A few days ago, my phone buzzed with a message from a friend. She was sheltering in a parking lot during a Russian air strike and wanted to know if I’d seen the news: America was pressuring Ukraine to cede Crimea to Russia. I replied and waited for a follow-up. None came.
I tried to picture where she was—perhaps a strip mall at the edge of town. Faded signs, broken glass, cracked pavement. Where people once bought groceries, now they take refuge from missiles. As I write this, I still don’t know if she made it out of that parking lot alive.
The news she shared didn’t surprise me. By now, I don’t expect anything else.
Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, Ukraine’s southern peninsula, in 2014, when I was 14 years old. Crimea felt far away from my home in Horlivka, in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, where I was studying for a history exam. I never made it to that test.
Within weeks, there were shouts outside our house, air strikes overhead, and deafening crowds. A colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Service appeared. He and a group of armed men took over local government buildings, set up checkpoints, and declared the creation of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. At the time I didn’t fully understand what that meant—just that something had changed, and we were expected to accept it.
Outside powers made statements affirming Ukraine’s sovereignty and criticizing Russia’s actions; America and the European Union imposed sanctions. And all the while, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed a diplomatic solution. Russia was occupying our land and backing armed separatists, but Ukraine was told to negotiate.
Then Russian-backed forces moved further into eastern Ukraine, and the cycle repeated: statements, warnings, sanctions.
Eight years later, in 2022, Russia invaded again. I was living in Kyiv when it started. This time, the war reached the capital.
For nearly half my life, I’ve been displaced. I’ve lost people. I’ve watched Russia take what it wanted, and I’ve watched the world redraw the lines afterward. Now, after all these years and all this bloodshed, Ukraine is once again being asked to accept the idea that Crimea belongs to Russia.
The Trump administration’s proposed agreement would recognize Russia’s illegal annexation and freeze the war’s front lines. But nothing I’ve lived through suggests this would be the end of it. Each concession has been followed by another demand. Every new border has eventually been redrawn. Crimea wasn’t the end. Neither was Donetsk. Neither was Mariupol. It’s not difficult to see what comes next.
Still, some insist this is a reasonable compromise. That we should accept the loss of Crimea for the sake of peace. That Ukraine should be “realistic.” From this side of the war, the plan feels like something else entirely.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine will refuse to recognize Crimea as Russian: “There’s nothing to talk about here. This is against our constitution.” In response, U.S. President Donald Trump blamed Zelensky for prolonging the war and said that Crimea’s return “is not even a point of discussion.” If Ukraine wants the territory back, Trump asked, “why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?”
Trump’s words made clear to Russia that it has the upper hand, and now there are no limits to how far it will go. Drawing a line requires strength, not appeasement. Strength is the only thing Putin respects—the only thing he understands.
Having lived through both phases of Russia’s war, I’ve seen that the more Russia is allowed to take, the more it will demand. I’ve learned how quickly lives can vanish—and how slowly the world reacts. I’ve reported from towns where people waited for the next wave of shelling with practiced calm. I’ve met families who moved again and again to avoid death. I’ve visited schools turned into shelters and walked through cities that once looked like mine but now exist only in memory.
What’s happening to Ukraine isn’t just about Ukraine. Every line redrawn here makes lines easier to redraw somewhere else. Ukraine sees clearly now that appeasement doesn’t end these kinds of wars. It just moves them.
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