Facts are not facts in the post-truth world. President Trump has called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and blamed Ukraine for causing the war. He has also questioned Zelensky’s legitimacy given the latter’s presidential term ended last year. The falsity of these alternative facts becomes plain upon comparison: Between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership styles and records; between the Ukrainian and Russian political systems; and between Russian and Ukrainian behaviour since February 2022.

The reason all this falseness feels like facts is because it is part of a wildly popular anti-Western narrative that blames the West for the war. In this story, an imperialist America expands the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) eastwards, to the doorsteps of Russia, ignoring Russian warnings of an approaching casus belli, most dramatically delivered by Putin at the 2007 Munich Security Conference.

Popularity is no guarantee of a sound story, and this one does not address some key questions. First, why does it not give any agency to the eastern European countries that wanted to join Nato after the Cold War? Why isn’t their fear of a revived Russia — based on decades of experience of stifling occupation, subjugation and domination — factored into this narrative? Ask the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, the Poles, and the Hungarians (though not Viktor Orbán), and you’ll have a more nuanced picture. These peoples wanted Nato because they didn’t want to experience what Russia has done — yet again — to one of its neighbours.

And second, the assurance — and not an agreement or a guarantee since it was not codified in a treaty — about not expanding Nato eastwards was forged with a Russia that held the promise of democracy and human freedoms and not the entity that it has become since 2000. That assurance was a product of a milieu of optimism over Russia-West relations. Facts began changing in the 2000s, when the casus belli is claimed to have crystallised.

Furthermore, this narrative does not ask questions of the Russian response to the alleged threat. Recall the approximately 60-kilometre-long Russian convoy that was headed towards Kyiv soon after the war began. It was aimed at subjugating Ukraine by taking the capital and perhaps installing a Moscow-friendly regime. Russia changed strategy and went for territorial conquest only after this plan failed.

Ukraine’s military neutrality would have addressed Russia’s security concerns. Moscow had a range of coercive options short of outright war, which it could have used to pressure the West and Kyiv into conceding neutrality. These included declaring that mobilised Russian troops at scale would remain indefinitely on Ukraine’s borders; moving nuclear weapons to Belarus and Crimea; and blockading Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea. If Russia’s aim was not to destroy Ukraine, as the narrative claims, then why were coercive options not exhausted?

The fact is that over the past three years, we have seen a sovereign State aggressed upon by a neighbour that is a military hyperpower. But the narrative that the West is responsible for the war has such hold on popular imagination that the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, the destruction of its territorial integrity and economic system, plain land grab and abduction of its children have all failed to appeal to the global moral sense.

And it is set to get worse. After telling Zelensky in the Oval Office that he had “no cards”, Trump said that Russia had “all the cards”. Russia’s progress on the battlefield has been similar to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth of a large but halting economy — and if that’s a card, it is not a very strong one. The strong cards were given to Russia by the Trump administration.

Even before the negotiations began in Saudi Arabia, America declared that Ukraine will not join Nato; it effectively ceded Ukrainian territory captured by Russia; it marginalised Europe, even though the continent is indispensable to Ukraine’s survival as an independent nation; and it adopted Russia’s talking points on the causes of war and Zelensky’s legitimacy as Ukraine’s leader. The result is a Russia firmly in the driver’s seat.

It is hard to not see that America is mediating the aggressor’s peace and securing a windfall for itself: The infamous deal for Ukraine’s critical minerals, a glaring illustration of neocolonialism that should disappoint those who thought Trump will put an end to the American empire.   

Ukraine’s only hope of surviving this aggressor’s peace is the revival of Europe as a credible guarantor of Ukrainian and its own security. And in a race against a few weeks, the continent is already delayed by years.

Atul Mishra teaches international relations at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR. The views expressed are personal