From the Telegraph / Yahoo!News:
"Trump has betrayed Ukraine, making the world immeasurably more dangerous
This is a straightforward defeat. A defeat, not just for Ukraine, but for the values which the Anglosphere and its allies have upheld since 1941, to the immense benefit of the human race. Aggression is being rewarded. Borders are being changed by force. A brittle dictatorship has defeated a Western alliance with a combined economy forty times larger than its own. The prestige of the democracies is suffering a Suez-level hit.
As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Alaska – a venue surely proposed by the Kremlin, both to demonstrate that Putin is again welcome in the United States and to suggest that there is nothing terribly new about ceding territory – all the momentum is with the Russian leader.
From the moment he took office, Trump has been wheedling and conciliatory with Putin, aggressive and bullying with Volodymyr Zelensky. Who can say what animates him? Perhaps he can’t forgive Zelensky for his cameo role in l’affaire Hunter Biden; perhaps, as conspiracy theorists claim, Putin has kompromat on him; or perhaps it is simply Trump’s customary deference towards dictators.
Frankly, it doesn’t much matter. Whatever his motives, Trump has behaved exactly as a Russian asset would, not only vis-à-vis Ukraine, but also by making aggressive territorial claims against Denmark and threatening Canada with annexation. His tariff policies have caused as much disruption to Western economies as his sanctions have to Russia. Putin could not have wished for more.
We do not know how much has already been settled, and there are still details to be hammered out. But the broad outlines of the proposed ceasefire deal can be glimpsed in leaks to both American and Russian media.
Putin will hang on to most of what he has seized – not just the territories he occupied in 2014, but many of the lands he has conquered since 2022 and even, according to some briefings, those parts of Donetsk that are currently under Ukrainian control. Sanctions will be eased, and we might even see more economic collaboration between the US and Russia than before 2014. In any event, the US will stop supplying weapons to Ukraine.
These concessions constitute a colossal Russian victory, regardless of what is decided on Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, formal recognition of Russian sovereignty in Crimea or precisely where the lines are frozen.
To understand the scale of the West’s defeat, we need to remember why we were backing Ukraine in the first place. Not because we thought that Zelensky was brave or handsome or even particularly democratic. Not because we believed that Ukrainians were kinder or more amusing than their Russian cousins. Not even because, long before 2022, Russia had been buzzing our airspace and overseeing cyberattacks against our infrastructure and had, on two occasions, committed acts of war against us when it ordered its operatives to carry out lethal attacks on British soil (against Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and, unsuccessfully, against Sergei Skripal in 2018).
No, we are backing Ukraine because it is the wronged party. We are sending it weapons because it was attacked without provocation by a neighbour to whom it presented no threat. We are training its soldiers because, when Ukraine agreed to hand over its nuclear arsenal in 1994, it did so in exchange for an explicit promise that its independence would be respected within its existing borders – a promise guaranteed by Britain, the United States and (never forget) Russia.
The idea that countries should not help themselves to slices of territory is not some ancient and immutable principle. On the contrary, it dates in its current form from exactly 84 years ago, August 1941, when Churchill and Roosevelt met in Newfoundland and agreed to the Atlantic Charter, a set of rules that they wanted to shape the post-war world. Land should not be annexed by force, nor borders altered without the consent of local people. Aggression should not be rewarded. Raw materials should be accessible on world markets and sea-lanes kept open, so that there would be less incentive to invade a neighbour. Democracy and self-determination should be encouraged over autocracy.
When these ideals were proclaimed, the United States was still neutral. Four months later, after Pearl Harbor, the Atlantic Charter informed the war aims of the Allies. Its principles went on to shape the UN Charter and the Nato alliance. It is true that they were sometimes violated, for we live in an imperfect world. But they at least remained the aspiration. Until now.
It cannot be sufficiently stressed that our interest in Ukraine was to uphold the international order under which mankind had flourished since 1945. It was never about Zelensky, however gallant his initial response to the invasion.
Trumpians like to point to corruption and illiberalism in Ukraine as though they invalidate the premise of our assistance. But our 1994 guarantee was never conditional on who was in government, or what kind of government it was.
There is nothing new here. Poland was hardly a model democracy when Britain guaranteed its sovereignty in March 1939. Józef Pilstroksudski’s 1926 coup had created an autocratic regime which, while it stopped well short of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or the USSR, none the less harassed dissidents and censored media.
In much the same way, Ukraine today, while nowhere near Russian levels of despotism, is far from being a free country... None of this should make the slightest difference to our policy. But I fear that it will, because support for Ukraine has been presented as a goodies-and-baddies issue rather than a question of defending territorial integrity and national sovereignty. We somehow seem to find those aims sterile, dull and inadequate.
Just as Tony Blair once claimed in a party conference speech that we had joined the Second World War to end Nazism (when in fact we joined to defend Poland), so we now imagine that we came to the aid of Ukraine because Zelensky is nicer than Putin...
We were backing and supplying Ukraine because the world order that was born after 1945 lifted our species to unprecedented heights of peace and prosperity.
When Putin gets to keep the better part of his spoils, and furious Ukrainians eject their regime, every tinpot dictator in the world will get the message. NATO, the most powerful alliance on the planet, would not protect one of its friends. The old order is over. The world of the Atlantic Charter has gone. Something altogether colder and darker is on its way."
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