Did these European nations learn nothing from WWII, or are they gone soft in their wealth and safety under our American umbrella? Or do they ignore the fresh lessons the nations of eastern Europe—freed from Russian occupation only a generation ago—would teach them?

Some European Union states have floated the idea of giving President Vladimir Putin an off-ramp that would make it easier for him to justify a de-escalation to his domestic audience in Russia, while a peace plan drawn up by Italy proposed autonomy for Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas.

Our own Henry Kissinger—who negotiated our preemptive surrender in Vietnam—is an especial embarrassment. Pontificating in Davos, he actually said with a straight face

…”ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante,” suggesting that Ukraine should allow Russia to retain the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and swaths of the eastern Donbas region seized by Moscow-backed separatists the same year.

And

pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine … but a new war against Russia itself.

That is Kissinger once again practicing his politics of preemptive surrender, ceding to Russia the occupied territories of Ukraine, a Kissingerian ownership based solely on their seizure by Russia at gunpoint.

It’s certainly easy enough for those far away from the fight for national survival, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, blithely to tell that nation to just give up some land and we’ll have peace in our time.

Never mind that giving away any square inch of a nation’s territory is giving away pieces of that nation’s existence. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had the right characterization of Kissinger’s words.

I get the sense that instead of the year 2022, Mr Kissinger has 1938 on his calendar. And that he thought he was addressing an audience not in Davos, but in erstwhile Munich.

One of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Oleksiy Arestovych, was more blunt:

Get lost with suggestions of this sort, that Ukraine should trade some of its territory. Children are dying here, soldiers are stopping shrapnel with their own bodies, and they’re telling us to sacrifice territory. It will never happen.

And from the second link just above:

they are telling us to sacrifice our land? Bite me, f*ckers.

Indeed.