Zelensky accuses ‘appeaser’ Kissinger of living in 1938
Ukrainian president claims statesman’s plan to give up land to Russia compares to pacifying Hitler at Munich
VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY crushed calls from Henry Kissinger to cede some of Ukraine’s territory to Russia, as he warned of the dangers of appeasing Vladimir Putin. The Ukrainian president compared the suggestion to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler before the Second World War and said Mr Kissinger was stuck in a 1938 mentality.
The 98-year-old former US secretary of state told world leaders in Davos that the West should push Ukraine into making concessions to Putin and that humiliating Russia could be disastrous for the long-term stability of Europe.
It comes alongside increasing calls from influential Western figures for Ukraine to seek peace with the Kremlin while resigning itself to letting Russia rule the territory it has captured.
“No matter what the Russian state does, there is always someone who says: let’s take its interests into account,” Mr Zelensky said on Wednesday.
“It seems that Mr Kissinger’s calendar is not 2022, but 1938, and he thought he was talking to an audience not in Davos, but in Munich of that time” – a reference to the Nazi appeasement policies promoted by Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement.
He also referred to the family history of Mr Kissinger, who had to flee Nazi Germany as a teenager.
He said: “He was 15 years old, and he understood everything perfectly.
“And nobody heard from him then that it was necessary to adapt to the Nazis instead of fleeing them or fighting them.”
Mr Kissinger, the architect of Cold War rapprochement, whom Mr Putin reportedly holds in high esteem, said the war in Ukraine must be stopped.
“Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante,” he said, referring to the situation prior to the February invasion but after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.”
The EU’S eastern and central European members have sided with the Ukrainian government in its stance on the conflict.
The Polish president insisted that “only Ukraine has the right to make decisions about its future” during a visit to Kyiv over the weekend.
Officials in Kyiv last week were also angered by an editorial in The New York Times suggesting that Ukraine will “have to make the painful territorial decisions” to end the war. Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Mr Zelensky, who is involved in talks with Russia, said that was “not a path to peace but a war postponed for several years.”
In a rival editorial, The Kyiv Independent, Ukraine’s leading English-language publication, argued that conciliation would only encourage Mr Putin, whose ambitions of taking over Ukraine have grown since the first Russian incursion in Ukraine in 2014.
“Allowing Russia to annex Crimea emboldened Russia to try to swallow the Donbas,” it said.
“When it invaded in 2014, carving up a sovereign state and killing civilians, the other world leaders’ tepid response made Russia’s bloody dictator feel empowered to do more.”
But Norman Lamont, a former Conservative chancellor, also weighed in to support Mr Kissinger.
“Dr Kissinger has a very distinguished record, is no woolly idealist, and is a hard-headed diplomat” he told the House of Lords. “However inconvenient it may be, shouldn’t his advice be carefully studied?”
Three months after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the war is now mostly contained to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, parts of which have been overrun by Kremlin-backed separatists since 2014.
Russia appears to have given up its attempts to take Ukraine’s largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, but it still controls large swathes of eastern Ukraine where an outright annexation is planned.