The Babes in the Wood

Ukraine fears being left on the sidelines of the Trump-Putin negotiation

Photo by Daniel Seßler on Unsplash

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…