Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has
joined industrialist Elon Musk in openly saying that Ukraine should surrender
any claims over Crimea in exchange for an end to hostilities with Russia.
The Pershing Square hedge fund manager is
the latest wealthy businessman to favor a ceasefire, urging U.S. military
support continue only so long as Ukraine needs to return its borders to what
they were prior to the invasion in February—but after Russia's annexation of
Crimea eight years ago.
“If we return to the status quo ex ante
[sic] 2/24, Russia is not rewarded for its aggression and Ukraine can
immediately begin to rebuild with support from the West,” he posted late on
Sunday. “Thousands of lives will be saved and resources can be invested to
rebuild Ukraine rather than in a war that will only lead to more destruction
and death.”
Crimea was illegally seized by Putin in
2014 in a move that Russia claimed was to protect the ethnic Russians that
comprised a majority of its population. Ukraine has never relinquished its
claims, and the UN voted overwhelmingly against recognizing the annexation. The
land grab was a response to the Euromaidan revolution, in which Ukrainians
protested successfully for closer ties with the West rather than Putin’s
Russia.
Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks, a
former PayPal senior executive, have recently been arguing in favor of an end
to hostilities involving Ukraine concessions to major Russian demands.
Sacks argued in a series of tweets on
Sunday that the U.S. should propose an armistice based on the territory that
existed before the Ukraine invasion, and Ukraine should promise not to join
NATO.
Late on Sunday night, Ackman supported
Sacks' call that the military alliance guarantees Ukraine would not be allowed
to join.
“Ukraine has proven it can defend itself
without NATO membership. Properly armed it will deter future aggression,” he
wrote.
“If there is a viable path to peace, we
should pursue it," he added.
Ukraine had been in possession of a nuclear
deterrent in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, but
the newly-independent country agreed in the early 1990s to surrender its
stockpiles in exchange for security guarantees by Russia.
Musk's early-October "peace"
plan was immediately met with backlash when he posted it on Twitter.
“Which @elonmusk do you like more?”
Ukraine's President Zelensky asked in a Twitter poll similar to the one that
Musk posted. "The two choices? One who supports Ukraine, and one who
supports Russia."
Ukraine's former ambassador to Germany was
even more blunt.
"F--- off is my very diplomatic reply
to you," Andrij Melnyk wrote on Twitter.
And on Monday, in an interview with
Politico, former top U.S. diplomat Fiona Hill accused Musk of
"transmitting a message for Putin," who she said was adept at playing
on the "egos of big men."
'Attack on the western world'
On Monday, Musk reiterated his view that
the Crimean peninsula was a red line for the Kremlin—one for which they would
risk mutually assured nuclear annihilation if need be.
“Crimea *is* seen as a crucial part of
Russia by Russia, much as Hawaii is seen as a crucial part of America,” he
wrote. “If Russia is faced with the choice of losing Crimea or using
battlefield nukes they will choose the latter.”
He posted the tweets in response to an
op-ed that Sacks had written for Newsweek writing about Musk's first
much-pilloried tweets earlier this month. Sacks' essay, published a day after
Musk's early October tweets, is titled: "The Neocons and the Woke Left Are
Joining Hands and Leading Us to Woke War III."
Not all business tycoons were pushing for
the Ukraine to agree on a ceasefire with Russia, a country that under Putin has
not been a reliable partner for peace.
The CEO of the world’s most valuable bank,
for example, likened the threat from Russia to the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon said last week in London liberal democracies
needed to prove they can rise to the threat lest they embolden autocratic
regimes like Russia or China.
“It’s really an attack on the Western
World,” he said. “If we don’t get this one right, that kind of chaos you can
see around for the next 50 years,”
Putin however, does not appear to be
backing down. Instead of paying talk of a ceasefire any heed, he has mobilized
conscriptions and dispatched tank echelons to Belarus for a possible attack
from the north after Kyiv seized key rail links in the eastern Donbas.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported Putin struck a deal with pariah state Iran, currently facing its own uprising, to procure cruise missiles capable of striking targets as far as 700 kilometers away.