Adenauer at the time replied that he preferred to remain the chancellor of half of Germany than become a political prisoner of the USSR in a reunited one, Russian political commentator Andrey Piontkovsky says, arguing that the US must see that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is offering exactly the same “deal” to Ukraine.
Moscow has been pushing this idea under the guise of the Minsk Agreements for six years, the Russian commentator says; and after the Geneva summit the Kremlin leader has implied that US President Joe Biden is at least sympathetic to the notion of sticking to the Minsk Accords if not necessarily in the way Putin reads them.
But the reaction to Putin’s claims in the United States has been overwhelmingly negative, he continues.
Support for Ukraine makes those kinds of relations with Moscow as long as Putin is in power impossible, and the pursuit of such ties with Moscow undermines the very possibility of supporting a country that the Kremlin leader has made as clear as Stalin did with regard to the Federal Republic of Germany that he wants to destroy, Piontkovsky argues.
The fact that there are divisions in Washington and possibly even in Biden’s mind about dealing with Ukraine and Moscow means that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy must come to the US to press for a decision like the one Adenauer and the West made more than half a century ago.
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