The significant fact about Ukraine’s corruption scandal is that it is having one. A scandal, that is, as opposed to just a fact of life.
Last month an investigation led by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency, accused allies of President Volodymyr Zelensky, including two ministers, of graft and fraud to the tune of $100 million. The ministers have resigned. So has the president’s chief of staff, while a former business partner of Mr. Zelensky appears to have fled the country. The president himself is not accused of wrongdoing but has been politically damaged.
Corruption has always been what’s wrong with Ukraine. The investigation, and the legal and political accountability that have gone with it, is what’s right. A nation that can investigate its leaders even as it fights for its existence is one worth defending.
That’s the thought that should animate anyone not part of the peace-at-any-price wing of the Trump administration, whose leading lights, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were in Moscow on Tuesday for personal talks with Vladimir Putin. The two real-estate developers were previously the authors, with the Putin negotiator Kirill Dmitriev, of a 28-point plan devised in Miami that amounted to a Ukraine surrender document; the thinking behind it, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week, was even scarier.
“For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity,” The Journal noted. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe — while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”
What’s wrong with this thinking? To adapt Churchill’s line about Russia — “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” — the notion of peace through business is self-dealing wrapped in self-delusion inside self-harm.
History refutes it: Britain and Germany were major trading partners on the eve of World War I; economic ties between China and the West have grown as Beijing has become more truculent. Experience with Putin’s Russia refutes it: One Western company after another got burned — or worse — doing business in Russia in the era when the Kremlin supposedly welcomed foreign investment.
And common sense refutes it. If Putin were interested in peace and prosperity between Russia and the West, he would have pursued both over his quarter-century in power. But Putin does not want coexistence. He wants dominance, even at the cost of the one million casualties his forces have reportedly suffered so far. His role models aren’t Bill Gates or Konrad Adenauer. They’re Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible.
That’s not going to change. Putin is 73, sees himself as a world-historical figure and has thus far mainly succeeded in getting his way against adversaries he despises as weak, vain and corruptible. By sending two developers to negotiate with him, President Trump merely ratified Putin’s attitude.
The significant danger now is that Putin will agree, conditionally, to some sort of Trump-endorsed “peace plan,” putting unbearable diplomatic pressure on Kyiv to accept it. Among other effects, this will fracture Ukrainian politics, fracture the NATO alliance, rescue Russia’s economy, strengthen pro-Russian voices in European politics and give Russia time to recover its military strength. In exchange, Ukraine will get the kind of paper promises it got back in 1994, when it gave up its nuclear weapons for nonbinding security guarantees — another reminder that disarmament is as often a road to war as it is to peace.
A question for Marco Rubio: How good will U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv be in 2029, when he’s a private citizen, JD Vance is president and Putin is hungry again for another choice cut of Ukraine?
There’s always the chance that Putin will overplay his hand, once again giving Trump the feeling that the Russian is “tapping us along,” as he put it in May, and reviving the administration’s appetite to defend Ukraine. Besides being the right thing to do, it would signal to China that the administration will not bargain away the independence of Taiwan for the sake of lucrative business opportunities for the Trump family and its friends.
Zelensky and his remaining supporters in Europe shouldn’t count on it. They may soon have to make a terrible choice between grasping for a temporary peace or continuing to suffer through a punishing war. Far be it for a columnist writing from the safety of New York to offer his advice, but another line from Churchill is worth recalling: “Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”
The larger warning here is for free nations everywhere, particularly in Europe. The era of Pax Americana may soon be drawing to a close. From then on it will be every region, or country, for itself, against emboldened and avaricious adversaries. For a sense of how to fight, look no further than the Ukrainians whom we abandon at our peril and to our shame.
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