From Quillette, June 4:
Capitulation or Bloody Resistance?
An existential choice faces Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine. It is perhaps the worst choice facing any head of state in the world—between capitulation before Russian President Vladimir Putin and continued resistance to the Russian invasion. If Zelensky chooses the former, there is no guarantee—or even a realistic hope—that any agreement to end hostilities will be honoured a minute longer than Putin finds convenient. On the other hand, continued resistance guarantees that many more Ukrainians—military and civilian—will die and many more cities and towns will be reduced to rubble, even if victory (whatever that looks like) is achieved eventually.
Negotiations to secure a deal are urged by President Macron of France, Prime Minister Draghi of Italy, and Chancellor Scholz of Germany, along with Nixon’s ancient former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and British Lords David Owen and Robert Skidelsky. These people, and other prominent public figures who share their view, know—or should know—that a deal with Putin will be worth nothing. Truth in Russia, before and during the invasion, has not merely been sacrificed, it has been gutted and stamped on, criminalised and redescribed as lies. Merely calling the Ukrainian conflict a “war” currently merits arrest, and thousands have already been detained for protesting the invasion. Every night, the Kremlin’s chief media propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, spouts fountains of lies on Channel One, for which he’s so handsomely rewarded that he owns two large villas on Italy’s Lake Como (one of which has recently been burned and vandalised).
The invasion itself was so apparently senseless, and so self-destructive, that few expected Putin to press ahead with it, even as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders before the February 24th attack. Putin and his ranting TV anchors repeatedly denied that war was imminent, and his faithful foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, even denied Russia had invaded Ukraine after it had done so.
So, why did Putin do it? For two reasons, above all. First, he was tormented by the prospect of Ukraine becoming wholly democratic and pro-Western—an example he feared would inspire the very many Russians who wish to see their own country develop an active civil society. Second, were this to happen, it would thwart Putin’s clearly expressed aim to merge the three Slav states of the former Soviet Union into a partial reconstruction of the Russian empire—Belarus is already in Putin’s pocket; Ukraine is now fighting to stay out of it; and Russia has allotted itself the role of imperial master. In a 5,000-word essay published in July last year and titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin denied that Ukraine is a separate state, and warned that Russia could not permit it to drift into the West’s orbit.
In a Western context, imagine a British prime minister writing an essay titled “On the historical Unity between Britain and Ireland” as a prelude to the forcible seizure of the Irish Republic. After all, the rationale might run, it was part of Britain for centuries, until almost exactly a century ago (Anthony Trollope wrote two novels about an Irish politician named Phineas Finn, which dramatized the countries’ political union in the mid-19th century). But this counterfactual is inconceivable for the simple reason that the UK has long renounced its imperial ambitions while Putin has rekindled and inflamed those of Russia. He has come to see the reconstitution of the most important part of the Russian empire as his legacy. If rumours of Putin’s failing health are true, that legacy may soon become operative, which has led observers to speculate that the precipitate invasion was the decision of a sick man in a hurry. Putin’s imperial ambitions and iron determination make him an impossible interlocutor—a man determined, as Emmanuel Macron has discovered, not to give an inch....
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