Peace Comes to Ukraine

Kyiv

They have healed the brokenness of my people superficially saying, “Peace, peace.” But there is no peace -- Jeremiah 6:14 

The war of Russian aggression against Ukraine began a full month ago, when a forty mile convoy of destructive war material was seen by Maxar Technologies in Colorado snaking its way from Belarus, to Kyiv, Ukraine.

Many supposed at the beginning of the war that Stalinist wannabe Vladimir Putin would overcome Ukrainian resistance in a matter of days. That convoy certainly seemed intimidating, pregnant with portents of future mass destruction.

This notion – that Ukraine would fall without effective resistance, as Czechoslovakia had done when faced with superior Nazi firepower from 1938-44 – likely was hard baked into the American response to the war.

Lt. General Scott Berrier, who leads the Pentagon’s Primary Intelligence Arms, recently admitted that the Pentagon had misjudged Ukrainian resistance: “We made some assumptions about his [Putin’s] assumptions, which proved to be very, very flawed. I think assessing will, morale and a will to fight is a very difficult analytical task.”

“To put it in the bluntest of terms,” this writer noted on March 12, “the Pentagon likely had advised President Biden NOT to invest American troops on the ground or necessary defensive war material in Ukraine because the defense of liberty there was a lost cause. The resistance would be, according to Pentagon calculations, quickly put down, and the American ‘investment’ ultimately would pay no dividends.”

In Afghanistan, the United States had turned over to international terrorists, the Taliban, an entire country. And the Biden administration had left behind both Americans and Afghans who had helped Americans to preserve a peace for two decades. In addition, the Biden administration had surrendered to the Taliban, Bagram Airfield, along with a massive cache of weaponry, as yet an unacknowledged strategic error of the Biden administration.

A heedless repetition of strategic mistakes in politics may sometimes be fatal.  No doubt Biden’s miscalculations in Afghanistan figured into the administration’s early strategic calculations in Ukraine. Why supply Ukraine with weapons and provide assisting air cover if Biden’s Pentagon’s advisors were telling him that Ukraine might well turn out to be a second Afghanistan?

Surprise, surprise – Ukrainians, it turned out, were not prepared to deliver their country to a victorious and rapacious Putin. When Abraham Lincoln was pressed by members of his cabinet to fire General Grant, who had suffered minor defeats. Lincoln replied, “I need that man. He fights!”

Ukrainians fight. And it’s rather a good thing they do, not especially for suffering Ukrainian civilians, many of whom have lost their lives in Ukraine’s major cities, under unremitting attack from Putin’s superior forces that command the skies over Ukraine. No, no – if the resistance to Putin is not successful in Ukraine, it must be successful in Poland and the Baltic States not yet under a crushing Russian bombardment.

The economically crippling  sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States, Germany, Poland and NATO allies, all potential victims of Putin should Ukraine fall, have not saved a single life lost to Putin’s unanswered aggressions. But in the long run, Biden and others believe, the sanctions may at least deliver an unambiguous message to Russia:  Sanctions, more or less equitable, distribute suffering, and suffering clears the mind wonderfully.

What, some are now wondering, would a peace proposal preventing further Russian aggressions look like?

It should contain, at a minimum, the following terms: Every Russian aggressor in Ukraine must leave the country prior to the signing of a peace agreement. Russia must pay reparations to Ukraine in an amount sufficient to restore Ukrainian cities. Russia must formally agree that Ukraine is a sovereign nation.  All parts of Ukraine that have been forcibly seized by Russia, including Crimea, must be returned to Ukraine. The buildup of Ukraine’s defense forces will continue until the country is sufficiently armed to prevent further military incursions from Russia. None of the sanctions imposed on Russia, presently or in the future, will be withdrawn until all of the demands above are satisfied.     

Despite his brave words in Poland – misconstrued, Biden has insisted – that the free West ought not to do business with Putin, a war criminal, Biden is a creature of bad habits, one of which is an unseemly posturing before political campaigns commence, a trait he and other politicians share with former President Donald Trump.

It is altogether likely Biden has no intention of maintaining long term sanctions on Russia until the country tires of its Stalin-light autocrat and dumps him in the ashbin of history, a consummation devoutly to be wished. But this end cannot come to pass unless Putin fails, and is known to have failed, in Ukraine.

The strewn rubble in Ukraine large cities, the masses of war-wounded women and children leaving the country, Putin’s strategic effort to permanently divide Ukraine along the lines of North and South Korea, and his ambition to use the country as a bridge for Russian land trade with Europe, may succeed in laying waste the best laid diplomatic plans of Biden and Democrat politicians and news editors, all of whom are prepared to both weep over Ukraine and, at the same time, surrender it to Putin as a trophy that will allow him an easy exit back to Moscow, where he will be wined and dined by detestable, globalist American billionaires.

That would be both a humiliating defeat of a mindless American diplomacy-for-diplomacy’s-sake, and final proof of Marx’s dictum that a historic tragedy, when needlessly repeated, makes its reappearance on the world historical stage as comic farce.