The Babes in the Wood
Ukraine fears being left on the sidelines of the Trump-Putin negotiation
A father on his deathbed begs his brother to care for his two young children. But in time the uncle sees a chance to seize their inheritance and hires two “ruffians” to murder the children.
One of the men has second thoughts and kills the other. Then he leaves the boy and girl to perish in the woods, where a robin covers their tiny lifeless bodies with leaves.
There is no uplifting moral to the story.
That horrifying English folk tale is what came to Winston Churchill’s mind when he recounted the Munich agreement in the first of his six volumes on World War II.
The “Babes in the Wood had no worse treatment” than the leaders of Czechoslovakia who had to sit by while bigger nations carved up their country to appease German dictator Adolf Hitler in 1938, Churchill wrote.
The U.K. and French governments had decided to cave in to Hitler’s threat of war.
“On one thing they were all agreed: there should be no consultation with the Czechs,” who were “confronted with the decision of their guardians,” observed Churchill. (His “Babes in the Wood” reference wasn’t to the 1932 Disney version, which ends happily.)
The precedent of major powers making deals with each other while ignoring the legitimate national interest of smaller nations is one that weighs heavily on Ukraine right now.
It follows from President Donald Trump’s announcement Wednesday that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin would begin negotiations immediately on ending the war. Trump seems to have little interest in helping Ukraine regain its lost territory or in erecting a robust security system to protect the nation from another war.
On the sidelines
The sidelining of Ukraine in the forthcoming Trump-Putin negotiations threatens to resemble that of Czechoslovakia. Its territory, the Sudetenland, was surrendered to Hitler in October 1938, when Britain, France, Germany and Italy signed a deal in Munich to avert war.
Afterward, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier “saw the Czech representatives, who had been left waiting in an anteroom, and told them their country had been partitioned by the Big Four,” as historian George Lichtheim wrote.
Hitler promised he had no further designs on European territory, but on March 15 the following year, his army swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia.
The diplomatic failure at Munich has been picked over for decades by historians and politicians and mis-applied to numerous political and military conflicts, including serving as a defense of the costly U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
It’s by no means a close parallel to today’s war in Ukraine, but there are two striking similarities: the first is the likelihood that Ukraine’s own views on peace will be downplayed by Trump and Putin. The second is that Putin’s promises in any peace agreement may not be worth the paper they’re written on.
‘A quarrel in a faraway country’
A month before the Munich talks, Chamberlain gave a radio broadcast to the British people, who were still traumatized by the slaughter of a generation in the trenches of World War I.
Referring to the dispute over the Sudetenland, Chamberlain observed, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing…”
Convincing himself that it was possible to do business with Hitler, Chamberlain engaged in a round of negotiations leading up to the meeting in Munich.
In the diplomatic discussions, Churchill wrote, the French and British Cabinets “presented a front of two over-ripe melons crushed together, whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel.”
War, anyway
In 1939, Britain and France would go to war with Germany after the Nazis invaded Poland. By Churchill’s account, the two allied nations missed a much more favorable opportunity to stop Hitler in 1938 when his own generals were convinced they didn’t have the resources to both defeat Czechoslovakia’s well-equipped army in the east and France in the west.
By the time war erupted over Poland, the Nazis had neutralized the Czechoslovak army and had amassed the far more formidable western force that rolled into France in 1940.
“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival,” said Churchill, who succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister and led Britain’s war effort.
“There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”
In retrospect, Munich was a turning point that enhanced Hitler’s power. “The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion,” Churchill wrote.
Ukraine’s dilemma
When Vladimir Putin invaded his western neighbor in February, 2022, Ukraine fought back fiercely. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not only withstood the assault on Kiev but rallied much of the world to back the Ukrainians.
An enormous amount of American and other western aid poured into Ukraine while Putin proved willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of troops to gain pieces of southeastern Ukraine. Russia has been making small gains but the contest is essentially a military stalemate.
Ukraine doesn’t have a path to victory against its nuclear-armed foe while Putin seems committed to continuing the fight for as long as it takes to achieve his aims.
What has changed, of course, is the politics. U.S. President Donald Trump is breaking with former President Joe Biden’s policy of aiding Ukraine. Instead he wants a quick end to the war and a harmonious relationship with Putin’s Russia.
Ukrainians would naturally welcome an end to the continuing barrage of Russian attacks on its people and infrastructure. Yet they have real reason to be wary, Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk wrote this week in Foreign Affairs:
Even now, most Ukrainians see continuing to fight as incomparably better than the terror of Russian occupation. For the West, failure to recognize how Russia is using Ukrainian territory to undermine and destabilize the whole country risks making a cease-fire even more costly than war…
As many Ukrainians recognize, what observers in the West have characterized as brutal excesses in occupied areas—human rights abuses, political repression, and war crimes—are in fact a central part of Russia’s war strategy. The issue is not merely what happens to those under Russian rule but how Moscow has used its control of significant numbers of Ukrainians to undermine the stability of the whole country, even without taking more territory. Nor is this a hypothetical threat: as Ukrainians know too well, the Kremlin, while pretending to negotiate, used the eight years of so-called frozen conflict with Ukraine after 2014 to create a launch pad for the larger invasion…
In the cold
Biden insisted that the U.S. would never negotiate about Ukraine’s future without including Ukraine’s leaders. That commitment is now shaky at best.
One Russian “tycoon” in charge of some Russian volunteer fighters was quoted in the Financial Times Thursday saying “It must really hurt for the EU and Ukraine to hear this. But their opinion doesn’t matter any more.” Konstantin Malofeyev said. “Ukraine is just the pretext for a grand dialogue between two great countries about the start of a new era in human history.”
Zelenskyy said Ukraine, “as an independent country,” can’t accept agreements made “without us.” And while Trump said Ukraine would be included in the negotiations, he spoke to Putin first — and only then told Zelenskyy about the discussion.
The Ukrainian leader said it is vital to “not allow everything to go according to Putin’s plan.” But it seems to be going that way.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posited this week that a peace deal could give Russia some of the Ukrainian land it has seized since 2014, that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO and that American forces wouldn’t play any role as peacekeepers. In the face of criticism, he walked back his remarks.
And in an interview Thursday with the Wall Street Journal, Vice President JD Vance insisted the U.S. cares about Ukraine’s “sovereign independence” and could, if needed, use sanctions or even military force against Russia to protect the smaller nation. Vance spoke Friday at the annual security conference which is held in, of all places, Munich.
In 1938, when Neville Chamberlain returned to Britain after reaching the Munich agreement, Churchill rose to speak in the House of Commons.
He warned: “And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
“Ukraine is just the pretext for a grand dialogue between two great countries about the start of a new era in human history.” My bet: In some crude yet grandiose fashion, Trump now sees the world at a tipping point and himself as the moment's most essential figure. More likely, we are at the top of a pendulum swing and in time will relocate the center. Meanwhile, damage is sure to be done. Thanks again, Rich, for perspective, clarity -- and hard work.