What if Putin Doesn’t Want Peace?
Calls for the U.S. to push Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war require assuming a peace-minded Russia that doesn’t exist.
It’s a common position among the Republican Party’s dominant MAGA wing—for example, Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) argued that military aid for Ukraine “should be totally off the table and replaced with a push for peace talks”—as well as the “anti-war” left, and some self-styled “realists.”
The underlying logic is that American support makes the Ukrainians overconfident—including in 2023’s costly and largely unsuccessful counteroffensive—and the U.S. doesn’t mind sacrificing an indefinite number of Ukrainians to hurt Russia. Therefore, weakening Ukraine by withdrawing aid would encourage them to pursue reasonable accommodation. In this vision, Ukraine concedes land Russia currently controls and formally promises never to join NATO, the U.S. guarantees it, and the violence finally ends.
In The Nation, Adolph Reed, Jr. says he’s “outraged at Biden’s adventurist bellicosity in Eastern Europe” with “rhetoric to stoke hostilities between Russia and Ukraine,” and claims the United States “seems hell-bent on fighting to the last Ukrainian.”
Reed doesn’t try to explain how the U.S. supposedly tricked or forced Russia into massing 190,000 troops and invading in 2022, nor tricked Ukraine into resisting Russia’s assault when they supposedly want to surrender. He assumes that Russia wants peace, the United States wants war, and Ukraine has no agency, so war it is
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