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Ukrainians Need (and Want) an End to War
It’s time to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, so they can heal and rebuild.
May 28, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s expressed exasperation over Russia’s continued attacks on Ukraine seemed to temporarily lift the spirit of pro-war European leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron, who said he hopes Trump’s anger “translates into action.” The U.S. isn’t likely to resume the massive military support it provided under former President Joe Biden. Under one scenario, however, it could conceivably sell weapons to NATO for Ukraine’s use.
The abandonment of peace efforts in Ukraine would be disastrous—especially for Ukrainians.
American citizens and those of other NATO countries have a moral obligation to demand peace—a just peace, but an urgent one.
Americans’ support for the war has softened somewhat, according to recent Pew polling, with 44% saying the U.S. has a responsibility to aid Ukraine’s defense and 52% saying it doesn’t. Sixty-nine percent, however, still believe the war is “important to U.S. interests.”
They don’t seem to understand the situation in Ukraine, the harm it is causing, the threats it poses to the United States—or the wishes of the Ukrainian people.
What Ukrainians Want
Chances are, most Americans didn’t see last November’s Gallup news report headlined, “Half of Ukrainians Want Quick, Negotiated End to War.” Or the Ukrainian poll which found that only 16% of Ukrainians wanted their country to “continue fighting until it wins the war.” This important information went all but unreported in American media.[1]
Their war-weariness is easy to understand. Ukrainians have already suffered more than 400,000 casualties. Two million Ukrainian residences have been destroyed or damaged, and nearly one-fourth of Ukraine’s population has been displaced, including 15% who have fled their homeland. Nearly 900,000 Ukrainians (the equivalent of 7 or 8 million Americans) are serving in the military.
Ukrainians are reportedly the poorest people in Europe. Today, one-half of Ukraine’s households reportedly live at a basic subsistence level; roughly 1 in 4 must “scrimp” for food. The government’s decimated finances have led to cuts in services, usurious tax hikes, and ever-worsening corruption.
To put it bluntly, they’re living in hell.
The Nuclear Scenario
And speaking of hell: This war also carries the very real risk of the first wartime use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Germany’s new chancellor has confirmed, all NATO countries have lifted their restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles against Russia. That increases the risk of nuclear confrontation, which was already at an unacceptable level.
The New York Times recently published an investigation which revealed that the United States actively planned, armed, and helped carry out direct military actions against the world’s only other nuclear superpower—actions so reckless they even alarmed U.S. intelligence, which sharply raised its assessment of the nuclear threat.[2]
A War That Can’t Be Won
The Times report should have dominated the news cycle and changed the conversation about this war. It should have—but it didn’t. But then, little attention was paid back in November 2022 when Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that the war was essentially unwinnable and that it was time to negotiate.
Journalists and war-promoting politicians have collaborated in downplaying both the horrors of this war and the impossibility of Ukrainian victory. That’s allowed the United States and its Western allies to extend this exercise in futility, while offering false hope to the Ukrainian people and expending their own resources on weapons abroad. It’s time to stop claiming we can help Ukraine fight until it “wins.”
It won’t win—not ever. To believe otherwise is to help NATO countries use Ukrainians as cannon fodder.
That’s not to deny that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war crime. It is, and any decent person should abhor it. But we must also recognize the real-world concerns and provocations that preceded it.[3]
Facing Reality
It was unwise—not to mention criminal—to mark the start of U.S.-Russian negotiations by murdering a top Russian general with a car bomb in a Moscow suburb, an act that appeared to be a deliberate “F— you” to both negotiating parties. Ukraine’s role in that attack—also illegal under international law—was affirmed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s comments afterward.[4]
Graham Allison, professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School, writes:
Rather than attempting to deny brute facts... Zelenskyy should now focus on what he and his brave compatriots have won. They have defeated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to erase their country from the map. Ukraine’s army has fought the second-most powerful military on Earth to a standstill.
Allison writes, “Zelenskyy’s team should make its best efforts to use the few cards that it has left to negotiate an ugly but sustainable peace.”
Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft writes:
Most of the peace plan for Ukraine now sketched out by the Trump administration is not new, is based on common sense, and has indeed already been tacitly accepted by Kyiv.
Lieven adds that, given the details yet to be worked out, “it was unwise and thoughtless of Zelenskyy to declare immediately that ‘there is nothing to talk about here.’”
A Different Future
Ukraine needs and deserves more reassurances than it has been given so far. To be sure, any negotiated outcome will be painful, portending what Allison calls “an ugly but sustainable peace.” But these negotiations are Ukraine’s best hope. They are, in fact, its only hope. The only alternative is an even uglier procession of days, weeks, months, and years containing only death and destruction, with nothing to be gained and no end in sight.
Ukraine can still have a bright future someday, free of war and poverty. One possible future can be glimpsed in Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1989 proposal to the Council of Europe for a “common European home” that “replaces the traditional balance of forces with a balance of interests.”
As long as the war continues, however, Ukraine can’t move forward at all. American citizens and those of other NATO countries have a moral obligation to demand peace—a just peace, but an urgent one. That obligation extends to the many Democrats whose hostility to Donald Trump has deepened a needless partisan divide over this issue.
The United States must lead the West in shifting its focus—and its spending—from war to peace. Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction costs were last estimated at $524 billion over 10 years. It’s time to end the suffering of the Ukrainian people, so they can heal and rebuild.
We must help them in that recovery. But first, all Americans—Democrats as well as Republicans—must call for peace now.
________________________________________________________
[1]. The Gallup poll represented a dramatic change in Ukrainian public opinion: 73% wanted to fight until “victory” in 2022, and 63% the year after. By November 2024, 52% of Ukrainians wanted to end the war. I only found these polls mentioned once in The New York Times’ news section—a reference to Gallup’s poll in the 23rd paragraph of a story headlined, “Ukrainians Fear Peace May Strand Them Forever From Lost Homes.” (It also appeared in an op-ed.)
[2].The New York Times’ investigation of the U.S. military in Ukraine is a must-read. It documents the U.S.’ leadership role in planning, arming, and carrying out direct military actions against the world’s only other nuclear superpower.
“Until that moment,” the Times reports, “U.S. intelligence agencies had estimated the chance of Russia’s using nuclear weapons in Ukraine at 5-10%. Now, they said, if the Russian lines in the south collapsed, the probability was 50%.”
Ukraine is also the home of 15 nuclear reactors housed in four power plants.
[3]. The Geopolitical Economy website has done an excellent job laying out the United States’ shameful role in provoking conflict between Russia and Ukraine. (See, for example, here, here, and here.)
[4]. Zelenskyy celebrated and took credit for the killing, writing on Telegram that a Ukrainian intelligence official had “reported on the liquidation of persons from the top command of the Russian armed forces.”
Zelenskyy added: “Justice inevitably is done... Good results. Thank you for your work.”
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Amnesty International Defiant After Russia Dubs It 'Undesirable Organization'
"We will not give in to the threats and will continue undeterred to work to ensure that people in Russia are able to enjoy their human rights without discrimination."
May 19, 2025
A decade after Amnesty International warned that "Russia is set to bolster an ongoing draconian crackdown which is squeezing the life out of civil society by adopting the 'undesirable organizations' law," Russian authorities on Monday hit the human rights group with that designation.
Amnesty is a longtime Kremlin critic. Shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Febraury 2022, Russia blocked the London-based group's Russian-language website and shut down its Moscow office.
The Russian Prosecutor General's Office on Monday announced Amnesty's new desigantion, claiming that "they justify crimes committed by Ukrainian neo-Nazis, call for an increase in their funding, and insist on Russia's political and economic isolation," as Russia's state-owned news agency TASSsummarized.
"You must be doing something right if the Kremlin bans you."
Responding in a Monday statement, Agnès Callamard, Amnesty's secretary general, said that "this decision is part of the Russian government's broader effort to silence dissent and isolate civil society. In a country where scores of activists and dissidents have been imprisoned, killed, or exiled, where independent media has been smeared, blocked, or forced to self-censor, and where civil society organizations have been outlawed or liquidated, you must be doing something right if the Kremlin bans you."
"The authorities are deeply mistaken if they believe that by labelling our organization 'undesirable' we will stop our work documenting and exposing human rights violations—quite the opposite," she stressed. "We will not give in to the threats and will continue undeterred to work to ensure that people in Russia are able to enjoy their human rights without discrimination. We will keep documenting and speaking worldwide about the war crimes committed in Ukraine by Russia. We will redouble our efforts to expose Russia's egregious human rights violations both at home and abroad."
"We will never stop fighting for the release of prisoners of conscience detained for standing up for human rights or for the repeal of repressive laws that prevent people in Russia from speaking up against injustice," Callamard continued. "We will continue to work relentlessly to ensure that all those who are responsible for committing grave human rights violations, whether in Russia, Ukraine, or elsewhere, face justice. Put simply, no authoritarian assault will silence our fight for justice. Amnesty will never give up or back down in its fight for upholding human rights in Russia and beyond."
According toThe Associated Press:
Russia’s list of "undesirable organizations" currently covers 223 entities, including prominent independent news outlets and rights groups. Among those are prominent news organizations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty or Russian independent outlet Meduza, think tanks like Chatham House, anti-corruption group Transparency International, and Open Russia, an opposition group founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled tycoon who became an opposition figure.
After Open Russia was declared undesirable in 2021 and disbanded to protect its members, its leader, Andrei Pivovarov, was arrested and convicted on charges of carrying out activities of an undesirable organization. He was sentenced to four years in prison and released in 2024 in the largest prisoner exchange with the West since Soviet times.
The move against Amnesty notably comes as U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing for a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine. After speaking with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday, Trump said that the two countries "will immediately start negotiations."
Trump, in his post on Truth Social, highlighted opportunities for the U.S. to trade with both Russia and Ukraine, as well as the newly elected American pope's offer to host the negotiations at the Vatican. The president also said that he called key European leaders following the call with Putin.
Like Putin, Trump has generated concern by cracking down on dissent. As Common Dreamsreported Monday, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University led a letter that the coalition wrote "to sound a collective, unified alarm about the Trump administration's multifront assault on First Amendment freedoms, and to call on leaders of civic and other major institutions—including universities, media organizations, law firms, and businesses—to stand more resolutely in defense of these freedoms that are integral to our democracy."
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Europe’s 21st-Century Goal Should Not Be to Follow the US Path to Global Power
Europe needs to spend more on its welfare states and on making the green transition fast and fair, not boosting its military prowess.
May 02, 2025
Should Europe embark on rearmament? Should it seek to replace the U.S. as a global power? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou takes a stance on these critical issues in an interview with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. He argues that Europe’s priorities should be on the social and ecological dimensions—unless the aim of the continent is to experience in full the militarism, war mongering, and dysfunctional social order that have defined the contemporary United States.
Alexandra Boutri: During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump has shown hostility towards U.S.’ closest allies, even threatened some of them, and is bent on overturning the global order. In the process of doing so, he has weakened the nation’s strengths, making in fact a mockery of U.S. soft power. What is he after?
C. J. Polychroniou: It is not easy to offer a straightforward explanation for Trump’s actions. Doing so would suggest that this unstable wannabe dictator has an overarching global strategy. But nothing could be further from the truth. Trump is neither a thinker nor a strategist. Look at his on-again, off-again tariff policy. It was just a bet that went bad. That said, I also don’t think that he came to office with a strategy to upend the global order. He is not against global capitalism. He is just trying, but failing so far, to force a change in trade terms that would be overwhelmingly favorable to U.S. interests and in the way that international institutions behave. And he must be delusional to think that he runs the world. As we have seen, for instance, scores of countries retaliated against Trump’s tariffs and China forced the U.S. into retreat. Moreover, Trump’s ratings are very low not only in the U.S. but around the globe. Perhaps only in Israel, where a unique form of far-right extremism is prevalent, can Trump claim to be a popular leader. He is extremely unpopular in Europe, “even in countries with a strong far-right voter base,” as Jeremy Shapiro and Zsuzsanna Végh pointed out in a recent commentary in the European Council on Foreign Relations. But you are right in saying that he has already succeeded in making a mockery of U.S. soft power. No one trusts the U.S. anymore. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the world sees Trump as an infantile narcissist, though a very dangerous one. Indeed, why U.S. voters opted to give Trump a second chance is one of the most mind-boggling political phenomena in the modern history of politics. Probably more irrational than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continuing to win elections in Israel.
Do we really want Europe in the 21st century to become yet another global empire?
Alexandra Boutri: One would have expected Europe’s far-right to be fully aligned with Trump and his MAGA movement. But that isn’t the case. Why not?
C. J. Polychroniou: Trumpists in the U.S. and European right-wing extremists do share certain common ideological traits. Both camps are against immigrants, (especially Muslim immigrants) and pro-climate policies and want to rollback LGBTQ+ rights. Nonetheless, there are some striking differences. America’s far-right is animated by white supremacy and anti-governmental extremism. The European far-right, on the other hand, emerged as a major political force only during the time of the euro crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis, both of which erupted in 2011. However, while European far-right parties see the European Union (E.U.) as a bureaucratic monster that undermines the national identity of a member state, they favor a strong national state with welfare benefits and healthcare services, but only for native citizens. Their view of the state has its roots in the history of fascism. Here, the state engages in a comprehensive takeover of economic and social life. A fascist state is an authoritarian state, but not all authoritarianisms are fascist. Of course, in today’s world, the extent to which far-right parties in Europe are committed to a fascist welfare state needs to be questioned as most of them are not simply pro-capital but have embraced the main tenets of neoliberalism. They may be opposing the consequences of neoliberalism but, as odd as this may sound, they do not reject neoliberalism itself.
That said, there are also clear differences among the different European far-right parties. Some of them, like Italy’s far-right party Brothers of Italy, are Euroskeptic rather than anti-E.U. Indeed, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has defended Italy’s fascist past but is a very calculating leader, has shown no interest in undermining the E.U. and has even positioned herself as a mediator between Europe and the United States. Meloni has also sided with Ukraine, is backing NATO, and described Trump’s tariffs as “a mistaken choice.”
Alexandra Boutri: Isn’t the E.U. a bureaucratic monster?
C. J. Polychroniou: There is a lot about the E.U. that deserves harsh criticism. But let’s not forget that some of the E.U.’s shortcomings and failures have been the result of the overwhelming influence exercised in decision-making processes by some powerful member states. Germany has dominated the E.U., and how this came to be the case is too long of a story to cover here. Suffice to say that while Germany may have been a driving force behind European integration, it has also been the principal stumbling block to a fiscal union and to the boosting of the E.U.’s social dimension. In fact, only just recently Germany eased off on its national fiscal rule, the “debt break.” But the irony here is that Germany may not be able to use its new national borrowing space under the E.U. fiscal rules that Germany itself had historically insisted on.
Alexandra Boutri: How likely is it that Europe will be able to replace the U.S. as a global power?
C. J. Polychroniou: It’s not expected to happen in the near future even with Trump’s disruptions of the global economy. A new E.U. needs to be built before Europe can become a global power in the true sense of the word, let alone replace the U.S. as a global hegemon. First, a fiscal union for the euro is a prerequisite for the E.U.’s ability in tackling future challenges and to foster convergence. Second, a standing common E.U. force is needed so Europe can not only defend itself without the U.S. but be a meaningful player in the global chessboard. As far as I can tell, there is no political determination among today’s European leaders for the successful realization of any such project. And I am not sure whether such a project is practical or desirable. The U.S. is a global empire, with some 750 overseas military bases costing $66 billion annually. Do we really want Europe in the 21st century to become yet another global empire? I am not even in support of Europe’s rearmament project, which will cost over 800 billion euros. European leaders really need to have their heads examined if they sincerely believe that their capitals are under threat by Putin’s Russia. This is Cold War mentality 2.0. Europe needs to spend more on its welfare states and make the green transition fast and fair, not boost military spending. Unless, of course, the ultimate goal of the continent is to experience in full the disastrous economic and social order that has taken hold across U.S. society and take pleasure in waging illegal and catastrophic wars.
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