Latest news with #KennanInstitute
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Ukraine's valor is reminiscent of Britain's in 1940
Ukraine's breathtaking ingenuity, the latest example of which destroyed or damaged dozens of Russia's long-range bombers on bases 2,500 miles from Ukraine, is in the service of an unflagging valor reminiscent of Britain's in 1940, when it was isolated and embattled, with the German army at the English Channel. Ukraine's resilience is inconvenient for those Americans who are eager to proclaim that the geographically largest nation entirely within Europe is inevitably doomed to defeat, dismemberment and domination. Such Americans' unseemly 'realism' has them invested in, and even eager for, Ukraine's disappearance from the map of European nations. Those Americans should remember Winston Churchill's 1941 response to French military 'realists' who had said in 1940 that Britain would soon have its neck wrung like a chicken. Said Churchill: 'Some chicken. Some neck.' Today's faux 'realism' cannot fathom what is at stake in Ukraine. Michael Kimmage can. The director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, writing in Foreign Affairs, says Putin has 'renormalized the idea of large-scale war as a means of territorial conquest.' Putin is, therefore, undoing a war aim enunciated before the United States entered World War II. In August 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill, meeting on warships in Placentia Bay, off Newfoundland, propounded the Atlantic Charter, item two of which looked to a future without 'territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.' It was to buttress this principle that President George H.W. Bush in 1991 orchestrated a broad coalition of nations for the limited but luminous purpose of forcing Iraq to leave Kuwait. It was for this principle that in 1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent British forces to the South Atlantic to undo Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands. An Argentine intellectual dismissed this military event as 'a fight between two bald men over a comb.' Actually, it was a fight for a principle that again seems perishable. Vice President JD Vance uses flippancy, as adolescents do, for the fun of being naughty: 'I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.' He has dismissed as 'moralistic garbage' a distinguished historian's mildly different opinion about Ukraine's prospects. Vance wonders whether Niall Ferguson of Stanford's Hoover Institution is 'aware of the reality on the ground, of the numerical advantage of the Russians, of the depleted stock of the Europeans or their even more depleted industrial base?' Ukraine, says Vance, never had 'any pathway to victory.' Vance's ventriloquist, the U.S. president, has called Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky a 'dictator,' although it is unclear how much disapproval Trump conveys using that term. Trump has said to Zelensky, 'You don't have the cards.' But Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's minister of foreign affairs 2020-2024, writing May 30 in Foreign Affairs, says: 'In December 2023, Russia controlled approximately 42,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. In December 2024, that figure had grown only slightly, to around 43,600 square miles …. As of late May, Russia held approximately 43,650 … the country supposedly holding all the cards has gained just 1,650 of Ukraine's 233,030 square miles over the last 16 months. … Moscow has gone from occupying about 18 percent of Ukrainian territory in late 2023 to roughly 19 percent today.' Russia, which Sen. John McCain called a 'gas station masquerading as a country,' has one third of the European Union's population, one tenth of the E.U.'s gross domestic product, and last year had more than half a million more deaths than births. Writing in the Atlantic, Anna Nemtsova, a Daily Beast correspondent who covers Eastern Europe, reports: 'According to one demographer, Russians may have had fewer children from January to March 2025 than in any three-month period over the past 200 years.' Although some people similar to Vance admired British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's 'realism' at Munich in 1938, Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute cautions that it is 'misleading and ahistorical' to compare Ukraine's vulnerability in coming negotiations to Czechoslovakia's in the negotiations that presaged Germany's takeover of Czechoslovakia: Czechoslovakia was not forced to acquiesce to a fatal agreement 'after defending itself successfully against Nazi military might for three years.' President Donald Trump finds Russia 'easier to deal with' than Ukraine, perhaps because he agrees more with Russia. Vance says Trump might walk away from peace talks if Putin is not 'serious' about them. So, Vance has notified Putin that simply by being unserious about negotiations, he might provoke Trump to show that among the things he is unserious about is the principle affirmed at Placentia Bay.
New York Times
18-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Why is a Ukrainian Nuclear Plant Suddenly Part of Cease-fire Talks?
After months of worry over the possibility of nuclear accidents at the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine, the reactors were stopped in 2022 and the plant mainly dropped off as a topic of discussion. Until last weekend. That was when President Trump suddenly said he intended to bring up Ukrainian power plants in his planned call on Tuesday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to discuss cease-fire proposals. While he did not specifically identify the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been under Russian control since early in the war, his administration has strongly hinted at it. Why did the plant re-emerge as a topic of discussion? According to a current Ukrainian official and a former one, both of whom have knowledge of talks between the United States and Ukraine, the plant may now be on the table because it is partly tied to negotiations over U.S. access to Ukrainian mineral resources. The possible carrot for the United States: the critical minerals deal with Ukraine that Mr. Trump wants is contingent on extracting and processing those minerals. And that takes a lot of energy, which the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe's largest, could provide. Kyiv and Washington have been negotiating for weeks over U.S. access to Ukraine's untapped deposits of critical minerals, including lithium and titanium, which are crucial for manufacturing modern technologies. Ukraine has told the United States that processing the minerals would be viable only if the Zaporizhzhia plant was back under its control, according to the two Ukrainians, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the talks. The currently serving Ukrainian official said the issue came up again last week during a top-level U.S.-Ukraine meeting in Saudi Arabia to discuss a potential cease-fire. The plant in question sits in Ukraine's southern region of Zaporizhzhia, which Russia has said it annexed despite controlling only part of the territory. Worries over the safety of the plant continue in part because of its proximity to frontline fighting. And although all six reactors have been shut down — meaning they no longer generate electricity — they still require energy to power critical safety systems and cooling mechanisms to prevent a meltdown. Ukraine has repeatedly demanded that Russian forces leave the plant in order to reduce the risk of a nuclear accident. For Ukraine, regaining control of the plant has obvious benefits. Andrian Prokip, an energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington, said Ukraine desperately needs the plant to ease power shortages caused by Russian attacks on electrical facilities. The plant served nearly a quarter of Ukraine's electricity needs in 2021 before the war began, Mr. Prokip said. The argument that the Zaporizhzhia facility would be needed to extract and process minerals emerged recently, as Ukraine and the United States negotiated the minerals deal. That agreement would establish a jointly owned fund collecting revenues from new resource extraction projects covering oil, gas and minerals. Mr. Trump has presented it as a moneymaker, and one that will generate funds to pay the United States back for the billions it has spent aiding Ukraine during the war. The nuclear power plant is near several Ukrainian-controlled deposits of titanium, iron and rare earths. The deal had been set to be signed at a White House meeting between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky last month. But the signing was delayed after the meeting devolved into a tense showdown. When Ukraine and the United States announced that Kyiv had agreed to back a monthlong cease-fire proposal last week, their joint statement said they would conclude the minerals deal 'as soon as possible.' Energy experts also noted that the United States could have an economic interest in seeing the plant back under Ukrainian control because it uses fuel and technology supplied by Westinghouse, an American nuclear technology company. Victoria Voytsitska, a former Ukrainian lawmaker and senior member of the Parliament's energy committee, said fuel supplies to the plant 'were a big contract' for Westinghouse. Over the past three years of war, Westinghouse has expanded its presence in Ukraine, gradually replacing technology from the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom used in Ukrainian plants. It remains unclear what Mr. Trump could offer to Russia to get it to hand over the plant to Ukraine. Russia would likely demand something in return, Mr. Prokip said, such as the lifting of Western sanctions that have hurt its economy. 'They will not just give this nuclear power plant back for free,' he said.
