I
Each day brings forth some new enormity perpetrated by the Russian military against the people of Ukraine, as it has for three long years now. In recent weeks we have seen Russian ballistic missiles rain down on Odesa’s historic city center, severely damaging the Bristol Hotel on Italiiska Street, the Odesa Philharmonic Theater, several museums, a children’s outpatient facility, and a daycare center. A Russian drone smashed into a thermal power plant in Mykolaiv, and another one into the protective shell covering the radioactive remains of Chornobyl’s reactor No. 4, precisely the kind of insane aggression on the part of the Kremlin that we have come to expect by now. Cruise and ballistic missiles, aerial bombs, and Shahed drones have flattened residential buildings in Poltava, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, while in Kherson a bomb strike destroyed a high-rise apartment building, grievously injuring a pair of fourteen-year-old twins. Their mother was found dead in the rubble later that day. More villages, towns, and cities in Donetsk have been wiped off the face of the earth, more civilians killed, displaced, or left without heat in the dead of winter, more Ukrainian prisoners of war executed in cold blood, more priceless heritage reduced to calcined wreckage, more fields and rivers poisoned, and all of it in plain sight.
The hostilities continue in the information space as well, in social media, on the airwaves, and in print, even as American and Russian envoys lay the groundwork for a ceasefire (lasting or otherwise), and ultimately a peace deal (just or otherwise). For Russia’s representatives, this means more opportunities for their trademark mendacity. On the second day of the war, as street fighting raged in the suburbs of Kyiv and Russian cruise missiles slammed into civilian infrastructure, the supremely loathsome Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov swore that “nobody is going to attack the people of Ukraine,” and that there would be “no strikes on civilian infrastructure,” later even preposterously insisting that “we didn’t attack Ukraine in the first place.” The gaslighting continues three years on. In response to a U.S.-proposed moratorium on tit-for-tat attacks targeting Russian and Ukrainian energy infrastructure, Lavrov stayed true to form, asserting that Russia has “never endangered the [Ukrainian] civilian energy supply systems.” Such is the nature of our new negotiating partner. (RELATED: Trump, Zelenskyy, and Ukraine: A Tale of Frustration)
Now I suppose there are people who believe this kind of nonsense. There are, after all, those who believe that Ukraine “provoked” this war merely by existing. There are those who believe, notwithstanding the work of American inspector generals on the ground, that half the arms being shipped to Ukraine are being sold off to the Mexican cartels, who we can expect any minute now to arrive at the border with M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, M142 HIMARS rocket launchers, and F-16 Fighting Falcons in tow. There are those who have hallucinated the existence of secret bio-labs hidden away in the Ukrainian hinterland, where passerine birds are weaponized with Slav-targeting viruses. There are even those who warn of a sinister cabal of demon-possessed Zionist-Fascist Khazarian mafiosos, possibly operating in league with the Rothschilds, who manipulate the levers of the Ukrainian state while conducting experiments involving human DNA manipulation, slaking their thirst on Russian blood, and working to establish a Heavenly Jerusalem in the former Khazar homeland.
Every so often a new form of vilification is churned up from the miasmic depths of the information ecosystem. It is apparently now in vogue to fulminate against Ukraine’s alleged descent into dictatorship, on account of the postponement of the 2024 Ukrainian presidential elections. Back in the summer of 2024, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mockingly remarked that “democracy in Ukraine seems to be suspended by the world’s foremost democracy advocate himself — Field Marshal Zelensky,” a criticism that has worked its way up to the Oval Office, with President Trump and Elon Musk now referring to the Ukrainian president as “a dictator without elections.” It is a curious sort of dictatorship that has shed such copious blood in the cause of freedom, democracy, and a Western orientation, that maintains a flourishing civil society, and that has elected six different presidents since achieving independence, in stark contrast to the Putin and Lukashenko regimes with their torture chambers and assassinated opposition leaders and habitually fraudulent elections.
II
The idée fixe that Ukraine must hold elections immediately is a hard one to fathom. As Ukrainian officials have repeatedly pointed out, the postponement of parliamentary and presidential elections is a matter of constitutional law, pursuant to Article 19 of Ukraine’s legislation “On the Legal Regime of Martial Law” and Article 83 of the Ukrainian Constitution, which provides for an automatic extension of the term of the Verkhovna Rada until a new Rada can be seated upon the termination of martial law. Other practical issues abound. Terminating martial law in order to hold the elections would be highly destabilizing, and even if elections were to be held, it would be impossible to ensure safe and fair access to polling places with the entirety of the country subject to constant aerial bombardment. The Lviv-based journalists, Lee Reaney and Joel Wasserman, have noted that
Ukraine has a system of robust procedures to ensure the integrity of the voting process. All ballot boxes must be visible by observers and members of the precinct electoral committee at all times so that no stuffing of ballots or other malfeasance can take place. Similarly, the counting of ballots must occur in a single sitting in sight of all observers and committee members. How can constant oversight of ballots, voter lists, and other important documents be maintained as everyone shuffles off to the bomb shelter? How can security be maintained when everybody in the voting hall and lined up outside needs to crowd into the limited shelter space?
What is more, “Ukraine also has no system for absentee voting. Ukraine’s entire voting system relies on in-person ballot casting, even for people who are hospitalized (there are polling stations inside hospitals) or who are bedridden (polling workers bring ballots and a ballot box directly to the doors of those who cannot leave home). There is no current or planned capacity to organize large-scale mail-in or drop-off balloting in Ukraine.”
And that is not all. Some 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced, eight million of whom have gone abroad, and Ukrainian embassies and consulates lack the capacity to process the votes of so many refugees. Ukraine’s State Voter Registry is out of date. It is unclear how electoral districts would be drawn. A few days ago, Ukrainian forces recaptured the frontline town of Pischane, located southwest of the beleaguered city of Pokrovsk. How are elections supposed to proceed in Pischane, or in other electoral districts located in the partially-occupied regions? How can a parliament be formed when millions of Ukraine’s best and brightest are fighting at the front, or volunteering at the home front, or busy contributing to the war-time economy? Or is Ukraine meant only to hold a presidential election? All of the prospective candidates other than Volodymyr Zelensky — Petro Poroshenko, Yulia Tymoshenko, or potentially the popular former general Valerii Zaluzhnyi — have come out in favor of the ongoing term prolongation, and polls have indicated that roughly four-fifths of the Ukrainian population are opposed to general elections until the war is over.
This is hardly without precedent. The United Kingdom, as is well known, held a general election in December of 1910, and would not hold another one until December 14, 1918. And, it held a general election on November 14, 1935, with the next one taking place on July 5, 1945. The Prolongation of Parliament Acts of 1940 and 1944 did not just stop general elections during wartime, but local elections as well, while the main parties struck a bargain not to contest any bye-elections that might otherwise have taken place. Yet it would have been inconceivable, outside of Nazi propaganda, for Winston Churchill to have been cast as a dictator simply because the hustings were postponed due to a state of emergency prompted by total war.
The current administration seems to think that the fact that the United States managed to hold elections in 1864 and 1944 is relevant to Ukraine’s particular situation. One suspects that if the Confederacy had already occupied Indiana and Ohio, and Confederate armies were pressing into Pennsylvania, and cities like Washington, D.C., Boston, and Philadelphia were under regular bombardment by Confederate artillery or gunboats, the 1864 elections might have been handled rather differently, just as the 1944 elections might very well have been affected somewhat had the United States been in the process of being dismembered The Man in the High Castle-style at the time. Conservative commentators have blithely brushed off objections to immediate war-time elections based on Ukraine’s lack of territorial integrity, with one arguing that after all “There were no votes counted from Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea in 2019 when Zelensky was first elected.” Actually, there were plenty of votes counted from the unoccupied portions of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, but we needn’t quibble. The important point is that policymakers and pundits should really be able to distinguish between differing circumstances across space and time. Just as Ukraine is not in the position of America in 1944, it is not even in the position of Ukraine in 2019, a year in which the war in the Donbas region had wound down almost completely, with the OSCE Mission in Ukraine reporting only 19 civilian deaths and 128 injuries over the course of 2019 (many due to landmines, not active fighting), the lowest numbers since the conflict began in 2014. Holding a national election was a relatively straightforward matter in 2019, even if the Verkhovna Rada perforce had 27 vacant seats due to the occupied status of communities in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. Holding one in the fraught early months of 2025 is not nearly so simple.
III
In his confirmation hearing, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that when it comes to the Russia–Ukraine War, “We know who the aggressor is. We know who the good guy is. We’d like to see it as advantageous for the Ukrainians as possible, but that war needs to come to an end.” It is not entirely clear, given the events of recent days, that the Trump administration regards Ukraine as “the good guy.” Its democratically-elected president has been labeled a dictator with a 4 percent approval rating (only 50 points or so off) who was “sleeping and unavailable to meet” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (despite photographic evidence to the contrary). Its government has been presented with an American demand to sign a deal to hand over half the country’s revenue from natural resources, Black Sea ports, and infrastructure on an indefinite basis, while it is still unclear what Kyiv would receive in return for surrendering the birthright of its people in perpetuity. As the New York Post editorial board observed, “That would quickly add up to countless billions more than we’ve given Ukraine; it’s a demand that a victor might make of a country that started and lost a war, to teach a lesson. Indeed, as a share of GDP, it looks to be harsher than what the victorious allies imposed on Germany in the Peace of Versailles after World War I … To squeeze the war-crippled country for all we can, simply because we can, would be despicable.” A shake-down like this can possibly be justified in the short-term purely as a cynical exercise in machtpolitik, but it presages the definitive end of America’s longtime role as the leader of the free world, the vanguard of democracy, and the sole guarantor of international peace and security. It is all fun and games when the U.S. government is cutting funding for, say, promoting atheism in Nepal; it is another thing altogether when a U.S.-led international order is precipitously consigned to the dustbin of history. (A revised mineral deal is apparently in the offing, one far less rapacious, it is said, which suggests that the Ukrainian government did the right thing by pushing back against the initial deal, accusations of lèse-majesté notwithstanding.)
There is a school of thought that suggests that all of this is an instance of elaborate geopolitical kabuki theater. Boris Johnson has wondered aloud:
When are we Europeans going to stop being scandalised about Donald Trump and start helping him to end this war? Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor. Of course a country undergoing a violent invasion should not be staging elections. There was no general election in the U.K. from 1935 to 1945. Of course Zelenskyy’s ratings are not 4 percent. They are actually about the same as Trump’s. Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.
Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, has described Trump’s negotiating technique in Soviet military terms, as “reconnaissance through battle,” in which “you push and you see what happens, and then you change your position, legitimate tactics.” So maybe this is all kayfabe, a way to convince the Europeans to stand on their own two feet while luring the Russians to the negotiating table, only to flip the script and in the end craft a deal that is truly “as advantageous for the Ukrainians as possible.” The 4-D chess theory must perforce remain a hypothesis until Russo–American consultations have properly unfolded.
The Russians do not appear to be seeing it this way, demanding as they are further territorial concessions from Ukraine, the likes of which they have not been able to achieve on the battlefield, including broad swathes of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts that remain firmly under Ukrainian control. With Russia increasingly suffering manpower and matériel shortages, and now deploying donkeys in support of military logistics, one can imagine that the Kremlin is champing at the bit to gain at the negotiating table what they cannot in the trenches and plains of northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine, and absent the threat of redoubled support for Ukraine, crippling sanctions against the tottering Russian economy, or some other form of intervention, it is understandable that Russian negotiators like the horse-faced Lavrov are feeling their oats.
While we can stipulate that is still far too early to predict the outcome of the negotiations, it is difficult to ignore Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s prediction that “should this conflict come to an acceptable end,” there will be “incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically on issues of common interest and frankly, economically on issues that hopefully will be good for the world and also improve our relations in the long term.” Is this mere flattery, or a genuine attempt to woo the Kremlin away from Beijing? The United States is presently waffling over whether to co-sponsor a U.N. resolution that would mark the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reaffirm the international community’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and denounce Moscow’s aggression, and is also hesitating over a G7 statement that would refer to Russia as the “aggressor” in the conflict. And here I was under the impression that “we know who the aggressor is.” Is it time once again to gaze into Putin’s dead, beady little eyes and get a sense of his eminently trustworthy soul? Is it time to break out the infamous Clintonian reset button and start furiously clicking? Perhaps there are wheels within wheels at work, but one can hardly blame Ukrainians for their increasingly frayed nerves.
For all that, it remains the case, as Representative Brian Fitzpatrick assures us, that “There is an outcome-determinative number of Members of the United States Congress, from both parties and in both Chambers, who are ready, willing, and able to do whatever it takes to prevent Communist Dictator Vladimir Putin from being rewarded for his illegal invasion, raping, kidnapping, torturing and murdering of the Ukrainian people, including so many women and children. We will use every lever and every vote at our disposal, regardless of the personal or political consequences. This matter is that time-sensitive and it is that existential. It is legacy-defining,” adding that
We all want an immediate end to this brutal Russian invasion and killing. For a peace agreement to be fair and lasting, it must be done in a way that holds the Russian invaders accountable, protects the dignity of the Ukrainian victims, and provides for fair and equitable cost-sharing amongst all European nations. To do otherwise would be to encourage future invasions and to perpetuate future heartache and bloodshed. This is about Peace Through Strength. This is about Patriotic Common Sense. And Patriotic Common Sense is what America must always stand for.
Fitzpatrick’s fellow Republican, Representative Mike Lawler, has similarly demanded that “any deal towards peace must include Ukraine at the negotiating table, must protect its structural sovereignty and that of its neighbors … The outcome in Ukraine will have long-lasting consequences. We must beat back the unholy alliance that has caused death and destruction around the globe.” Any number of senators (including John Kennedy, Roger Wicker, John Thune, Kevin Cramer, John Curtis, Thom Tillis, and others on both sides of the aisle) have likewise reaffirmed their commitment to Ukrainian independence and their belief in the responsibility of the Putin regime for the conflict.
Peace Through Strength may manifest itself over the course of the negotiations; it is not much in evidence at the outset, unless we consider flexing on the Ukrainian people the appropriate use of American power and influence. Vice President JD Vance professes America has all the leverage needed to achieve a just settlement. We eagerly await the use of that leverage on the Kremlin. But if the Trump administration genuinely thinks it can find “incredible opportunities … to partner with the Russians” on geopolitical and economic issues, it will quickly be disabused of that notion, as every American administration invariably has been over the decades of Putin’s (genuinely dictatorial) reign.
IV
It was last Nov. 16 that my family and I made our way to a candlelight vigil held in remembrance of the millions of people killed during the 1932-3 Holodomor terror famine, organized by our local Ukrainian cultural association. As darkness descended like a pall and blasts of biting wind frequently snuffed out the flickering candle flames, a priest of the Byzantine Catholic Church recited the Panakhyda memorial service on behalf of the countless dead. Then a rabbi intoned the words of the Av Harachamim, in honor of the fallen “who were swifter than eagles and fiercer than lions,” before calling upon the “merciful Father, who dwells in the supernal heights,” who “will judge among the nations, full of corpses, His head bowed across the great land.”
Thoughts of nations full of corpses, and the Holodomor with its millions of victims, naturally led to thoughts of Walter Duranty, the drug-addicted, possibly necrophiliac New York Times correspondent-turned-propagandist who garnered a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, if it can really be called that, on the Soviet Union. Duranty notoriously called the “famine” — his scare quotes — “mostly bunk,” and maintained that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” In private, he admitted that as many as 10 million souls had perished as a direct or indirect consequence of Soviet agrarian policy. Malcolm Muggeridge called Duranty “the greatest liar I ever knew,” and Robert Conquest, in his 1986 study The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, described how
The Nation, in citing the New York Times and Walter Duranty in its annual “honour roll”, described his as “the most enlightening, dispassionate and readable despatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world.” At a banquet at the Waldorf Astoria to celebrate the recognition of the USSR by the United States, a list of names was read, each politely applauded by the guests until Walter Duranty’s was reached; then, Alexander Woollcott wrote in the New Yorker, “the one really prolonged pandemonium was evoked … Indeed, one got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty.” Well, a spasm anyway.
When I was still cutting my eye-teeth in the world of foreign affairs, the Duranty affair was considered the original sin of American leftwing journalism. That publications like the New York Times, Nation, and the New Yorker would lavish such praise on a Soviet genocide apologist remained scandalous decades after the fact.
Nowadays, as Russia is once again inflicting untold destruction upon its neighbor, Ukrainians still find themselves the subject of calumny, derogation, and vilification, this time all too often coming from the right, which was once far more receptive across the board to the plight of captive nations. Sometimes the criticism is ludicrous — that the war itself is fake, that Ukraine is full of bio-labs and Nazi cannibals armed with PSI generators and all that sort of thing. Sometimes it is merely cynical — Ukraine brought the war on itself, Ukraine sells its much-need weapons to the cartels, President Zelenskyy is a dictator, and so on. Perhaps it stems from some sort of rapid-onset socially contagious empathy deficit disorder. Just as leftists in the 1930s reckoned that the famine was “bunk” and that Ukrainian farms were doing just fine, now all too many on the right imagine that the situation in Ukraine is basically normal, even if women and children are occasionally blown to atoms by Russian bombs while they sleep. There is a widespread inability to understand the existential crisis Ukraine faces, and the incredible job it has done waging one of the most successful defensive campaigns in modern history along a thousand-kilometer-long frontline, against the second most powerful army in the world, for three whole years and not the predicted three days, something few nations on earth could have accomplished.
The estimable Russian-born satirist and pundit Konstantin Kisin recently addressed some of the ubiquitous “lies about Ukraine”:
No, Zelensky hasn’t banned “opposition parties.” He has banned certain opposition parties because they are openly pro-Russian. Britain banned the British Union of Fascists during WW2 in exactly the same way. America went further and rounded up Japanese Americans and threw them into internment camps. No, Zelensky hasn’t suspended “independent media.” He has suspended pro-Russian media. Even Orwell, arguably the greatest defender of free speech of the 20th century, acknowledged the need for state restrictions on media during war. The idea that in WW2 we would allow pro-enemy propaganda on our airwaves is absurd … the spectacle of people sitting in warmth, comfort and plenty lying and misrepresenting a country and a people who are courageously fighting to defend their land against a bully is sickening and people who engage in this should be deeply ashamed. They won’t, of course, because to most of them the war in Ukraine isn’t a real thing. It’s just a topic for online click farming. The only silver lining is we’re really finding out who’s who.
Finding out “who’s who” is a small consolation. Far more comfort can be found in the words of Ukrainians themselves, so often left out of the discourse. Words like those recited at a Holodomor remembrance ceremony; words sent back home from the frontlines; words left behind by the many writers and scholars who have fallen in battle against Russia, or were murdered in Russian torture chambers; words like those of Vasyl Stus, the dissident poet who fought for all the uiarmleni narody, “people under the yoke,” and who knew in his heart that “criminals will be punished, and those who do good will triumph, if only posthumously.” Stus perished on Sept. 4, 1985, while incarcerated at the Soviet forced labor camp Perm-36, but his words have survived, and will always survive, despite the best efforts of genocidal Russian aggressors.
Конає світ. Уярмлені народи
гойдають небо, ніби абажур…Konaye svit. Uyarmleni narody
hoydayutʹ nebo, niby abazhur…The world’s in agony, but defiant peoples
Still shake the lampshade of the sky.
READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:
The Obligations of Home: JD Vance and the Ordo Amoris
Never Had It So Bad: The Decline of the Great British Empire
