxford left 10 minutes late. That is something which can be “fact-checked”. (By consulting several passengers, looking at an authoritative database at Network Rail and so on). The statement is either true or false in a very simple one-dimensional way. How the Ukraine war started is more complex than that. You can have a view. You can argue it, by referring to selected facts and developing arguments and maybe with reference to a broader theory or perspective. For example, I think that the main cause of the war was the drive to put Ukraine into NATO. I would point to multiple statements since 2008 when Russia made it very clear that this was an absolute red line. (What did they mean?) I would point to a telegram from the US Ambassador in Moscow who told Washington it was “the brightest of red lines”. I would discuss the history of Ukraine and Russia and the collapse of the USSR. How did the USSR see NATO? Is Russia not the successor state to the USSR? How might they be expected to feel when NATO expands to their borders and indeed even into a country where several million ethnic Russians live? I would also refer to my overall perspective on Russia which is that it is in a defensive mode and has been since the fall of the USSR. (I would, of course, need to argue this but here I might for example cite the EU report that said the 2008 Russia Georgia war was started by Georgia and not Russia as the “Russia is an aggressor” school likes to say). And so on. In short, I would put together a case for my view. I don’t claim this is a “fact”. It is a theory or viewpoint, but one which I think is strongly supported by evidence. This is how history works. There is a kind of history which is about facts. That is the bourgeoise history of a country which tells the history in terms of the dates of the births and deaths of the Kings and Queens. How the Ukraine war started is not a matter of ‘fact’; you cannot treat causes of historical events as ‘facts’. If they try to tell you it is a matter of fact you know you are already in la-la land. Whatever ‘facts’ they claim. (Ironically, perhaps, in the West this has happened before. Marx believed that history could be explained scientifically, and this means that there are factually true and untrue statements about history).
Update.
Today the Guardian even goes so far as to have a headline, “Kiev’s Whitehouse wooing implodes as Zelensky tells the truth about Trump”. Perhaps they should ask Zelensky to do their next ‘factcheck’?
Al-Jazeera, which as a media publication is basically 100% on message with Western liberalism with a bit of a different take on the Palestinian question, also has an “Explainer” about Trump’s comments about the Ukraine war which contains the gem: “Trump’s claim that Ukraine started the war is also untrue. Russia sent troops inside Ukraine as part of what it called a “special military operation” and has since captured nearly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory.” [2] In fact! Trump’s words were; “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal”. So, it is clear that Trump’s was contextualising his statement about Ukraine starting the war by pointing out that they could have made a deal. Indeed, Kiev had multiple opportunities to make a deal with Russia. They could, for a start, have implemented Minsk. (The agreements to grant autonomy to Donbas which Kiev never implemented and whose German sponsor then Chancellor Merkel later admitted/claimed that she had only signed to buy time for Ukraine to arm itself; which it did). Trump is saying “you started the war because you eschewed making an agreement with Russia despite having had ample opportunity to do so”. in fact!, the liberal ‘fact-checkers’, ironically enough, have started their “fact-checking” by misrepresenting what Trump said, something which is itself actually a checkable fact! Such is the level of confusion in Western liberalism. It can only be explained by a serious collective mental illness.
The New York Times has a headline: “Trump Falsely Says Ukraine Started the War With Russia. Here Is What to Know”. This includes the gem: “There is no doubt that Russia started the war by invading Ukraine. Russian troops stormed over the border almost exactly three years ago, with the explicit aim of toppling the pro-Western government of Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, the capital. “. Even if we put on one side the problem that Trump was talking about Ukraine not making a deal when there was a chance – and not about who in concrete terms physically started the war, this is still absurd. Not least because Zelensky’s government was the result of a coup in 2014 by “pro-Western” forces which overthrew an elected President! At the level of scholarship, (which one should not expect too much of these days in the West), it is shockingly ignorant. When historians discuss the causes of a war what is at stake is not who fired the first actual bullet, but the political circumstances leading up to the war. But, as we have noted, Trump was not even saying that Ukraine started the war in this sense. Finally, if we want to “fact-check” the New York Times further we could note that this claim, “It was a striking distortion of reality. Mr. Zelensky did not talk the United States into giving him money “to go into a war.” He and his country were attacked, and only then did the United States under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. respond with expansive financial assistance.” is, to be very kind, disingenuous. It omits the $1.5 billion weapons given to Ukraine by the US between 2014 and 2019, (mostly under Trump as it happens) as the Department Of Defence reports. [3] It is interesting that while “fact-checking” Trump’s (taken out of context) comment about how the Ukraine war started and finding it to be “false”, the New York Times is essentially engaging in (fact-checkable!) lying.
It looks to me like all this “fact-checking” is some kind of intense propaganda operation. Did someone in MI6 or the “Integrity Initiative” (a British intelligence connected op to sow pro-Western liberal disinformation in the media) simply come up with the idea of “fact-checking” and circulate it via the Integrity Initiative to editors? You can almost see them sitting round the board-room table, looking at a PowerPoint with a slide, “Call it fact-checking” and they (the population) will believe it. The speaker goes on to explain that countering arguments and evidence with .. arguments and evidence is a fool’s game. Much better to say, “we have fact-checked” anything which is inconvenient and found it to be “false”. A mass hoax operation which requires a direct assault on any concept of ‘truth’ deeper than simple true/false facts. (The idea that the trans movement is a weaponised assault on epistemological standards is now beginning to look not so crazy).
Update – the crazy, lying world of the Guardian
The Guardian today has a headline “Trump turnaround as he acknowledges Russia invaded Ukraine” with a subheading “Donald Trump has reversed course to admit that Russia did in fact invade Ukraine”. The piece says:
Donald Trump has reversed course to admit that Russia did in fact invade Ukraine. In an interview with Fox News radio on Friday, he acknowledged Russia had invaded Ukraine on the order of Vladimir Putin, but said Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, and then-US president Joe Biden, should have averted it. “They shouldn’t have let him attack.” The US president had said on Tuesday that Ukraine “should have never started” the war three years ago, prompting criticism domestically and internationally.
Trump has not “reversed course” or committed a “turnaround”. His previous comments in a shortform social media post amounted to view that Ukraine “started the war” in as much as they could have made a deal but chose not to. In this interview, just based on the Guardian report, we can see that Trump simply clarified his remarks, (given the earlier media misreporting). I doubt these are mistakes by the Guardian. I think the authors are knowingly lying. (This piece is attributed to ‘staff and agencies’ which is a pity as I would like to call out the author as a liar). This is sheer media manipulation of the narrative. You could call it “misinformation”. I would guess that directly or indirectly the intelligence agencies are involved.
* On this idea I can’t help pointing out that what Wallace is talking about in reality is locking us into a prison.
Update: the lies flow free on the Guardian:
As well as dismissing the democratically elected Zelenskyy as a dictator, the White House has been pressuring Ukraine’s president to sign a $500bn minerals deal in which he would give the US half of his country’s mineral resources. [4]
Zelensky is not ‘democratically elected’. His term has expired. The ‘double-standards’ is striking. If Zelensky is ‘democratically elected’ then so is Hamas. Also; I think it is not “half of his country’s mineral resources” but a percentage of the revenue from their development until a total sum of $500 billion is reached. (I’m not evaluating the deal either way just noting that it is not as reported by Toby Helm and Luke Harding).
Update:
Another characteristic feature of Western media narrative construction is evident in this story. Having, ‘falsely’ said that Trump “falsely said that Ukraine started the war”, they now continue to repeat that line ad nauseum. I could put multiple links from the Guardian and New York Times where this phrase is used. For example; “Yet Starmer is going into the talks with a clear message that Putin is the aggressor, after the US president falsely claimed Ukraine had started the war.” [5].This is simply the tactic that if you repeat something which isn’t true frequently enough then you establish it as functionally true.
Notes
- Council of Europe has an extensive set of requirements about national minority and language rights: https://www.coe.int/en/web/minorities/at-a-glance#{%2279030665%22:[4]} and https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=09000016800c108d The EU requires that member countries respect “cultural diversity”: https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/enlargement-policy/conditions-membership/chapters-acquis_en . Ukraine’s language laws for example requiring shopkeepers to greet customers in Ukrainian appear at least at first glance to be either incompatible with the conditions of the Council of Europe “Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities” – or at least contrary to it in spirit. Ukraine is a member of the Council of Europe; I am surprised I did not see anything in the press about that body complaining about Ukraine’s treatment of its minority populations in the East.
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/20/trump-vs-zelenskyy-whats-behind-escalating-war-of-words
- https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/1879340/dod-announces-250m-to-ukraine/
- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/22/keir-starmer-lays-down-ukraine-peace-demand-ahead-of-trump-talks
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/24/trump-ukraine-putin-peacekeepers-macron