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PERSPECTIVE -
Why abandoning Kyiv would betray the very revolution that birthed us.
The first thing Ken Burns’ The American Revolution makes unmistakably clear is how close we came to losing everything. The second is how impossible it would have been to win without France. The Continental Army bled in the mud, starved in winter camps, and suffered humiliating defeats. Yet the patriots refused to break. Their grievances were too many, their hunger for liberty too fierce, their knowledge of tyranny too intimate. Even had the field armies been destroyed, a guerrilla war would have dragged on for years. Freedom is a stubborn thing.
The same is true in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s invasion has not cowed Ukrainians; it has clarified them. No peace plan that surrenders their people, land, or children will ever be accepted. They will fight on—as long as it takes—just as we once did.
And here is the central historical parallel too often ignored: France did not simply assist the young United States, it made our independence possible. Our revolution survived because another nation recognized that our struggle was not a regional dispute but a universal test of human liberty. That alliance was born of geopolitical clarity and moral principle: a free people battling imperial domination deserved the means to endure.
Today we stand where France once stood. Ukraine stands where we once stood. And we owe to Ukraine what France owed to us: the resources, solidarity, and resolve that turn a doomed rebellion into a durable freedom.
Instead, the Trump administration now proposes a settlement that reads less like a peace plan and more like a capitulation document drafted in Moscow’s vestibule. Trump's 28-point proposal demands that Ukraine surrender additional territory, forswear NATO membership permanently, cap its military at 600,000 troops, and accept a demilitarized buffer zone inside its own borders, territory internationally recognized as Ukrainian but effectively handed to Russia.
The plan even grants blanket amnesty for all wartime actions, meaning Russian officials and soldiers could not be prosecuted for mass deportations, torture chambers, Bucha-style executions, or the systematic kidnapping of Ukrainian children. It invites Russia back into the G8, lifts sanctions, and promises long-term U.S.–Russia cooperation in strategic sectors like AI and Arctic mining. It allows Russia to retain Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk outright. It creates a buffer zone in Donetsk from which Ukrainian forces must withdraw unilaterally, while Russian forces merely “agree” not to advance. As Zelensky asked, “What will restrain Russia from advancing? Or from infiltrating disguised as civilians?”
Nothing in recent history suggests they would restrain themselves at all.
Zelensky has acknowledged the pressure. He has noted that an American-devised “special economic zone” in eastern Donetsk could become a Trojan horse for Russian infiltration. He has opened the door to a referendum, because Ukrainians—not foreign diplomats—should decide the fate of their own land. Of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, he has said that any “shared control” with the United States is meaningless if Russia refuses to relinquish its illegal occupation. And despite America’s push for a “quicker conclusion,” he insists no deadline will be forced upon a nation fighting nightly under missile barrages.
Trump appears increasingly impatient with the complexities of the war. Impatience, however, is not strategy. And substituting Ukraine’s sovereignty for the illusion of stability is not peace, it is appeasement.
Russia, meanwhile, has violated nearly every pillar of international law:
- It launched a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime” under the UN Charter.
- It has targeted civilians in cities far from military objectives, violating the Geneva Conventions.
- It has executed prisoners of war and deported children—acts defined as war crimes.
- It has used starvation, infrastructure destruction, and terror against civilian populations.
- It has attempted illegal annexations of internationally recognized Ukrainian territory.
To reward these acts with land, legitimacy, or leniency is to dismantle the very legal order the United States helped build after 1945.
Patrick Henry’s warning from 1775 carries a relevance sharper than ever: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Ukrainians have answered that question with their bodies. They are not asking us to fight. They are asking us not to abandon them.
The geopolitical stakes differ. The nations, weapons, and battlefields differ. But the core principles have not changed: human beings possess the inherent right to live free, to defend their homes, and to determine their political future. Until Ukraine’s rights are secured, defended, not bartered, there will be no real peace.
We, of all nations, should understand that. Our own story began with a people who refused to yield, who endured against odds that seemed hopeless, who kept faith long enough for France to enter the war and tip the balance. The world doubted them. They did not doubt themselves.
The question before us is the same one faced by the French court in 1777: Will we stand with a democracy fighting for its life, or will we watch from a safe distance while an empire crushes a people who only want what we once demanded for ourselves?
History is watching. And so is Ukraine.
(George Cassidy Payne is a freelance journalist, poet, and crisis counselor whose writing explores the fault lines between politics, history, and moral responsibility.)
