It is necessary to deal with criminals. It is immoral – and, if history teaches, dangerous – to absolve them of crimes and reward them. Yet this is how Trump’s peace plan treats Putin’s Russia. In the morally inverted universe of the plan, there is no distinction between perpetrator and victim, aggressor and defender, militarised dictatorship and democracy.

Invading a peaceful neighbour with no provocation whatsoever, Russia killed as many as 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 14,534 civilians, including over 3,000 children, who perished in incessant missile and drone bombings of residential buildings, schools, hospitals, churches, maternity wards, kindergartens and children’s playgrounds. As many as 20,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to Russia.

Nowhere in Trump’s plan is there the slightest notion that Moscow is responsible for this carnage, nor a suggestion of atonement or reparations commensurate with an estimated $524 billion cost of reconstruction and recovery. Instead, the plan makes sure that Russia is never held accountable for the devastation it has perpetrated: all parties are granted ‘full amnesty for their actions during the war’ and enjoined from making ‘any claims or consider any complaints in the future.’

Having shielded Russia’s banditry from justice, the plan guarantees the permanence of its loot. In twenty-first century Europe, everything an aggressor seized by force is to remain the aggressor’s in perpetuity. Crimea, Luhansk and........

© The Spectator