Giving up land means surrendering to Russian occupation
By Herman Pirchner
October 10, 2024
Washington Times
As the war in Ukraine heads toward its third anniversary, the question on the minds of many Americans is, why do the Ukrainians keep fighting? The conventional wisdom argues that after nearly three years of killing, the war must end — something possible only through the surrender of Ukrainian land occupied by Russian forces.
Yet polls consistently find that nearly 70% of Ukrainians oppose ceding land for peace. Why? Because giving up land means surrendering to life under Russian occupation. Ukrainians know from history what that means; to prevent it, they are willing to endure the deaths of thousands more of their soldiers and the destruction of many of their cities and towns.
Since February 2022, Ukrainian civilians have been murdered, tortured or raped by occupying Russian forces. Bucha, Irpin, Izyum, Lyman, Kherson and Mariupol are among the cities where these crimes have been documented.
Meanwhile, thousands of Ukrainian citizens who survived Russia’s brutality or were fortunate enough to escape it have been forcibly displaced from their homes and the internationally recognized territory of Ukraine. The fate awaiting them is grim; as the U.S. State Department has documented, Russia has established internment camps in its territory designed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men, women and children.
This is not an entirely new idea for Moscow. In the early Soviet period, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were forcibly sent to remote parts of Russia. In their place, Russian peasants were brought to Ukraine to dilute the Ukrainian population and to provide the labor needs created when the Holodomor, Stalin’s famine of 1932-33, resulted in the deaths of at least 4 million Ukrainians.
That history is known by Ukraine’s neighbors as well and helps drive their decision-making. This is so for good reason. Senior Russian officials have repeatedly made territorial claims against the seven countries that, as a percentage of their gross domestic product, provide the most aid to Ukraine.
Five of them (Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland) joined NATO more than two decades ago as the only practical way of dealing with Moscow’s imperialistic ambitions. Two others, Finland and Sweden, joined only after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to see Moscow’s threat to their sovereignty as anything but existential.
They are not the only ones. Germany, France, the United Kingdom and other European countries have also come to believe that Russia’s imperial aims will not stop with Ukraine. There is a
growing consensus among European leaders that should Russia prevail in Ukraine, it would become necessary to deploy a large number of troops to NATO’s eastern borders. That conviction drives their ongoing support of Ukraine as well as their own internal efforts to increase their respective defense budgets and industrial capabilities.
Regardless of what is provided by other countries, however, the role of the United States is essential. That’s because we are the only country that can supply certain weapons that are necessary for Ukraine to effectively confront Russia on the battlefield. This is far more important than the total amount of American aid, which represents a smaller percentage of our GDP than the assistance given by 16 other countries.
To be sure, this aid gives us leverage in shaping the end of the war in Ukraine. But as long as Ukraine chooses to fight and has the means to do so, we don’t have the power to dictate the terms of any peace. On the other hand, absent an adequate U.S. supply of arms, Russia will likely continue to chip away at Ukrainian territory.