Humanitarian interventionism sowed the seeds of the Ukraine war

As the United States and Russia begin negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, I can’t shake off an episode that, in retrospect, was the first step down the slippery slope leading to war.

In the summer of 1992, I took my friend, Dmitro Markov, then press counselor at the Ukraine Embassy in Washington, D.C., to a news conference at the National Press Club. At the time, I was a consultant to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and to the Ukrainian presidency. The press conference was held to announce Carnegie’s latest report, “Changing Our Ways: America and the New World.” I wanted Dmitro to experience how we handled the Washington press corps.