President Trump campaigned on ending the war in Ukraine, and his negotiators on Tuesday began the process with a meeting in Saudi Arabia between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart.
Global politics can be an ugly business, but the looming rehabilitation of Vladimir Putin is especially hard to take.
Mr Trump said last week after a phone call with Mr Putin that he’s convinced the Russian dictator wants “peace.” He didn’t say what kind of peace Mr Putin has in mind, though if history is a guide it won’t be what most Americans understand by the word.
The Kremlin overlord in 2022 started the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, and his “special military operation” has killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians. His missiles have targeted apartment houses and train stations. His forces have tried to freeze Ukrainian civilians into surrender by crippling electric-power plants.
His troops have kidnapped hundreds of Ukrainian-born children from their parents to new homes in Russia. They have tortured and executed Ukrainian troops in violation of every rule of international warfare.
Russian hit squads have also been dispatched to assassinate enemies of his rule at home and abroad. This includes killing Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in London and an attempted murder of a former spy in Salisbury, UK, with Novichok nerve gas that killed an innocent bystander. The British government has said it believes Mr Putin ordered the Novichok attack.
No one should forget the death of Alexei Navalny, the brave opposition politician who was poisoned abroad, then arrested upon his return and killed in prison. Numerous Russians are taken by a sudden and mysterious desire to leap from tall buildings to their deaths.
Mr Putin has been charged with war crimes by an international court, and the US sanctioned his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in 2022 as one of the “architects of Russia’s war against Ukraine.” Mr Lavrov sat across the table from Mr Rubio on Tuesday and denied that Russia targets Ukrainian power plants despite mountains of evidence.
We realise that the ruthless men who rule much of the world can’t be ignored. But usually those men aren’t rewarded with a visit to the US, as Mr Trump hinted last week, before they’ve made any compromises. Visits with Soviet leaders during the Cold War at least had some preparation to assume the US would get something from the diplomacy. Any peace Mr Putin strikes has to be made with all of his legacy of destruction in mind.
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