“Because in 2024, Ukraine is no longer facing Russia. Soldiers from North Korea are standing in front of Ukraine. Let’s be honest. Already in Ukraine, the Iranian ‘Shahedis’ are killing civilians absolutely openly, without any shame,” said Zaluzhny, adding that North Korean and Chinese weapons are flying into Ukraine. Zaluzhny urged Ukraine’s allies to draw the right conclusions. “It is still possible to stop it here, on the territory of Ukraine. But for some reason our partners do not want to understand this. It is obvious that Ukraine already has too many enemies. Ukraine will survive with technology, but it is not clear whether it can win this battle alone,” he said.
Yes, letting the regime that was throwing all the “undesirables” into an industrial death factories, in the land they already had, to take even more land, to control all of those “undesirables” would have been better. Sure, the loss of life would have been less, if you feel like the nazis did about the people being slaughtered in the holocaust.
Just allowing Japan to take China, and everything around them, sure would have stopped them from massacring all the people they were killing there too.
Appeasing dictators is fundamentally different from pursuing de-escalation and cooperation. In the 1940s, after the war had begun, there was no realistic path for the Allies to achieve diplomatic success with Germany or Japan. The nature of their aggressive expansionism and ideology made meaningful negotiation impossible, leaving military conflict as the only viable response.
Are you really trying to draw a comparison to today’s situation? The context is entirely different—we are more informed and connected than ever before. Avoiding paths to peace and solely pursuing escalation under the premise that “Putin is bad” is a fundamentally flawed approach. First, we do not choose Russia’s leadership. Second, if Putin is the leader the Russian people have chosen, who are we to dictate otherwise?
Lets say in a perfect world in 1940’s US and Japan had open diplomacy, it’s possible a deal could have been reached to prevent such atrocities. The beauty of diplomacy lies in its ability to minimize human loss while fostering cooperation and peace.