THE PUTIN APPEASEMENT PLAN

The 28-point Trump peace plan for Ukraine, as leaked to the public last Friday, would have been better named The Putin Appeasement Plan. The so-called peace plan, as leaked, might as well have been authored by the Kremlin (and perhaps was).

In fact, at the start of talks between US and Ukrainian officials this week in Geneva, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended up having to deny that the Russian government had anything to do with drafting the plan.

Summed up briefly, the plan’s talking points—which were clearly unacceptable to Ukraine, and would be to any country that had been the victim of such massive foreign aggression, and that had fought as long, as bravely, and as hard as Ukraine has—included measures that would basically have tied the hands of both Kyiv and the leaders of Europe, while opening the way for further expansionist aggression by the Putin regime. Indeed, if it is true that the document—reportedly leaked to the press by an official of the Ukrainian government—was  formulated solely on the suggestions and demands of President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State (“Little”) Marco Rubio, then these two top-ranking US officials should, from here on out, be considered Russian agents.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed satisfaction with advances made in the Geneva talks on November 23^rd and 24^th and the Trump administration and Ukrainian delegation released a joint statement expressing optimism when the preliminary talks ended.

According to that statement, “Both sides agreed the consultations were highly productive. The discussions showed meaningful progress toward aligning positions and identifying clear next steps. They reaffirmed that any future agreement must fully uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty and deliver a sustainable and just peace…
Ukraine and the United States agreed to continue intensive work on joint proposals in the coming days. They will also remain in close contact with their European partners as the process advances.
Final decisions under this framework will be made by the Presidents of Ukraine and the United States.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky

It was obvious to everyone, apparently, except Trump that the original 28-point plan wasn’t going to fly. At least not with Zelensky…or the EU…or, it would seem, either of the two main US political parties.

First, from what we know about the original document—the terms of which continue to be re-discussed, not only Ukrainian land illegally annexed and militarily usurped by Russia, but also parts of Ukraine’s territory that Russia has yet to be able to successfully wrest from the hands of its rightful owner would be summarily handed over to Putin.

Second, if some sort of peace deal were reached (by some miracle), Ukraine and the world would simply have to take Moscow’s word with regard to not only the future security of Ukraine, but also of the rest of Eastern Europe. Ukraine is a key piece in the European security puzzle, and, according to Trump’s plan (which was never consulted with the EU), neither Europe nor NATO would be able to post troops in Ukrainian territory as a guarantee against future Russian aggression.

Third, not only would Ukraine be forbidden from having European troops on its soil, but it would also be required to reduce the size of its armed forces, and of its cache and variety of weapons, with long-range arms capable of striking back against Russian aggression being specifically prohibited.  

Fourth, the resulting treaty would have ensured that Ukraine could never become part of NATO—a stipulation that flies in the face of the best interests of both Ukraine and the rest of Europe.  

Fifth, Ukraine would have received no US military aid, meaning that its only supply of additional war materiel would have to come exclusively from Europe.

Trump had originally given Ukraine an ultimatum to accept the US deal by Thanksgiving (that’s this coming Thursday). Trump told White House reporters that President Zelensky could either accept the US deal, or continue to “fight his little heart out”.

Following the leaking of the so-called plan, the Trump administration came under withering attack from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike.

Former Senate Majority Leader and senior Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said:  “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. If administration officials are more concerned with appeasing Putin than securing real peace, then the President ought to find new advisers.” He went on to say that, “Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests…And a capitulation like Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan would be catastrophic to a legacy of peace through strength.”

The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), warned that, “This so-called ‘peace plan’ has real problems, and I am highly skeptical it will achieve peace. Ukraine should not be forced to give up its lands to one of the world’s most flagrant war criminals…Vladimir Putin.” Wicker added that, “Any assurances provided to Putin “should not reward his malign behavior…in particular, any suggestion that we can pursue arms control with a serial liar and killer like Putin should be treated with great skepticism.”

Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska accused the Trump administration of trying to force Ukrainian capitulation. Specifically, he said, “They’re pushing a surrender plan on Ukraine…It looks like Russia wrote it.” He opined that, “In the war between Ukraine and Russia, the first to surrender was America…This will be President Trump’s legacy if he forces this surrender plan on Ukraine.”

Reiterating Bacon’s sentiment, Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) said, “They want to utilize it (the 28-point plan) as a starting point…It looked more like it was written in Russian to begin with.”

On the other side of the aisle, ranking Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), said, “This is a Russian proposal … There is so much in that plan that is totally unacceptable.” She went on to say that, instead of acquiescing, the US should “put pressure on Putin, provide long-range weapons, impose secondary sanctions…and force Putin to the table for real negotiations…We should not be representing Russia’s interests in this agreement.”

So one-sided "Little" Marco had to publcly
deny it was penned by the Kremlin.

Maine Independent Senator Angus King succinctly said that, “It rewards aggression. This is pure and simple. There’s no ethical, legal, moral, political justification for Russia claiming eastern Ukraine.” King added that, in talking to Secretary Rubio, he had concluded that this was “not the administration’s plan,” but more like a “wish list of the Russians.” 

These opinions were echoed by the  Royal Institute of International Affairs, a London-based think-tank better known as Chatham House, whose  stated mission is "to help governments and societies build a sustainably secure, prosperous, and just world." Criticizing the Trump plan, Chatham House foreign relations experts posited that it read “more like a demand for capitulation than a peace deal.” They highlight that many of Russia’s long-standing war aims were fully baked into the proposal, including territorial concessions, limits on Ukraine’s military, and constraining its sovereignty by, among other things, dictating when elections would happen there.

Chatham House also warned that Trump’s plan would weaken Ukraine’s long-term deterrent capabilities by restricting its military and future NATO prospects. The think-tank’s experts pointed out that, bottom line, without strong, legally binding security guarantees (comparable to NATO’s Article 5), Ukraine’s future protection remains uncertain.

Virginia Democrat, Senator Mark Warner, made the point, on Fox News (of all places), that the draft plan was “total capitulation (and) a historically bad deal, rivaling Neville Chamberlain giving in to Hitler before World War II.” He argued that many of its terms—territorial concessions, military reductions, barring Ukraine from NATO—“are likely to make Xi Jinping happy, just like they make Vladimir Putin happy.”

His reference to the appeasement of Hitler at the start of World War II was spot on, but not original. From early on in Trump’s presidential career, observers have repeatedly mentioned Trump’s almost slavish appeasement of Putin, comparing it to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. Among other places, the danger of appeasing the Russian dictator was made clear here, in A Yankee At Large,  back in early 2022.  https://yankeeatlarge.blogspot.com/2022/03/appeasement-history-repeats-itself-in.html

That danger remains, despite reported advances in the Geneva talks, particularly because Trump has repeatedly proven himself  not to be a trustworthy negotiator—when the chess game doesn’t go his way, he simply kicks over the chess board, and can never be counted on to keep his word. The comparison with Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler with the terms of Trump’s original “peace plan” was stunning, since there are major parallels between the two men’s actions.  

In the late 1930s, rather than confronting Hitler militarily, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made concessions to the German strongman, most famously in the Munich Agreement (1938). This pact between Britain and Germany allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland (a region of what was then Czechoslovakia) in exchange for a promise of what was called "peace in our time" (basically a vow from Hitler that he could annex Czech territory if he would go no further).

Chamberlain’s motivation was that his country had been deeply scarred by World War I, giving rise to strong pacifist sentiment, fear of another devastating war, and a hope that reasonable negotiation could avert conflict. But the British PM was completely misjudging Hitler—much as Trump has Putin since 2016.  There was simply no way that Hitler’s territorial ambitions could be quelled by limited concessions, or that he would not risk a broader war if given some of what he wanted. Many international affairs analysts also believe this to be true of Putin, who, they indicate, is bent on returning Russia to the power it wielded under Stalin and the Soviet Union, or to even before that, when it was still the czarist Russian Empire.

By giving in to Hitler’s demands, Britain (and France) signaled to him that aggressive expansion would be rewarded. This emboldened Hitler to push further. This policy weakened the deterrent effect of collective security. Rather than a unified front standing up to German expansion, appeasement led to fragmentation and uncertainty.

In the end, Chamberlain’s gamble failed. With each concession, Hitler gained new strength, and the following year, Germany invaded Poland, leading directly to WWII.

To understand the comparison, you need only look at what Trump’s 28-point plan included: namely, a freeze on the front lines roughly where they are now, meaning Russia would forestall further military advances but retain control over significant occupied territory; reduction of the size of Ukraine’s military; the relinquishing of Ukraine’s NATO aspirations; the lifting or easing of sanctions currently enforced against Russia, and only the weakest of security guarantees for Ukraine against renewed Russian aggression.

Zelensky needs full EU support

Critics argue that the spirit and original letter of Trump’s proposal rewards Russia for its war of aggression on Ukraine, and punishes (rather than standing up for) Ukraine for so nobly and fearlessly defending itself against a superior military aggressor.

After seeing the terms of a truly terrible plan, any improvement negotiated will tend to look better. But that doesn’t guarantee that a clearly Russian-prone US administration will eventually agree to throw out the 28-point plan entirely and forge a deal that will be frankly advantageous to both Ukraine and Europe as a whole, which are clearly the aggrieved parties in Putin’s unprovoked aggression and expansionism.  According to the US Council of Foreign Relations,  “This plan comes at the worst time for Ukraine and its partners,” adding that, “at minimum, Russia will try to put the blame on Ukraine for preventing peace in the eyes of Trump.” The CFR points out that, “Territorial concessions…the international recognition of this territory as Russian …would surrender Ukraine’s most formidable defenses.”  The CFR adds that, “The entire agreement is structured to work via incentives and carrots with Moscow, instead of sticks and punishment.”  

This US-based Atlantic Council suggests that Trump’s influence on any final peace deal should be tempered by congressional discretion. The non-partisan suggests that, if a deal is made, it should go through formal US legal and institutional processes (e.g., Senate ratification) to demonstrate seriousness and to create a durable commitment.

The European Council on Foreign Affairs is specific and adamant about the shape any peace deal with Russia should take. The ECFA makes it clear that  “Borders cannot be changed by force? … All gone in the 28 points … which seem to stem from a different assertion: the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.” The foreign relations group believes that forcing Ukraine to accept the loss of territories to Russian aggression “would create a material threat to Ukraine’s independent existence.” According to the ECFA,  “It would strip Kyiv of its defensive ‘fortress belt’ in the Donbas…and send a powerful signal of impunity” to Russia.

The ECFA concludes that a weak deal like the one proposed by the US, “would, of course, be immoral…But more than that, it would also be a mistake. It would embolden (Russia), teaching Moscow all the wrong lessons. The council adds that such a deal “would trade a bad war now for a worse one within a few years.”

To date, Trump has stubbornly and egotistically sought to keep America’s European NATO partners entirely marginalized from the Ukraine peace negotiations. It is easy to speculate that he has done this because the EU, from the start, would have resisted Trump’s consistent tendency to act as an agent for Putin in the framing of any peace plan.

But the outrageously one-sided 28-point draft plan has so weakened the administration’s credibility both at home and abroad that the EU has been emboldened to insist on a more active role in the negotiations. Clearly, Europe must have a major role in setting the stage for ending the war, and Europeans should be actively providing Zelensky with their backing in insisting that Putin not be rewarded for international aggression and for waging an illegal and illegitimate war.  

Because, in the end, how this war ends isn’t a question of Ukraine’s security going forward, but of the future security of both Eastern and Western Europe. And that is far too important an issue to be left solely in the hands of a man as erratic, self-interested, arrogant and willfully ignorant as Donald Trump.

 

CRIMEA: LET’S LOOK AT THE FACTS

When Donald Trump came to office last January, it was with the promise that he would have the war in Ukraine over with in twenty-four hours. Like much of what Donald Trump says and promises, this statement too was empty, hyperbolic and always undoable.

Since then, however, he and what I call his non-negotiators—principally Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice-President JD Vance and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—have sought to quickly end the conflict by scandalously siding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and vilifying Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. This approach ignores completely the fact that the Ukraine War is a war of aggression perpetrated by Russia’s totalitarian leader against a sovereign nation. It also disregards the direct challenge Russia’s aggression poses to NATO, and to the sovereignty of the nations of both Eastern and Western Europe.

The Trump administration’s stance further ignores the fact that Russia is a natural enemy of the US and of the West as a whole, engaged ever since World War II in an ideological and geopolitical struggle for worldwide influence and power that is opposed to the West’s own world leadership goals. There has only been one brief period of rapprochement following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But since the start in 1999 of the reign of Vladimir Putin, alternating between the offices of prime minister and president, the focus of the Kremlin has been on reviving Russian imperialism and on the reestablishment of a bipolar world.

Incredibly, considering this environment, the officials handling Trump’s virtual capitulation to Putin’s whims are now quoting a Russian talking point as the basis for their “negotiations”. Namely, that the war is not Russia’s fault at all, but Ukraine’s for seeking a place as a Western ally within the framework of NATO. Here, my friends, is where we should be seeing a huge flashing sign reading: What’s wrong with this picture?

What I mean by that, in case you’ve let yourself get confused about who Putin is and who the US is supposed to be, is that Ukraine’s wanting a closer relationship with the West is now, and should always have been, a good thing, not a fault. Ukraine is a key piece in the geopolitical puzzle, the very terrain which stands between Russia and renewed domination of Eastern Europe. In case you’re getting lost on the map, if Ukraine’s wanting to be in NATO sparked Russia’s war of aggression, letting Russia have Ukraine is the same as opening a gaping hole in Western defense against a repeat of Russian post-war imperialism, and of the czarist imperialism that preceded it.

In the manner of Herod making a reluctant gift to Salome of John the Baptist’s head, Trump administration officials conducting these non-negotiations are starting from a position of abject weakness by kneeling before Putin with Crimea on a platter. Their sorely uneducated notion is that Crimea has always pretty much been Russian anyway, and besides, Putin grabbed it a decade ago, so, hey, finders keepers.

But is that really the case? The answer is, no.

The fact is that prior to Russia’s original imperialist advances, Crimea was inhabited by various ethnic groups, but principally the Crimean Tatars. They were a Turkic people who established the Crimean Khanate in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the name Crimea is derived from the Turkish root word Qirim. Crimea was a vassal khanate of the Ottoman Empire from 1478 to 1774. The Ukrainian region was, then, part of the Ottoman Empire’s broader sphere of influence, not that of the Russian Empire.

It was only through conquest, not by legal or consensual means, that the Russian Empire annexed Crimea in 1783, following the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774).  At the end of that war, the Ottoman Empire had granted Crimea independence through the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774). So the Russian annexation nine years later was the first instance of Russia’s simply grabbing sovereign Crimea for its own strategic purposes. It was that annexation that marked the start of a Russian presence on the peninsula, but contrary to Putin’s narrative, that presence wasn’t based on any inherent or historic Russian claim to Crimea.

Crimean Tatars

The Putin myth echoed by Trump officials that ethnic Russians have always formed the population of Crimea is also spurious.  While it is true that Cossacks traditionally formed part of the Crimean population, along with the native Turkic Crimean Tatars, and while it is also true that Cossacks took part in Russian military campaigns throughout history, the Cossacks cannot be counted as Russians. They were a diverse group of predominantly East Slavic people. A mix of peasants, escaped serfs, and some nobility, they emerged as a nomadic society in the fifteenth century, banding together for mutual protection. They were a quasi-military and semi-nomadic society that primarily inhabited the Ukrainian steppes, venturing as well into Southern Russia. While the Cossacks still exist, with various levels of organization and activity, their communities have been reconstituted and adapted to modern society. 

Highly independent and of autonomous spirit, while not strictly mercenaries, the armies of the Cossacks often fought for a variety of regional powers, including Russia, in exchange for self-governance and a free lifestyle. They played a significant role in the history of the region, including participation in conflicts with various states in resistance against foreign invaders. But they formed part of no other nation.

Cossacks - quasi-military, semi-nomadic people

Nor is the term "Cossack" Russian. It is derived from the Turkic word kazak, which, literally translated, means adventurer or free man. Furthermore, East Slavs, the ethnicity to which the Cossacks pertain, were once part of a federation of principalities known as Kyivan Rus', a medieval state that existed from the late ninth to the mid-thirteenth century. It emerged as a powerful confederation with the city-state of Kyiv (today the capital of Ukraine) as its capital, and its territory encompassed much of what are today Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Russia. 

That said, the Cossacks weren’t indigenous to Crimea. Having taken  part in Russian military campaigns in the area, some of their number eventually settled on or near the Crimean Peninsula, but their presence does not give Russia a legitimate claim. Especially since some of the campaigns the Cossacks took part in where Russian efforts to subjugate and/or displace the native Crimean Tatars.

As for the Tatars, they were the dominant ethnic and political group in Crimea for centuries, and still formed the majority of the population until 1944, when Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin engineered their mass deportation. It was, then, through an act of what is today known as ethnic cleansing, rather than through any legitimate transfer of sovereignty, that the Crimean region’s demographic balance was tipped toward a predominantly ethnic Russian population.

Stalin's deportation of the Tatars

From a strictly legal standpoint, ten years after Stalin’s annexation of Crimea in 1944, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (governing body of the USSR) transferred the peninsula back to Ukraine in 1954. Basically, the Supreme Soviet removed Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and placed it once more under the original control of Ukraine (at the time, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). Ukraine’s claim to Crimea was never questioned after that, until Putin’s decade-long challenge to Ukrainian sovereignty—not by the Russian Federation after the fall of the USSR in 1991, nor by any international body.  

What is more, International law recognizes Crimea as part of Ukraine. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited Crimea as part of its internationally recognized borders. Russia itself recognized these borders in multiple treaties, including the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal.

Bearing all of this in mind, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its armed invasion of other parts of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, using devastating military force, are violations of international law, and have sparked the largest major ground war in Europe since World War II—one involving a world-class nuclear power. Russia’s war of aggression on a sovereign country has drawn widespread condemnation in the international community. The United Nations has passed a resolution (R68/262) reaffirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity and declaring invalid a referendum held by Russia in Crimea to try and justify its annexation.

Crimean Tatar children in traditional dress

In short, Russia’s claim to Crimea and all other areas of Ukraine that it has usurped by military force since 2014 is historically, ethnically, legally and morally illegitimate, and the Trump administration’s attempts to justify Russia’s actions based on some “might makes right” theory that forms part of Trump’s authoritarian view of the world, fly in the face of international law, of respect for the sovereignty of free nations, and of America’s traditional role as the erstwhile leader of the Western world.

Worst of all, Donald Trump admires authoritarians. It’s a schoolyard philosophy, a bully’s attitude of joining other bullies in ganging up on the weaker kids in order not to have to stand up to the other bullies himself.  It’s a stance that not only makes the US Russia’s vassal, but which is also tantamount to appeasing a dangerous, megalomaniacal imperialist.

It is easy enough to understand if we stop pretending this is business as usual and start realizing that Trump identifies with Putin because Trump has megalomaniacal expansionist delusions of his own when it comes to our neighbors. There is all too obviously no difference between Trump’s feverish, openly-stated ambition of taking over Canada and making it a state, and Putin’s realized dream of invading Russia’s sovereign neighbors and making them part of his empire.

Appeasing bullies has never worked. There is no better example to quote than that of another megalomaniacal expansionist who invaded his neighbors prior to World War II. The US and Europe alike appeased Germany’s Adolf Hitler when he took over Austria. They turned a blind eye as well when he went on to invade Czechoslovakia, apparently hoping if they let him violate the sovereignty of a couple of nations, he would somehow get it out of his system. It was a fatal mistake, one with the most catastrophic consequences the world has even known.

Western Europe needs to stop appeasing not only Vladimir Putin, but also Donald Trump, if the US itself continues to fail to rein in its rogue leader. European leaders must stop hoping against hope that Trump will have some sort of epiphany and suddenly begin exercising the kind of pro-Western leadership the US consistently produced before the Era of Trump. For as long as Trump is leading it, the US is no longer a reliable ally, and does not have the best interests of the free world in mind. If anyone is to save Europe from the new wave of Russian imperialism—which, make no mistake, will not end in Ukraine if Ukraine is abandoned to its fate—it will have to be Western Europe itself, and the time to step up, sideline Trump, and draw a line in Ukraine is now.  

APPEASEMENT - HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF IN UKRAINE

 

The tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine at the moment is the consequence of the kind of ruthless, murderous, criminal behavior that the world—shocked though everyone seems to be—should by now have come to expect from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It is a repetition of the kind of unprovoked invasion and scorched earth tactics that he has commanded during his twenty-two-year reign in places like Chechnya and Syria. And it mirrors the same lack of concern over geopolitical consequences and humanitarian considerations that Putin demonstrated nearly a decade and a half ago in Georgia, where he launched the first European war of the twenty-first century.

But leaving aside the similarities between the ruthlessness that Putin has exhibited in Ukraine and those he has employed in earlier armed interventions, there are also historical similarities between how the world is reacting to this latest naked aggression in Europe by the Putin regime, and the earlier policy of appeasement that permitted unfettered expansion by the armies of the most undisputedly emblematic dictator of the modern era.

Since the two world wars fought in the twentieth century, “appeasement” has become a technical term for any diplomatic policy that is based on making concessions to an aggressive power in order to avoid armed conflict. The term’s most iconic historical application has been as a means of describing the diplomatic policies of the then all-powerful British Empire in dealing with the rapid rise of fascism in Germany and Italy and the brutal expansionist doctrines instituted by both nations—but particularly by Nazi Germany—in the run-up to World War II.

The scapegoat for the appeasement shown toward German dictator Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime has traditionally been British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was heading the British government when Nazi Germany’s aggression in Europe could no longer be ignored and spilled over into the start of World War II. But truth be told, previous British prime ministers, including Ramsay McDonald and Stanley Baldwin, had preceded Chamberlain in their hands-off approach to the brutal rise and aggression of both European dictators, embracing appeasement even as both Hitler and Mussolini consolidated their power in Europe in the period between World War I and World War II.

In all fairness, those were different times, the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when the world didn’t yet have the historical context of World War II to look back on. World War I was still being thought of as the “war to end all wars” and as “the Great War”, and most people at that time couldn’t have imagined that Germany’s European aggression would once again spark a worldwide conflict that would prove far more deadly and horrific than the first one. Appeasement, at that time, was not seen as “backing down” in the face of naked aggression, but rather as a policy aimed at preserving the peace that had cost all of Europe such tremendous sacrifice during the First World War.

Appeasement was also seen as the price Europe was paying for the exaggerated and highly vindictive sanctions and contemptuous treatment to which the Allies had subjected Germany following the Great War. There was no more outspoken critic of those sanctions than renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes,

John Maynard Keynes

whose book, The Economic Consequences of Peace, published in 1919, was to become a worldwide bestseller. In that book and at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where he was the British Treasury delegate, Keynes argued that applying a “Carthaginian peace” with the purpose of further crushing an already defeated Germany would lead to new consequences for European peace in the future. He advocated not imposing crippling reparation payments that would impoverish the German people and lay waste to the country’s economy, or at least limiting those reparations to no more than two billion pounds.

Keynes’ advice fell on deaf ears among the Allies in their drafting of the Treaty of Versailles and other associated treaties. And the terrific hardships that the people of Germany suffered in the post-World War I years are historically cited as the main social and humanitarian catalyst that permitted Hitler to become the most powerful man in Germany and the country’s undisputed Fuhrer.

As Great Britain and the US began, during the late nineteen-twenties, to visualize the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, appeasement commenced to be viewed as the most desirable way to avoid escalating new hostilities between Germany—allied with fascist Italy—and the rest of Europe. Appeasement garnered powerful support among the British upper classes, including the House of Lords, British royalty, and big business, at the time headquartered in the City of London. Conservative media, such as the BBC and The London Times, were also supportive of appeasement as a tool of peace.

The left and the lower and middle-class public at large were, however, far less convinced of the wisdom of permitting Nazi Germany to aggressively expand without drawing a line in the sand. As Hitler advanced beyond German borders, much of the liberal press and popular public opinion decried the former Allied powers’ increasing failure to contain Hitler and drive Nazi Germany back, Prime Minister Chamberlain could think of nothing better to do than to impose censorship on the liberal press, meet with Hitler in Munich and then declare himself the architect of “peace in our time”.

Much in the way that Putin is today seeing the desire of the West to maintain world peace and not get into a shooting war with him as acquiescence that he can take advantage of in order to prosecute his expansionist policies, Hitler seized the opportunity provided by appeasement to annex Austria, parts of Czechoslovakia, Bohemia and Moravia, before invading Poland, which finally became a bridge too far, and sparked the start of World War II.

Historians remain divided on the issue of appeasement, however, with one school of thought positing that the policy of appeasement was precisely what permitted Nazi Germany to become so powerful and to gain such a European foothold while the other school of thought is that in the run-up to the war, Hitler’s Germany was already so powerful that early engagement might have permitted him to win the conflict, while appeasement gave Europe time to better prepare for what was, in the end, an unavoidable conflagration.

Like Hitler in Germany following the Treaty of Versailles, Putin built his popular strength as a dictator on the rubble of the fallen Soviet Union. As a ranking intelligence officer in the former KGB, Putin worked closely with former head of state Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first freely elected president following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and managed to become Yeltsin’s protégé. His reputation as a strongman and eminence gris behind Yeltsin placed him first in the line of succession when Yeltsin, in ill-health and highly unpopular after a crippling recession in Russia that some economists have compared to the Great Depression in the US and Europe, resigned from office in 1999. In exchange, one of Putin’s first acts was to provide immunity from prosecution to Yeltsin, who was facing possible charges of corruption and dereliction of duty.

If Yeltsin had tried unsuccessfully to convert Russia from a seventy-five-year-old communist regime to a free market economy overnight, Putin took a more pragmatic approach, taking advantage of the more open market to position himself at the forefront of a highly lucrative oligarchy that helped him consolidate his power and made him, as well as his cronies, a very wealthy man into the bargain. Although Yeltsin had considered the Soviet era over and done with, if anyone was paying attention, it was easy to see that, despite his taste for capitalism, Putin was nostalgic for the enormous power that the Soviet Union had wielded on the world stage, and which had waned to only a shadow of its former self under the post-Berlin Wall Russian Federation. In this regard, cavalierly relegating the two world wars to a position of secondary importance, Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union had been, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

He also took clever advantage of the so-called “glasnost” policy first introduced by his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, which actively sought ever-closer ties with the West. He established strong trade ties with Western Europe and the US and succeeded in making some of the most powerful countries in Western Europe—most notably Germany—largely dependent on Russian oil and gas, the Federation’s main export.

He was at first seen in the West, then, as the new face of Russian democracy and capitalism and gained “most favored nation” trade status with Western nations including the United States—a status that, incredibly, even as he lays waste to Western ally Ukraine, he continues to enjoy, and it is only now that the US and Western Europe are reluctantly considering revoking it. It wasn’t until he was certain that he was in the best position possible to ensure that any Western moves against him would not come without injury to Western economies that he began to reveal who he really was—a ruthless, anti-democratic dictator with an agenda aimed at rebuilding the Russian Federation to the level of power once wielded by the Soviets, but without the all-pervading communist Politburo to hamper him.

Establishing a political partnership with Dmitry Medvedev in which they basically passed the offices of prime minister and president back and forth between them for nearly two decades—a “tandemocracy” as international journalists dubbed it—Putin was clearly always the strong man and Medvedev his shill. Two years ago, Putin decided that he had consolidated sufficient autocratic power to dispense with this farse and pushed Medvedev, who has since been demoted to deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, to resign. Medvedev did so, saying that he was leaving office to permit Putin to introduce constitutional changes—obviously designed to further entrench him in power permanently.

"Strategic target" - a Ukrainian kindergarten

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is utterly unprovoked and brutal. His main goal in doing so is to prevent Ukraine, as an independent sovereign nation, from seeking membership in NATO and the European Union and thus from becoming a basically Western country. A large country of more than forty million people with valuable resources, Ukraine was one of the many Eastern European nations dominated by the Soviet Union from World War II until the end of the cold war, when, like other former satellites of the USSR, Ukraine declared its independence from Moscow.

As of the start of his reign in 1999, however, Putin set to the task of re-introducing Russian domination by infiltrating Ukrainian politics and eventually installing a puppet government in Kyiv that was loyal to Moscow and beholden to Putin. In 2013, mass protests erupted in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, the main purpose of which was to seek closer ties with the West, and particularly with the European Union. Although opposed by the ethnic-Russian minority—mostly centered in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea—this movement became a full-fledged civil uprising known as the Revolution of Dignity, in which at least ninety-eight people were killed, a hundred went missing and some fifteen thousand were injured. In 2014, the protests boiled over into what was essentially a popular coup d’état, as a result of which Putin’s surrogate Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych was removed from power and fled to Moscow.

Putin is using thermobaric bombs that crush the 
lungs of anyone within their killing range.

New—this time free—elections were called, and Petro Poroshenko won by more than fifty percent of the votes, running on a pro-European Union platform. Since then, Putin has actively and violently moved to retake Ukraine by force, first through the direct annexation of Crimea and by providing material and military support to pro-Russian insurgencies in Eastern Ukraine, and now, with the strengthening of pro-Western overtures under the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, by means of the full-scale invasion and destruction of the country as a whole.

The excuse of NATO for not doing more to militarily help the Ukrainians—among other things, at least establishing a no-fly zone so that cities in that country don’t have to contend with Russian air support for its bloody invasion—is that Ukraine isn’t a NATO country. But it’s not for lack of trying on the part of Kyiv. Since once and for all declaring its independence from Moscow, the main thrust of Ukraine’s foreign policy has been to be accepted into the West.

A Ukrainian school hit by Russian cluster bombs.

Clearly, Ukraine would be a positive addition to the West. It is the second-largest country in Europe by area (after Russia). Its population has free access to excellent education. Full secondary school is compulsory, and the country has a literacy rate of about ninety-nine percent, compared to the US with only an eighty-eight percent literacy level. Higher education is free with admissions being provided on a competitive basis. The country’s Lviv University was established in 1616, and the rest of Ukraine’s major cities also host centuries-old institutions of higher learning—a total of nearly one hundred fifty, with a student population of eight hundred fifty thousand.

The country boasts significant natural resources, including lithium, natural gas, kaolin, timber, and an abundance of arable land with a temperate climate that permits a long growing season—even if in certain regions it is vulnerable to environmental issues such as inadequate potable water, air and water pollution, and radioactive contamination in the northeast due to the Chernobyl atomic reactor disaster that took place in 1986, while Ukraine was still dominated by the USSR.

A bombed out apartment building

Ukraine has a score of major industries including power-generation, fuel, ferrous and non-ferrous mining, chemical and petrochemical production, natural gas, machine-building, metallurgy, forestry, woodworking, wood pulp and paper production, construction materials, and food production, among others. The country also has a massive high-tech industrial base in such areas as electronics, arms production and aerospace. 

Unfortunately, its economic performance fails to reflect its very real potential since it has always been subject to the vicissitudes of the Russian economy or has been punished by Russia for seeking its independence, a problem that Western Europe and the US have failed to systematically offset. Add to this the fact that, in just three weeks, Russia is estimated to have destroyed a hundred billion dollars in Ukrainian economic assets—or a little less than two-thirds of the GDP—and Ukraine is currently the poorest nation in Europe.

So why hasn’t the EU done more to embrace Ukraine and make it a progressive Western emerging economy, since the country is not only willing but eager to do just that? Again, the answer is appeasement. It is the West caving to Putin’s refusal to allow a sovereign nation to exercise self-determination. Had the West moved in 2014 to bring Ukraine into the European Union, and more importantly, into NATO, it would have taken a much bigger Russian commitment to war than the one it is now making by ruthlessly invading Ukrainian territory.

While it may be a laudable goal to try and avoid Western armed conflict with one of the world’s two most advanced nuclear powers—especially considering that it is someone as ruthless and brutal as Putin who currently has his hand on the Russian nuclear trigger—as happened with Hitler before World War II, appeasement very likely will prove to be a policy of postponement rather than of avoidance in facing down the Russian dictator. Seeing Putin’s performance to date, it is very hard to imagine that following NATO appeasement in Ukraine, he will not want to test the Western alliance’s resolve in acting on its all-for-one-and-one-for all Western defense policy.

Russia with a defeated Ukraine would pose an immediate threat to Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, and, thanks to its alliance with Belarus, Lithuania. Poland would also be immediately vulnerable, as Putin sought to make good on his dream of returning to the past glory of the powerful Soviet Union.

The choices are clear: How NATO in general and the US in particular react to further Russian expansion will almost certainly either lead to a NATO-Russian shooting war, or it will lead to the nullification of NATO as a viable body for the protection of Western security and to the severe erosion of world security as a whole.

Meanwhile, Ukraine remains the sacrificial lamb in a still cold war between East and West. Putin is determined to use unadulterated state-terrorist tactics to bring Ukraine to its knees, while the West appears to be content to stand by with its arms folded in the hope that Putin will shoot himself out in that country and perhaps not then push on to attack others. 

The price of both opposing strategies is tragic. Ukraine, in just three weeks, has suffered indiscriminate bombing in sixteen of its twenty-five regions. As in Syria and Chechnya in the past, Putin’s war isn’t nearly as much on the Ukrainian military as it is on the Ukrainian people. His bombs have repeatedly destroyed apartment blocks, food and water supplies, heating facilities, stores and shops, markets, schools, churches, and, at last count, at least twenty-four hospitals. His attack on that country is the largest in any European country since World War II, already generating two and a half million refugees, predominately the elderly, women and children. In some locations, like the city of Mariupol, it has given rise to unprecedented humanitarian crises. Also in Mariupol, in just three days of Putin’s siege, at least one thousand three hundred civilians were slaughtered, and Ukrainian officials were forced to start creating mass graves to handle the war dead.

In short, the valiant people of Ukraine—who only sought to live in peace and democracy—and their courageous president are being sacrificed as pawns in the latest East-West power struggle, constituting the most heart-breaking human tragedy in Europe since the end of World War II.  

US FOREIGN POLICY IN THE TRUMP ERA...