Putin Wants His Own Munich

By Leon Aron

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

History, Marx wrote, paraphrasing Hegel, repeats itself: What was first tragedy becomes farce the second time around. Yet as historical analogies go, Vladimir Putin’s invitation to Xi Jinping and Donald Trump to meet next month to talk about ending the war in Ukraine rests firmly in the tragic mode.

 

The putative summit’s historical twin is the September 30, 1938, Munich Agreement. On that date, two fascist dictatorships (Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy) and Europe’s two largest democracies (the United Kingdom, represented by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and France, led by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier) assented to ceding Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany. The Czechoslovak armed forces, among the strongest in Europe, were ordered to stand down. In Munich II, Putin will aim to have two heavily militarized police autocracies, Russia and China, and the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, agree, under the guise of “peace,” to bring about the capitulation of Ukraine, which continues heroically and skillfully to thwart Russia on the battlefield.

 

Of the three principals, Putin has the most urgent needs. Throughout the course of a four-and-a-half-year war he cannot win yet cannot walk away from, he’s gone through some half a million men killed and around 1 million wounded or missing, and he continues to lose between 30,000 and 34,000 soldiers every month. Casualties may soon exceed the number of draftees and volunteers Putin is able to scare up.

 

Just as important, Putin’s implied social contract with his subjects—support the war and I’ll protect you from its consequences—is beginning to wobble. Russia’s economy is on the brink of recession: This year’s projected GDP growth is under 1 percent. With hundreds of thousands of working-age adults lured by higher salaries into the hypertrophied defense sector, drafted into the war, killed in battle, or emigrated out of the country, the civilian economy is rife with labor shortages and depressed by a 14 percent interest rate. As of the first nine months of this year, the government’s expenditures are up 15 percent while revenues are lagging behind with a 10 percent increase and an expanding budget deficit—with no way to cover the deficit except by raising taxes and forcing banks to buy government bonds. Although inflation officially sits at 6 percent, prices for staples, like chicken and eggs, have risen almost three times as much. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drone attacks have brought down Russia’s gasoline production to 30 percent below domestic needs, causing nationwide shortages and long lines at gas stations.

 

Although not nearly as pressing as it is for Putin, Ukraine’s submission to the Munich II diktat would be deeply gratifying to Xi. Apart from geostrategic reasons, including implications for the annexation of Taiwan, such an outcome would be a momentous vindication of Xi’s ideological verity: the inexorable attrition and eventual demise of the world’s capitalist democracies, Kyiv’s main supporters. A fervent Marxist—he called Marx the “greatest thinker in human history,” whose teaching remains the party’s “guiding theory and ideology”—Xi marked the nationwide celebration of Marx’s 200^th birthday in 2018 with a speech titled “Marx’s Theory Still Shines With Truth.” A key part of that “theory” is historical materialism, a philosophy of history that postulates an unstoppable progress toward communism.

 

In large measure to help that history along, China has thrown a lifeline to Putin’s Russia. As the largest buyer of Russian oil, at 50 percent of total exports, Beijing has paid Moscow between $40 billion and $61 billion a year over the last six years. In addition to cash, China supplies the Kremlin with critical components of Putin’s war machine, including microelectronics for missiles, metalworking machine tools for making ammunition, and nitrocellulose, a key component of artillery shells. In 2024, a NATO summit labeled China the “decisive enabler” of the war against Ukraine.

 

As for Trump, who plays the role of Chamberlain in this emergent historical script, he too lusts after the image of a hero who brings about what the British prime minister called “peace for our time.” Yet when it comes to the war in Ukraine, Trump’s repeated instances of moral turpitude and studied ignorance have by now far exceeded Chamberlain’s description of the Sudetenland crisis as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

 

Apparently taking at face value what Putin—an ex-KGB lieutenant colonel and a graduate of the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Academy of Foreign Intelligence—tells him in long and invariably friendly phone chats, the U.S. president professes to believe that Ukraine started the war. He is also likely to have bought Putin’s explanation for seeking to conquer and annex Donbas in order to end the suffering of the ethnic Russians there, a borrowing from Hitler’s justification for detaching the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia because of the entirely bogus oppression of the territory’s ethnic Germans.

 

Trump also seems to have internalized Putin’s canard of the “illegitimacy” of the democratically elected President Volodymyr Zelensky because Ukraine has not held presidential elections, which are banned by the country’s constitution in wartime. Calling Zelensky a “dictator without election,” Trump rolled out the red carpet for the Kremlin ruler in his 27^th year in power. Unable to distinguish between the aggressor and his victims and exasperated by Ukraine’s reluctance to give in, Trump also accused Zelensky of not wanting to “settle” this war.

 

Trump insists on jollying Putin into “peace” with blandishments while Moscow steadily escalates the killing of Ukrainian civilians by bombing their homes, hospitals, and schools. After waiving the ban on Russian imports by contracting for $4.5 billion worth of diesel oil for the U.S. and global markets, Trump halted, via executive order, the implementation of multiple sanctions on Moscow spelled out in a bill that had passed the House and the Senate with big majorities. The order was signed amid a Russian bombing campaign against commuter buses in Ukraine.

 

Should the historical analogy hold, Ukraine’s giving in—either by ceding all of the Donbas or, even worse, by recognizing the provinces of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk as Russian—is not likely to lead to lasting peace. Munich was followed five months later by Germany’s invasion and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. In another six months, World War II began with Hitler’s assault on Poland.

 

In a replay of this scenario, Russia would likely insist—as it consistently has in the past—on a dramatic reduction of the Ukrainian armed forces and the break of all military ties to NATO. The Kremlin would also be poised to steadily manipulate Ukrainian domestic politics, engineering the installation of a Quisling government and eventually turning Ukraine into a protectorate a la Belarus.

 

Exhilarated by victory and emboldened by the sight of a demoralized Europe and NATO bereft of America’s support, Putin would also be likely to follow up with an attack on a vulnerable country on NATO’s eastern flank. Nuclear blackmail would follow, forcing an “overall settlement,” which would fulfill Putin’s key strategic goal of rolling back the post-1990 NATO expansion, effectively recovering the Soviet Union’s dominance of Eastern and much of Central Europe.

 

Of course, the historical parallel may come well short of a complete script. The tripartite summit may not take place. Even if it does, Europe’s support for Ukraine may become strong enough to enable Kyiv to defy Munich II and, instead, continue the fight even without U.S. backing. And NATO’s cohesion and rearmament may prove impressive enough to make Putin put the grand schemes on hold, while not abandoning the dream of repeating Stalin’s feats.

 

Still, it would be a pity to let the historical concordance go to waste without at least considering, and perhaps readying for, the repeat of some of its most unsettling possible consequences.