The Free Press
America has officially betrayed Ukraine.
It had been coming for months: On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had suggested he would do just that.
Then, in the course of one week, the new president of the United States initiated negotiations to end the war in Ukraine behind Ukraine’s back, called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator,” and threatened to cut U.S. support for Ukraine—unless Ukraine forks over the rights to a huge chunk of the rare earth minerals it’s sitting on. (Ukraine said no.) To make sure no one missed this, Vice President J.D. Vance retweeted the president’s statement on X. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Ukraine would have to give up some territory to end the war with Russia and that NATO admission was off the table—which is exactly what Russia wants.
Together, they were not simply telling Ukraine that America was overextended, or that the paradigm had shifted. They were broadcasting to the whole world that the United States could not offer so much as moral support to a country invaded by another country—a country run by a despot who wants to reassemble the empire the United States once crushed.
This was a betrayal not only of Ukraine, but America.
I have seen America’s impact on Ukraine in the first and second decades of this century.
I was there to report on the Orange Revolution, in late 2004, and the State Department’s involvement in that revolution, in early 2005, and a government campaign to rehabilitate alcoholic bears, in 2012 (true story). Among other dispatches in between.
My father’s mother’s family had come from Odessa, in southern Ukraine, on the southern flank of the Pale of Settlement, where the Jews had lived in their shtetl-cells for over a century. My father’s father had been born in a provincial town in what is now Belarus, just north of the Ukrainian border. I had never met my paternal grandparents or great-grandparents, and when I imagined them, they were usually darting through a blood-dappled steppe.
In 2006, when I was a reporter based in Moscow, I took the overnight train to Kyiv and spent the better part of a month wandering around the country.
Like other post-Soviet places, Ukraine was a liminal place. Between ages, temperaments, peoples—those welded to the past, and those trying to transcend it.
But that was nearly impossible. The country was so steeped in death—the pogroms, in the decades before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, that had chased my family out; the revolution; World War I; the famine, which had left nearly 4 million dead; the Gulag; World War II; the Holocaust.
All these atrocities were not simply visited upon Ukrainians, but carried out by them. They were the executed and the executioners. They were the victims of other people’s evil, and they were the informants, the apparatchiks, the concentration camp guards—they were the tools used to implement that evil. They had been enveloped by a seemingly unstoppable bloodletting, which had given way to a prolonged grayness after the war.
Ukraine, like so much of Eastern Europe, felt haunted. It was horrifying, like the books about the death camps I found on my parents’ bookshelves when I was 6 and 7, but it was impossible to look away from.
I went back to Moscow; I visited Siberia, and the Caucasus. But then, in 2007, I came back to Ukraine—to see a few friends and zigzag around the country in a rental car with a fellow reporter and eventually make our way south, to the Crimea, the beach.
It was summer. We bought peaches and apricots from old ladies on the side of the road and shashlik, grilled lamb and pork kebabs, from cranky men in wifebeaters who tended to the grill while smoking, drinking, watching soccer games in Manchester or Barcelona.
In Dnipro, we went to a club, and there was a rave like a hundred thousand other raves in the last decade of the last century and the first decade of this one—electronic music; pretty girls; large, heavily tatted dudes; synthetic drugs—and it was filled with the same air, the same feeling, that everyone seemed to be going for: one of total abandon or liftoff, soaring, Icarus-like. We met some girls, and wandered across the river into a park filled with rockets the Soviets had built decades ago. They called Dnipro “Rocket City.”
Everywhere you went there was this churning: hustlers, hackers, students who had just returned from or were about to go to Cyprus or Sharm el-Sheikh, gray markets where you could buy a laptop.
Everywhere you went there was also a dark humor, which wasn’t exactly humor. There were never punch lines, just humorously rendered vignettes.
After we left Dnipro, on the highway cutting through long green fields heading south toward the coast, I recalled a joke a man in Kyiv had told me, about the bodies of rabbis fertilizing the hills outside the city. He had been a boy during World War II, and he remembered watching the Ukrainians, under the command of their German overlords, eagerly shoot Jews, and seeing the slow-moving earth in the pits filled with almost-dead shtetl dwellers.
The story of Ukraine in the first decade of this century is one of a gradually receding desperation. That feeling was most evident in Odessa.
On my first evening in the city, I wound up at a café at the top of the great Potemkin Stairs, which overlook the Black Sea, and there was a crowd, and I glimpsed a man who looked exactly—not a little bit, but exactly—like my uncle, whom I had watched die in a hospital in Manhattan the year before. He was sitting next to a gaggle of younger people smoking, eating, laughing uproariously, and they were surrounded by other Ukrainians, Russians, Georgians, Italians. It was hard not to wonder who my grandmother might have become, and my father, and me, if they had stayed. Or whether we would have been at all.
The city had been one part Russian, one part Jewish, one part other, and it had deflected the ancient hatreds of the Russian Empire and Soviet empire by rising above them, enveloping itself with music, literature, an ironic sensibility. It felt like a leading indicator: After clawing their way out of the longest century ever, Ukrainians were regaining control, tentatively, over their fate. There was a new openness that bound them to the world beyond Ukraine, a new way of thinking about themselves, the future, that elevated them above whatever histories or cultural compartments had once been their prison.
There was a lot of corruption, and there were many Ukrainians in the east and south who still had their attachments to Russia (those have since disappeared). But there was a seemingly ineluctable force pushing them forward, out of the death and squalor and stagnation toward the new reality.
There were many reasons for the new reality: the 1991 Soviet collapse, the internet, globalization. But really, there was one reason behind all the others: America.
It was not that the United States had liberated Ukraine from the Nazis (we hadn’t) or rebuilt it after the Soviets (ditto). It was that we were building the future, and we understood that, our many foibles notwithstanding, we were vastly superior to the alternatives.
This is what so many on the American right have now forgotten.
For almost a century, America refused to accept what was “inevitable”—that peoples were confined to their subjugation, that individuals could not rise above themselves. This was what distinguished us from the Old World: our defiance of the cosmic order. It was not a matter of anything abstract. It was real and deeply felt. We had come to America, all of us, out of a sense of desperation, and our desperation had given way to a new confidence and a conviction that what was ours—the freedom to chart our own future, whatever that future may bring—belonged to everyone.
What is the point of an America that does not defend, if only from the bully pulpit, the right of all peoples to self-determination? The right of smaller, weaker countries to defend themselves against their bigger, rapacious neighbors? How have we become so alienated from ourselves that we not only find it difficult to empathize with the Ukrainians but feel compelled to demonize them? We used to celebrate the likes of Zelensky, who proudly refused an American offer to airlift him out of his country two days after Russia invaded it. “The fight is here,” he said. “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Neither Trump nor his subordinates ever says what will happen after Russia is rewarded for its aggression. They simply say that that is our only option. They don’t imagine or talk about the new world order according to the authoritarians—how that might jeopardize American security and jobs, how that would affect the price of imports or exports shipped via sea-lanes now patrolled by U.S. battleships and aircraft carriers. Nor do they ever bring up the countless democratic movements that America helped usher into being.
They talk endlessly about the cost of beating Russia. But they never talk about the more frightening and much more expensive alternative. The cost of not.
For more on Trump and Ukraine, read historian Victor David Hanson: “Can Trump Troll His Way to a Peace Deal in Ukraine?”