Chris Bambery tells us that peace talks in Alaska represent “a road to peace.” What he actually describes is a road to capitulation. His argument hinges on a sleight of hand familiar from every apologist for Russian imperialism: he treats Putin’s aggression as inevitable and legitimate, while casting Ukrainian resistance as reckless, naïve, or manipulated by “neocons.”
The language gives the game away. Bambery speaks of a war that did not begin with the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, but with “highly contested elections” in Ukraine in 2013. That is Kremlin boilerplate. By this logic, Ukrainians choosing an orientation away from Moscow and towards Europe is the real provocation, not Russia’s seizure of Crimea, not the orchestration of war in Donbas, not the massacres of Bucha, Mariupol, or Kharkiv. For Bambery, Ukrainians exercising their right to decide their future is aggression, while Russia’s tanks rolling over borders is a defensive reaction.
The myth that NATO expansion “forced” Russia’s hand is equally hollow. NATO’s eastward enlargement happened because countries brutalised for decades by Soviet rule actively sought protection from further Russian domination. Ukraine sought NATO membership not out of “neocon plotting” but because it had already been invaded. Putin’s “red lines” are not eternal truths of geopolitics but instruments of imperialist bargaining: move the line, redraw the map, claim another neighbour.
Bambery repeats Moscow’s talking point that Ukraine is “running out of troops” while Russia “relentlessly advances westwards.” This is fiction. Ukrainian forces have held back the so-called “second army of the world” for over three years with courage, creativity, and solidarity, inflicting over a million casualties—including more than 250,000 Russian dead. Russia’s advance has been incremental, paid for in mountains of corpses hurled into the grinder. If Ukraine were truly collapsing, Putin wouldn’t be suing for recognition of his conquests at the table in Alaska. He would be dictating surrender terms in Kyiv.
The Alaska talks are not about “peace.” They are about Russia seeking international ratification of annexations won through invasion, mass murder, and deportation. Bambery calls this “a wider peace deal.” In truth, it is the classic imperialist settlement: redraw borders by force, break the sovereignty of a weaker neighbour, and call it stability. When Putin demands “neutrality” from Ukraine, what he means is permanent subordination. When he demands recognition of annexed oblasts, he means the normalisation of conquest.
Bambery’s appeal to “humanity” is no less dishonest. He accuses Ukraine’s supporters of fighting “to the last Ukrainian.” But Ukrainians are not passive pawns. They have chosen, overwhelmingly and repeatedly, to resist occupation. To tell them otherwise is to strip them of agency, to insist they accept the partition of their country in order to satisfy the “security concerns” of the very state that bombs their cities. The moral inversion is grotesque: Ukraine is asked to give up its territory, its democracy, its people, in order to save Russia the trouble of losing a war it started.
There is indeed a neocon agenda in play, but it sits in Moscow, not Washington. It is Putin who dreams of restoring a lost empire, who divides the world into spheres of influence, who threatens nuclear war to discipline neighbours. He wants not peace, but victory dressed up as compromise.
Ukraine’s struggle is not “a pipedream of victory” but a fight for survival. Any “peace plan” that rewards Russian aggression is not peace but appeasement, and history shows where that road leads. The only just peace is one built on Ukraine’s terms: full withdrawal of Russian forces, restoration of sovereignty, and accountability for war crimes. Anything less entrenches barbarism and teaches every aggressor state that borders can be changed by tanks and terror.
To stand with Ukraine is to stand against the politics of conquest and against the smug fatalism of those who tell a nation under siege to lay down and die for the sake of “humanity.”
