Donald Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine, and who doesn’t? Apparently Vladimir Putin, who used his annual end-of-year news conference last week to send the President-elect a message about his peace terms.
“Now, regarding the conditions for starting negotiations: We have no preconditions,” Mr. Putin said before outlining sweeping preconditions. Talks would be “based on” 2022 negotiations in Istanbul and “proceeding from the current realities on the ground,” he said.
Russia’s 2022 Istanbul proposal called for Ukraine to abandon aspirations to join NATO, become a permanently neutral state, and drastically shrink its armed forces. This would ratify Russia’s territorial gains and render Ukraine defenseless against inevitable future Russian aggression.
When the Kremlin floated that plan, Russian troops were in Bucha and Irpin — about as close to the center of Kyiv as JFK airport is to midtown Manhattan.
Ukraine has since driven the Russians out of Kyiv and the regions of Kherson and Kharkiv, broken Russia’s Black Sea naval blockade, and taken the fight to Russian territory in the Kursk region. But Russia is making gains in Ukraine’s east with the help of China’s technology and North Korean manpower and artillery, albeit at the cost of enormous casualties.
Mr. Putin also referred to his speech last June when he demanded that the West drop all sanctions on Russia and that Ukraine withdraw from the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Asked if he could return to February 2022, the Russian dictator expressed no regrets about his invasion but said “the decision that was made at the beginning of 2022 should have been made earlier.” That could have been during Mr. Trump’s first term in office.
Mr. Putin said he’s “ready to talk any time” with Mr. Trump, and some will dismiss his tough talk as merely the opening bid in what will be an inevitable deal.
But it’s a mistake to think the Kremlin boss has given up his designs to turn Ukraine into a vassal state like Belarus.
Letting Russia prevail in Ukraine on anything close to Mr. Putin’s terms would send a message of appeasement that would surely mean a larger war in the future.
Mr. Trump can’t let Ukraine become his Afghanistan.
