The US Has Already Surrendered Ukraine To Putin

The  Holodomor

Why make things more complex than they are? In the farcical diplomatic struggle between American President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden will be the loser and Putin the winner. The reason is obvious: Putin has more than 200,000 troops mustered on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, while Biden has Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, whom he is depending upon to offer diplomatic resistance to the 200,000 troops.

We know from history that in any contest between force and diplomacy force will win out. The United States government, which recently surrendered Afghanistan to Taliban terrorists, is not prepared to shed a drop of American blood in long-suffering Ukraine, historically a pathway to Soviet domination of free Baltic States and Poland. These stepping stones deposited the Soviet military in the post-war period in East Germany, which remained under Soviet occupation for decades until then President John Kennedy declared near the Brandenburg Gate that he too was a Berliner. A serious resistance to Soviet rule began there and continued until the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989.

The reunification of East and West Berlin marked the beginning of the long, slow dissolution of the Soviet Empire.

Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Joseph Stalin in 1953 as having fostered a “cult of personality.” He included in his denunciation a condemnation of Stalin’s brutal crimes, such as the execution, torture and imprisonment of loyal party members on trumped up charges. Sometime later, Khrushchev re-deeded Crimea to Ukraine. The Holodomor, the Stalin induced famine in Ukraine that destroyed what had been known since Roman times as “the breadbasket of Europe” and resulted in the deaths by starvation of 8-10 million people, haunted Khrushchev, who was born in Ukraine and who served as Stalin’s “butcher of Ukraine.”

In the postmodern world, Ukraine is to the Biden administration what Czechoslovakia was in pre-World War II days to Neville Chamberlain’s diplomatic reliant administration in Great Britain.

In 1936, after Chancellor Adolf Hitler had conjoined Germany and Austria by sending German troops into the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia was next on Hitler’s to-conquer list.

German Nazis in the Sudetenland were encouraged to stir up trouble. Czechoslovakian leader Evard Benez suspected correctly that should Hitler be given the Sudetenland as an appeasement trophy, Czech defenses would be handed over to an aggressor state and Czechoslovakia itself would be rendered defenseless.

A flurry of diplomatic activity was unleashed. Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden, then to Godesberg a week later, then on to Munich, where he received from Hitler a signed international agreement that the Chancellor of Germany would make no further demands for land in Europe beyond annexing the largely German Sudetenland. Hitler got what he wanted without firing a shot. Six months later, in March 1939, German troops took over the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Great Britain drew a red line at Poland. Having failed to stop aggression in Czechoslovakia, Hitler reasoned that Britain would not go to war over Poland. Two days after Hitler dispatched his troops to Poland in 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.

To be sure, Biden is not Chamberlain and Putin is not Hitler. But Putin has learned from history, while Biden has not. Putin already has sheared off a chunk of Ukraine – the Crimea – during the “lead from behind” administration of President Barack Obama.

That piece of the puzzle provided a salt water port to landlocked Russia at a time when Russia in the post Stalinist era had lost its satellites to the West. Since then, Putin, mindful that President Ronald Reagan had arranged with Saudi Arabia to cripple Russia’s exportation of oil by lowering its price on the world market, had resolved to boost oil production and, so far as possible, make Russian oil indispensable to Europe by means of a pipeline attaching Russia to Germany.

Germany, one of the principal pillars of NATO, is now an energy pipeline satrap of Putin, who has not forgotten the lessons of the post-Soviet years. And policies undertaken by the Biden administration – an abject surrender in Afghanistan, an open door policy to border jumpers, wild increases in inflationary spending at the tail end of a pandemic, and an over-reliance of diplomacy in the face of militant obduracy – have signaled to the world that the United States is now prepared to resume former President Barack Obama's failed “lead from behind” foreign policy misadventures.

Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, have taken it upon themselves to stem the ultimate tide of history concerning the predatory interests of Putin in Ukraine by visiting the country and condoling with Ukrainians in Connecticut and the world.

In the meantime, White House National Security advisor Jake Sullivan said on Sunday, according to an Associated Press story in a Hartford paper, that the invasion "could happen as soon as tomorrow, or it could take some weeks yet.”

Has “the White House… briefed lawmakers that a full Russian invasion could lead to the quick capture of Kyiv and potentially result in as many as 50,000 casualties”?

Sullivan, we are told, “did not directly address” such reports.

Perhaps Connecticut’s media should bestir itself and put that and other questions to Blumenthal and Murphy, both apparently friendly to Ukraine.