A little more than three years have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, setting off the worst conflict in Europe since the horrors of World War II. The war is a nightmare that every Ukrainian will remember for the rest of their lives. But, after years of grueling conflict, America has decided it is time to forget. We have abandoned our commitment to supporting Ukraine, and in so doing we have surrendered to the marching forces of autocracy.
At the beginning of the war, as Ukrainian soldiers fought desperately to stave off the Russian advance and save their homeland, everyone in the U.S. was on their side. We supported Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he defiantly stayed in the capital city of Kyiv while Russian forces were just miles away, saying “I need ammunition, not a ride.” We put Ukrainian flags in our social media bios and posted encouragements like “Slava Ukraini” or “Glory to Ukraine.” Zelensky was Time’s 2022 Person of the Year after a Ukrainian counteroffensive that pushed Russia’s forces back. Yet, even in that impressive feature, Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak warned, “If we fall out of focus, we are in danger.”
That danger has now been realized. The Trump administration recently met with Russian officials to discuss an end to the war without consulting Ukraine, a major about-face from former President Joe Biden’s commitments to supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty. On the three-year anniversary of the war’s beginning, the U.S. voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for the invasion, aligning itself with the aggressors of a devastating conflict that has killed or wounded over a million people and separating from the prevailing view of Western European governments such as France and the UK. These actions have all but served up Ukraine on a silver platter to the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has firmly established a dictatorship in Russia over the past twenty years.
The implications of supporting a dictatorial regime are incredibly dangerous, both for Ukraine and for America. In the past few months, Ukraine gradually lost ground as Russians throw wave after wave of soldiers at the Ukrainian lines. Zelensky and his compatriots need more assistance, not complete abandonment. But that’s exactly what the U.S. has done, even trying to force Ukraine into a deal for its reserves of important minerals. According to Trump, the deal would see Ukraine tide over hundreds of billions of dollars in these rare earths, amounting to extortion of a country that we once wholeheartedly supported. Ukraine is caught between a rock and a hard place – on one side, Russia stands ready to grind their forces down, while the U.S. is making threats and trying to extract concessions on the other.
This brings me to the problem of appeasement, a strategy which the Trump administration is wholeheartedly embracing when it comes to Russia. Nice as a cessation of hostilities might seem for preserving lives, a negotiated end to the war between Trump and Putin would likely cement Russia’s control over swathes of Ukrainian territory and leave the door open for further conquest. Letting Putin hold on to the territory he unlawfully conquered will send a message to Russia that his actions were ultimately acceptable. His own country, despite a massive loss of Russian life due to the war, will not oppose him now that he has jailed and killed many political opponents. He will look at countries such as Moldova and Georgia, which have already been infiltrated by Russian disinformation, and see little standing in the way of taking them over. Meanwhile, similarly minded autocratic countries such as China, might conclude that there is no great alliance of democratic powers ready to stand against them anymore. While true that U.S. policy might differ from Russia to China, capitulating to Putin’s demands clearly sends the wrong message on standing up for democracy.
The historical parallels are glaringly obvious. The U.S., as it did before the second world war, is retreating into a dramatically isolationist position under Trump’s “America first” policies, leaving Europe to deal with their own problems. The issue with this approach is that it failed to work. America was drawn back into a major war, whether it wanted to or not.
The second part of history we should pay attention to is the period immediately before World War II. In 1938, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany aimed to take over Czechoslovakia, beginning with an area known as the Sudetenland, which had a large German population. This is similar to how eastern Ukraine, which Russia currently controls much of, has far more Russian-speaking citizens than in the western part of the country. Essentially, the democratic powers of the age let Hitler have the Sudetenland in exchange for supposed peace. Czechoslovakian representatives weren’t even invited to the Munich conference where the deal was signed, just as Ukraine was shut out of recent peace talks. A year later, the bloodiest war in human history was underway. The example is not a perfect one—Putin lacks the means to carry out a conquest of Europe akin to the Nazis—but it illustrates that sometimes peace is not peace, and that attempting to quell the beast only leads to more problems down the road.
In a world more globalized than ever, appeasement and isolationism is not a viable strategy. The Trump administration only risks further, more widespread conflict in the long run by abandoning Ukraine.