Maggie Smith

The message to Russia should be simple: Negotiations start when Russia agrees to withdraw its forces from all of Ukraine, including Crimea. Until then, we continue to ramp up support for Ukraine. Anything else risks prolonging the conflict and bloodshed and, worse, enabling a Russian victory. The West's dithering and repeated offers of concessions to Russia fundamentally misread the situation. Putin has shown little interest in a peace that respects Ukrainian sovereignty. His ambitions are rooted in an imperial conception of Russian history, in which Ukraine is considered an inseparable part of a broader Russian civilization. He invokes the medieval state of Kyivan Rus' to justify these ambitions, ignoring the fact that Kyivan Rus' existed centuries before the Russian Empire and that Ukraine became an internationally recognized sovereign state in 1991. Crimea, moreover, was transferred from the Russian Soviet republic to the Ukrainian Soviet republic in 1954. Russia subsequently recognized Ukraine's existing borders following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including through the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership. Agreements with Russia mean little. Only a battlefield success (meaning Russia withdraws its forces) that makes clear the cost of renewing its adventurism will convince Russia.