Blinded by his delusional expectation of a Nobel Peace Prize, President Donald Trump fails to see the immovable obstacle to his goal of brokering a swift end to Russia’s war on Ukraine:
The last thing Russian President Vladimir Putin wants at this time is to halt his aggression far short of the objective of full conquest at a cost in lives and treasure threatening Russians with decades of poverty and isolation.
Even Trump’s efforts to appease Putin with offers to meet his maximalist demands have failed to stir interest in peace from the Kremlin leader. At Trump’s red-carpet reception of the indicted war criminal in Alaska last month, Trump returned to the White House with nothing to show for it despite pre-summit predictions that he would wrest an agreement from Putin for a ceasefire to facilitate peace talks.
Trump has already taken NATO membership for Kyiv off the table before Putin has agreed to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Encouraged by the easy wins over an impatient U.S. dealmaker, Putin has rejected Western security guarantees for a post-war Ukraine that don’t comply with Russian objectives.
Those objectives have not changed since Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, or the stealth occupations in 2014 of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea that preceded the full-scale invasion.
Every time Trump’s real-estate tycoon special envoy Steve Witkoff visits the Kremlin, he returns with reports of progress—conditioned on a peace agreement addressing the “root causes” of the war. Those obstacles are grievances dating back to the 11th Century when Kievan Rus spanned all Slavic lands from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. Putin proclaimed in a 2021 essay that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, rightfully to be united and ruled by Moscow.
It would hardly be a reprieve from wartime hardship and sacrifice if Putin’s war were to end with an unjust and unsustainable “peace” forced on Ukraine. The punitive economic and political sanctions imposed on Russia by most democratic countries would not end with a sham agreement.
Putin would still be an indicted war criminal, facing arrest and extradition to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, if he dared set foot in any of the 125 countries that are signatories to the global judicial body. The United States has not endorsed the ICC but most European allies and other developed nations have.
China is another state that has spurned ICC authority, which allowed Putin to attend President Xi Jinping’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tianjin over the weekend. Images of Putin mingling with the leaders of China and India sent a message of cohesion among the United States’ most powerful adversaries, united by shared grievances over Trump’s punitive trade policies and the turmoil unleashed in what used to be the world’s most prosperous and powerful country.
Xi urged the 20 foreign leaders in attendance to create an “orderly multipolar world” to integrate rather than politicize relations and interests, providing stability in the place of alliances previously dominated by U.S. policy and interests.
Despite mounting costs and shrinking resources, Putin is loath to stop attacking and cut a deal to take what territory he can and regroup to fight another day. He knows what a significant rollback of his invasion objectives would look like to the Russian population and his enabling nationalist war hawks. The devastated war spoils he has acquired so far provide a frightening look at the future for a leader who has squandered an estimated one million young Russian fighters and returned Russia to the community of rogue nations.
Russian forces have suffered significantly higher casualties per capita than has Ukraine, which had little more than a third of Russia’s population at the war’s onset. The Russian landmass is 28 times that of Ukraine and hosts many of the world’s largest deposits of valuable natural resources, including oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds, nickel, cobalt and other rare earth minerals. Per capita Russian GDP was more than twice Ukraine’s at the start of the war.
Yet Russian forces’ deaths and permanent injuries are estimated by the British Ministry of Defence and the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies to have topped one million earlier this year, with at least 250,000 of those fatalities. Ukraine’s death toll is estimated by both institutions as 60,000-100,000, including those missing in action and presumed to have died.
Putin has staked his legacy on acquiring all of Ukraine and inspired Russians to believe his war is a justified operation to rein in a rebellious region spun off from Mother Russia after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
In a blame game that rhymes with Trump’s accusing his presidential predecessors of causing all of America’s current problems, Putin accuses former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and independent Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin of selling out Greater Russia by recognizing the independence of Ukraine and the other 13 former Soviet republics.
It is Putin’s world view that all land that has ever been under Russian rule is an inseparable part of his Russian Empire. That notion portends further aggressions if his attempts at violent conquest are appeased at the expense of Ukraine.
Post-Soviet guarantees of Ukraine’s sovereignty and security were enshrined in the Belavezha Accords dissolving the Soviet Union signed in December 1991 by the leaders of the three republics that created the USSR in 1922 – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Ukraine’s sovereignty was further solidified under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum when Kyiv surrendered its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees of protection of its independence and borders by Russia, Britain and the United States.
Putin’s campaign to take Ukrainian territory by whatever force necessary has resulted in much of the conquered land and infrastructure being reduced to rubble. Russian-occupied Ukrainian cities like Mariupol, Donetsk and Bakhmut lay in ruins, in need of wholesale reconstruction to make them habitable for those left in the dregs.
If the war were to end tomorrow, or anytime in the foreseeable future, this burden of reconstruction would fall on Moscow at a time when Kremlin coffers are depleted by international trade sanctions, as much as 43% of the current annual budget spent on the military, Russia’s cash cows of oil and gas production facilities are damaged by Ukrainian drone attacks, and more than $300 billion in Russian hard-currency deposits are frozen in Western banks.
In Donetsk, the Eastern Ukraine city that Russian mercenaries occupied 11 years ago, the regional water system for a prewar population of one million has been destroyed by aerial and ground combat. Residents of the de facto capital of Russian-occupied Eastern Ukraine survive on trucked-in water available to some households for an hour or two every third day.
Putin’s quixotic effort to don the cloak of 21st Century conqueror has succeeded in unsettling much of Europe and the previously U.S.-led NATO military alliance. Trump’s divergence from democratic nations’ support for Ukraine has driven a wedge between the White House and U.S. allies in the European Union and NATO defense alliance. The future of further military aid to Ukraine is at stake as European democracies attempt to backfill the weapons and political support Trump has withheld from Kyiv in his flip-flopping diplomatic interventions.
If the Ukraine war were to end without the glorious victory Putin has promised, even with Trump’s efforts to give him all of what he has taken so far, he and his rabid nationalist co-conspirators would soon face the wrath of vengeful countrymen who, like many Germans in Nazi Fuehrer Adolf Hitler’s thrall, suffered ignominious defeat for following their leader’s misguided grievance to ubiquitous ruin.
Kremlin history is replete with avaricious dictators seizing land and sacrificing generations of Russians soldiers in pursuit of a wider empire over which the leader could rule. From Peter the Great to Josef Stalin, Russian warriors seized territory for a Greater Russian or Soviet Empire.
The August 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact should serve as a cautionary tale to Trump’s freelance diplomacy as the secret collusion fired the starting shot of World War II. Hitler invaded Poland a week after the deal was signed in Moscow. It carved up Europe into rival spheres of influence but collapsed less than two years later when Hitler’s forces attacked the Soviet Union and occupied the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that the pact had designated as Soviet spoils of war.
Trump’s pursuit of a Putin pledge to end his war on any terms necessary echoes the persistent pre-WWII campaign of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to pacify Hitler and Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini with other countries’ territorial concessions. The lessons of appeasement should be learned from the mistaken belief that satisfying a despot’s unjustified demands only leads to further capitulations.
The war is costing Russia much of the young talent it will need in the hard years ahead for recovery from Putin’s aggressive folly. The estimated one million Russian war casualties and an equal number of young Russian men who have fled abroad to avoid conscription have combined to further imperil the Russian nation’s demographic future. Always a country where more than one child was unthinkable in a family’s constrained financial circumstances, Russia now faces at least two decades of inability to sustain the population growth necessary to recover from the economic catastrophe of a failed war against a sovereign neighbor.
Perhaps Putin’s only escape from the social upheaval his aggression has fostered will be the biological solution. Putin is a month short of 73 years of age in a country where male life expectancy is 68, and 11 years less than Russian women who, statistically, live to 79.
The decimation of men in their 20s over the past three-plus years of successive mobilizations will accelerate the skewed gender balance, undermining Russia’s economic and demographic stability for decades, even if the next leader of Russia attempts to steer the country in a more peaceful and internationalist direction.
That is not the future scenario forecast by the present. Putin, like most megalomaniacs, has strategically thwarted the emergence of a successor. His death, in years near or far, will unleash a vicious power struggle among his coterie of rivals with no more commitment to bettering Russians’ lives than the current Kremlin occupant.
A divide between the Trump administration and America’s erstwhile allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific also portends a troubling future. Time is not on the side of a tuned-out American electorate, a neutered Congress and a Supreme Court uninterested or unable to halt the United States’ slide into autocracy.
Like Putin, 79-year-old Trump will likely not be around to suffer the consequences of subverting America’s 249-year allegiance to the Constitution and the republic it promised “if you can keep it.”
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