It is necessary to deal with criminals. It is immoral – and, if history teaches, dangerous – to absolve them of crimes and reward them. Yet this is how Trump’s peace plan treats Putin’s Russia. In the morally inverted universe of the plan, there is no distinction between perpetrator and victim, aggressor and defender, militarised dictatorship and democracy.
Invading a peaceful neighbour with no provocation whatsoever, Russia killed as many as 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 14,534 civilians, including over 3,000 children, who perished in incessant missile and drone bombings of residential buildings, schools, hospitals, churches, maternity wards, kindergartens and children’s playgrounds. As many as 20,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to Russia.
Nowhere in Trump’s plan is there the slightest notion that Moscow is responsible for this carnage, nor a suggestion of atonement or reparations commensurate with an estimated $524 billion cost of reconstruction and recovery. Instead, the plan makes sure that Russia is never held accountable for the devastation it has perpetrated: all parties are granted ‘full amnesty for their actions during the war’ and enjoined from making ‘any claims or consider any complaints in the future.’
Having shielded Russia’s banditry from justice, the plan guarantees the permanence of its loot. In twenty-first century Europe, everything an aggressor seized by force is to remain the aggressor’s in perpetuity. Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be ‘recognised as de-facto Russian, including by the United States.’ In addition, the plan awards Russia the territory which its troops could not take in four years of relentless attacks: about 2,500 square miles of Donbas, including Ukraine’s most heavily fortified ramparts. To dispel any ambiguity, this land, too, is to be ‘internationally recognised as territory belonging to the Russian Federation.’
Blind to the difference between Ukrainian democracy and Russia’s despotism, the plan insists that Ukraine hold presidential elections. Since 1999, Ukraine has held free and fair presidential elections. Russia has not – just sham shows with gagged media and ‘candidates’ hand-picked by the Kremlin. In Ukraine, incumbents have never been re-elected. Putin has been in power for a quarter of a century. If the plan’s authors are worried about the regimes’ legitimacy, shouldn’t Russia, too, be required to hold Ukraine-style elections: with international observers, no political prisoners, freedom of the press, television and the internet and independent candidates?
Banned by the Ukrainian constitution in wartime, the election is yet another of the plan’s gifts to the Kremlin: Moscow is certain to interfere heavily to shape the outcome in favour of a quisling ‘candidate of peace’. This plank is an exact copy of Putin’s demand for ‘democratic elections’ in Ukraine. An ardent practicing democrat, the Kremlin master could not see Moscow’s negotiating with an “illegitimate” government in Kyiv.
Putin’s talking points have become Trump’s. ‘They haven’t had an election in a long time,’ the US President said. ‘You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.’ ‘They’re using war,’ he suggested, ‘not to hold an election.’ Which is to say that a country under daily and nightly assault from the air, suffering from lack of heat and electricity in a severe winter, and losing an estimated 300-400 of its sons and daughters in the trenches every week, chooses to prolong death and devastation for the sake of a cunning political stratagem.
In perhaps the most egregious case of turpitude, Russia is to be ‘invited’ to ‘rejoin’ the G7. The police state that bans X, Instagram and Facebook; that holds 1,755 political prisoners and is prosecuting 4,000 more political cases; that metes out seven-year sentences for placing anti-war stickers in a grocery store and 16 years for anti-war posts and re-posts in the Internet; and where children as young as 12 are hauled before the police for allegedly ‘supporting Ukraine’ – is the country that the plan wants to take its seat among the world’s leading democracies. (Should Russia rejoin the bloc, the group would be able to meet only in the United States, the only G7 country that does not recognise the authority of the International Criminal Court, which has issued an active arrest warrant for Putin on charges related to the transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia.)
His obvious next targets are Estonia and Latvia
Although a cliché, ‘getting away with murder’ points to immorality as causality: almost invariably, aggressors and mass murderers become more aggressive and bloodthirsty when their assaults are not sanctioned: Hitler after swallowing Czechoslovakia, Bashar al Assad after poisoning hundreds with Sarin, Saddam Hussein’s after a genocidal war on the Kurds.
Putin got away with the occupation of Crimea in 2014; then with taking over most of Donbas. Buoyed by Ukraine’s capitulation spelled by the plan and drunk on hubris, he is more than likely to follow the pattern.
His obvious next targets are Estonia and Latvia, still inadequately protected Nato members on Russia’s border. But, as I suggested five years ago in an essay and further described in a book published last year, Putin has no interest in a conventional conflict with Nato which he knows he would lose in a matter of weeks. After capturing slivers of territories – most likely Idu-Viru County in Estonia or Latgale in Latvia, where the large populations of ethnic Russians, could provide the Kremlin with the Donbas-like fig leaf of ‘liberation’ – he would issue a nuclear ultimatum and ‘propose’ an ‘overall peace settlement’, which would certainly contain his core demand of Nato’s roll-back to its 1994 membership, de-facto returning East-Central Europe to Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’.
Comments