Ukraine: Peace With Honor?

The world awaits hearing how President Trump plans to end the war in Ukraine. The word is that this will happen at the West’s annual security conference at — of all places — Munich. That’s the stadt where, in 1938, France and Britain, after meeting with Hitler and Mussolini, struck a deal in respect of another freedom-loving Central European nation, Czechoslovakia. The result made Munich a byword for appeasement.One doesn’t want to jump to any conclusions that Mr. Trump’s peace plan will resemble the long-ago pact. So far details are scarce as to what Mr. Trump will put forward. His envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, will speak at next week’s Munich parley. Vice President Vance is going, too. Bloomberg reports that while there, General Kellogg will inform allies of details of Mr. Trump’s plan, with no public announcement.“The person that’s going to present the peace plan is the president of the United States,” General Kellogg avers, denying speculation that he would unveil the pact. The general has “dropped hints in recent weeks,” Bloomberg reports, that the plan will reflect the idea of “peace through strength.” That, Bloomberg says, could mean “freezing the conflict,” and “leaving territory occupied by Russian forces in limbo” while giving Ukraine “security guarantees.”A guarantee of Ukraine’s security would, to be sure, mark an improvement over the agreement inked in September 1938 at Munich. That text omitted any explicit guarantee by Britain and France — then the leading military powers in Europe — over the fate of Czechoslovakia as a free nation. Premiers Chamberlain and Daladier settled for Hitler’s nebulous vow to refrain, once he got the Czechoslovak territory he coveted, from any more land grabs.Could any security guarantees today be taken to be ironclad in the case of Russia and Ukraine? After all, Russia, America, and Great Britain, in 1994, had already promised to protect Ukraine’s borders — and refrain from using military force — in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons. The emptiness of that pledge was exposed first in 2014 when President Putin seized Crimea and again in 2022 when he tried to absorb the rest of Ukraine. Mr. Putin’s aggression took place during the administrations of Presidents Obama and Biden. It is tempting to wonder whether, as Mr. Trump contends, stronger leadership might have averted either breach of Ukraine’s borders. The West’s inaction is akin to Chamberlain’s fecklessness in 1938, as war loomed over Czechoslovakia, when he dismissed the conflict as “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” Hours later, he was on a plane to Munich. The worst feature of the ensuing pact was the exclusion from the negotiations of the nation whose future was at stake. “About us, without us,” is how the Czechs termed what they called the “Munich Betrayal.” “If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world,” the Czechoslovak diplomat, Jan Masaryk, said, “I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls.”The perfidy at Munich was all the more poignant since the Czech president, Edvard Beneš, in a stance echoed by President Zelensky, had sought to enlist French and British support by vowing that “we are a western country.” Mr. Zelensky, for his part, is offering a note of caution about any potential peace plan: “We will be speaking with Putin. Don’t we make too many compromises? Even the conversation with Putin is already a compromise.”Masaryk’s, and Mr. Zelensky’s, words resonate as General Kellogg prepares to make his own flight to Munich and Russia is vowing to drive a “hard bargain” with America, as the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, puts it. One of the lessons of Munich is the moral necessity to include Kyiv in any negotiations over Ukraine’s future. Failure to do so would render any pact as hollow as Chamberlain’s achievement in 1938 of “peace with honor.”

Ukraine: Peace With Honor?

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