Slow Motion Munich
Thus, murder and mayhem continued in Ukraine, and pointless meetings proliferated. Putin met with Trump in Alaska on August 15, and the two men agreed to disagree but agreed to meet again to try to reach an agreement. On August 18, Trump held another summit in Washington with Zelensky and Europe’s leadership, who pledged to provide “security guarantees” in the form of “boots on the ground” for Ukraine. America would assist, he promised, but not by sending troops, imposing sanctions, or supplying weapons to Ukraine. Putin’s response? Massive missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians, a surge at the battlefront, and the Kremlin’s statement that “boots on the ground” will trigger WW3: “We reiterate our long-standing position of unequivocally rejecting any scenarios involving the deployment of NATO military contingents in Ukraine, as this risks uncontrollable escalation with unpredictable consequences.”
The challenge of providing “security guarantees” to Ukraine in the form of troops is laudable, but treacherous. If soldiers from NATO countries are recruited, they will be picked off by Putin’s forces, and an attack against one would be considered an attack against all 32 NATO members. This would trigger Article 5, and the “unpredictable consequences” would be a European-wide war. The Institute for the Study of War in Washington explained the problem: “Russia’s rejection covers the possibility of any NATO member state deploying a military contingent to Ukraine and threatening that Russia would deem any such deployment of forces to Ukraine as legitimate military targets. Trump and other EU officials reiterated that any deployment of peacekeeping forces to Ukraine would not be a formal NATO military contingent.” And United Nations peacekeepers won’t be summoned because Russia will exercise its veto at the Security Council.
Putin is not listening, but neither is Trump, nor has his team, or they would have abandoned “peace” talks long ago and imposed extreme economic and military pressure on Russia. On August 19, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov baldly stated the Kremlin's objective in Ukraine is not land swaps or a truce, but political control of all of Ukraine. So Trump pursues a peace deal that Moscow will never agree to.
Trump has also undermined the process in February when he and his Vice President humiliated Ukraine’s President without justification. This emboldened Putin. Trump has also refused to criticize the perpetrator until recently, failing to threaten Putin with force or sanctions and not demanding concessions. So it’s little wonder why Putin has made no concessions and ignored Trump’s deadlines to end the carnage. He even coaxed Trump to tacitly agree in Alaska that Ukraine give him a piece of Donetsk, a suggestion that was straight out of Hitler’s Munich gambit in 1938. As Hitler did in Czechoslovakia, Moscow would use the territory as a strategic springboard for more invasions.
But Trump’s shuttle diplomacy, rhetoric, “busy-work”, and dramatic “summitry” efforts have yielded no clear-cut results yet and allow Putin to continue his bloody onslaught unimpeded. Alaska didn’t move the dial, and the Washington summits have accomplished little except to propose “security guarantees” that Putin rejected out of hand. Former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev told The Moscow Times: “The [Euro-Trump] meeting demonstrated — or rather, it allowed each side to declare — that they want peace, while in reality, they’ll continue doing exactly what they were doing before. Trump will continue trying to be friendly with Putin without any sanctions, while Putin will keep waging war, claiming that he and Trump are somehow working to strengthen peace.”
Trump ignores American military experts. After Alaska, retired Gen. Philip Breedlove said: “Russia has never been interested in peace in Ukraine, is not now interested in peace in Ukraine, and will never be interested in peace in Ukraine,” except after its conquest. And it’s also doubtful that Trump read an open letter written to him in 2023 about Russia after the invasion of Ukraine by the late Russian film director and writer Eduard Topol. His letter described the DNA of Russia and its leaders, and explained why any peace efforts will fall on deaf ears, why the war will only stop when Russia is defeated, and why business between the US and Russia will never happen.
Topol’s bestselling political thriller
“As the author of fifty books and a dozen films about Russia, I consider myself entitled to inform you,” wrote Topol. “You must know that he (Putin) cannot stop the war with Ukraine, even if you gift him your Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Trump Tower in New York, and a dozen of your golf clubs. And not because he doesn’t want a break from war, but because he simply cannot.”
This is because Russia’s revolutions happened after Russian soldiers returned from unsuccessful wars, he explained. The most recent example was the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989, which led to chaos in the USSR and its collapse. “Knowing this,” Topol added, “Putin cannot end the war with Ukraine and bring his troops home. That is why Putin dreams of occupying Ukraine, as well as the Baltics, Finland, Poland, etc., to keep his army far away from Moscow. And he knows what will happen if one and a half million soldiers, trained to kill, loot, and rape professionally, return home from the Ukrainian front.”
The war has also enabled Putin to eliminate two million opponents of his regime, who fled, were jailed, or conscripted. Topol concluded: “I do not want Putin—a KGB man, a thief, and a murderer of millions—to keep brazenly deceiving you, lying, and misleading my President. If you want to stop Putin and the imperial ambitions of at least half of Russia’s population, you need to bring oil prices down to at least $25 per barrel and give Ukraine the weapons that will help it crush the aggressor. As for your desire to establish U.S.-Russian business partnerships, not in words but in reality, this could happen in a hundred years—or never at all.”
Diane Francis