The ugly truth is finally starting to sink in at the White House — or so we hope — and that is that Vladimir Putin has no intention of accepting a “standstill” in Ukraine. The administration has been lamenting the futility of the war for weeks. “Stop the killing” and “stop the bloodshed,” President Trump has repeatedly told the warring parties in press briefings and on social media.
These phrases, coming from his mouth, ring insincere. They would be convincing if Trump were a typical Western liberal who believes that killing and bloodshed occur mostly when people fail to see the benefits of stability and prosperity. But Trump doesn’t think that way—he never has—and that’s why he doesn’t express similar laments about the bloodshed in Haiti, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere.
In response to the Russian military's refusal to stop attacking Ukrainian civilians, Trump said on April 26: "It makes me think that maybe he [Putin] doesn't want to stop the war, he's just dragging me out." It's clear that Trump knows his Russian counterpart is a cunning player, but he ended the statement with another, seemingly gullible, appeal to liberal values: "Too many people are dying!!!"
Trump understands brutal opportunism, but not honor-based savagery. His advisers—notably real estate investor Steve Witkoff and Vice President J.D. Vance—seem to see Putin as a cunning Western-style politician who is calculating solely for money and political gain.
But that's just not true. As Gary Saul Morson explained in a remarkable essay from 2023 "Do Russians love war?", Putin fully embraces the age-old myth of Russia as a victim of betrayal and exploitation. Mongols in the 13th century, Turks in the 18th, British and French in the 19th, Germans in the 20th - in minds like Putin's, consumed by this myth, Russia must always fight against enemies who want to rob it of its wealth and destroy its people.
May 1945, the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Soviet Union in XNUMX, is, for Russians, Morson writes, "the most important holiday of the year, consecrated by the Russian Orthodox Church." They feel a kinship with the mystical body of the people, past and present.” War in Russia, he explains, is a kind of civic rite: newlyweds often lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, and criticizing the military is often considered sacrilege.
In American war films, "real heroes (or most of them) survive. In contrast, in countless Russian war films and novels, death is represented as much as possible. The story is not complete if anyone but the narrator survives. The more death, the greater the heroism."
Trump's lamentations about the killing and destruction in Ukraine are likely to have the opposite effect on Putin than he wants. That's a reasonable assessment, at least, after Putin's recent statement that any deal to end the war would have to include Russian control of four territories that Russia still doesn't fully control: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporozhye.
So, after weeks of pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and attempts to portray Putin as a reasonable man - "open type", as Witkoff called him in an interview with Tucker Carlson - the administration has managed to get nothing out of the Russian dictator. In fact, less than nothing. Putin is now asking for more, not less.
It is useful to ask how a government’s behavior will be judged by readers of history a hundred years from now. If Trump ultimately listens to Vance and Donald Trump Jr. and cuts off aid to Ukraine, the consequences will be comparable to the behavior of the Allies in 1939. I am not referring to the Munich Agreement of the previous year, but to the failure of Britain and France to support Poland — despite their promises — in its valiant but doomed attempt to resist the German Wehrmacht.
The reasons for the Allies' non-intervention sounded logical at the time. Halik Kočanski, in the book "The Unconquered Eagle" (2012), writes that Britain and France have gone through a period of "hesitation to do anything that would provoke German retaliation", from "delusions that they can't do anything anyway because their armed forces are not ready for war", all the way to "the final justification that there is no point in doing anything because Poland is collapsing so quickly."
The allies' excuses from 1939 are echoed today in the rhetoric of those who despise Zelensky: Russia could retaliate with nuclear weapons, NATO is too weak for the conflict, Ukraine cannot win.
In Britain and France's favor, it should be said that they would then have to send their soldiers and pilots against Hitler in Poland. But the shame is real - and every educated Briton and Frenchman knows it. America, on the other hand, should not send soldiers to Ukraine, but only weapons.
If we cannot do even that, we will earn the contempt of our grandchildren.
(The Wall Street Journal)
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