The Wall Street Journal condemned President Donald Trump’s “rehabilitation” of Kremlin overlord Vladimir Putin in a seething critical editorial, “The Rapid Rehab of Vladimir Putin,” on Tuesday night.
Trump’s negotiators have initiated the process to campaign for the end of Russia’s war on Ukraine, specifically with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper listed a considerable list of Putin’s questionable actions before pointing out that the president hinted at inviting the Russian dictator to the U.S.
“Global politics can be an ugly business, but the looming rehabilitation of Vladimir Putin is especially hard to take,” the Journal wrote.
The Russian president’s true intentions for “peace”—in a war that has been raging since 2014 and escalated in 2022 when Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine—were also brought up. Although Trump claimed that his phone call with Putin last week was successful in that the Russian dictator wants “peace,” the Journal warns that this news should be taken with a grain of salt.
“He [Trump] didn’t say what kind of peace Mr. Putin has in mind, though if history is a guide it won’t be what most Americans understand by the word,” the center-right newspaper wrote.
The editorial doubled down on its critique of Putin by enumerating his crimes including, but not limited to, starting the biggest land war in Europe since Adolf Hitler. The paper said that Putin’s “special military operations” have killed or maimed many thousands of Russians and Ukrainians. Additionally, his forces have tried to push Ukrainians to surrender by “crippling electric-power plants,”
Under Putin’s leadership, his troops kidnapped Ukrainian-born children. They also violated international warfare by torturing and killing Ukraine’s troops. The Journal also highlighted his involvement in dispatching Russian hit squads to terminate his enemies, including murdering Alexander Litvinenko and his political adversary Alexei Navalny.
“Numerous Russians are taken by a sudden and mysterious desire to leap from tall buildings to their deaths,” the paper said.
Not only has Putin been charged with war crimes by an international court, the U.S. also sanctioned his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in 2022 as an architect of “Russia’s war against Ukraine.” The very same Lavrov sat across from Rubio on Tuesday.
“We realize that the ruthless men who rule much of the world can’t be ignored. But usually those men aren’t rewarded with a visit to the U.S., as Mr. Trump hinted last week, before they’ve made any compromises,” the editorial concluded. “Visits with Soviet leaders during the Cold War at least had some preparation to assume the U.S. would get something from the diplomacy. Any peace Mr. Putin strikes has to be made with all of his legacy of destruction in mind.”
Read it at The Wall Street Journal
