OPINION: Realpolitik and Betrayal

I’m an American who has been volunteering in Ukraine for nearly two and a half years, first by helping to deliver humanitarian aid and then by raising funds to buy equipment for frontline defenders. I do this not because I’m an adrenaline junkie or because I have any Ukrainian roots, but simply because, like many Americans, I have a soft spot for the underdog. Many, but not all.

Here in Odesa, where I’m based, there’s real dismay about Donald Trump’s apparent sell-out of this country. Nobody knows the precise terms being discussed by Washington and Moscow, but the Ukrainians I talk to are increasingly worried that in the realpolitik rush to stop the fighting, a little thing called justice will get lost. They ask questions about matters that are unlikely to get much attention from the important Americans and Russians sitting across from one another at long polished conference tables. Questions about the victims of this pointless, unnecessary war. 

My friend Lena wonders about her son-in-law who was blown up by a Russian mine in Kherson, leaving behind a widow and two children, one with learning disabilities. Who pays for that? What about Artem who will never again walk properly after his right leg was shattered by a Russian drone? Valentin who considered suicide after his family’s home was turned into rubble by a Russian missile? Or young Violetta who has to use a VPN to speak with her parents stuck in the occupied territories, and wonders if she will ever see them again?

Other Topics of Interest

Ukraine’s Most Tragic Family Torn Apart by Russia’s War

In the early days of the war, had three generations of females in Yuriy Hlodan’s family – wife, daughter and mother-in-law – were killed by a Russian missile attack on Odesa.

What about the people who had to flee their bombed and burned-out homes in Mariupol and Bakhmut, Soledar and Maryinka? Cities that had parks and playgrounds, schools and shops, mirth and memories, before Putin’s barbarians rolled across the border. Who pays for that?

Or the hundreds of murdered civilians moldering in mass graves in Bucha, Borodyanka, Izyum and elsewhere? Not to mention the survivors who were tortured or raped. What are they worth?

What about the more than three million Ukrainians now living under harsh Russian occupation? Forced to give up their citizenship if they want a job, the most staunchly patriotic among them beaten, tortured and sometimes killed, their children pushed to enlist in Moscow’s “Youth Army” and taught to despise their homeland.

What about the thousands of children who were abducted from Ukraine and then adopted out to Russian couples, never again to be with their birth parents? How do we calculate the cost of that grief?

What about the tens of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers, and the many more who will live on with terror and trauma? The limbless and lost, the mangled and mad? The art unpainted, the poems unwritten, the spouses unloved, the babies unborn. Who pays the bill for that?

Most adults understand that life involves inevitable compromises, and that a stubborn insistence on perfection only prevents progress. So of course there will have to be unhappy tradeoffs if this savagery is ever to end. But there cannot be any accommodation with the countless war crimes enthusiastically perpetrated by the Russian army, on the explicit orders of Vladimir Putin, with the full-throated support of the majority of the Russian people. A price must be paid by Russia, a massive and painful price in rubles, restitution and regret.

To gloss over the horrors that nation has visited on Ukraine in order to expedite a shaky peace deal would be a breathtaking betrayal of tens of millions of ordinary men, women and children. If Donald Trump truly believes he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, let him bear that in mind.