Do Ukrainian Lives Really Matter?

The Ukrainian political scientist analyzes the White House’s attitude, which avoids calling a spade a spade, and an aggressor an aggressor. But American public opinion is strongly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Putin, so Trump will have difficulty abandoning Ukraine. As for the Ukrainian people, if abandoned by the Americans, they will fight back, relying on their European allies, but will not surrender.

Routinized killings

On Friday, April 4, a Russian ballistic missile with cluster munitions struck the residential area in the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih. Its flight from the Russian region of Taganrog to the Ukrainian frontline city with half a million people lasted just a few minutes. The citizens had little chance to hide. Nineteen people were killed instantly, including eight children. Seventy people were wounded, many of them heavily, so the death toll may still rise.

Recurring attacks on civilians do not make headlines. Two days later, Russia struck Kyiv with drones and missiles, with less casualties but even bigger damage. On Palm Sunday, a Russian ballistic missile landed in the very center of Sumy, a regional capital where a quarter million people live, in the northeast of Ukraine. To make the death toll much higher, Russia launched a second missile with cluster munitions soon after the first one, targeting the rescue teams that were trying to help wounded civilians in the street.

Quite a few international outlets reported on the events; quite a few politicians condemned the barbaric attacks, though not overwhelmingly and unequivocally. The events were, actually, quite ordinary, distinct only in scale and peculiar perfidy, but not in their murderous essence. Each new event overshadows the past, obliterates all the previous dramas, downgrades them to an annoying routine, to insipid statistics. Each attack becomes only a matter of numbers, not a part of the war per se. Every day in Ukraine at least several people are killed or wounded, but the casualties are usually dispersed over different regions (Ukraine is quite a big country, bigger than France): someone may step on a Russian mine in Chernihiv, someone else may be hit by a Russian drone in Kherson, a few more people perish from artillery shells in Kharkiv, and several other unfortunate civilians fail to escape from glide bombs in Kupiansk.

These recurring events, dispersed over the country, are not very conspicuous. They do not make headlines even in Ukraine, so it is unsurprising that international media prefer not to bother their audiences with distressing but trivial and hardly sensational (“clickable”) news.

The daily killing of Ukrainians has become a kind of routine. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission (HRMMU) estimates the number of killed civilians at about 13,000, but the real figures are certainly higher since many more people in frontline areas are listed as “missing”, and many more are probably buried in mass graves in occupied territories. In the Russian siege of Mariupol in 2022 alone, tens of thousands are believed to have perished.

Habitual denial

It usually takes a massive strike in a densely populated area, causing heavy destruction and high casualties, to “make headlines” in the news. Russians do not carry out such attacks every day, but “only” once or twice a month – either by mistake, when they confuse some “legitimate” (as they say) object of their attack with a hospital, school, apartment block or children’s playground. Or, more likely, they target civilians deliberately – just to terrorize, to intimidate, to make people desperate and compliant. In classic Kremlin style, the explanations vary between “What strike? We have nothing to do with that. We never attack civilians. Ukrainians probably bombed themselves in order to compromise us”, to more whimsical stories like in the recent Kryvyi Rih case where they used an arguably high-precision missile to hit “a gathering of Ukrainian unit commanders and foreign instructors, killing up to 85 people and destroying up to 20 vehicles”.

Any mindful reader would inevitably ask why “Ukrainian commanders” and “Western instructors” would set a meeting in a residential area rather than in special shelters constructed widely around Ukraine exactly for such purposes; why “high-precision” missiles target not those careless (or perfidious) conspirators but a children’s playground; and why the much-adulated “high-precision” missile aimed at a tight group of people was equipped with cluster munitions targeting a huge area. The three-year record of Russia’s war against Ukrainian civilians leaves little doubt about the real character of that war, or about the “high-precision” of the applied weapons. The latest United Nations HRMMU Report confirms, inter alia, that “in 2024, at least 306 [Russian] attacks damaged or destroyed medical facilities – a threefold increase from 2023 – while at least 576 attacks affected educational facilities, nearly double the previous year”.

Journalists who arrived at the place of the Russian strike in Kryvyi Rih did not find any traces of the 85 (!) enemies of the Kremlin who were supposedly killed there. Nor did they even notice serious damage in the café where the top-brass summit was allegedly held. Video footage from the café did not show any servicemen there, indicating instead that the place could barely accommodate twenty people, let alone 85. A UN mission that visited the site said, citing witnesses, that “a meeting of beauticians, not military personnel, had been underway at a nearby restaurant when the missile struck”. Most of the children died while playing in a park. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the Russian attack with cluster munitions as “a reckless disregard for civilian life”.

The pattern of Moscow’s responses to any new accusations is basically the same as it was after the shooting down of flight MH17, the poisoning of the Skripals, the assassination of many other regime enemies, or (if anybody remembers) after the false-flag bombing of residential apartments in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk in 1999, which facilitated Putin’s election campaign and ultimately his victory in a presidential race which was still competitive at the time.

The primary goal of those statements was not to persuade anybody but just to confuse, to make the idea of truth (and truth-seeking) irrelevant and delusional, because the truth arguably does not exist; there are only different points of view and different interpretations. Such a “post-truth” approach is very suitable for many people, not only in Russia, who do not want, for various reasons, to know the truth. Such knowledge, indeed, is psychologically uncomfortable, and sometimes unbearable. The truth requires one to take a stance, to make a difficult moral choice that often runs against one’s personal and business interests. “Post-truth” logic simply absolves witnesses and accomplices of government crimes from any responsibility. Since there is no truth, there are also no victims and perpetrators. Both sides share equal responsibility, and both can be equally blamed and acquitted. Politics is a mess, the argument goes, one cannot make any sense of it, and a really wise person should not even try to do so. If someone still insists on truth and morality, justice and responsibility, then that must be the sign of a serious mental disorder: Russophobia.

The international response to the latest Russian attacks on the cities of Kryvyi Rih and Sumy was rather unanimous and very similar to previous responses. Western leaders condemned the barbarous act, quality media reported on it, the Global South kept silent as usual, pretending their tacit support for Moscow has nothing to do with the recurrent killings. The Ukrainian president visited his native city of Kryvyi Rih and issued a mourning statement where he mentioned the eight perished children by name – from three-year-old Timofiy to 17-year-old Nikita. A ninth child died a bit later, in the hospital, after the statement was published.

Playing the euphemisms

What was missing, however, in the voices of mourning and condemnation, was the strong and (until recently) reputable voice of the United States. The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, published a short statement on X that can be seen as a virtuoso diplomatic move, but also as another proof of American ambiguity. “Horrified that tonight a ballistic missile struck near a playground and restaurant in Kryvyi Rih. More than 50 people injured and 16 killed, including 6 children. This is why the war must end”.

No condemnation of Moscow, no attribution of that enigmatic “missile” to a specific actor, and no hint, of course, as to how this war of aggression “must end” – even though Ms. Ambassador must know that the fastest and fairest way to end it is for Russian troops to just return home. Volodymyr Zelensky praised Western diplomats for their support, but could not help but express his deep disappointment with the U.S. tepid position: “Unfortunately, the reaction of the American Embassy is unpleasantly surprising: such a strong country, such a strong people – and such a weak reaction. They are even afraid to say the word ‘Russian’ when talking about the missile that killed these children”.

Diplomats surely must be skillful in their euphemisms, but probably not in a way that obscures the essence of a criminal war, mutes the names of killers and absolves them from any responsibility. Strikingly, both the “war” and “missile” in this discursive manipulation acquire some sort of agency, become independent actors who operate on their own: the war just happened, just began by itself and therefore “must” end (also probably by itself, by some outside magic). And the “ballistic missile” of unknown, unspecified origin has also appeared out of nowhere, out of the blue, by God’s will – like a storm, or deluge, or earthquake.

Discursive trick of nominalization of abstract categories that endows them with independent agency and allows them to operate by their own, as physical actors, obscures the real agents that operate them – very concrete commanders who launch the ballistic missile into the children playground and very concrete politicians who start the war and therefore it is not the war that simply “must end” but the specific people, with well-known names, that must end it. 

This false language is not as innocent as it looks. In some cases (as herein), it just supports a false version of the reality while in some other cases it informs it and facilitates all kinds of wrong, detrimental policies. All the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations might be a good example of such euphemistic distortions, omissions and silencing. Neither scholar nor politicians dared to call a spade a spade, Soviet empire – empire, Russian colonialism – colonialism, Stalin’s famine in Ukraine – genocide, or the Russian 2014 invasion and low-intensity war – a war. For ten years they talked about “Ukrainian crisis” which in fact had neither been “crisis” nor “Ukrainian”. The net result of that linguistic manipulation was that the main instigator and beneficiary of that “crisis” was tacitly removed from the picture and absolved from any responsibility, fully in line with the Moscow claim about a “civil war” in Ukraine.

For ten years the “crisis” became a powerful actor that operated apparently by itself, as a ghost, Deux ex machina, that effectively blurred and hid the role of the real actor who created that “crisis” and amplified it. Not only mass media but even scholarly journals averred (seriously) that “the crisis in Ukraine in 2014… led to Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea and military involvement in the war in Eastern Ukraine”; “The Ukraine crisis has provoked the Putin regime to reject liberal interdependence in favour of illiberal sovereign statism”; “The Ukrainian crisis brought Russia the contours of an ideology that filled the vacuum of the Yel’tsin’s years”. 

In other words, it was not Putin and his associates who occupied Crimea and waged the war in Eastern Ukraine, and not all the Dugins, Surkovs, and Pavlovskys who helped Putin to transform Russia into a fascist state, but ephemeral yet omnipotent and omnipresent “Ukrainian crisis”. We know the price of these language distortions and manipulations: they largely facilitated Russian propagandistic efforts, strengthened the confidence in impunity and paved the way to further aggression.

Reframing the war

On April 6, after the Russian drone and missile attack on Kyiv (two days after the bloodbath in Kryvyi Rih), the U.S. ambassador made a more specific statement, short of direct condemnation of Russia but disclosing at least the origin of the deadly missiles. This was probably her indirect reaction to Zelensky’s criticism, however belated and still very cautious. A few days later, the ambassador resigned. It is not yet clear whether it was this statement that led to her dismissal by the White House, or whether she resigned voluntarily. But her rapid shift from a strong pro-Ukrainian position under president Biden to regretful equivocations and truth-avoidance illustrates a more general tendency of the new American officialdom to abstain from strong words, let alone deeds, against Putin’s rogue state. So far, Trump’s proverbial “peace through strength” is directed almost exclusively toward Kyiv, which has arguably “no cards” and therefore seems to be a much easier target.

Truth-avoidance is fully in line with many other political steps undertaken by the incumbent U.S. administration, highly favorable for Russia and harmful for Ukraine. Explanations of this dramatic U-turn in American policy greatly vary, from conspiratorial allegations of Mr Trump being hooked by the KGB during his past erotic and business adventures in Moscow and blackmailed since then with unspecified kompromat, to more provable signs of his ignorance of all things Ukrainian and arrogance toward all other things, his admiration for dictators (tough guys) and perhaps his personal animosity toward Zelensky who did not help him with kompromat against Biden back in 2019.

Whatever the reasons, the omens are bad for Ukraine. All of them indicate an apparent desire of the U.S. administration to reframe the entire war of aggression of a rogue state against its peaceful neighbor as a “conflict” where each side holds its own truth and its own reason, both sides are guilty (“responsible”, as Mr Trump put it), so a compromise should be found somewhere in the middle as the “second-best option” for both Ukrainians and Russians.

In search for the second-best option

For Ukrainians, the first-best option is clearly the restoration of their country’s territorial integrity within its internationally recognized (in 1991) borders, the punishment of Russian war criminals and receiving reparations from Russia for all the damages. As this set of goals is deemed unachievable by Ukraine’s partners, the second-best option can be outlined briefly as “security now, justice eventually”. It stands for the immediate ceasefire at the existing frontlines, together with reliable international security guarantees, and implies that all other remaining issues – such as the status of occupied territories and the payment of reparations – will be solved peacefully, by diplomatic means, in some distant future. It might be difficult to sell this option to Ukrainians but, in principle, it is possible if the painful feeling of injustice is mitigated by the feeling of enhanced security. But for Russians, so far, there are no “second” options, and this might be the main, probably unsurmountable problem. They are so deeply obsessed with the final solution of the Ukrainian question – the full extinction of Ukraine’s sovereignty, the effective eradication of the Ukrainian state and the nation from the map, that they are very unlikely to abandon this idée fixe. 

Putin actually outlined this demand as the main precondition for any ceasefire: “The idea is right, he said, and we support it – but there are questions that we need to discuss.” A ceasefire, he specified, should lead to “an enduring peace and remove the root causes of this crisis”. When unpacking the euphemism of the “root causes”, however, it becomes clear that an independent Ukraine causes Moscow a strong existential anxiety. 

So far, Moscow sees no incentive to accept any “second best option” short of the much-coveted first. As long as they successfully manipulate Donald Trump and his envoys, making them accept and even reproduce Kremlin narratives, they may well expect “to be gifted by Washington what they failed to achieve on the battlefield”. Especially after they learned that the congressionally-approved arms supplies for Ukraine run out in a few months, and the new U.S. administration is not going to extend the deal, as was indicated in February by secretary of defense Pete Hegseth at the so-called Ramstein meeting (a gathering of 50 countries to coordinate military support for Ukraine). His conspicuous physical absence at the last Ramstein in April (though he joined online) is most likely perceived in Moscow as another encouraging signal.

There is, of course, a chance that Russians may overplay their hand, so that even the submissive (vis-à-vis Putin) Trump would lose his patience in what he has already angrily called “talks about talks”. But he has no appetite for defending Ukraine – a remote country about which he knows nothing (or, worse, knows what Putin has told him). Conversely, he has a huge appetite for conducting business as usual with a great and presumably reliable partner in Moscow. Throwing Ukraine under the bus might not be his first-best option – but as a second-best option, it may look acceptable: cutting the knot rather than untying it.

He may experience some limitations in doing so – not necessarily of a moral character, but rather of public opinion management, performed both domestically and internationally (only 2% of Americans sympathize with Russia, 61% with Ukraine; in Europe the attitudes are similar). This is probably why Mr. Trump and his designated subordinates try to discursively reframe the war into something more ambiguous and unclear. Because it is one thing to sacrifice a fledgling democracy to a fascistoid dictatorship, and another thing to dispose of one dictator (i.e., Zelensky, according to Trump) at the request of another (although Putin was never titled this way by the current U.S. administration). It is one thing to abandon a loyal ally who defends your shared values and principles, but it is another thing to punish an ungrateful and presumably “corrupt” client who does not show proper respect, does not appreciate a perfect peace plan, and refuses to make an even more perfect deal with American benefactors on his nation’s mineral resources. The partial success of these messages among the MAGA electorate is not yet translated properly upon the American society at large.

Fighting with bare hands?

There are a few more obstacles to Trump’s perfect plan. One of them is the Europeans, who do not buy the reframed vision of war as a family quarrel of two oriental irrational guys who do not understand what peace talks, dialogue and compromise mean, and are eager to kill each other rather than wisely negotiate. Europeans have woken up, albeit belatedly, and seem to be ready to help Ukraine as much as it takes. So far, their military resources are no match for those of the Americans, and will hardly achieve a comparable level within the next five years (in the best-case scenario). This makes Ukraine’s survival without the U.S. much more difficult, but still possible. 

And it is obviously also Ukrainians themselves who are the main obstacle to Trump’s perfect peacemaking. The latest opinion survey indicates that only 2% of Ukrainians consider Russian preconditions for a ceasefire acceptable (i.e., that Ukraine should stop mobilizing, and the West should stop providing Ukraine with weapons and intelligence). 79% of respondents definitely oppose this. A slightly modified question in the same survey was: “If the USA finally stops all support for Ukraine, what option would be best for Ukraine?” Remarkably, only 8% of respondents agreed to yield to Russian demands, while 82% insisted that Ukraine should continue the struggle with the support of European allies.

Donald Trump may not read Ukrainian surveys or trust them (otherwise he would not have claimed that Zelensky’s support in Ukraine is at 4%). But he may still listen to some professionals who have not yet been purged from government offices and who still dare to convey the truth to their boss. One of them, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, testified recently at a hearing in the U.S. Senate: “With regard to the Ukrainian resistance, the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian military have been underestimated for a period of several years now. And ultimately, from my reflections in observing, from an intelligence standpoint, I’m convinced that they will fight with their bare hands if they have to, if they don’t have terms that are acceptable to an enduring peace”.

When asked in the Senate about Ukraine’s war prospects, another professional, US General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, reported that “there is nothing inevitable in war, and the Ukrainians are in very strong defensive positions right now and are improving weekly their ability to generate force and to reinforce those positions”. He recognized, that it is hard at the moment “to envision a major Ukrainian offensive” that would clear the Russians “out of every square inch” of Ukraine’s territory from Russian occupation. “But likewise, it’s very hard to envision Ukraine collapsing and losing that conflict. I do not think there’s an inevitability to a Ukrainian loss”.

Facing the genocide

In practical terms it means that Ukrainians will continue to fight even after the U.S. president sells them out to Putin. They simply have no other choice, because they know better than anybody else that “Ukraine denial” in Moscow is not just the militant rhetoric of rabid propagandists but a deeply rooted and well elaborated “theory”, promoted feverishly by Russian scholars and writers, politicians and clerics, school teachers and TV stars, and implemented coherently in genocidal policies in occupied territories. There is no room for anything Ukrainian within this framework because there, Ukrainian identity is considered to be a mental disease that should be cured forcibly or, if incurable, eliminated with the infected species. As Roman Schwarzman, an 88-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, explained last year in the German Bundestag: “Putin is trying to destroy us as a nation, just as Hitler tried to destroy the Jewish people in World War II. Back then, Hitler wanted to kill me because I am Jewish. Now Putin is trying to kill me because I am Ukrainian”. That also means that the war will not simply end, as Mr Trump has boasted. Ukrainians will not give up, even if he gives them up to Putin while blaming Ukrainians themselves, their obduracy and lack of cooperation, for the fate they deserve. The war will not stop, but will merely become more bloody and horrible than it is now – with more Russian missiles and drones penetrating Ukraine’s open skies, sowing more terror, death and ruination.

The only hope is that Americans will at some point come to understand that Ukrainian lives also matter. And secretary of state Marco Rubio might even repeat his nice words from the past about the impossibility of living side by side with terrorists: “You cannot coexist with armed elements at your border who seek your destruction and evisceration as a state. You just can’t. No nation [can]… They [terrorists] sent a bunch of savages with the express and explicit purpose of targeting civilians. How can you coexist? How can any nation state on the planet coexist side by side with [such] a group?”

He was speaking about Hamas’ attack on Israelis.

Now might also be a good time to think about the impossibility of Ukraine’s coexistence with Putin’s Russia.