The spilled blood: giving up is not an option

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/03/2025 (224 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What needs to be understood above all else is this: Ukraine does not give up.

The blood they’ve had to spill over centuries, the multiple betrayals endured: Ukrainians have historically dealt with all of it by plodding forward, teeth gritted, into the storm.

When they’ve had to, they’ve sent their children away to survive elsewhere. All four of my grandparents, barely in their teens when the Russian Civil War broke out in 1917, came to Canada to survive, and perhaps bring the rest of the family later. Their innocent parents had fallen for faked pictures from Canada’s immigration minister, Clifford Sifton, who posed happy farmers in fields of neck-high wheat to show the fertility of Canada’s soil. The farmers were actually standing in deep-dug, invisible holes. No more family members came.

A betrayal of sorts, a tiny, early one in the wider scheme of things.

Ukraine’s Green Army fought for independence during that civil war. With the Communist win and birth of the Soviet Union in 1922, the Ukrainians went back to work in the fields. Freedom had been so close.

But they did not give up.

Immigration officials converted my incoming grandparents’ names to garbled English phonetic spelling. The young newcomers scratched out farms from raw prairie, had almost a dozen children to each family. About half survived. And they did not give up.

Back home, there was Lenin, then Stalin and the 1932/33 Holodomor, when somewhere around five million Ukrainians were starved to death. The world, pressed for decades by angry survivors’ descendants who did not give up, finally determined in 2019 that it had been intentional genocide.

Then came the Second World War and the dawn of nuclear weapons, and the USSR parked some 1,700 nuclear warheads in Ukraine. The Ukrainians didn’t want them. But there they were.

When the USSR dissolved in 1991, Ukraine was effectively the world’s third largest nuclear power, and in 1994, saw another chance for freedom. Ukraine signed onto the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons through the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that bartered the Ukrainian nukes back to Russia in trade for money and for sovereignty assurances. Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States had signed the treaty some 20 years earlier, and with the Memorandum they promised that precious independence, fever-dreamed for so long by Ukraine.

They lied. No surprise. In 2014, Russia invaded the Crimea, part of Ukraine. The U.S. and the U.K. issued firm scoldings. But Ukraine did not give up. Frustrated by continued resistance from the stubborn little nation, in 2018 Putin signed cease-fires and hostage exchanges. Crimea was occupied; Donbas fell into a no man’s land of constant skirmishes.

My grandparents were long gone by then. But I had learned from them. You do not give up. When Crimea fell, I became fiercely, angrily proud of being Ukrainian.

In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine proper despite its agreed cease-fire, NATO allies began ponying up the military aid they had withheld during the Crimea invasion.

Call it enlightened self-interest. It was obvious Ukrainians were now the bleeding human dam holding Russia back from conquest of Eastern Europe, then the rest of Europe, then…

In 2023, Bill Clinton publicly regretted pressuring Ukraine to give up its nukes. In 2024, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed he had told U.S. President Donald Trump that without NATO membership, Ukraine would have to build a nuclear arsenal. A Ukrainian think tank report noted it would take just months to build a bomb or two.

Zelenskyy has kept fighting, pleading with the free world to help him protect that very world from an unleashed Russian international rampage. Backed into a corner by U.S. threats to remove its support, he refused to accept yet another betrayal, this one from Trump. Barring security guarantees, there would be no endorsing an extortion forcing Ukraine to give up half its rare mineral treasures to the U.S.

Zelenskyy knows from personal history, even if Russia were to sign such guarantees, they would be worth exactly nothing without continued military support from the free world.

So Zelenskyy endured a public lambasting from Trump and J.D. Vance. And was tossed out of the White House.

But he showed the world precisely what Trump is made of: Trump cannot ever be trusted. Trump, if there was even a shred of doubt before, is a Putin puppet.

Trump was partly right when he told Zelenskyy, “you’re gambling with World War 3.” But it’s Trump making that gamble. Not Zelenskyy.

And when Trump abandons Ukraine and NATO, and we know he will, it will be up to NATO to decide what’s next.

Ukraine has never given up.

Will the “free world” give up? Or will we stand with Ukraine — against world tyranny?

And yes, quite possibly against the prospect of a third world war.

Judy Waytiuk’s grandmother once told her; “You be grateful dis country!” And she is grateful to be a Canadian. But right now, she is about as passionate and intense a Ukrainian as you’ll find.