The Ukraine-russia war needs to end now, at the conference table
Last month, at a California fund-raising event, President Biden called President vladimir Putin of Russia a “crazy s.o.b.” to which one can only respond: Yes, crazy like a fox.
It’s almost impossible for Americans to get a reliable fix on Putin through the dense propaganda fog of the Russia-Ukraine war. Biden has also branded Putin a “butcher” and, of course, a “war criminal.”
It seems like only yesterday that we were assured that Putin was dying from inoperable cancer or would be ousted in a kremlin coup by powerful rivals, channeling Russians’ widespread disgust with Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
These suggestions proved to be poppycock. Putin seems to be in fine shape. He can speak coherently about international affairs for hours at a time, which is more than you can say about the two men currently vying for the Us presidency. the only discernible threat to the kremlin dictatorship, Yevgeny Prigozhin, commander of the rebellious wagner Group mini-army, vanished in an airplane “accident” shortly after raising his hand against Putin.
Even Putin’s detractors concede that Russians approve of, or at least tolerate, his wartime regime. opinion polling in a totalitarian state is a parlous venture, yet the kyiv Independent newspaper recently reported that 77 percent of Russians support the war.
According to the Christian science monitor’s moscow correspondent, fred weir, the positive poll numbers are “fraught with ambiguity. outside of official publicity, there is little enthusiasm for the war effort, but neither does there seem to be much overt opposition.”
It’s painful to admit that the war in Ukraine has turned out as Putin might have expected. After kyiv successfully parried Russia’s initial, hapless attempt to seize the capital city and “decapitate” the regime, Russia began to take territory. After two years of bloody fighting, Russia now controls about 20 percent of Ukraine, which finds itself locked in a war of attrition with a larger, stronger adversary.
Enthusiasm for the war among Ukraine’s allies is waning. After pumping $75 billion worth of aid into Ukraine, Congress is less eager to rubber stamp more appropriations for the stalemated conflict. the much-ballyhooed sanctions imposed on Russia have harmed, but not crippled, the Russian economy. Globalism is real; Russian oil that can’t be sold to europe can be sold to India. “Yes, [the sanctions] create temporary problems for us,” Putin recently said. “But everything, of course, will be done anyway.”
I wish the odious Henry kissinger were running American foreign policy right now, in place of the current secretary of state, rock ’n’ roll savant Antony Blinken. sounding a lot like Putin, kissinger argued a decade ago that “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. … Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined.”
It’s shocking and hypocritical that Us policy makers still invoke the monroe Doctrine to justify Us meddling in the affairs of our Central and south American neighbors but have turned a deaf ear to Putin’s consistent warnings, dating back to the Clinton administration, not to lure Ukraine into the Nato fold. Healthy, prosperous democracies have enjoyed neighborly relations with Russia. for instance, finland “peacefully co-existed” with Russia from 1945 until just last year, when, shocked by the Ukraine invasion, it joined Nato.
Where are we now? It is deemed semi-treasonous to state the obvious: this bloody, avoidable war, which has claimed the lives of at least 90,000 Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, needs to end now, at the conference table. there is zero chance that Ukraine will emerge even partially restored in a cease-fire. At a minimum, Crimea and swathes of the fake “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine will become Russia-controlled.
Does that mean Putin “won”? Not really. Russia is a pariah nation and likely to remain one for a long time. A younger Putin dreamed of Russia allying with the civilized industrial democracies of europe. Now he’s currying favor with the likes of North korea and a contemptuous China. that’s not what he had in mind.
And yes, his brutal dictatorship will live another day. He’s an s.o.b. —
Biden’s right about that. the Russian president’s rivals “end up dead, or close to it,” as Chris wallace indelicately noted in a famous 2018 sit-down with Putin.
But he’s not crazy. If only he were.