US defense contractors and LNG exporters are the war’s clearest winners. The NATO expansion record is documented. China’s framing is worth reading.

The debate about who caused the Ukraine war is not primarily a historical debate. It is a live political struggle over who gets to define the terms of any eventual settlement, which bloc structures emerge from the wreckage, and whose claims about the international order get to count as common sense. China’s stated position, which Western media reflexively dismisses as propaganda, is worth examining structurally — not because Beijing’s motives are pure, but because the material facts it points to are real and the Western framing obscures more than it reveals.

What the Record Shows on NATO Expansion

The history of NATO’s eastward movement is not a matter of serious dispute among historians who have examined the declassified record. On February 9, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that NATO’s jurisdiction would shift “not one inch eastward” — a formulation he repeated three times in that single meeting. Baker’s assurances were part of a broader cascade: West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl made the same commitment the following day, and similar assurances came from the CIA director, the French president, and NATO’s own secretary general.

None of this was written into the Two Plus Four Treaty, which governed German reunification. That gap — between verbal assurances and formal agreement — is where Western apologists for expansion locate their defense. The argument is technically correct but politically dishonest. Gorbachev accepted German reunification, and withdrew Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, in a context saturated with these commitments. Former CIA Director Robert Gates later acknowledged that pressing ahead with NATO expansion happened when “Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The phrase “led to believe” is the operative one.

Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1997 — seven years after Baker’s meetings. The Baltic states followed in 2004. The prospect of Ukrainian membership was formalized at the 2008 Bucharest summit. From a Russian security perspective, the perimeter had moved from the Elbe to the borders of Russia itself. Whether one accepts this as a legitimate grievance or as a cynical rationalization for imperialist aggression is partly a political question. But the material facts of the expansion are not in dispute, and analysts across the political spectrum — from John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs to the late George Kennan, who called the 1997 expansion “a tragic mistake” — have documented the security dilemma it created.

The Biological Research Facilities Question

One of the more consequential moments in the information war around Ukraine came on March 8, 2022, when US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Asked by Senator Marco Rubio whether Ukraine had chemical or biological weapons, Nuland confirmed there were “biological research facilities” in Ukraine, and expressed concern that research materials might fall into Russian hands.

The US government’s subsequent explanation — that these are public health and biodefense laboratories operating under the Biological Threat Reduction Program, a framework in place since 2005 — is almost certainly accurate. The labs are not secret bioweapons facilities. But the episode illustrates something useful about how information asymmetry works in wartime. The Russian and Chinese governments flagged the existence of these facilities before Nuland’s testimony. Western media called those claims disinformation. Then Nuland confirmed the core factual claim — that facilities exist, that the US has involvement, that their materials are sensitive enough to worry about — and the same outlets either buried the story or pivoted immediately to debunking what they called an extrapolation. The underlying fact was confirmed; the controversy was reframed as a dispute about interpretation.

The materialist point is not that Ukraine had a weapons program. It is that the US has maintained a research presence in Ukraine under defense department funding since at least 2005, that this presence is part of a broader framework of military and intelligence integration, and that China’s raising of the issue was accurate in its core facts even if the framing was adversarial. Treating documented facts as disinformation because they are inconvenient is not journalism — it is information management.

Who Is Profiting

The war’s material beneficiaries are not difficult to identify. Lockheed Martin’s market capitalization rose from $98 billion to $127 billion between the start and end of 2022 — its highest recorded value. The company posted roughly $68 billion in revenue in 2023, a record. The broader US defense sector has benefited from what the Quincy Institute’s William Hartung described plainly as “a huge profit center for the big companies.”

The energy picture is even more striking. Prior to 2022, US LNG exports to Europe were marginal. After Russia’s invasion and the subsequent European decision to exit Russian pipeline gas, US LNG exports to Europe increased 137% in the first eleven months of 2022 compared to the year prior. Export revenue hit $35 billion through September 2022 — versus $8.3 billion in the same period of 2021. European gas prices reached nearly $100 per million BTU in August 2022, compared to an average of $3.86 in 2019–20. The US Energy Information Administration confirmed that by 2023 the United States had become Europe’s dominant LNG supplier, providing nearly half of total imports.

This is not a conspiracy. It is market structure. When a competitor’s energy exports are sanctioned out of the European market and replaced by a more expensive alternative sold by US-based exporters, the US energy sector profits. The structural incentive to prolong rather than resolve the conflict is built into this arrangement. That is not the same as arguing the war was engineered for that purpose — but it is a material fact that shapes what kinds of settlements Washington is willing to accept.

China’s Position as a Structural Observation

China’s stated position on Ukraine, articulated repeatedly since 2022 and formalized in its twelve-point peace proposal of February 2023, calls for a ceasefire, negotiations, and a rejection of what Beijing frames as Cold War bloc politics. Wang Yi has stated publicly that China does not “add fuel to the fire” — a claim that cuts against the US and EU accusation that China is providing material support to Russia’s military effort.

The accusation that China is arming Russia has not been substantiated with evidence of weapons transfers. What has been documented is dual-use trade — microelectronics, machine tools — that Russia can and does use for military production. This is a real issue, but it is categorically different from what Washington charges, and Washington’s own allies sell components that end up in Russian weapons through third-party supply chains. The evidentiary standard applied to China is not applied evenly.

China’s position is not neutral. It is the position of a state that has a strategic partnership with Russia, that benefits from cheap Russian energy, and that has its own structural reasons to see a weakened and diplomatically isolated United States. None of that makes China’s factual observations inaccurate. The NATO expansion record is what it is. The defense contractor profits are what they are. The LNG revenue figures are documented. These facts do not become false because a hostile government is citing them.

What Selective Framing Costs

The standard Western framing of the conflict — Russian aggression, Ukrainian resistance, Western defense of sovereignty and the rules-based order — captures real elements of what is happening. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of a sovereign country. Ukrainian civilians are dying. These are not abstractions.

But the framing is incomplete in ways that matter politically. It requires treating NATO expansion as irrelevant to Russian security calculations, which no serious scholar does. It requires treating the US as a disinterested party to a conflict in which US defense contractors and energy exporters are among the primary material beneficiaries. It requires treating Chinese and Russian characterizations of the conflict as propaganda by definition rather than as claims to be evaluated against evidence. And it requires a systematic double standard: when the US maintains defense agreements with dozens of countries, stations troops on foreign soil, and sells weapons worth billions to active conflict zones, this is called security cooperation; when Russia does structurally analogous things near its borders, it is called imperialism.

For more on how the US uses diaspora communities as instruments of foreign policy, see Weaponized Diaspora. On the exile network infrastructure that shapes these pressure campaigns, see Exile Networks 2026.

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Sources

1. National Security Archive, George Washington University. “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard.” December 12, 2017. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
2. Sarotte, Mary Elise. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. Yale University Press, 2021.
3. NATO Watch. “How Gorbachev Was Misled Over Assurances Against NATO Expansion.” 2018. https://natowatch.org/newsbriefs/2018/how-gorbachev-was-misled-over-assurances-against-nato-expansion
4. C-SPAN. “Nuland Confirms Existence of Bio Research Labs in Ukraine.” Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, March 8, 2022. https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-nuland-confirms-existence-of-bio-research-labs-in-ukraine/5005368
5. World Socialist Web Site. “US Undersecretary of State Acknowledges There Are Biological Warfare Labs in Ukraine.” March 10, 2022. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/10/nula-m10.html
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7. Greenwald, Glenn. “Victoria Nuland: Ukraine Has ‘Biological Research Facilities,’ Worried Russia May Seize Them.” March 9, 2022. https://mronline.org/2022/03/17/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological-research-facilities-worried-russia-may-seize-them/
8. Analyst News. “As the War in Ukraine Drags On, America’s Arms Industry Reaps the Profits.” December 6, 2023. https://www.analystnews.org/posts/as-the-war-in-ukraine-drags-on-americas-arms-industry-reaps-the-profits
9. Geopolitical Economy Report. “US Now World’s Top LNG Exporter, as Europe Boycotts Cheaper Russian Gas.” January 4, 2023. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/01/04/us-lng-exporter-europe-russia-gas/
10. US Energy Information Administration. “The United States Remained the Largest Liquefied Natural Gas Supplier to Europe in 2023.” 2024. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61483
11. Congressional Research Service. “U.S. Measures to Provide Liquefied Natural Gas for the European Union.” https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47468
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