The Russian regime is openly saying that its plan for Ukraine entails death and suffering on a scale unseen on the European continent since 1945.
From the pope on down, those who insist that Ukraine must submit to Russian aggression and commit to negotiations with its would-be conqueror insist they have Ukrainians’ best interests in mind.
Ukraine must embrace “the courage of the white flag,” Pope Francis implored. Kyiv’s continued resistance is fatal hubris. “It is even money that Zelensky’s army will be facing some sort of collapse before November,” The American Conservative’s Scott McConnell bloodlessly opined. A “painful peace agreement” be preferable to a war that continues “until Ukraine is defeated,” the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven mourned. “Peace talks are worth pursuing and would save lives,” preached the Reverend Adam Russell Taylor. “The best Kyiv’s desperate leaders can hope for is to achieve a stalemate via [a] negotiated settlement,” Brandon Weichert concluded in a National Interest piece. Indeed, continuing to provide for Ukraine’s defense is a great sin. “Team NATO keeps micturating in the wind and filling Ukraine up with false hope,” he mourned. “I just want it to stop.”
These and others frame their desire to consign Ukraine to subjugation as an outgrowth of their profound compassion for Ukrainians. In their formulation, it’s those who would support the Ukrainians’ desire to defend themselves and their families from Russian aggression who are truly callous. Their solipsism is predicated on the assumption that Kyiv has a partner with whom it might negotiate. Their arguments, therefore, presuppose a Russian political consensus in support of a truce — a consensus that does not exist.
Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s longtime right-hand man, recently articulated the terms that Russia would consider as the basis for a negotiated settlement to its war of territorial expansion. They include: “Complete and unconditional surrender,” “demilitarization,” the “recognition of the Nazi character” of the regime in Kyiv by “the international community,” the dissolution of the Ukrainian government, the absorption of its “entire territory” into “the territory of the Russian Federation” and the adoption of Russian law, and, as a sweetener, reparations to Moscow as “compensation for property damage caused to constituent entities of the Russian Federation.” How generous.
Lest we conclude that Putin’s attack dog is merely playing bad cop to the Kremlin’s good cop, Medvedev seems only to be stating Moscow’s position on peace talks. “It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine just because it’s running out of ammunition,” Putin told an interviewer this week. The Russian president isn’t banking on European paralysis; Europe has not begged off its support for Ukraine. If anything, Putin is betting that the impasse on Ukraine aid in the U.S. Congress will persist long enough for Russia to achieve its battlefield objectives. And Ukrainians know full well what those objectives are, insofar as they can be gleaned by Russia’s battlefield tactics: ethnic cleansing; rape as a weapon of war; mass execution, kidnapping, and reeducation as a tool of statecraft; and the eradication of the entity Medvedev dismisses as “Ukraine” in scare-quotes.
The Russian regime is telling anyone willing to listen that its plan for Ukraine entails death and suffering on a scale unseen on the European continent since 1945. The naïve Westerners who seek peace at any price — surely at the cost of tiny Ukraine’s sovereignty — must conjure in their minds a Russia that does not resemble the one with which we are confronted today. Not only that, but they must also fabricate an abstracted Ukrainian who would rather submit himself and his loved ones to the horrors he knows await them on the other side of occupation.
Theirs is a happy fiction — one that serves only to reinforce their own self-conception as noble peacemakers, bravely standing up to the warmongers with whom they are surrounded. Their concern for Ukraine doesn’t seem to be shared by Ukrainians. Their desire for peace is rejected by the Russians. It’s hard to see what else they get out of their blinkered advocacy beyond self-satisfaction.