Many commentators have likened President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska to the 1938 Munich meeting between Adolf Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Eduard Daladier over the fate of Czechoslovakia. There certainly are similarities.

The Munich meeting took place without the presence of Czech President Edvard Benes, and the Alaska summit will not include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And there is widespread fear, especially in Europe, that Trump will yield to Putin’s demands for Ukrainian territory — both that which his armed forces have already seized in Crimea and the oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk, and those still held by Ukraine there and in the oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

As the Institute for the Study of War points out, should Putin successfully obtain control of all four oblasts — and especially all of Donetsk, which contains what the Institute terms Ukraine’s “fortress belt” — he would control several potential vectors of attack on the remainder of Ukraine. This would enable Russian forces to seize the country, just as Hitler ultimately took all of Czechoslovakia.

Yet there are significant differences as well. Hitler was determined to seize

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