Free Republic

The kernel of the long-awaited “victory plan” for Ukraine that President Volodymyr Zelensky introduced this fall goes something like this: If you give me what I’ve been asking for — membership in NATO and permission to fire Western missiles deep into Russian territory — I could end the war by next year. The demands are not in themselves new. The urgency is in the timing: The American election, and what President Biden does before he leaves office, will have serious consequences for the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine war. Actual membership in NATO is not in the cards for Ukraine until...

Many years ago, in the 1980s, I went to Brighton Beach, then in its heyday as a district of newly arrived Soviet Jews. It was a grand event, rich in humor and tinged with nostalgia. I asked a middle-aged partygoer for his thoughts on his lost homeland, and his reply has stayed with me: “I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.” It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po...

The new report in The New York Times that Russia is quietly signaling a readiness to freeze the war in Ukraine is both suspicious and tantalizing. The caveats are many: An armistice would leave Vladimir Putin in control of about a fifth of Ukrainian territory. He is not trustworthy; he could use prolonged negotiations to bolster his forces for a renewed push, or to lull Western lawmakers into cutting aid for Ukraine; he may be stalling in the hope that Donald Trump, his preferred choice for president, will return to the White House and stiff Ukraine. But if Mr. Putin...