Give Up Your Arm, and Call It Peace

When they call surrender a solution, and expect Ukraine to thank them for it.

SOME DAYS, I DON’T KNOW WHAT HURTS MORE. The bombs that fall, or the words they throw from across oceans.

Today, it was Donald Trump. As usual.

Saying that Zelenskyy is unwilling to negotiate peace because he refuses to give up Crimea.

Crimea. Our land. Our people. Our history. And Trump says the war continues because we won’t hand it over.

Just pause on that for a moment.

He’s accusing the president of a sovereign nation, a man who wakes up every day with missiles in his sky and soldiers in his soil, of being too stubborn. Too unwilling.

Because he won’t hand over a part of his country to the one that invaded it.

Imagine that.

Imagine someone breaks into your home, shoots your family, and sets your kitchen on fire, and then someone tells you that if you want peace, you should give him your bedroom too.

Would you call that peace?

That’s what Trump wants from us. To amputate a part of ourselves, and say thank you for the bandage.

To give our silence in return for being allowed to survive.

He’s not offering peace. He’s offering another name for defeat. And he wants Ukraine to smile while swallowing it.

I wonder if Trump even knows what Crimea is. If he could find it on a map. If he’s ever seen the faces of the people who live there. The ones arrested for speaking Ukrainian, the ones who disappeared in Russian prisons, the ones who still hold keys to homes they haven’t seen in eleven years.

Trump doesn’t know how to find Crimea, but he certainly knows where Florida is, because it is known that he has a property there, right?

Florida, the state that lies almost entirely on a peninsula. Just like Crimea.

So imagine asking the United States to give Florida to Russia.

Imagine demanding Trump to cede Florida to an enemy who bombed Washington, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and every major city in America, tortured civilians, and laughed in your face while doing it.

Would you still call that peace? Because that’s what Trump wants from us.

He’s not asking for an end to the war. He’s asking for the world to applaud a surrender.

And for Ukraine to pay the cost of it.

And I don’t care how many votes he wants. I don’t care how many rallies cheer him. He should be ashamed to speak those words.

He should be afraid of how history will remember him: the man who asked a wounded nation to dig its own grave and call it reconciliation.

What Trump said is not just wrong. It is obscene.

What else to say? Well, Crimea is not his to discuss.

Crimea is not Zelenskyy’s to offer. Crimea is not even mine to give.

It belongs to the people who lived, loved, laughed, and died there. It belongs to those who never left, even when hell invaded their lives just because they chose dignity over submission.

To us, Ukraine is not an idea. It’s not a chess piece. Not cards.

It’s the air we breathe. The ground we bury our dead in. The language we whisper to our children before bed.

It’s home.

I think of my son, growing up abroad as a refugee in a country where the language is written in another alphabet from his suffering homeland.

I think of my friends who sleep in basements because they don’t know if their windows will still exist tomorrow.

And no, we’re not going to “move on.”

We’re not going to “be realistic.”

We’re not going to pretend this is complicated. It isn’t.

A country has borders. And Russia crossed them.

The story starts and ends there.

And if you’re reading this thinking it’s just about Ukraine, it’s not.

It’s about what kind of world you want to live in.

One where bullies redraw borders while the rest of us scroll past, or one where some things still matter enough to get angry about.

If this feels absurd to you, if something inside you says “No, this cannot be right,” then you’re one of the last people still holding the line.

So if Trump wants to make deals, he can go negotiate with his own map. He can hand over one of his towers, or one of his golf courses.

But we’re not trading our country to please a man who has never risked anything for something he believes in.

Not now.

Not ever.

🇺🇦

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