Ukrainian Foreign Minister Slams Western Calls to Appease Russia

Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba has criticized the mounting proposals to concede Ukrainian land to Russia.

Speaking at the Davos Economic Forum session “Ukraine and the EU: Everyone Will Win” in Switzerland, Kuleba underscored that the West’s appeasement and concession strategy toward Russian aggression has not worked since 2014 and, therefore, is destined to fail in the future.

“For those of you who believe that Ukraine should make concessions to calm Putin down, my answer is straightforward. This is exactly the strategy that leading world powers waged from 2014 until Feb. 24, 2022. ‘Make a concession here and there, it will stop the war,’ they said. This strategy failed, shapeshifting into missiles launched at Kyiv and the Donbas bloodshed,” he said.

Kuleba added that if politicians truly want to stop the war, they must support Ukraine and help it win.

“I understand that it is difficult for politicians to acknowledge that their policy was flawed and ultimately failed. But my message is if it failed before, it will fail again, and the war will continue.”

History has taught us that the strategy of appeasement sometimes just doesn’t work.

“I can’t imagine the three allies – the USSR, the US, and Britain – meeting up in 1942-1943 and saying: ‘look, the situation at the front is really tough. We need to call Hitler and offer him a deal. Maybe we’ll need to make several concessions to stop him. We need to act wisely,’” he said.

Kuleba’s Davos address comes after a series of proposals made by prominent Western figures such as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Ukraine concede territory in order for Putin to “save face” and act “wisely”.

Such proposals have received major blowback from Ukraine and beyond.

In response to one such proposal made in the New York Times recently, Mykhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, begged the question: “How non-intellectual do you need to be to make suggestions like that? They will come around to grab our Poltava, Odesa and Mykolayiv Regions, and kill us gradually.”

Ukrainian experts have also provided a detailed response to why the appeasement policy is flawed.