There is no exit for Russia

In his April 27 op-ed, “Does the exit ramp look more attractive to Putin now?,” David Ignatius summarized the current events surrounding the war in Ukraine. I suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ultimate reason for initiating the war precluded any consideration of an “exit.”

An exit ramp would seem to presuppose a measured political or economic rationale for the invasion together with a set of related goals and contingency plans, perhaps a goal of implementing the Minsk II agreement. Somewhere out of the fog of his imagination and perhaps more personally through a sense of embarrassment because of the collapse of East Germany, Mr. Putin has absorbed pan-slaviclike aspirations as a basis for the current and perhaps future invasions to fulfill a destiny for Russia. There is no concept of exit when motivated by such a conceptualization — it’s all or nothing. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s comment about the possibility of a nuclear conflict would seem to bear this out.

Andrew Labadie, Washington