Ukrainians Are in Shock
What other reaction can there be when America turns against its allies, its values, itself?
WHEN I CONSIDER THE PLIGHT of Afghans who worked with U.S. forces in the past, I know in my heart that my country is perfectly capable of abandoning allies. Our bureaucrats and politicians are known to make deadly mistakes and inhuman decisions.
When it comes to the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine, however, the process cannot be attributed to a mistake—it is gleeful and openly malicious, and carries tremendous ramifications for the role of the United States in the world.
JD Vance has already accused Ukrainian-Americans like me of dual loyalty. The vice president seems incapable of understanding why anyone would support Ukraine for reasons other than self-interest, but if Putin had invaded, say, Moldova, instead of my native Ukraine, I would feel exactly the same way about him.
Being loyal to my adopted country apparently means being loyal to Vance himself, and his well-documented isolationism and support for nationalist leaders like Viktor Orbán, who is useful—if not outright friendly—to Vladimir Putin and his goal of weakening and humiliating the United States.
I don’t think Vance—or Trump, for that matter—really understands Putin’s burning hostility toward all Americans, especially American leaders. As I like to point out to fellow Americans, we hardly think about Russia at all, and thus can’t imagine the seething hatred many Russians have for us.
Since Trump and Vance’s disastrous meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, since aid was stopped, and since intelligence sharing has also been paused, I’ve found myself as the designated recipient of the grief of friends and relatives in the country of my birth.
“We have been so grateful for the years of aid,” my late father’s old friend, whom everyone calls Uncle Yurchik, told me, making me flinch as I remembered Vance’s brazen lies about Ukraine’s lack of gratitude. “It feels impossible that a world leader like the U.S. would leave its allies to be torn apart.”
Yurchik and I spent the first weeks of the full-scale invasion on the phone constantly, chatting while he sheltered in a basement with his grandchildren. He had faith then, and he has it today. But few Americans, even sympathetic ones, can understand the truth of what Russia stands for, the truth that Yurchik knows and carries in his body, marked with illness and stress.
“Wherever Russia shows up, destruction and death follow,” Yurchik told me, referencing not only Ukraine, but also Syria, Georgia, West Africa, and other places. For people who haven’t heard Russian planes screaming overhead, perhaps his words ring hollow. It’s one thing to see videos of bombs and sterile explosions on social media or the news. It’s another to hear, on the other end of the line, Yurchik in his basement, and to know that far above, another man in the cockpit of a bomber is trying to kill him.
Russia has designs beyond Ukraine, and America is not exempt from them. If they can’t attack us directly for now, they are sowing discord between us, so that we may do their job for them. Thanks in part to Russian provocation, Americans are more bitterly divided than we’ve been in generations, while the Kremlin’s most provocative yet honest mouthpiece, Dmitry Medvedev, signals Russian designs on Alaska.
My fellow Second Amendment enthusiasts frequently point out that locals alone could defend Alaska quite nicely, but they forget about the long-term damage that disinformation and plain disorientation can have on people. They laugh about how we have superior weapons, not understanding that a weapon that destroys the American mind over time is not so easily overcome—the Orbánism on display in the highest office in the land is proof of that already. This is what Zelensky meant when, during the Oval Office catastrophe, he talked about how the ocean won’t protect us, only to be jeered and dismissed.
Among my friends fighting off Russians on the front lines today, the only response to the Trump administration has been the word “shock.” I’ve heard it over and over again, and while I’m jaded enough to not be shocked myself, I cannot ask them for more at this time. They’ve seen it all by now—rotting bodies in trenches, women and children following brutal rapes, blood on nursery room floors, little old ladies starving in ruined apartment blocks. To see all that and realize that the United States does not have your back any longer—what is there but shock?
Behind the front lines, my old friend, the radical feminist Mariya Dmytreva, a frequent critic of Zelensky, wrote to tell me that she “expected better from Americans, who have been preaching for decades the virtue of democracy and honor.” I couldn’t argue. I couldn’t even object, “Not all Americans!”, not even as a joke—the caveat is too feeble. Abandoning our allies is a blight that mars us all.
American power likes to flex its muscle, and rightly so. As I often tell my friends and neighbors, a world ruled by the likes of China and Russia is not a world that anyone would want to live in.
Yet true strength does not mean stabbing a weaker ally in the back. Strong leaders and strong societies do not revel in the rapes and executions of the vulnerable.
“America First” is our own self-doubt, dressed up as robust, no-nonsense foreign policy. Because only an American who doubts our place in the world would copy and endorse Russian propaganda—as now de-facto president Elon Musk did, for example, when he labeled the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine as Khrushchev’s mistake.
I agree with fellow Americans who say that Europe should start pulling its weight—increased defense spending is crucial. Europe can’t afford to be a museum—and besides, even museums have guards. But with our Orbánist vice president trashing Europe as it aims to step up in Ukraine (because, and I hate that it even needs to be spelled out, Putin is a threat to the continent as a whole), I get the feeling that this won’t be good enough for the current administration, either.
Russia doesn’t have allies. It has nations it dominates and bullies and coerces, and nations it wishes to dominate and bully and coerce. How dissimilar is that foreign policy from America’s now?
Of course, Russia also has a tremendous gap between the rich and poor, and a docile, cowed populace that takes whatever scraps the elite throws its way. And I can’t help but think that this gap looks attractive to our billionaires. We are in a new Gilded Age, albeit a tremendously stupid one.
The Trump administration’s fact-free nihilism is also familiar to anyone who’s observed Putin for more than five minutes. Trump administration’s insistence that Ukraine is somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion—these are the claims of a torturer who wants to break you until you knowingly repeat a lie, and the actions of Russia itself as it insists it attacked Ukraine in self-defense.
“How can a country that was attacked be responsible for starting a war?” Another old friend in Ukraine, Anatoly, asked me after he read Trump’s statements. Like many Ukrainians, Anatoly has spent a large portion of his recent years hiding from missiles and drones instead of enjoying his retirement. He is a Russian speaker who used to have friends in Russia, the kind of person Russians claim they are “protecting” in Ukraine, even as they seek to murder him and his family.
I had no easy answer for Anatoly, besides the fact that this state of unreality is expedient to those who wish to wash their hands of him.
The illusion that it will all be okay should be shelved for now. I love the United States with the entirety of my broken heart—this country welcomed me and saved me long ago, and made me into the person I am today—which is why I refuse to dabble in illusions on its behalf.
I also, however, dabble in hope. A humble hope, and not the pompous kind, because pompousness leads us nowhere. A hope born of many years watching the world fall apart and realign itself around me.
The gears of history are turning and some of us will be ground down, but maybe future generations will build things from our dust.
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