And it leads into a false premise. These errors are William Galston’s, writing for The Wall Street Journal last Tuesday. His subheadline lays out the false premise:

Kyiv will have to make concessions to Russia, but it will also need security guarantees.

No. Kyiv can make almost no concessions to the barbarian without rewarding him for his invasion and giving tacit encouragement (reminiscent of ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) permission to Putin that a small incursion into Ukraine would be OK) for a renewed, expanded, and better prepared invasion a year or two later. “Almost no:” perhaps—a weak maybe—an agreement might consist of a non-exclusive lease to the barbarian of the narrow confines of the port at Sebastopol. Note: that’s the port, not a naval base, and that’s the port, not the surrounding city.

The wrong question Galston posed in his lede:

Where does Europe end and Russia begin? This centuries-old question underlies the meeting between President Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and European leaders in Washington on Monday. The resolution of Russia’s war against Ukraine will settle this question, at least for now.

Again, no. The “centuries-old question” was answered centuries ago: the Ural mountain range is the demarcation (however blurry) between Europe and Asia. Russia west of that range is in Europe, and Russia east of it is in Asia. It really is that simple.

The real question is where does Russia end and the individual nations of the rest of Europe begin. The barbarian chieftain in the Kremlin insists that the boundary of his immediate interest lies between Russia on the one side and Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia on the other side. The barbarian already is making early, mostly political interference, moves against Moldova, and he’s already engaging in cyberwars against those three Baltic States.

Any “settlement” between Ukraine and Russia that involves land concessions to the barbarian only puts those other nations in nearby, if not immediate, peril: the barbarian has said many times, and unequivocally, that he intends to reconstitute the Russian empire, and that means absorbing into the Rodina those other nations (as oblasts, they’d be permitted to keep their current names), and results in the Russian border being pushed even farther west. It’s imperative for the safety of those other European nations and that of our own, that we all support Ukraine materially as well as politically, and enforce the eastern border between Ukraine and Russia along with the northern border between Ukraine and the barbarian principality of Belarus.

Beyond this, the barbarian’s behavior is putting a premium on expanding NATO to include Ukraine, or alternatively, the standing up of a new mutual defense arrangement that includes the Three Seas Initiative nations, Sweden, Finland, the UK, and the United States.

There are broader implications to this struggle. The fate of the Republic of China hangs in the balance, along with the subsequent fates of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and all of the nations rimming the South China Sea. As does our own fate.