One year of Reporting on Ukraine

Offering thanks for reader support, and looking to Europe as the U.S. prepares to abandon Ukraine

Andrii “Juice” Pilshchykov, a Ukrainian fighter pilot, lobbied U.S. officials in Washington to supply F-16s to Ukraine early in the war. His efforts helped persuade the Biden administration to eventually send the jets. He died in August 2023 at age 30 during a training mission and lies buried in Kyiv. (c. Martin Kuz)

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This newsletter debuted a year ago today. I had been reporting from Ukraine for more than two years by then, publishing articles with various news outlets, but as the months passed, interest in the war waned among editors. At the same time, with my family ties to Ukraine, I wanted to write about its people, culture and history in a less formal, more personal way.

I launched Reporting on Ukraine with little sense of whether it would find a readership. A year later, I’m humbled and grateful to share that the newsletter is fast approaching 1,000 subscribers — a tiny number in the grand scheme of media yet 10 times above what I expected at the start. (That’s the truth: I thought I would be lucky to crack 100 sign-ups.) So I thank each one of you for reading and, much more so, for your enduring concern and compassion for Ukraine.

My reporting relies on the generosity of paid subscribers — a little more than 10 percent of you — and donors to my GoFundMe campaign. Heading into the newsletter’s second year, I hope more of you will consider supporting my work, as I believe that the war in Ukraine — less than a month into Trump 2.0 — has reached a critical, possibly fateful moment.

The past week delivered one alarming news report after another. President Trump revived his bromance with Vladimir Putin with a phone call that ended the Russian dictator’s political isolation from the West. Former Fox News sock puppet Pete Hegseth, now play-acting at U.S. defense secretary, dismissed Ukraine’s twin aspirations to restore its pre-war borders and join NATO. And Vice President JD Vance, addressing European security officials in Munich, stayed silent on the threat that Russia poses to Ukraine and the West while proclaiming that far-right fascists are people, too.

Trump committed an act of geopolitical arson when he spoke to Putin without offering so much as a heads-up to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The call set fire to the West’s guiding principle of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” and the flames rose higher today as U.S. officials met with a Russian delegation in Saudia Arabia to begin talks on a potential ceasefire. No one from Ukraine was included in the gathering. Nor was anyone from anywhere else in Europe.

European leaders convened an emergency gathering in Paris yesterday to discuss strategies for strengthening Ukraine’s security and the prospect of deploying troops in a peacekeeping role in the event of a truce. Trump’s reflexive kneeling before Putin makes clear that the survival of Ukraine’s liberty this year and beyond will require Europe to overcome its chronic resistance to attaining military self-reliance. The United States can no longer be trusted to lead and protect the Western world. For democracy to withstand the Russian-American axis of fascism, the nations of Europe must rediscover the collective resolve that the continent has lacked since World War II.

The first step should be to more deeply embrace Ukraine as a sovereign nation and democratic ally deserving of full military, political and humanitarian support irrespective of its non-NATO, non-EU status. Such a display of solidarity would at once redress a historical betrayal of Kyiv and fortify Europe’s future security.

In 1994, three years after the Soviet Union’s collapse and under sustained pressure from the U.S., Britain and Russia, Ukraine surrendered the nuclear weapons on its soil. In exchange, the three larger nations pledged to safeguard the country’s territorial integrity if it “should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”

America and Britain have failed to fulfill that commitment every day for more than 4,000 days — i.e., since Putin first invaded southeastern Ukraine in 2014. Britain, Germany, France and the rest of Europe could remedy the West’s dereliction by supplying the Ukrainian military with enough fighter jets, long-range missiles and artillery to prevent further Russian aggression, and by deploying troops before Putin ignores a peace agreement.

No suspense surrounds the question of whether Putin would breach a truce if America abandons Ukraine. His record of violating borders and ceasefires in Ukraine, Chechnya, Georgia and elsewhere dates to his first year in power a quarter-century ago. A negotiated settlement imposed on Kyiv by Washington and Moscow would enable him to rebuild his decimated military and, within a year or two, attempt again to seize all of Ukraine.

Building up the militaries of every NATO member nation not called the United States represents Europe’s best chance to deter Putin in Ukraine and thwart him from expanding his war into neighboring countries. European officials appear to grasp that Trump’s selling out of Ukraine will end the war only for America, and that the specter of Russian belligerence will remain for Kyiv and capitals across Europe.

So with Putin’s full-scale invasion entering its fourth year next week, the time has come for Europe to recognize Ukraine as one of its own as much as Poland, Romania or any other country once trapped behind the Iron Curtain. The time has come, in other words, for a new guiding principle: Nothing about Europe without Ukraine.

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Etc.

— Andrii “Juice” Pilshchykov, the Ukrainian fighter pilot shown in the photo above, features in this heartbreaking story about military lives and love cut short by the war, and the pain that endures for the partners left behind.

— My sincere thanks for reading and for your support during the first year of Reporting on Ukraine. Please offer your thoughts below if you’re a paid subscriber, and don’t forget to connect with me on Bluesky at martinkuz.bsky.social. Thank you.