Imagine Treating Ukrainians as Ends in the Themselves
It seems that everyone engaged in world politics now, both in the U.S. and Europe, has a position on Ukraine – what really happened there, who’s at fault, who deserves to win, and what their nation’s government ought to be doing about it. From leaders of NATO countries that are outlawing opposition political parties and imprisoning people for Facebook posts – all in defense of democracy – to embittered “red-pilled” Americans who wish we had our own Putin, the stances are all staked out on the ideological battleground.
These people disagree with each other fiercely and call each other names. They want radically opposite outcomes to the Ukraine-Russia war. They accuse their opponents of callously risking either a Russian invasion of Scotland or a nuclear World War III. But after years of careful reading and listening, I have found a common thread uniting all these self-styled Ukraine whisperers. Perhaps it can even serve as a common ground that brings them all together.
What’s interesting is that none of them actually care about the people who live in Ukraine. Whether they live or die, prosper or flee, go back to grinding poverty or abort and trans themselves out of existence, none of the people who talk about Ukraine really care. They treat Ukrainians like counters in a dorm room game of Risk – in which, as those who’ve played it will recall, control of Ukraine is key to winning. (Okay, Ukraine and the Middle East, but the Risk players already goad us into wars for that region too.) Or pawns in a chess game, which of course can be sacrificed for any strategic advantage.
I take the eccentric position that the most important thing to worry about in the Ukraine war is the Ukrainians. Since it is their country (not ours), their interests ought to come first, then second, then third. Only after that should we investigate how a given stance on the country benefits our national interests and ideological goals. Indeed, if the well-being of real, live Ukrainians requires it, we might even have to take the “L” and sacrifice some worthy project we had in mind, rather than pay for it in the blood and misery of hapless foreign citizens.
Ground Our Policies in Reality — Historical and Moral
To determine what really would benefit Ukrainians, we must sift through the many partisan claims and biased histories surrounding that country — and as best we can, figure out what’s really true. As scientists say about data, “Garbage in, garbage out.” If our starting point isn’t a solid understanding of genuine facts, we’re going to push policies that are grounded in wishful thinking. And that’s how you get conflicts like the Iraq War, which end up benefiting organizations like ISIS.
Based on very wide reading, talks on the ground in Ukraine with citizens and soldiers, and what I learned from my friends in the U.S. intelligence community, I believe the following facts are solid:
The West took ruthless advantage of Russian weakness after the Soviet collapse in 1991. After promising not to expand NATO as Mikhail Gorbachev’s price for disbanding the Warsaw Pact, we did exactly that – pushing that nuclear alliance right up to Russia’s borders instead of inviting Russia in or dissolving NATO as now obsolete. Russia rightly sees NATO membership for Ukraine the way U.S. leaders saw nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.
U.S. President Bill Clinton convinced the impoverished, inexperienced leaders of newly independent Ukraine to surrender their best guarantee of independence – the nuclear arsenal they’d inherited – in return for a nonbinding, unratified nontreaty which might as well have been written on a bar napkin. Our foreign policy elites insist on treating that document as if it were part of the U.S. Bill of Rights.
Vladimir Putin took ruthless advantage of NATO expansion to weaponize Russian nationalism and revive old chauvinist notions of Ukraine as “Little Russia,” a perpetual province to be ruled from Moscow — as if a common heritage in the 10th century could erase the terror famine Russians imposed on Ukrainians in the 1930s.
The American Deep State, especially the CIA and its front organization USAID, has opportunistically seized upon the real desire of Ukrainians for genuine independence in order to try reshaping the country as a puppet of Western elites. Ukraine’s government and civil society were hijacked and honeycombed by U.S. agents and representatives. They in turn treated the country as a laboratory for social engineering experiments, from U.S.-funded abortion clinics to trans grooming in schools. Accepting such poisonous policies was the price of getting Western aid to resist the Russians, as one pro-life Ukrainian Christian after another told me in tears.
As I warned in a Kyiv address in 2023:
Will Ukraine trade Russian colonizers and occupiers for post-Christian, post-Western ones? Will it turn its children over to the counselors and therapists who now in America quietly recruit kids for sex-change procedures, puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical castration of boys — often without the consent or even the knowledge of their parents? Will Ukraine let Planned Parenthood — which designed the murderous One Child Policy on behalf of the Red Chinese government — open clinics in Kyiv that would rob you of a generation of children, a new Holodomor in service of a new godless ideology of evil to finish the job Josef Stalin started?
Russia’s government has in turn weaponized the perverse social agenda of Western elites to paint itself as the defender of Christian values and legitimate nationalism, even as it waged a vicious war of conquest against a long-suffering nation. Vladimir Putin’s invasion is an act of naked aggression driven by a delusional, quasi-spiritual ideology that bears more in common with occult totalitarianism than Christian conservatism. His philosophical muse, Alexander Dugin — an admirer of Satanists and cultists — has been called “Putin’s brain,” and it shows. Russia’s war has brought death to civilians, repression to churches, and devastation to a Christian nation already bruised by a century of suffering. No Christian should be seduced by Moscow’s propaganda.
With all of these facts read into the record, what should we hope for? What should we do? We should work for a compromise peace as soon as possible rather than stoke an unending conflict to “make Russia bleed” (U.S. General Mark Milley’s goal) in the name of making impossible reconquests of unsustainable regions — such as Crimea, which Russia will never surrender.
President Trump’s efforts to serve as a good-faith neutral arbitrator, rather than a distant, callous warmonger, deserve our support and prayers. We ought to seek peace not because we are jaded and don’t give a fig about Ukrainians, but for the exact opposite reason. We care about those people’s lives far more than icy neoconservative geopolitical amateurs with Ukraine flags in their Bluesky profiles and Blackrock stock in their portfolios. That’s why we don’t want to abort or transition Ukraine’s children to another gender, or send its young men to die for pie in the sky.
To me, that’s the proper patriotic and Christian stance. But hey, maybe I’m a weirdo.
Perhaps to prove that point: Here’s an op-ed I published as a graduate student back in 1999, warning of the dangers to peace of an ever-expanding NATO alliance. (At the time, NATO was bombing civilian targets in Yugoslavia in pursuit of Bill Clinton’s policies.) The column got me in quite a bit of trouble, but I can’t say my predictions were wrong. If only they had been.