Boris Johnson, in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, is on the right track regarding the idea of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin an end to the barbarian’s invasion. Negotiations now would be both fruitless and pointless, Johnson writes, because they would require Ukraine to surrender Ukrainian territory and they would idiotically rely on the barbarian’s trustworthiness in keeping any agreement. Negotiations now would be ill-timed, as well: the time for negotiating can only be after the barbarian has been driven entirely from Ukrainian territory and Ukraine having won, totally and decisively, the war the barbarian began.
Johnson had this, too, though:
If Mr Putin were to use a weapon of mass destruction [one of the barbarian chieftain’s many threats], he would be tendering Russia’s resignation from the club of civilized nations….
With this characterization, Johnson is being…generous. Russia hasn’t been a civilized nation, at the least, since the mass starvation the Russians—the people as well as the government—inflicted on Ukrainians and on the Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Belarussians during the kulak collectivization atrocities of the 1930s. The barbarian has demonstrated—in rivers of blood—the continuing depths of its depravity with the atrocities inflicted by the products of Russian society on Ukrainians in the present barbarian war. Atrocities Johnson describes so genteelly:
captives tortured, women raped, schools and kindergartens deliberately targeted.
He omitted the hospitals deliberately targeted, the vast lines of refugees from besieged cities that the barbarian had agreed to allow to evacuate—and then targeted for mass murder once they were so conveniently lined up on the agreed roads leading away from the city.
Those finally arrived at post-victory negotiations? [A] peaceful, orderly and lasting relationship, and friendship, between Ukraine and Russia, as Johnson so naively described them?
Keep in mind two things as you contemplate such a negotiation. The “soldiers” inflicting those atrocities today—the rapes, the tortures, the child butcheries, the attacks on hospitals, the attacks on infrastructure necessary for civilian survival during the coming winter—are the products of Russian society. Most of these armed thugs may well be from the lower tiers of that society, but who taught them to be the way they are? The rest of that society, who either condone the atrocities or actively order them, all the way up to the chieftain sitting on his throne in the Kremlin.
The other thing is the impossibility of Ukrainian friendship with a polity—barbaric or civilized—that is bent on the utter destruction of Ukraine.
No. The only outcome for the present situation is the utter, decisive defeat of the barbarian, with his being driven entirely from Ukrainian territory. The only possibility for any future relationship between Ukraine and Russia is Ukrainian eternal vigilance against the next wave of barbarians from the east. For that wave will surely come.