To anyone who has slogged through Bob Woodward’s serial tomes, his latest, War, will come as no surprise. Its obsequious treatment of select senior officials grappling with the Ukrainian and middle east wars runs true to form. Just in case readers miss the point, he concludes with the assertion that “President Biden and his team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.”
As we shall see, it is unlikely that future historians will come to any such conclusion, assuming they have access to sources beyond Woodward.
Was it “steady and purposeful leadership” that brought on the mass-murder with American weapons of 42,000 people, at the very least, in Gaza and Lebanon? In which case the word “purposeful” takes on a sinister connotation that Woodward probably does not intend. Did any of his heroes, principally Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, pause for a second to ponder where, prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, plummeting relations with Russia might lead, or how Palestinians might react to their increasing marginalization and repression? Points raised by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in prewar discussions with Blinken are routinely dismissed without elucidation as “bluster.” Furthermore, historian Scott Horton has detected and reported what are clearly deliberate misquotations of Lavrov in the book.
Trudging through War induces a sort of trance, as the conversations related to Woodward by cooperative interested parties, notably Blinken and Sullivan, roll on remorselessly, like waves breaking on a beach. Just to show us that this is how our rulers really talk, the words “fuck” and “fucking” appear in quotes no less than thirty nine times. Inducing stupor is an important component of the Woodward technique, since it may preclude readers from sitting up and saying “wait a moment, what about..?”
Thus the chapters covering the early months of the Ukraine war trundle along from its outbreak, past the failure of the Russian advance on Kyiv, Biden’s rage at Putin (lots of “fucking” there) and detailed reports of diplomatic encounters with various European leaders, through to the fall and a story of how steady U.S. leadership deterred Putin from using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. (Good Story If True, as my old editor at the Daily Mail used to write on copy.)
Amidst this there is zero mention of a crucial episode in the early months of the fighting, about which Woodward’s sources could supply details of enormous interest and importance.
As we know from detailed accounts from various participants and well informed observers, in April 2022, Russia and Ukraine negotiated a peace deal that would have ended the war, saved at least 500,000 lives and prevented the destruction of much of Ukraine.
The record of what happened is now abundantly clear, buttressed and confirmed by a multiplicity of sources, including six who were involved in the talks - Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Israeli. All, as well as White House advisor Fiona Hill, agree that over the course of talks that began shortly after the Russian invasion, initially in Belarus and later in Istanbul, the two sides settled on a peace deal under which Ukraine would abandon all efforts to join Nato and accept neutrality, while Russia agreed to “peacefully discuss the status of Crimea” down the road. A draft of the agreement was initialed by both sides on April 15, 2022.
As the senior Ukrainian politician and former presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych (who had been a member of the Ukrainian delegation in the Istanbul talks) explained in a November 2023 interview on Ukrainian TV, ““[The Russians] were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality like Finland once did. And we would make a commitment that we would not join Nato.”
But other interested parties were not happy. As Arestovych explained: “When we returned from Istanbul Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said: “We will not sign anything with them at all and let’s just go to war,”
Quite obviously, Johnson would not have intervened without at least conferring with Washington, and more likely was operating under direct instructions from imperial headquarters. Indeed the latter conclusion has been confirmed by former acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who stated in a September 2024 interview that “People inside Ukraine and people outside Ukraine started asking questions about whether this was a good deal and it was at that point that it fell apart.”
It is inconceivable that negotiations with a potential direct effect on the central preoccupation of US national security policy at the time could not have excited intense discussion in the White House, probably including a lot of the salty expressions from Biden that Woodward loves to quote. Yet there is not a word of this in Woodward’s 448 pages.
Thankfully, we do not have to depend on this court historian for information about the episode. But who knows what else he has left out, purposefully or not?
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