Russia and Ukraine

[Rev. Rye]

And Ukraine wanted to make a deal. Were they signing their own death warrant?

Yup because Putin can't be trusted to hold up his end.

Funny thing is, if the agreement in April went through, it’d probably be almost exactly like what everyone thinks the Munich agreement in 1938 was like.

Granted, things were more complicated, since Hitler had far better control over his own narrative than he would a few years later (he could still act like he was fairly reasonable at this point, the Final Solution wouldn’t become a thing for years, and not being addicted to drugs at that point certainly helped); Chamberlain’s decision to appease makes much more sense when you consider that A: the First World War was so devastating that doing a repeat that wasn’t absolutely necessary was extremely unpopular, B: he figured out early on that (to quote my copy of Ian Kershaw’s Nemesis) “If I've understood you correctly then you're determined in any event to proceed against Czechoslovakia. If that is your intention, why have you had me coming to Berchtesgaden at all? Under these circumstances it's best if I leave straight away. Apparently, it's all pointless,” and C: seemed to consider the Munich agreement a stop-gap more than anything else (one that he, unfortunately, dropped the ball on); and that, depressingly, a good-sized portion of the population of the Sudetenland actually wanted to rejoin Germany.

In this case, it’s blindingly obvious that Putin does not want compromise. To him, Ukraine isn’t a nation. It’s just an a part of Russia whose claims to independence he will no longer entertain. He’s repeatedly said as such. A crucial part of how the agreement managed to pass was because Hitler still had spin doctors who could easily make his ambitions seem more moderate than they actually were. Now, it’s all a part of the public record and if they were to try and claim that Putin was willing to settle for small pieces of Ukraine, everyone with a modicum of information about the situation would know it was a lie unless they were already too busy sucking Putin’s dick to notice or care. Boris Johnson is a fucking idiot, but even he’s not that stupid.