In the week gone by the New York Times published a full page advertisement under the heading cited above. The dense basic text is remarkable. The subtitles are eye-catching: ‘The Potential for Peace,’ ‘U.S. Actions and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,’ and most particularly ‘Seeing the War Through Russia’s Eyes.’ You involuntarily ask yourself when is the last time that a mainstream U.S. media outlet cared to see anything through Russia’s eyes.

The Timeline on the right of the page shows key events in the chain of causality that led from the 1990 pledge by the U.S. to Russia that NATO would not expand towards its border to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

The point of the advertisement is set out in three sentences in the opening section of the dense text:

We deplore the violence, war crimes, indiscriminate missile strikes, terrorism, and other atrocities that are…