WHY ALAN J. KUPERMAN IS WRONG ON TRUMP BEING RIGHT ON UKRAINE
PART I
[REPOST: We apologize for the inbox deluge today, but several of our readers informed us that yesterday’s post went behind the paywall after we made our corrections. We are reissuing yesterday’s post with corrected copy and the paywall removed.]
In this two-part post, we provide a rebuttal to Alan J. Kuperman’s March 18, 2025, op-ed in The Hill, entitled “Sadly, Trump Is Right on Ukraine”.
Why are we taking so much time responding to one academic’s op-ed? First, the timing of the piece is deeply unfortunate amid chaotic negotiations over Ukraine’s future in Saudi Arabia, and it includes misinformation that questions the very legitimacy of the Ukrainian government at this crucial moment. It is part of a false narrative that Russia has constructed over the past decade, and one that Trump himself has embraced and spread, including in his infamous Truth Social posts in February 2025, where he accused Kyiv of starting the war.
These views permeate the administration. For example, last week’s utterances of Trump envoy Steve Witkoff included claims that Russian-occupied parts of Donbas have freely chosen to join. Underlying these claims and this vision of what has happened in Ukraine since Russia began its dirty war against the country in 2014 and launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
And, lastly, The Hill has a troubling track record of publishing smears about Ukraine that dovetail with Russian misinformation as editorial content, as demonstrated by John Solomon’s sorry role, uncovered during Trump’s 2020 impeachment hearings. You can read for yourself the results of The Hill’s own investigation of 14 of Solomon’s pieces published in February 2020.
A junta, not a government…
Notably, Kuperman is a professor of public affairs at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin. From his official bio, he has no obvious links to the Trump administration. Indeed, he has advised Democratic elected officials, including Senator Charles Schumer (NY-D). We do not make any assumptions about his motivations for writing the piece, we simply seek to understand it on its merits.
He begins his revisionism by claiming that the February 22, 2014 ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia was, in fact, a far-right coup d’etat. The impetus for the president’s flight was the massacre of protestors in the days leading up to Yanukovych’s departure by snipers around the Maidan – Independence Square – in Kyiv. But, the conspiracy theory goes, it wasn’t police snipers who killed the protestors, but militants from far-right nationalist groups, who carried out a false-flag operation. This provided Russia with a justification for the occupation of Crimea and its (long-denied) brutal militant takeovers of the Donbas cities of Donetsk and Luhansk that rapidly followed Yanukovych’s exit. This story is why Russia continues to call Ukraine’s legitimate government a “junta”.
For this, Kuperman cites a work by Ivan Katchanovski, an academic based at the University of Ottawa. In brief, citing witnesses and investigators, he claims that right-wing paramilitaries, allegedly occupying the Hotel Ukraine overlooking the Maidan, shot both protesters and police. US academic William Risch wrote a detailed dissection last year of these claims, including assertions that Georgian snipers and, of course, an American vet were involved. Cathy Young provided another rebuttal to Katchanovski in the Bulwark in November 2023. As she notes, Katchanovski has put great weight on the official finding of a Kyiv court that “unknown persons” were firing from the hotel. Yet, the same legal process convicted four out five special forces police on a variety of charges. As Young points out, out of more than 100 killings, there are eight in which the role of the Berkut could not be definitively proved, and the role of other parties could not be ruled out. It’s as if Katchanovski trusts the Ukrainian investigators for this finding but not the outcome of the trial.
Notably, the Ukrainian investigation was indeed deeply flawed, as the EU’s International Advisory Panel found in its extensive reporting on it. There was a massive flight of responsible judicial and law-enforcement officials to Russia and a flawed investigation. In any case, Risch and Young and many others have disproved his specific claims. His version simply is not “overwhelming forensic evidence,” as Kuperman claims. It is closer to relying on the claims of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison about JFK’s assassination.
Ukrainian provocations
Kuperman’s story relies on the false flag claim as it explains and all but justifies everything that followed. He writes: “Putin responded by deploying troops to Crimea and weapons to the southeast Donbas region on behalf of ethnic Russians who felt their president had been undemocratically overthrown. While this backstory does not justify Russia’s invasion, it explains that it was hardly ‘unprovoked.’”
If you’re a specialist in Russia or Ukraine or have spent a lot of time in Ukraine over the past 30 years, that sentence will have you pulling your hair out. Another member of the Trump inner circle, David Sacks, wrote on X in November 2024 that “the vast majority of Crimea and Donbas are ethnic Russians”. This could be an essay in itself and we won’t waste time except to say that the (outdated) reported figures for ethnic Russians in Crimea and Donbas are more like 58% and 38%, and, numbers aside, Russia has engaged in the armed occupation of both areas, never held fair elections and arrested and even murdered Ukrainians, like Volodymyr Rybak, a city councilman tortured to death by FSB-trained goons for removing an insurgent flag from a local building in Donetsk region.
Returning to the rest of his statement, Kuperman writes that “Putin responded by deploying…weapons” to Donbas. This sentence elides the vast amount of human suffering that Russia unleashed in the dirty war that followed. Amid official denials, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Military Intelligence (GRU) and even corporate security personnel under the direction of figures like nationalist, cassock-wearing businessman Konstantin Malofyev unleashed a bloody and orchestrated uprising in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The United Nations wrote in 2016 that violence in southeastern Ukraine was “fuelled by the inflow of foreign fighters and weapons from the Russian Federation, accounts for the majority of violations of the right to life in Ukraine over the last two years” led to more than 2,000 civilian deaths over the previous two years. Importantly, the report chronicles killings on both sides. The point is that Russia triggered this spiral of violence. Russian citizens like the notorious paramilitary commander Igor Girkin have admitted to their roles despite official denials.
Notably, pro-Russian forces arrested American journalist Simon Ostrovsky in April 2014 for investigating the role of Russian forces in the conflict. They held him blindfolded, beat him, and accused him of being a spy before his release. At least seven journalists, Ukrainians and Russians, were killed while covering the fighting in Donbas. Add to this rape, the destruction of homes, refugees and, oh yeas, the shootdown of a Malaysian airliner with 298 passengers and crewmembers.
This leaves out the economic toll. Along with steel mills and coal mines seized by the so-called people’s republics, depriving thousands of their ability to make a living (and making them even more reliant on the Moscow-backed militants) the Russians stole one of Ukraine’s largest gas fields in the Kerch Strait, where ExxonMobil was heading a Western consortium that was in the process of setting up production when events intervened.
Kuperman has set the scene for the conclusion of the dirty war phase. It is important to repeat that Ukrainian forces, including members of far-right groups, engaged in killings and other atrocities in this period. But Russia was solely responsible for launching a campaign that killed thousands, maimed thousands more and left countless former combatants and civilians deeply traumatized. Can we just chalk this up to Russia being “hardly unprovoked”?
And this is just setting the table for the bloodbath to come.
That is where we’ll stop today. Tomorrow, we look at Kuperman’s claims that it was the Ukrainians, specifically President Volodymyr Zelensky, who drove the Russians, reluctantly, to launch their full-scale invasion in February 2022.