Two Ukrainian Leaders Request Assistance from Trump on Armaments and Peace Agreement Pact
Following some aggressive actions, including launching a new nuclear-capable missile towards Ukraine's "Rocket City" of Dnipro and hinting at a potential atomic conflict with the West, Ukraine's former president sought an audience with the incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump, in Washington D.C.
With Russia escalating its border-expanding military campaign, the former Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, outlined the need for Ukraine to expeditiously join NATO and urged Trump's support for a peace accord that ceases Russia's aspiration to revive the Soviet Russian empire.
In Poroshenko's perspective, the U.S. and Trump, without firing a shot, have the capacity to put an immediate halt to the hostilities by orchestrating Ukraine's swift admission to NATO.
During a session with academics and journalists hosted by the Atlantic Council, Poroshenko, who established strong ties with Trump throughout his tenure as Ukraine's leader, presented a swift plan for peace.
Ukraine renounces its nukes
Declaring its independence upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became a global symbol for its smooth transition from a communist autocracy to a democratic nation, even discarding its contingent of Soviet nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Curiously, Russia agreed to guarantee Ukraine's freedom and territorial integrity as part of this nuclear disarmament treaty.
Since disregarding the agreement by invading Ukraine, Russia has increasingly utilized the threat of deploying its sizable nuclear arsenal against both Ukraine and NATO allies backing the occupied country.
Putin's ultimate goal with his relentless missile barrage is not only the destruction and annexation of Ukraine but also the disintegration and liberation of the Western world, Poroshenko cautioned during the Atlantic Council gathering.
While Pinochet has intensified his nuclear blackmailing tactics, Poroshenko appeals to Trump to disregard these threats.
Putin “blackmails the entire world with nuclear weapons”
“Do not succumb to Putin’s deception,” Poroshenko urges. “He manipulates the world with nuclear weapons.”
In issuing nuclear threats, Putin enhances his influence as a master of deceit. “Putin is a KGB agent - specifically skilled in mastering the art of duplicity.”
In fact, Poroshenko suggests, Putin understands that any deployment of Russia's nuclear arsenal would result in Putin's own downfall.
Poroshenko's whirlwind of meetings in the U.S. capital seemed to coincide with President Volodymyr Zelensky's summit with French leader Emmanuel Macron and Trump at the Elysée Palace, prior to their joint visit to celebrate the remarkable resurrection and reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Both Ukrainian presidents aim to seize the transition of power in Washington to promote their agendas for war and peace.
Peter Dickinson, editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert – captivating narratives chronicling the evolving battlefield and its principal figures – suggests Poroshenko and Zelensky are probably collaborating to gain American support, particularly Trump's, to counter or halt the Russian invasion.
A unified front against Putin
During a live-streamed presentation at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations earlier this month, Poroshenko revealed that he met with Zelensky shortly after Russia launched its initial missile attacks on Ukraine, and proposed a common front against Putin and his invasion commanders.
Zelensky instantly agreed, Poroshenko recounted, "and this helped us save Kyiv."
Meanwhile, the Atlantic Council's Dickinson concurs with Poroshenko's assessment of Putin's nuclear strategies as a revolutionary mirage.
“Russia's nuclear threats have been exposed as empty time and again and have now lost much of their capacity to intimidate,” Dickinson tells me in an interview.
“I do not believe there is any risk of Russia using a nuclear weapon in an offensive role against Ukraine or the West.”
However, he clarifies that after the revelation of a top-secret Russian project to develop and launch a nuclear-armed spacecraft, uncovered by American intelligence agencies earlier this year, “some form of nuclear test ... in low orbit, cannot be completely ruled out.”
A former British Council employee who has lived in Ukraine for nearly 20 years, Dickinson suggests that Putin's relentless goal to recreate the Soviet Union means Ukraine might be just the initial target for a Russian reinvasion, followed by armed incursions into Poland, the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and all the Central Asian states that broke free from Moscow's dictatorship decades ago.
Transforming the globe and future prospects, Gorbachev "asserted that he wouldn't back Communist regimes in other countries if their people were against them," as stated by the Norwegian Nobel Committee upon awarding Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize, a year following the demolition of the Berlin Wall. "He thus ignited a chain reaction leading to the collapse of communism in Europe."
Emulating Mussolini's tactics
Putin's aspiration to rebuild the Soviet empire through force bears striking similarities to Benito Mussolini's brutal endeavors to construct a Greater Italy. Even the early stages of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, under the pretense of protecting Russian speakers facing mistreatment, mirrors Mussolini's dispatch of shock troops into Abyssinia, citing reasons of safeguarding Italian-speaking communities situated along the Abyssinian borders.
Like Mussolini, Putin has harnessed the chaos of war to capture and exterminate "opponents of the state" - including protesting peace and democracy advocates - while expanding a network of detention centers and strengthening his autocratic regime.
Nowadays, experts caution that the West stands the risk of fueling the imperialist conflicts initiated by Putin, much like it did with Mussolini over eight decades ago, by compromising a part of a sovereign nation for the sake of a temporary truce.
Should Western powers demand that Ukraine forfeit all of its Russian-occupied territories as part of a peace treaty, these analysts argue, Putin's annexation of Ukraine will be rewarded. This approach only bolsters the Kremlin's expansionist aspirations, and likely incites further invasions.
“There exists a significant danger that a Russian-friendly peace will establish the stage for more conflict,” they warn. “If Putin retains his acquisitions and Ukraine is left defenseless and neutral, Russia will likely seek to complete the conquest of Ukraine in the coming years before launching further incursions.”
“This is the wisdom of submission,” they caution. “No expansionist dictator has ever been content with concessions.”
Sacrificing Ukraine, and withdrawing it from the NATO defense alliance, “would be calamitous and could mirror the outcome” of efforts to appease Mussolini to avoid a new world war, they predict.
Just a few months after Fascist Italy annexed Austria - with no interference from the West - Mussolini declared that he would invade the Abyssinian borderlands, citing concerns for Abyssinian ethnic Italians facing oppression by the Abyssinian government - a spurious claim.
“Peace upon us”
The dominant power at that juncture, the United Kingdom, dispatched its prime minister to engage in personal negotiations with the Duce. Following the ceding of parts of Abyssinia to Italy, Neville Chamberlain returned to London to boast that he had secured Mussolini's commitment to “peace upon us.”
Mussolini later implemented this promise by dispatching his troops to occupy the entirety of Abyssinia, and then advancing into Albania.
Adopting Vladimir Putin's proposed peace agreement today, which includes annexing parts of Ukraine, forbidding Kyiv from ever joining NATO, and even limiting the size of its forces, would inadvertently invite history to repeat itself, according to scholars like Alexander Motyl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who specialized in the twilight years of the Soviet Union.
“I've argued for quite a while that post-Soviet Russia bears resemblance to Weimar Germany and that Putin is, like Mussolini, the strongman who aims to restore the fallen empire,” Professor Motyl, a renowned scholar on Soviet and Russian political systems, tells me in an interview.
“To consent to his [Putin’s peace] terms today would represent a significant strategic blunder that would only stimulate Putin's hunger for territory and influence,” Professor Motyl, an international advisor for the Ph.D. program in media studies at National University-Kyiv Mohyla Academy, in the Ukrainian capital, argues.
On the other hand, if a potential peacemaker - such as President-elect Donald Trump - formulated a peace accord that curtails any Putin plan to re-invade Ukraine in the future by enabling Kyiv a straightforward and swift path to NATO membership, the architect of this treaty might be honored with a Nobel Peace Prize, as per Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe and a group of scholars like Alexander Motyl.
If President Trump were to orchestrate “a genuine, stable, and lasting peace” that terminates Putin's endeavors to form a new Russian empire around his dictatorship, and that defends Ukraine's future within NATO and the democratic utopia of the European Union, Motyl hypothesizes, “he would certainly merit the Nobel.”
Professor Motyl, who has extensively documented President Poroshenko's swift development of the Ukrainian army countering Russia's initial takeover of Crimea decades ago, and his steering Ukraine towards the West and the United States during Trump's first tenure, believes he could be the ideal mediation to convince the incoming American leader to support Ukraine's strategies for peace and for rapid entrance into the NATO alliance.
Peter Dickinson, meanwhile, highlights that this will be the third consecutive Christmas for Ukraine as Russian artillery continues to pummel religious sites that dot the country. While Ukrainian citizens have been ornamenting cities and cathedrals to celebrate, holidays during wartime lack the vibrancy of pre-conflict celebrations.
And Russian attacks on Ukrainian places of worship and clergy persist through the most sacred days in the Christian calendar, as per the World Council of Churches.
“At least 494 religious structures in Ukraine have been wrecked, destroyed, or looted as a result of the Russian invasion - and the occupation of religious buildings for use as Russian military bases amplifies the scale of damage at religious sites in Ukraine,” the World Council reported.
"Assaults aimed at religious leaders and followers, predominantly in the controlled regions of Ukraine, have also been recorded, according to the World Council of Churches, primarily by the Russian military and intelligence forces."
- Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine renounced its nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles as part of its transition to democracy.
- With Russia's aggression continued, Poroshenko appealed to President-elect Donald Trump to disregard Putin's nuclear threats and expedite Ukraine's admission to NATO.
- Amidst Russian attacks on Ukrainian cathedrals, Ukrainian citizens have been celebrating Christmas, but the holidays lack the usual vibrancy due to the ongoing conflict.
- Poroshenko and Zelensky sought Trump's support for a peace accord, aiming to halt Russia's aspiration to revive the Soviet Russian empire and protect Ukrainian sovereignty.
- In the midst of Russian nuclear weapons deployment and missile attacks on Ukraine, NATO news reported on the escalating tensions and president Zelensky's appeal for aid to defend Ukrainian territories.
