Putin Has No Good Way Out

Mr. Kimmage, a historian of the Cold War, is an expert on U.S.-Russian relations.

“No Exit,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-act existential play on the hell of non-endings, was first performed in Paris in May 1944. World War II was about to enter its fifth year. In the play, three people, recently deceased and apparently locked in a drawing room of hell, face the bad choices of their lives, from which, in death, there is no escape.

If the Russian authorities would allow Sartre’s play to be put on in Moscow in 2026, one wonders what President Vladimir Putin and ordinary Russians, more than four years into Mr. Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, would make of........

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