Ukraine’s inspiring democratic resilience; The Washington Post, November 28, 2025

Editorial Board, The Washington Post; Ukraine’s inspiring democratic resilience

"Democracy and martial law make strange bedfellows. In Russia, where President Vladimir Putin’s hierarchical power is never contested, authoritarianism is entrenched. Repressive measures imposed for the sake of the war are unlikely to ever be lifted.

In Ukraine, however, the democratic spirit never bridled under wartime restrictions. Most Ukrainians understand that emergency measures have been necessary but remain skeptical of permanent centralized rule.

Isolationists in Washington may try to use Yermak’s resignation as an excuse to ditch Ukraine, citing it as evidence of endemic corruption. In truth, his ouster is evidence of resiliency and maturity that should hearten the Trump administration. Friday’s news shows Zelensky’s willingness to sideline even his closest aide to do what’s best for his country in its fight for national survival."

Trump’s Neville Chamberlain Prize; The New York Times, November 22, 2025

Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times; Trump’s Neville Chamberlain Prize

[Kip Currier: Thomas Friedman speaks out persuasively for Ukraine and its brave people, at a time when so many in positions of leadership and political influence are disgracefully silent.

Ukraine is the U.S.'s ally. Ukraine's people are fighting to uphold its democracy and freedoms.

And yet Trump again and again sides with Russia and its tyrannical autocrat Vladimir Putin against Ukraine and its stalwart leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Who in the U.S. Congress will stand up for and beside Ukraine when courage and moral clarity are needed most?]

[Excerpt]

"Finally, finally, President Trump just might get a peace prize that would secure his place in history. Unfortunately, though, it is not that Nobel peace prize he so covets. It is the “Neville Chamberlain Peace Prize” — awarded by history to the leader of the country that most flagrantly sells out its allies and its values to an aggressive dictator.

This prize richly deserves to be shared by Trump’s many “secretaries of state” — Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio and Dan Driscoll — who together negotiated the surrender of Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s demands without consulting Ukraine or our European allies in advance — and then told Ukraine it had to accept the plan by Thanksgiving.

That is this coming Thursday.

If Ukraine is, indeed, forced to surrender to the specific terms of this “deal” by then, Thanksgiving will no longer be an American holiday. It will become a Russian holiday. It will become a day of thanks that victory in Putin’s savage and misbegotten war against Ukraine’s people, which has been an utter failure — morally, militarily, diplomatically and economically — was delivered to Russia not by the superiority of its arms or the virtue of its claims, but by an American administration.

How do you say “Thanksgiving” in Russian?

To all the gentlemen who delivered this turkey to Moscow, I can offer only one piece of advice: Be under no illusions. Neither Fox News nor the White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt will be writing the history of this deal. If you force it upon Ukraine as it is, every one of your names will live in infamy alongside that of Chamberlain, who is remembered today for only one thing:

He was the British prime minister who advocated the policy of appeasement, which aimed to avoid war with Adolf Hitler’s Germany by giving in to his demands. This was concretized in the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain, along with others in Europe, allowed Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain boasted it would secure “peace for our time.” A year later, Poland was invaded, starting World War II and leading to Chamberlain’s resignation — and his everlasting shame...

Trump, facing blowback from allies, Congress and Ukraine, said Saturday that this was not his “final offer” but added, if Zelensky refuses to accept the terms, “then he can continue to fight his little heart out.” As always with Trump, he is all over the place — and as always, ready to stick it to Zelensky, the guy fighting for his country’s freedom, and never to Putin, the guy trying to take Ukraine’s freedom away.

What would an acceptable dirty deal look like?

It would freeze the forces in place, but never formally cede any seized Ukrainian territory. It would insist that European security forces, backed by U.S. logistics, be stationed along the cease-fire line as a symbolic tripwire against any Russian re-invasion. It would require Russia to pay a significant amount of money to cover all the carnage it has inflicted on Ukraine — and keep Moscow isolated and under sanctions until it does — and include a commitment by the European Union to admit Ukraine as a member as soon as it is ready, without Russian interference.

This last point is vital. It is so the Russian people would have to forever look at their Ukrainian Slavic brothers and sisters in the thriving European Union, while they are stuck in Putin’s kleptocracy. That contrast is Putin’s best punishment for this war and the thing that would cause him the most trouble after it is over.

This would be a dirty deal that history would praise Trump for — getting the best out of a less than perfect hand, by using U.S. leverage on both sides, as he did in Gaza.

But just using U.S. leverage on Ukraine is a filthy deal — folding our imperfect hand to a Russian leader who is playing a terrible one.

There is a term for that in poker: sucker."

The Guardian view on the Alaska summit: there must be no more gifts to Vladimir Putin, Editorial; The Guardian, August 17, 2025

Editorial; The Guardian view on the Alaska summit: there must be no more gifts to Vladimir Putin

"Ukraine must remain in control of the future of its own territory, and the use of force must not be rewarded by the summary redrawing of borders. With enormous bravery and skill, and at immense cost, Ukraine has resisted an illegal invasion for more than three years. There must be no sellout."

Resignation and betrayal: What handing Donbas to Putin would mean for Ukraine; BBC, August 17, 2025

Joel Gunter, BBC ; Resignation and betrayal: What handing Donbas to Putin would mean for Ukraine

"For Ukrainians, polling shows security guarantees are an absolutely vital part of any potential agreement on territory or anything else.

"People in Ukraine will accept various forms of security guarantees," said Anton Grushchetsky, the director of Kyiv's International Institute for Sociology, "but they require them."

For Yevhen Tkachov, the emergency worker in Kramatorsk, exchange of territory could only be considered with "real guarantees, not just written promises".

"Only then, more or less, I am in favour of giving Donbas to Russia," he said. "If the British Royal Navy is stationed in the port of Odesa, then I agree."

As various paths to peace are floated and discussed, sometimes in the deal-making style preferred by President Trump, there is a risk of losing sight of the real people involved – people who have already lived through a decade of war and who may stand to lose even more now in exchange for peace.

Donbas was a place full of Ukrainians from all different walks of life, said Vitalii Dribnytsia, a Ukrainian historian. "We are not just talking about culture, about politics, about demographics, we are talking about people," he said.

Donetsk might not have the cultural reputation of somewhere like Odesa, Mr Drinytsia said. But it was Ukraine. "And any corner of Ukraine, regardless of whether it has some great cultural significance or not, is Ukraine," he said."

Trump’s Shameful “Summit” Was Even Worse Than We Thought; The Bulwark, August 16, 2025

 TIM MILLER , The Bulwark; Trump’s Shameful “Summit” Was Even Worse Than We Thought

"Tim Miller takes on how the Trump-Putin Alaska summit went from what seemed to be an empty nothing-burger to a grotesque betrayal as it’s now being reported Trump pushed Putin’s demands onto Zelenskyy that Ukraine give up Donetsk and Luhansk."

Ukraine has exposed Trump’s true identity: as a vandal, an autocrat, a gangster and a fool; The Guardian, April 25, 2025

 Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian; Ukraine has exposed Trump’s true identity: as a vandal, an autocrat, a gangster and a fool

"Whether Trump succeeds in making Kyiv buckle or not, the new reality is clear. The US president is taking an axe to an international order constructed in the aftermath of a bloody world war, a system that has held, however imperfectly, since 1945. A central tenet of that order was that big states could not simply swallow up smaller ones, that unprovoked aggression and conquest would no longer be allowed to stand. Yet here is Trump bent on rewarding just such an act of conquest, not simply acquiescing in Putin’s land grab in Ukraine but conferring on it the legitimacy of approval by the world’s most powerful nation.

Note how he speaks as if Putin had every right to seize the territory of his neighbour. Asked this week what concessions, if any, he had extracted from Moscow, Trump replied that Putin’s willingness to stop the war, rather than gobbling up Ukraine in its entirety, was a “pretty big concession”.

This is not only a disaster for Ukraine, though it is obviously that. It is also the destruction of global architecture that has stood for many decades – and it is hardly a lone case. Trump’s tariff fetish is similarly upending a system of international trade that had made the world, and especially the US, more prosperous. The consequences are already visible, in plunging global stock markets, gloomy growth forecasts and warnings of a recession that will start in the US and then spread everywhere else.

Trump’s eagerness to acquiesce in Putin’s seizure of Ukraine makes a dead letter of international law, with its prohibition of the crime of aggression, and that too points to a wider pattern. For Trump is at war with the law at home as well as abroad. Indeed, in three short months, it has become an open question whether the rule of law still operates in the US...

There is no mystery to Trump. It’s all plain to see – the habits of the vandal, the autocrat, the gangster and the fool – with Ukraine as clear a guide as any. Not that that is any comfort to the people of that besieged land. They don’t want to be a cautionary tale, a demonstration case of the fecklessness and menace of Donald Trump. They want to be a free, independent nation. Their great misfortune is that the mighty country that should be their most powerful friend is now in the hands of an enemy."

How criticism of Zelensky's clothing made it to the Oval Office; BBC, March 1, 2025

Mike Wendling, BBC; How criticism of Zelensky's clothing made it to the Oval Office

"When the meeting was opened up to questions from reporters, one came from Brian Glenn, chief White House correspondent for conservative cable network Real America's Voice.

"Why don't you wear a suit?" Glenn asked. "You're at the highest level in this country's office, and you refuse to wear a suit.

"Do you own a suit?" he continued. "A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office."

The aggressive questioning marked the moment when the Ukrainian president – who until then seemed to be having a diplomatic, even friendly, conversation with Trump – first appeared tired and irritated.

"I will wear costume after this war will finish," Zelensky replied. (The word "suit" can be translated into Ukrainian as "kostyum".)"

The weekend the "Free World" died; The Ink, March 2, 2025

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The Ink; ESSAY: The weekend the "Free World" died

In the Oval Office fiasco, a country revealed

"Early in the afternoon on Friday, the president and the vice president of the United States delivered a contemptuous scolding to the wartime leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. The country of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” and “We choose to go to the moon” and “rendezvous with destiny” had become the country of “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.” It was a shocking, abusive scene, unlike any foreign policy chroniclers could recall. By Sunday, the British prime minister had declared that “we are at a crossroads in history,” and European countries were talking about a coalition of the willing to defend Ukraine. It was the weekend the notion of the “free world” died...

Toward the end of the meeting, Trump commented that the awful scene he had participated in would make great television. Here was the triumph of the spirit of attention-seeking at any cost, the spirit in which there are no values worth defending if they do not carry the possibility of making people watch you. Everyone is an influencer now; everyone covets followers more than friends. Trump trash-talked an erstwhile American ally because he knew it would do numbers with his followers.

In recent weeks, I have wondered why the leaders of other countries have not been brave in calling out the situation in the United States, in naming this fascist threat from within. The obvious answer is American power and leverage. It can be expensive to speak truth to superpower, as Zelensky will surely be learning in coming days.

But after the meltdown in the Oval Office on Friday, I began to wonder if another reason is involved. Maybe those leaders, like much of the world, do not look at America right now and see a country being hijacked by this dangerous leader. Maybe much of the world looks at a country that, in its bones, has fundamentally changed. Has lost that other spirit. Lost the sunniness, the hopefulness, the decency, the will to sacrifice, the idealism, the confidence, the hope.

What will stop Trump? everyone is asking all day long. Maybe an actual and effective form of resistance will involve more than the thwarting of a leader. It will be a cultural project up and down American life. To resist the meanness and smallness and cruelty and cynicism and solipsism. To insist, by showing, that what he is is not who we are."

World leaders back Zelenskyy following Trump, Vance Oval Office spat; Fox News, February 28, 2025

Caitlin McFall, Fox News; World leaders back Zelenskyy following Trump, Vance Oval Office spat

"European leaders came out with sweeping support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following the explosive Oval Office meeting in which President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance gave harsh reprimands and accused him of being "disrespectful."

Several leaders took to social media to back Ukraine and to remind Washington that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the Russia-Ukraine conflict's "aggressor," not Zelenskyy."

Trump Thinks He Humiliated Zelensky. He Really Humiliated the United States; The Daily Beast, March 1, 2025

David Rothkopf, The Daily Beast; Trump Thinks He Humiliated Zelensky. He Really Humiliated the United States

"The Trump-Putin Axis came fully out of the closet today. 

The new U.S. administration has clearly embraced what might be called a “mob boss” foreign policy—because of the criminal pasts of the men who are leading it and because of the tactics they appear to favor.

In an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump and his dangerously ill-informed yes-man, JD Vance, the U.S. president pressed for a deal to squeeze mineral assets out of Ukraine in exchange for some ill-defined level of continued support for that country that could only be described as extortionate...

It was an ugly display of foreign policy crudeness, the likes of which we have never seen in the White House. It is tempting to call it inept. But it was not. It achieved precisely the goal that Putin and Trump had long sought, to produce a public break between the United States and Ukraine that would directly and meaningfully support Russia’s illegal, brutal conquest of its neighbor.

Trump and Vance, however, were rebuffed by Zelensky in important ways. When the Americans sought to perpetuate lies that have been a staple of Kremlin propaganda and Trump campaign speeches, Zelensky stood up to them. He refuted the idea that Ukraine provoked Russia’s invasion.

Trump has made it clear that he would stop U.S. support for Ukraine and that he was sympathetic to Putin, a man who has sought both to deny Ukraine’s right to exist and to wipe the country from the map.

Unsurprisingly, Zelensky was not cowed by the two-bit goons who confronted him...

It is surely one of the darkest days in the history of American foreign policy...

But for all the embarrassment we feel at our president, we should not lose sight of the hugely embarrassing and damaging performance of JD Vance. Vance, like Trump, had virtually every fact wrong. Furthermore, he was completely out of line addressing a foreign head of state as he did, especially one who is one of the genuinely great heroes of our era and who has been fighting courageously not just on behalf of his own people, but in defense of the ideals and interests of the U.S. and our long-time European allies."

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy says US businesses should pull out of Russia, calls for more aid; USA Today, March 16, 2022

Joey GarrisonCelina TeborLedyard KingJohn BaconRick RouanMatthew Brown, USA Today; Ukrainian President Zelenskyy says US businesses should pull out of Russia, calls for more aid

""Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace," he Zelenskyy said in remarks livestreamed at the U.S. Capitol. He added, “I call on you to do more."