I agree fully with Rich Lowry’s assessment that a remark by JD Vance aimed at criticizing the Biden administration was taken with unnecessary umbrage by Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky tried to make the point Mark Wright says, which is that he cannot just have diplomacy with Vladimir Putin because Putin does not negotiate in good faith, referring back to failed Minsk agreements.

Trump and Vance understandably took Zelensky to be “educating them” when Trump obviously believes himself to be a better negotiator than Angela Merkel and François Hollande. From there it was not going to go over well. Also Vance may have had in mind that nobody honored the Minsk agreement, least of all Ukraine. Hollande himself argued after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that the Minsk agreements worked as they were intended to work; they existed simply to delay further invasions and bought time for Ukraine to arm itself to defend against a larger Russian effort. “Thus, the time that Putin thought was an asset for him turned out to be, in fact, an opportunity for the Ukrainians,” he said to the Kyiv Independent.

But there is another way to understand Zelensky’s blowing up the meeting, and then swiftly collecting attaboys from European leaders.

Zelensky is not the first nationalist to find out that no matter the enormity of blood sacrifice, his nation cannot prevent its more powerful neighbor from partitioning it and imposing on it painful political concessions, possibly even neutrality. Michael Collins was killed in the Irish Civil War for signing on to such conditions with the United Kingdom. President Rhee of South Korea avoided involvement in the armistice that froze the Korean War.  It may suit Zelensky just fine to have a big public diplomatic break with the man who is setting about negotiating a peace that Ukrainians can never popularly endorse as adequate to their sacrifices.

As for the broader point about trusting Putin to keep his word: Well, in one sense, he very much did keep his word. He told the West (as many other Russians had) that Ukraine in NATO was a red line over which he would fight. When Biden and Stoltenberg pointedly refused to rule out such an outcome, he committed his country to a terrible and costly war. That’s not a basis for trust, but it is one for taking him seriously. We should also remember that the “post-war order” that is so often babbled about began with a much worse act of appeasement than what happened at Munich. The American-led order began by appeasing Moscow at Yalta. That’s not an argument for trusting Putin to be a friend, but a sober understanding of what a devil he can be as an enemy.