at the end of 2022, Antony Blinken would have opposed the Pentagon which wanted to launch peace negotiations with Moscow

Will diplomat Antony Blinken, who will leave the US State Department in a few hours, have been the “secretary of war”asks the New York Times this Sunday, January 18, on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration? The portrait that the American daily devotes to the head of American diplomacy is not kind. Withdrawal from Afghanistan, war in Ukraine, attack on October 7 then war in Gaza… His four years within the Biden administration were deeply marked by large-scale conflicts. The hasty departure from Kabul was a «fiasco»taking by «surprise» American diplomacy. As for the Middle East, Antony Blinken, like Joe Biden himself, finds himself criticized in all directions, caught in a long “political and moral nightmare”.

After the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, American policy in Ukraine seemed to achieve greater consensus. From the start of the war, Antony Blinken firmly warned his counterpart in Moscow, Sergei Lavrov, warning that a Russian attack would be met with a “quick, severe and united response” allies of kyiv. In fact, the Secretary of State will be the linchpin of the coalition of 50 countries supplying arms to Ukraine or taking sanctions against Russia. And, on the ground, the Ukrainian army put up fierce resistance against Russian forces.

Insistence that “the fight continues”

In the long term, however, American policy raises the question: what was the theory of victory, at work in Washington, which would one day make it possible to end this war? And with what means? “Antony Blinken was less a peacemaker than a war strategist”strikes him New York Timeswhich reveals dissensions between the Pentagon, less inclined “to take risks”and the State Department, in favor of sending more and more powerful weapons. In late 2022, when the US military’s highest-ranking officer, General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested that “Ukraine capitalizes on battlefield gains by seeking peace talks with Moscow”Antony Blinken, “immersed in the details of military equipment and battlefield conditions”opposes it and “insists that the fight continues”.

We must remember this moment in the war to understand the implications of this debate. From the summer of 2022, the Russian offensive in Ukraine bogs down and the Ukrainians regain the initiative. In the fall, two counter-offensives offered kyiv a success which, a few months earlier, would have seemed unexpected. On the one hand, the Ukrainians retake the city of Kherson (the only regional capital conquered by the Russians in 2022) and drive the Russians from their bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnieper, to the west of the river. On the other hand, in the Kharkiv oblast, the Ukrainians took back 10,000 km2 of land from the Russians, driving them out of Izioum, Lyman and Kupiansk, and depriving them of a vast balcony along the Donets River which threatens Donbass from the North. The Russians are in dire straits: their military presence in Ukraine is undersized and Vladimir Putin, after urgently annexing four oblasts to impose a fait accompli, is forced to partially mobilize 330,000 reservists.

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It was precisely at the end of this victorious streak for kyiv that General Milley pushed the idea of ​​peace talks. In November 2022, the American general notes that “the likelihood of a Ukrainian military victory, consisting of driving the Russians out of all of Ukraine, including the […] Crimea, the probability of this happening soon is not high, militarily speaking” and asserts that“There can be a political solution where the Russians withdraw.” “It’s possible”underlines the soldier who tells the Ukrainians: “When there is an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it”.

In fact, the future rather proved General Milley right. For a year after these two setbacks, the Russians built strong fortifications all along the front – the «ligne Sourovikine»named after the general then commanding the special military operation – while those mobilized made it possible to «boucher» the holes and that Wagner’s mercenaries fixed the best Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut. This great battle was finally won by the Russians in May 2023, a little less than a month before the Ukrainians launched their great summer counter-offensive in southern Ukraine, which turned into a fiasco – in accordance with doubts issued by General Milley. From the fall of 2023, the Russians regained the initiative and have not lost it since, today placing the Ukrainians in a very difficult situation, against a backdrop of shortages of soldiers, weapons and equipment.

“The war took up a lot of our time”

From now on, Donald Trump has imposed the idea of ​​peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. But conditions are likely to be much more favorable to the Russians than at the end of 2022. Not only have they progressed since then, but they are even progressing at an increasing rate over a year. The new American president already intends to postpone the question of kyiv’s membership in NATO for 20 years and fix the front line as it currently stands. And there is nothing to indicate at this stage that the Russians, in a position of strength, will be satisfied with American demands.

On the Ukrainian file, Antony Blinken leaves the State Department without triumphalism. Certainly, he was one of those who allowed Ukraine to resist no matter what, but he may not have seized the right moment to negotiate. “Yes, the war – if we want to use the term loosely – took up a lot of our time and effort”he confided to the two journalists from New York Times during an interview this week in his office. But “For better or worse, his legacy rests not on the conclusion of major peace treaties – these traditional diplomatic rewards have eluded him – but on his role in two wars”summarizes New York daily.