Pope Urges Ukraine to Surrender, er, Negotiate
The "courage of the white flag" is a horrible idea.
AP (“Pope Francis: Ukraine should have the courage of the ‘white flag’ and negotiate an end of the war with Russia“):
Pope Francis said in an interview that Ukraine, facing a possible defeat, should have the courage to negotiate an end to the war with Russia and not be ashamed to sit at the same table to carry out peace talks.
The pope made his appeal during an interview recorded last month with Swiss broadcaster RSI, which was partially released on Saturday.
“I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates,” Francis said, adding that talks should take place with the help of international powers.
Ukraine remains firm on not engaging directly with Russia on peace talks, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said multiple times the initiative in peace negotiations must belong to the country which has been invaded.
Russia is gaining momentum on the battlefield in the war now in its third year and Ukraine is running low on ammunition. Meanwhile, some of Ukraine’s allies in the West are delicately raising the prospect of sending troops.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said Saturday that Francis picked up the “white flag” term that had been used by the interviewer. He issued a statement of clarification after the pope’s “white flag” comments sparked criticism that he was siding with Russia in the conflict.
Throughout the war, Francis has tried to maintain the Vatican’s traditional diplomatic neutrality, but that has often been accompanied by apparent sympathy with the Russian rationale for invading Ukraine, such as when he noted that NATO was “barking at Russia’s door” with its eastward expansion.
Francis said in the RSI interview that “the word negotiate is a courageous word.”
“When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate,” he said. “Negotiations are never a surrender.”
The clarified comments are less outrageous than the original ones, which may well just be the function of an 87-year-old man conducting an interview in a second language. Still, the Vatican’s neutrality reaches beyond amorality into immorality.
While there comes a time when accepting defeat is the only humane option, the notion that a people who have been invaded should simply accept their defeat because victory will be costly is outrageous. And, while it might save lives in the short term, acceptance of that idea only encourages more attempts at conquest.
Time to quote Star Trek. No it isn’t something Garek said.
Remember Spock learned this about Edith Keeler using stone knives and bearskins.
Seems to me that Russia learned their lesson here. They’re a nuclear power and they were stuffed. They went after Kyiv for a quick victory and have since been dragged into a brutal war with absolutely no purpose except its own existence. Had Russia grabbed Kyiv in the first weeks and then split the county it would have been different.
I don’t care how much control you have over a country or what the Russian heart says about geopolitics. If China tried to invade Taiwan and two years later they were still struggling in a war in attrition against an alliance that had kept nukes off the table while inflicting huge losses, they would be considered losers. Same goes with Russia.
There’s no other option than negotiation. The war can not be won by Ukrainian forces.
Hey Frankie boy, how’s about Putin withdraw his forces from all of Ukraine and set himself on fire?
Like in WWII, good Catholics fighting fascism will have to do it without the Pope.
Basically, the Pope is adopting the American Republican Party stance, that it may be necessary to capitulate to and appease Russia.
The Vatican has, in the not so distant past, appeased fascists.
It does not have history on its side.
People who call for negotiations almost never have any serious proposals on how Putin is to be held to any promises he offers, especially given the numerous times he has broken such promises in the past.
But the pope is so old!
@Modulo Myself: “There’s no other option than negotiation. The war can not be won by Ukrainian forces.”
The first time I hear ‘negotiation’ in any other sense that ‘surrender and slaughter’ will be the first.
I don’t think the Pope was saying Ukraine should surrender. But he’s more right than you are –
Ukraine is currently losing the war and a ceasefire would actually be tremendously helpful to Ukraine right now. Doing some jaw-jaw would be the opposite of what you imply about “victory.”
I hate that I’ve been right in my assessments all along about this war, especially about the realistic prospects for Ukraine to achieve its war aims of regaining all of its pre-2014 territory. Those prospects have always been, to put it kindly, aspirational, but right now, those prospects have never been lower except maybe during the open stages of the war in 2022.
The current reality is that Ukraine is tapped out. Although the inherent nature of this war strongly favors the defense, Ukraine could suffer the loss of significant territory and personnel this year.
Russia is going to have a significant advantage this year in several critical warfighting areas, even if those doucebags in the GoP get off their butts and pass an aid package. That’s because we are also tapped out because we’ve burned through stockpiles, and defense production has either not ramped up or hasn’t ramped up yet to come close to meeting the need. Even so, that package is desperately needed – not only because of the inherent Russian advantages but also because Europe overpromised and under-delivered its own armaments aid.
Biden hasn’t been hammering the importance of Ukraine for nothing – there’s a reason it was the opening issue in his SOTU speech. And here’s a reason he and Democrats were finally willing to give up much of the farm on immigration reform before the GoP stupidly did a Lucy and took the ball away because Trump told them to.
It’s actually more realistic to criticize negotiations from the other direction – there is very little reason right now for Russia to negotiate any kind of resolution to the conflict or a temporary ceasefire. They can see that they have a window this year where they have an advantage, even if US aid is approved. They are not going to throw away the opportunity they have.
Now is not the time for talk about victory being costly, because defeat is even more costly, and the important thing right now and for most of, if not all of this year, will be avoiding that.
The time to offer a peace settlement is when one has the upper hand. See Germany vs Russia in WWI, and the Entente vs the Alliance also in WWI. If you don’t have the upper hand and offer peace, it is called surrender. See Japan vs the Allies in WWII,
Moreover, Ukraine has nothing to bargain away. It’s not like they hold Russian lands they could return in exchange for peace (see Israel and Egypt in the late 70s). Not unless they want to accept the Mad Vlad fantasy that all Ukraine belong to Russia; even then, subjugation would be worse than surrender.
I’d also say how weird it is to contrast the domestic politics of the legitimacy of even the mere suggestion of negotiations and/or ceasefires in the Israeli/Hamas conflict vs Russia/Ukraine.
I would urge the Pope to open the Vatican records on child molesting, and require all the dioceses in the church to do the same. He is an accomplice in tens of thousands of cases of child rape.
Anyway, the child rape ringleader offers no way to hold Putin to any promises that he makes, given that Putin wants nothing less than the entirety of Ukraine’s territory and the destruction of Ukraine as a separate culture.
Yup, countries that had “the courage of the white flag” re: Hitler’s invasions did not seem to stop Nazi warmongering. Oops. Yes, telling someone to raise the white flag is obviously telling them to surrender, that’s what “white flag” means.
Moreover, people everywhere don’t get that the US and its allies are not the only entities with agency. The US can push for ceasefires and negotiations, but Israel and Palestine and Russia and Ukraine can say no. And they have. The “Ceasefire Now!” and “Defund Ukraine” crowds are having trouble understanding this.
Russia also has agency. So the Pope could tell Putin to have white flag courage and remove his barbarians from Ukrainian territory and it reflects badly on Francis that he is too scared to do so. Courage?
Ukraine also has agency, something that Putin and his apologists and enablers cannot wrap their heads around. Americans lecturing Ukrainians to surrender — no matter what weasel words they want to use to hide it — should ask themselves if they would ever stop fighting back if someone stole their house, kidnapped their kids, and killed their friends.
If Ukrainians want to fight to death, then neither the Pope nor any American has any right or ability to stop them. We are giving them our grim assessments, and we could also tell them to surrender: they will not.
Given that, the US is right to support their choice to stand until the bitter end. The Pope and everyone else telling Ukrainians what to do from the safety and comfort of their fine, uninvaded homes should STFU. I’m reminded of the Southern adage, “If you can’t help me, just get out of my way.”
@DK:
Hear, hear.
A cold-blooded calculation of the interests on our side would favor keeping the war going. We all like the Ukrainians. I think Zelensky should change his first name to Winston. These people are magnificent. But our interests are in bleeding Russia as long as they can be bled.
Yes, we’re burning through ammo and we have to ramp up production but this is the bargain war of all time. The reputation of the Russian military is in the toilet along with their arms export business. Their economy has been seriously hurt, whatever the Kremlin propagandists say. They’re selling their resources at a discount. Something like 300,000 men are dead, in a country already looking at a steep demographic decline and a massive brain drain. And we extended the frontiers of NATO and Russia by hundreds of miles and made their Baltic fleet as big a joke as their Black Sea fleet. They are significantly weakened, and they will never close that gap.
And all that at the loss of zero American lives. If we really had planned it, it could hardly have gone better for us. If the Ukrainians want a peace deal, they’ll tell us, but failing that we should back them to the hilt.
@Andy:
I agree with Andy. The Pope is calling for a negotiated truce, not surrender, which would be the end of Ukraine as a nation. It goes without saying that would not be a negotiated settlement.
To those who say this is impossible because nothing could guarantee it working, this is the condition of all truces. Moreover, the with Mikael Johnsonovich in charge of the House, the Ukrainians are not going to reclaim the territories lost in 2014 and 2022, not on his watch. He will be around for some time to come and there is a possibility Trump will once again be in charge. This is a reality that must be faced. Hope for the best but plan for the worst.
The faking of truce is a two way street, btw. It might be wise for the Ukrainians to fake it for a couple years while EU war production comes on line…as opposed to being pelted in the interim.
@Michael Reynolds:
This. Calling for ceasefires and negotiations is fine, but it’s ultimately meaningless when the belligerents don’t want that. Accepting this and other limits of American part is a part of acknowledging reality, one which we are not good at.
Ending the longest active war in US history should be centerpiece achievement in Biden’s re-election campaign. Instead, he was rewarded with attacks that started his approval ratings spiral. A country and Republican Party that couldn’t stomach the end of failing 20-year war should more humble and patient on the facing realities bit.
The kinds of things we should want the Biden admin telling Zelensky and Ukraine:
– “Our assessment is you are losing.” (if true)
– “Our data says you are winning.” (if true)
– “Our metrics says it’s a stalement right now.” (if true)
– “Evidence indicates you will run out of manpower on 00/00 without another draft.” (if true)
– “We think our sanctions are growing more effective and your enemy will soon face drastically degraged munitions capacity.” (if true)
– “We think the Russian economy and defense industry will remain resilient indefinitely.” (if true)
– “There is no political will for additional aid in the US and Trump might win, you need to find $x billion dollars from other allies or you will lose.” (if true)
– “Our private modeling points to Democratic victory, you need abc and 123 to hold out for another year.” (if true)
– “We will tell you the truth, but we will support whatever decision you make to the best of our ability.”
What Biden should not be telling Ukraine:
– Any battlefield assessment that is less than the unvarnished truth
– “You need to agree to negotiate/to surrender/to a truce.”
– “We will abandon you if we disagree with your decisions.”
It is not our call to tell Ukraine to make peace with an untrustworthy, genocidal enemy. Our calling supporting fleldging democratic allies facing a fascist attack. Iran, China, and N Korea are watching. Abandoning the Ukrainian cause now = US troops in Israel, Taiwan, or S Korea later.
@Andy: @dazedandconfused: I agree that a maximalist war aim of restoring the status quo ante 2014 is unrealistic. But Francis doesn’t seem to be talking about that. There’s no “negotiated peace” right now that doesn’t give Russia a significant part of the post-2022 invasion territory it now occupies. To me, that’s a surrender to the invaders, not a negotiation.
@Michael Reynolds: Viewed purely as a US/NATO-Russia proxy war, this could hardly be going better. We should, of course, have concern for the massive destruction and loss of life in Ukraine. But if they still have the will to keep fighting, I agree fully with you and @DK that we should keep pouring in the materiel support.
Just to be clear, I’m not advocating for any particular COA, merely noting that a pause in combat would be useful at this moment to the Ukrainians because they are currently at a significant military disadvantage in key areas and will be on the defense for most, if not all, of this year.
As I have consistently maintained—and as we see with Israel/Hamas and pretty much every other conflict around the world—the ability of parties who are not combatants in the conflict to force or otherwise compel those who are in the fight to negotiate, have a ceasefire, accept certain conditions, or not accept others is usually useless. The most you can do is, as a friend, have a private “tough love” conversation if you think what they are doing is foolish.
My position is that the US and Ukraine’s allies should not make promises that they cannot deliver because Ukraine’s assessments of its ability to fight, much less achieve its war aims, are dependent on Western support and aid. Yes, Ukraine should always get to make the call on its warfighting decisions, but to do that, it needs honest and accurate information, and in this war, a huge part of that is what it can expect from its allies since it is entirely dependent on us for most of its war material. It does not help Ukraine to tell them, “we’ll give you whatever you need to win” if winning is not at all a realistic goal and if we can’t, in fact, give them whatever they need for all time.
And that’s what I’ve seen as a big problem – overpromising and underdelivering. The extent to which various pro-Ukraine advocates in the West have overestimated Ukraine’s capacity for victory and the West’s ability to enable that has been highly counterproductive.
So my position is we should definitely not force Ukraine into “surrender” or force a ceasefire it won’t accept. At the same time, we also need to be honest about what the US can actually help them accomplish and stop blowing sunshine up people’s asses about the realities of this war and the prospects for how it will end. And the reality is that it will almost certainly end with some kind of negotiated agreement and not with Russian tanks in Kviv and Lviv or Ukrainian tanks in Sevastopol and Luhansk.
Finally, I would just point out that the Pope was also excoriated in the Russian official media for suggesting any kind of negotiation. The Russians didn’t interpret the comments as the Pope suggesting that Ukraine surrender, and they also categorically reject any kind of settlement or talk of a settlement, for reasons previously explained.
Of course, it would be a mistake to view it purely through that lens. There is the bigger picture to consider, such as the much closer relations between Russia and China, a strategic alliance that is now cemented between Iran and Russia, and the post-conflict end game, to name three factors. Focusing on the first, Russia is already weak and no conventional threat to Europe. We are also trying to contain China through increasingly aggressive means. One thing we want to avoid is driving Russia and China together into an anti-US alliance. China is already giving Russia significant amounts of non-military and some dual-use aid, like chips. What is China’s red line for assisting Russia in other ways? It’s one thing to keep Russia weak; it’s quite another to try to weaken it to such an extent that China feels compelled to become more active in this proxy war.
@dazedandconfused:
And what exactly must they give up or endure for that “truce” to be? The Pope should know, the devil’s in the details.
I should lay out my thinking. IMHO, it’s clear that a ‘truce’ would likely mean:
1) Ukraine drops like a rock, weakening them severely.
2) Russia gets at least some easing of sanctions (and likely massive, due to no more enforcement) and access to their reserves, strengthening them.
3) Putin can attack whenever he likes, whether probes, missile attacks or full-scale offensives.
4) When Putin has rebuilt Russia’s strength, he will resume a full-level war (the low-level war will never have stopped).
@Barry: Sorry, ‘Aid to Ukraine drops like a rock’.
@KM:
The Pope may be reacting to Erdogan’s meeting with Zelenskyy recently. Erdo is trying to play middle man in a negotiated truce, probably at the behest of Putin, and Zelenskyy blew it off as impossible.
The details only become an issue if both sides agree to talk about it. If taking back the all the lost territories is not realistic, the classic diplomatic question about war is once again on the table: “How does this end?”