We’re on the wrong track in Ukraine

Encouraging Ukraine in their heroic fight will not come to a good end within our terms of reference.

Ukraine will not defeat Russia, and we have no stomach for the struggle ahead, unless we are ready to push Putin into a Hitler-like Berlin bunker scenario. Under the current realities, we are asking Russia to significantly alter its existence, and the opposition to that is unquestionable; therefore, the best we can hope for is a negotiated settlement.

The confluence of geography and climate of Russia has always been an enigma to most, not only to foreigners but also to the Russians themselves. Around 75 percent of the landmass is covered with permafrost and much of it is uninhabitable land. Forced labor, POW camps and gulags were needed to push civilization west of the Urals. Life was always extending from the days of Byzantine, the genesis of their culture, Orthodox Church, Cyrillic alphabet, all spread northward through Kiev, through Moscow to St. Petersburg. You can almost draw a line of sorts from St. Petersburg through Moscow, Kiev and the Crimea; that is the historical backbone of Russia going back over a thousand years. Much of that landmass extends so far West that Sarah Palin from Alaska admitted she could look through the Bering Strait into Russia. That land was never brought into political cohesion in the civilized sense of the word, not the Tsars, Lenin, Stalin or the Cold War period. There was always a fight with Mongols. Tartars, managed by the hired guns of Russia, the Cossacks. Ukraine never constituted a nation state but a vast hinterland that proved a disaster for the land forces of both Napoleon and Hitler.

Mr. Putin, having learned what Eastern Germany looked like, took his sense of discipline as a KGB officer and, with a few of his guys and Spetznaz troops, established a powerbase that nobody wanted to muck around with. What he did I find amazing. After the devastating historical collapse, he reestablished himself as the current Tsar of Russia. He is not going to give up the Donbas or the Crimea; access to the Black Sea is existential. To him, as many observers pointed out, the Ukraine constitutes a historically embedded part of Russia and does not recognize the collapse of the Soviet Union as legal justification for Ukrainian independence. Putin does not live in the legalistic international community but in his own geopolitical reality or what earlier was known as the Pan Slav Hemisphere.

I don’t know if we, as a country, can continue to walk our talk in the long term and absorb the humanitarian disaster that could last another 10 years and cost the lives of 6-to-10 million Ukrainians. Remember, the Russian breed, under Lenin and Stalin, sacrificed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s just to establish the Soviet agricultural system. The current strategy can only prove decisive if it somehow brings about the removal of Putin and a new Russian regime that could live with the cost of an independent Ukraine that would significantly alter the existence of Russia as a world power.

More and more, it will come to light that our partnership in the Ukraine is on shaky ground, compromised by deeplyembedded corruption, only propped up by our unrelenting media and Biden administration support. The overwhelming reality, however, is that an independent Ukraine, as a member of NATO and EU, would be the end of Russia as a global power, to which Mr. Putin could or would never agree to.

We should push for a negotiated settlement before our well-intentioned support culminates in bona fide nuclear war.