Ukraine will never recapture its eastern territories and should give up both these and NATO membership, says Victor Davis Hanson.
Europeans – who view the impending meeting between Trump, Putin and Xi with concern – are on the sidelines, and deservedly so, due to their weakness, double standards, disloyalty and sense of victimhood, according to the renowned American historian and author.
Here is a machine translation of what Hanson says in the video:
There’s a lot of acrimony right now about a planned uh summit with the three most powerful leaders at least in terms of nuclear weapons and military. Vladimir Putin, President Xi of China and Donald Trump. And the West is furious right nowbecause they are accusing Donald Trump of selling out Ukraine because he said some negative things about them theUkrainian war and they feel that the Europeans are shut out and the American Congress is shut out and Trump will dealaway uh Ukrainian sovereignty.
But why are they meeting? Why does Trump want what’s he want to get out of this? Well, the obvious thing is he’s mentioned it so much before that he would like to be a triangulator. He would like to tell Putin, I’m your I’m I don’t want you to be friendlier to China than you are to us. He wants to tell Xi, I don’t want you to consider us a greater enemy thanyou you consider Putin. We want all three to balance each other out.
Where does he get this? It’s traditional Henry Kissinger’s triangulation. There’s a second reason that Trump wants to meet during this lull in the Iranian war. It’s pretty clear that we have not hit uh facilities on the CA Caspian Sea, nor have we stopped all the highway and rail links by land out of Iran that find their way into Russian provinces, former Soviet provinces, and eventually Russia. And Iran is getting some materials.
Trump wants to say to Putin, I will like to negotiate the United States role with Ukraine if you will stop all of that and we can finish. What last thing Donald Trump wants are two wars at the same time. Three, of course, he wants cheap oilprices. Right now, 24 million barrels are going out of the Gulf. that is at the same level if not a little greater than before the war. But gas prices haven’t yet felt that decline or that open hormones. They haven’t seen it because of refinery and the Ukrainians are hitting refineries in Russia and we don’t have enough refineries due to our regulatoratory and green mania of the last two decades. So the problem is not going to be oil, it’s refining. And Trump wants to talk to Putin and say, “Let’s finish the war and let us we will stop the Ukrainians from hitting your refineries and we’ll take the sanctions off and the price of gas and oil will drop and the world economy will flourish.”
Now, the Ukrainians are scared stiff and they’re they are thinking that he’s going to give Putin everything. He’s not from what is leaked out. It is what we call uti possidetis, as you possess it. It’s a formula for the status before the war. In otherwords, before the war there was a sovereign Ukraine and there was a aggressive uh Russia. You’re not going to change that. But as you possess, it also means that the battle line between the two parties will be the new armistice line. [sighs]Ukraine in that five or six00 mile corridor has linked towns, roads, and has a viable defense front. It has to have that otherwise the Russians will keep going into Kiev. Russia has got about 6 to 8 million Russian speakers by annexing Crimea and annexing eastern Ukraine.
There is no way that Ukraine that has lost 25 to 30% of its population and suffered a devastating loss in to its economy will ever have the wherewithal to take back Crimea or to take back eastern Ukraine. And you add into that factor that Crimea has traditionally been a part of Russia since the late 1700s. It was only autonomous as an independent country for about 3 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. And Ukraine grabbed it before theSoviets could the Russians could grab it. And Ukraine’s eastern part was seated to Ukraine by Nikita Kushv partly to As Ukrainian national liberation sympathies in other words cool and independence move. So there’s a checkered history there.
This is very reminiscent this meeting that will occur of the Finnish war the the winter war of 1939. Russia, as aggressive as ever, attacked little Finland just like Putin attacked Ukraine. And they said they were going to roll over, roll over Finland. And the Fins fought completely outnumbered 10 to1. They fought ferociously for the whole fall and into the spring of 1940, just like the Ukrainians. And then they realized they could not defeat this Soviet juggernaut. So they cut a deal and they said you you wanted us to surrender 10 or 15%. We went to war to preserve that. You’ve got that now. Youcan take it. However, we will fight you to the death or we will promise not to attack you and keep to ourselves. The Germans are our allies. Should there ever be a war, we will not join the Germans in attacking you on Russian soil. General Manorheim kept his promise and Finland for all the jokes about Finlandization during the Cold War that it was sort of like Austria or Switzerland kind of a neutral opportunistic nation. It survived.
That’s a good m model for Ukraine. It can say I don’t want to be in NATO. I want to be armed to the teeth. I’ll be the bull work of Europe on the front lines. But we cannot be openly a part of NATO and openly aggressive to Russia. But we will be in a position to repel Russian aggression. That’s the um outlines of a deal that I think they’re going to make.
Why else do they want to do it? Besides the Iran war, besides the unrest in the Middle East, and besides thehumanitarian consideration that almost nobody on the left is talking about, probably 2 and a half million total casualties. This is Stalenrad and the Somme and Verdun combined. This is the worst massacre in Europe since the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
And it’s endless. There’s no end in sight. Nobody has come up with a peace plan. Nobody has come up with a end to it. Ukraine has not folded to the Russians anger. It won’t fold. And Russians won’t stop. They’re kind of very ironic. As I said, they’re in the reverse stalenro stalenrad position where the German army, remember, couldn’t go forward and beat them, but it wouldn’t go back. It refused to go back and be saved. The Russians will not withdraw, but they can’t advance.
And so, it’s in everybody’s interest to find an end in humanitarian terms. Finally, there is the question of Taiwan. When you have Russia and Europe and the United States occupied in Ukraine and you have the United States occupied in Iran, China sees an opportunity and they might move on Taiwan. So, it would be better to talk to Russia and Taiwan, especially to Russia, that China going into Taiwan is not in their interest.
I know that they’ve lost Syria, they’ve lost Iran, they’ve lost Venezuela, they’ve lost a lot of clients, but the last thing youwant to do is have an aggressive ascendant China right next to Russia that’s underpop populated with the largest area in the world and the richest natural resources in the world.
