Why is the United States pressuring the nation under attack instead of the one carrying it out?
We already understand the moral logic at stake. When leaders invoke force in other conflicts, they often point to human suffering as justification. If loss of life demands action in one place, it cannot be negotiable in another.
Because this is not a dispute over a “small piece of land.” It is a question of whether force determines ownership.
In the post-WWII order, the world established a basic principle: Borders are not redrawn by brute force.
Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, the devastation is staggering. Roughly 1.8 million soldiers have been killed, wounded, or gone missing. Tens of thousands of civilians are dead, with many more uncounted. More than 6 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more are displaced within it – families fractured, communities hollowed out.
Entire cities have been reduced to rubble. Homes, hospitals, and energy systems have been deliberately targeted, forcing daily life into a relentless cycle of sirens, blackouts, and uncertainty. Nearly one-fifth of the country remains under Russian control.
I have seen this reality firsthand. This is not just war. It is the systematic breaking of a sovereign nation.
Ukrainian maritime drones disabled two Russian oil tankers at the entrance to the Novorossiysk port, as President Zelensky vowed to continue expanding Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities.
In the post-WWII order, the world established a basic principle: Borders are not redrawn by brute force. We do not walk into a neighbor’s home, remove them, and call it a negotiation. We cannot accept wrongdoing just because correcting it is inconvenient.
History warns us where this leads. In 1938, the Munich Agreement allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia in the name of peace. The concession was framed as a pragmatic way to avoid a larger war. Instead, it emboldened further aggression. Within a year, Europe was at war.
And yet, that is exactly what growing pressure on Ukraine risks repeating in a modern form.
If Russia wants what it has taken – or to take even more – then the burden should not fall on Ukraine to surrender.
The people of Ukraine have not stumbled into sovereignty. They voted for it, they have built it, and they are defending it with their blood. To ask them to concede territory without meaningful guarantees is not pragmatism. It is the normalization of conquest.
If Russia wants what it has taken – or to take even more – then the burden should not fall on Ukraine to surrender. The burden should fall on Russia to account for what they want.
Make Russia pay.
Pay for the cities it has destroyed.
Pay for the infrastructure it has targeted.
Pay for the millions it has displaced.
Rebuilding Ukraine alone is now estimated to cost roughly $500 billion or more over the next decade, according to joint assessments by the World Bank, United Nations, and the European Commission. That cost should not be absorbed by the victims or shifted to the global community while the aggressor retains the spoils of war.
If Russia is allowed to take and keep territory by force, this will not end in Ukraine.
History is clear: What is tolerated is repeated.
It teaches the world that military aggression works. It tells authoritarian regimes that borders are negotiable if you are willing to destroy enough lives to change them. It lowers the cost of future invasions – whether in Eastern Europe, the Indo-Pacific, or beyond.
History is clear: What is tolerated is repeated. That which is accepted does not stop; it spreads.
If the international community rewards conquest with concessions, it will not produce peace. It will produce precedent. And precedent is far more dangerous than any single conflict, because it reshapes the rules for all who are watching.
The question, then, is not simply how this war ends. It is what kind of world that ending creates.
In the modern world, you cannot take land by force, destroy a people’s future, and then negotiate from what you managed to keep.
To accept that outcome is not realism. It is a moral and strategic retreat.
The United States has long claimed to stand for a rules-based order where power is constrained by principle and where smaller nations are not left to the mercy of larger ones. That claim is now being tested in multiple arenas around the world.
Peace matters. But the terms of peace matter more.
A settlement that ignores justice, rewards aggression, and pressures the victim to concede what was taken by force is not a durable peace. It is an invitation for totalitarian regimes to try again.
We should not normalize that.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
