AS FEBRUARY 24 marked the grim one-year milestone since Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine, the media coverage of this war reaffirms the old adage that the first casualty of war is the truth.

While Russians and Ukranians have certainly received their fill of propaganda and media spin, so, too, have the US and British public. 

One dangerous media narrative that has circulated all year is that a Ukrainian victory over Russia is around the corner, as long as the West keeps sending Ukraine more money and increasingly powerful weapons. 

Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by but we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war. 

General Erich Vad, who was German chancellor Angela Merkel’s senior military adviser for seven years, recently spoke to Emma, a German news website.

He called the war in Ukraine a “war of attrition” and compared it to the first world war, and to the battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side.

He said that today, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a military stalemate in which refusing to negotiate is a “senseless waste of human life.”

The US Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley ruffled feathers in Washington circles when he made a similar call for negotiations in November.

He said that both sides need to reach a “mutual recognition” that victory “is maybe not achievable through military means, and therefore you need to turn to other means,” adding that the stalemate provides “a window of opportunity for negotiation.”

But another dangerous media narrative, that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, makes peace talks seem unrealistic.

The press has buried the story of the fruitful negotiations that began soon after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the United States and Britain.

Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about these ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that he helped to mediate in March 2022.

Bennett said explicitly that the West “blocked” or “stopped” (depending on the translation) the negotiations. 

Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a Nato foreign ministers’ meeting: “There are countries within Nato who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker.”

Advisers to President Volodymr Zelensky provided the details of Boris Johnson’s April 9 visit to Kiev that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5.

They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Vladimir Putin and Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with.”

The second was that even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the “collective West,” who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.

The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear those who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister.

The narrative that Russia won’t negotiate feeds into a vicious cycle in which the only way forward is for Ukrainians to keep fighting and the West to keep supplying them with weapons.

Ukraine’s total dependence on money and weapons from the West compels it to keep throwing troops into terribly bloody battles just to keep the weapons coming.

As Colonel Alexander Vershinin, a retired US tank commander, wrote on Harvard University’s Russia Matters website: “In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost.” 

But despite the media spin and political support for sending more and more powerful weapons, a growing number of the Western public are questioning the blank check for war.

A recent AP poll in the U.S. found less than half of Americans, 48 percent, in favour of providing weapons to Ukraine, with the rest either opposed or unsure. This is down 12 per cent from a similar poll in May 2022. 

US President Dwight D Eisenhower famously said that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can keep the military-industrial complex in check.

Today, as we face the prospect of another year of war — and a war that could descend into a catastrophic nuclear confrontation, an alert and knowledgeable citizenry would surely condemn Russia’s invasion, but it would also demand that our governments stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations to bring an end to the suffering of the people of Ukraine.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books.

Benjamin is the co-founder of CodePink for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CodePink and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.