What Happens To Ukraine, Happens To Freedom

To me, Ukraine is the Spanish Civil War of this century. For those of you who have no idea what was the Spanish Civil War and want more background, Wikipedia will suffice. It gave the Nazis and the Fascists the confidence to start World War Two.

Trump will give Putin what he wants - a win in Ukraine. That threatens freedom in Europe. 

The Trumpists’ Dangerous ‘Peace’ Plan for Ukraine 

Predictably enough, the plan stipulates an immediate ceasefire, obligatory negotiations with Russia and a temporary—in truth, likely to be permanent—abandonment of Ukrainian claims to the 20 percent of Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Moscow. The poison pill was less predictable: Under the plan, the United States would strong-arm Kyiv to defer membership in NATO “for an extended period”—again, in the real world, most likely forever.

Trump hasn’t yet endorsed the plan, but his comments on a podcast last month suggest he is open to a NATO ban. “If Ukraine goes into NATO, it’s a real problem for Russia,” the former president told a trio of sympathetic Silicon Valley investors. Echoing a claim that Moscow and its proxies have been peddling for years, Trump argued that it was President Joe Biden’s support for Ukrainian membership in the alliance that provoked Vladimir Putin to invade in February 2022.

Trump’s interpretation of Russia’s aims isn’t wrong. Putin’s principal goal for the war is a neutral, nonaligned Ukraine. He signaled this first in the brief peace talks held in Istanbul in March 2022, where his paramount demand was a Ukrainian renunciation of any desire for NATO membership. He gave up long ago—if he ever cared—on winning Ukrainian love or loyalty for the Russian Federation. Nor, apparently, is Putin interested in harnessing Ukraine’s considerable economic potential. If he were, why would he wage the war as he has waged it, destroying factories, mining farmland, obliterating infrastructure and terrorizing civilians? What he wants is a gray zone—a neutral buffer between Russia and Europe.

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Who would invest in a neutral state unable to defend itself against a rapacious and expansionist Russian neighbor? How many of the 6 million Ukrainians who fled their country since 2022 would be likely to return? (In fact, polls show that NATO membership is one of the conditions that matter most when Ukrainian refugees consider going home.) Ukrainian voters will feel that they have been abandoned by the West, betrayed again as they were betrayed in 1994 when they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons and in 2014 after the Minsk Accords that purported to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine. The backlash this time would likely be even fiercer, perhaps irreparable.

But even if Ukraine didn’t drift voluntarily back into the Russian orbit, almost no one but Trump takes Putin at his word that he will be satisfied with just one-fifth of Ukrainian territory. Moscow’s avowed goal when it invaded in 2022 wasn’t just absorbing the eastern part of Ukraine it has now claimed as its own, but decapitating the central government in Kyiv.

Anyone who believes that Ukrainian territorial concessions to Putin will lead to lasting peace in Europe “watches a lot of [the propaganda TV channel] Russia Today,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said wryly last week in a speech to the Bundestag. The Trump team’s proposal is “a joke, not a plan,” one user wrote on the Telegram channel Trukha Ukrayina. “An ideal plan for Russia,” another echoed. “With the sanctions lifted, she quickly assembles a new army and recovers financially and takes over the rest of Ukraine, which does not have any guarantees.” 

Trump threatens our freedom; he threatens the freedom of the world. Voting against Trump is a vote for freedom.

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