You can't just wrap a statement the compiler has deemed to not pass the borrow checker and make it compile. Unsafe blocks can bypass the type system, but you have to call extra magic to do so.
So, really, what we're discussing is how much ceremony a language ought to require before enabling unsafe behavior. I think C++ provides enough ceremony that you can write decently safe programs in C++.
It's not about ceremony - it's disingenuous to say that C++ can enforce the same safety rules as Rust w.r.t. to lifetimes or that C++ is as safe as Rust is within it's unsafe blocks.
Whilst currently the borrow checker is a bit greedy, it's safe to say that most of the time the borrow checker is checking the code is safe the same way I try to reason about memory accesses in C and C++ when dealing with concurrency or freeing memory. The power of the borrow checker shows itself when reasoning about a local function and no longer requires you to reason about the whole application state as the compiler ensures locality to the extent that shared mutable state is not allowed.
That has empirically been proven false over a decade of C++ use. Additionally, C++ allows for plenty of memory safety problems without any syntactic ceremony.