The Ukrainian government has dismissed as “appeasing the aggressor” calls by veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger that the time had come for a negotiated peace with Russia in order to reduce the risk of a devastating world war,
Al Jazeera reports.
Former US Secretary of State Kissinger, architect of the Cold War policy of detente towards the Soviet Union under disgraced US President Richard Nixon and later President Gerald Ford, made the proposal in an opinion piece published in the Spectator magazine.
“I have repeatedly expressed my support for the allied military effort to thwart Russia’s aggression in Ukraine,” Kissinger wrote.
“But the time is approaching to build on the strategic changes which have already been accomplished and to integrate them into a new structure towards achieving peace through negotiation,” he wrote.
“The preferred outcome for some is a Russia rendered impotent by the war. I disagree,” Kissinger continued.
“For all its propensity to violence, Russia has made decisive contributions to the global equilibrium and to the balance of power for over half a millennium. Its historical role should not be degraded. Russia’s military setbacks have not eliminated its global nuclear reach, enabling it to threaten escalation in Ukraine,” he added.
Kissinger, who has met Russian President Vladimir Putin multiple times, proposed at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May that Ukraine should let Russia keep Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and that Russia withdraw to the front lines before its February 2022 invasion.
“Mr. Kissinger still has not understood anything … neither the nature of this war, nor its impact on the world order,” Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said on Telegram.
“The prescription that the ex-Secretary of State calls for, but is afraid to say out loud, is simple: appease the aggressor by sacrificing parts of Ukraine with guarantees of non-aggression against the other states of Eastern Europe,” he said.
