Whatever happened in the Trump-Putin meeting, just after this column was written, we are finally getting close to the only satisfactory end to the awful Ukraine war. President Donald Trump deserves credit for being the only western statesman who audibly made the point that the West had two objectives in this war. Of course, Russia could not be permitted to occupy and reabsorb Ukraine. If it had done so, it would in one stroke have regained the largest single piece of what it had lost in its total defeat in the Cold War, which caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the collapse of international communism, (and the realignment of the left of the world as spontaneous environmental militants attacking capitalism from a new angle in the name of saving the planet). Ukraine is next to Russia itself the largest and most strategically important component of the former USSR. Apart from being a strategic disaster and a terrible injustice to Ukraine, the Russian conquest of Ukraine would have exposed the Western Alliance as a paper tiger that no aggressive state need take seriously.