Trump's Ukraine peace "plan": A massive betrayal of America's friends — like me

So what did Donald Trump actually do this past week? Something that may well be remembered until the planet gets smashed by an asteroid or goes up in a nuclear fireball. Maybe that's the whole point — making sure his name stays in the history books, no matter how? Scandal, absurdity, outright disaster — especially on the world stage — those are the fastest ways to etch yourself into memory. Trump knows that better than anyone.

Blaming Ukraine for the last three years of war, while crediting Russia's "nobility" for not wiping the Ukrainian nation off the map in response, and parroting the Kremlin’s line about ousting Volodymyr Zelenskyy so Russia can finish what it failed to do on the battlefield — this is all three at once: scandalous, absurd and an outright disaster.

Trump is turning the world upside down, stomping on common sense and sowing pure chaos — admittedly, his standard modus operandi. More specifically, this torpedoes what Trump has tried to pass off as a "peace initiative." How do you talk peace and confront aggression while blaming the victim? How do you negotiate the victim into making major concessions while all but telling them to pack up and leave? (This echoes Trump’s demand that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should be evicted so the U.S. can "own" it, although the situations are not identical.) That’s not diplomacy — it’s a guaranteed dead end. Ukraine can’t accept negotiations under those terms, which means they’re doomed before they even start.

Did any of this bring America closer to being "great again"? Not in the slightest. It’s a joke, one that makes the U.S. look like the Joker on a global scale — but without the demonic charm.

Let me tell you straight up what made America great in the first place. It wasn’t just power or wealth — it was the sheer number of America’s friends and allies. Perhaps even more important, it was the countless people around the world who admired America, believed in it and pinned their hopes on it. At the peak of its global influence, the U.S. had an enormous army of friends. A giant extended family. A vast support base. A legion of voluntary promoters of American culture and the American worldview. 

Here’s where we need to stress the difference between two concepts: the American world and the Russian world.

The Russian world is a fiction, a patchwork of "dead souls." People who speak Russian, who are Orthodox Christians, who were born in the Soviet Union or its successor states — Moscow slaps the label "Russian" on them and claims them as its own. There is no genuine love, no admiration, no choice, no longing — just an imposed identity, a bureaucratic annexation of human lives.

The American world, however, is (or at least was) entirely different. It’s built on admiration, aspiration and voluntary belonging. People choose to be part of it. They choose to learn its language, adopt its culture, dream its dreams. It’s not dictated by geography, religion or bureaucratic decree — it’s fueled by belief, by the idea that America stands for something bigger than itself. That’s what made America powerful. That is, in fact, what made America great.

Now all of that is in rapid decline, and about to shrink even more dramatically. And why? Because of a guy with a cameo role in "Home Alone" who thinks being "great" means screwing the world over.

At this point you may well ask: Who the hell am I to tell you this? Fair enough.

OK then: I was once one of your ultimate enemies. I was one of the millions raised to hate America, to want it gone. I was trained to shoot within walls that still echoed with anti-American slogans, beneath posters that painted America as the global villain.

The city of my birth, Minsk — the capital of Belarus, then a Soviet republic and now a Russian client state — was the place where Lee Harvey Oswald got so bored that he packed up and headed back to the U.S., and into into the history books. According to some theories, Oswald was trained for his deadly mission there. Who knows?

Either way, the city still looks and feels as if the Soviet Union never collapsed. It just got a modern upgrade, as in the classic Soviet sci-fi movies of my youth. It was designed to feel that way. Although the city’s history goes back to the Middle Ages, it was rebuilt under Joseph Stalin after World War II as a kind of triumphal arch and a gateway to Moscow, 700 kilometers away. One Belarusian artist called it the “Sun City of Dreams,” a showcase of Communist utopia, frozen in time.

Oddly enough, the man who served as Oswald’s KGB handler in Minsk would later go on to sign the Belavezha Accords — the very document that dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. That was the  moment briefly celebrated as “the end of history,” which supposedly signaled America’s victory in the Cold War. 

In Minsk, that victorious moment didn’t last long. A leader emerged who was eager to turn back the clock and make the Soviet empire great again. That man, Alexander Lukashenko — the first and only president of supposedly independent Belarus — reinstated Soviet colonial symbols as early as 1995. In that same year, Lukashenko’s air force, acting more like enforcers of a bygone era than a modern military, literally shot down a hot air balloon carrying two Americans. That so-called accident felt more like a grim political statement.

Thirty years later, Lukashenko still rules Belarus with an iron grip, while his minions keep the anti-Western propaganda machine running nonstop.

So I was trained and groomed to become another America-hater — at least until we got full access to the internet. Before that, with Russian TV shaping the narrative, I was fed propaganda and I bought into it. There were moments when I was ready to go fight Americans in the former Yugoslavia. After the 9/11 attacks, I caught myself thinking, they had it coming.

Now, even as I see Donald Trump wrecking everything I loved most about America, I deeply regret ever thinking that way. And I still wonder: How the hell could I have been that blind?

Those episodes of propaganda-induced lunacy are far behind me. I grew up into an adult fully steeped in America. I soaked in America. I inhaled America. Not just the surface-level pop culture that seeps through every crack of the world, but the real, deep, unfiltered America. I didn’t just learn about America. I lived it. 

I know America’s fabric — its geography, history, culture and politics — better than I know any other country in the world, including my own.

Despite not having that little blue ticket to the land of the free — I have never set foot on American soil — I still feel like a part of it. I’ve poured too much time, too much emotion, too much of myself into understanding this country to feel like an outsider.

I love America. Not blindly, not naively. I love it in all its complexity, its contradictions, with all its mistakes and stains. I love it because I see it clearly — its highs, its lows, its reckless ambition and its messy, infuriating brilliance.

But that orange glitch in the Matrix, that reality-TV Frankenstein — he is too big of a stain, too much of a mistake to bear.

Somehow, we have to acknowledge that those who voted Trump into office had their reasons. Legitimate concerns and real frustrations — I get it. I’m not here to judge anyone for caring more about the price of eggs in Pennsylvania (or whatever else was rattling, disturbing or downright pissing them off at the time) than by events unfolding an ocean away. That’s human.

But here’s the thing: The chaos Trump is unleashing won’t do America a damn bit of good. What’s the point of winning if it means losing the people who once admired you, who chose to stand with you around the world? Alienating voluntary friends, burning bridges that took decades to build — how does that make America great?

If you think those lost friends can be easily replaced with new ones, forget it. They can’t.

Trump’s new friends are not America’s friends. They may be his friends, at least for the moment: political opportunists, power-hungry strongmen and regimes that don’t care about the ideals America once stood for. They don’t admire its history, its culture, its principles. They barely know anything about it.

They’re celebrating one thing: the fact that the America that once stood in their way is crumbling. They don’t respect a strong America. They relish the idea of a weak America, , an America too distracted, too divided, too consumed by its own chaos to stop them. And don’t fool yourself into thinking they’re satisfied with just a piece of the pie.

They want the whole damn bakery.

When I talk about myself as a genuine friend of America, you might get the impression that I was some kind of anomaly, a rare exception in these parts of the world.

Not at all.

In Belarus, there were plenty of people who could have ensured that the place remained friendly to America — if they had a voice. If they weren’t brutally silenced, persecuted, shoved into prisons, driven into exiled or simply made too afraid to speak. If only they had the freedom to shape the country’s politics.

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In other words, if we had democracy.

One of the main reasons we didn't, and don't, is Russia’s grip on my country. I myself was forced into exile, fleeing from relentless persecution. That was how I lost my home and the life I had built for myself — for the first time. Where did I go? I moved to Mariupol, on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine, well before that city made headline news all over the world. 

Mariupol is close to the Russian border. It had been teetering on the edge of war since 2014. But despite all that I felt safe there, much safer than in polished, orderly Minsk, where it felt like I was being crushed under a giant concrete slab of pro-Russian dictatorship.

You may know the rest of the story. Not my story, but the story of Mariupol. It was bombed into dust after the Russian invasion. Very little of the city is left now. I lost my home, for the second time.

Please understand that Ukraine was on its way to becoming a faithful American ally. It’s the largest country in Europe by land area (not counting Russia, which frankly doesn’t deserve to be counted) and, I would argue, the bravest one.

Ukraine did what almost no one expected — it stood up against Russia. After the invasion, the rest of the world assumed the same thing Vladimir Putin assumed: Kyiv would fall almost immediately, and Ukraine would surrender within days. Instead, Ukraine fought. It’s still fighting, three years on.

If you ask me, that remarkable country is a friend worth keeping.

What’s the point of betraying and alienating Ukraine? Trading it in for a “bigger friend” in the geopolitical playground?

That’s not how this works. 

Ukraine isn’t just some disposable pawn, in a game where you ditch one piece to grab a shinier one. The “bigger friends” Trump is flirting with — Russia for sure; possibly China too — will never be allies in the way Ukraine is. They don’t admire America. They don’t want a strong America. They don’t stand by its values or interests. They see it as an obstacle, a rival, a force to be undermined and outplayed.

Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to be America’s friend. Not out of cynical calculation, but because it genuinely wanted to be part of the Western world, to align with democracy, with freedom, with the ideals the U.S. claimed to uphold.

Abandoning Ukraine isn’t just about losing a friend. It’s about something much larger — demonstrating to the world that America’s word means nothing. That loyalty, commitment and standing up for allies are not principles, but endlessly negotiable bargaining chips. The cost of breaking that trust will be unbelievably high: Good luck convincing anyone else, big or small, ever to believe in America’s promises again.

Before I finished writing this article, Trump opened his mouth again. This time it was even more shocking. He called Zelenskyy a "dictator" and advised him to "move fast" — whatever that’s supposed to mean — or he might lose his whole country.

I would say that was crazy and unbelievable, but at this point it’s almost expected: The man who tried to overturn his own country’s election is calling Zelenskyy a dictator for postponing elections during a full-scale war. (As Winston Churchill did, for example, during World War II.) The audacity is staggering.

What kind of election can you possibly hold in a country torn apart by war, with millions of refugees scattered across the world, a significant chunk of its territory under occupation, and many of its cities facing constant bombardment? No functioning democracy on Earth would stage a nationwide vote under these conditions.

And what exactly does "move fast or there’s going to be no Ukraine anymore" mean? The sitting U.S. president is effectively telling Ukraine not to resist, not to fight, but to throw in its cards and surrender, as the only acceptable option. Who is Trump speaking for here? It doesn’t sound like America. It sounds like another Putin mouthpiece, spewing the Kremlin’s approved talking points.

But let’s set aside the Ukrainians — "these Slav-squatting, track-suited snow-apes," as Curtis Yarvin, one of Trump’s ideological whisperers, has so charmingly called them — and ask what else is at stake here

Alienating all of Europe? Pushing many European nations further into Russia’s sphere of influence, making the entire continent vulnerable to the same kind of dark forces that have already corroded its weaker states from within? Sure, that might be what Yarvin and his ilk want; they think an isolated, weakened Europe is a good thing. 

But exactly how does that make America great (again)?

What’s the grand strategy here? Gutting alliances, throwing away decades of trust and leaving the field wide open for America's biggest rivals? If this is supposed to be some 4-D chess move, it looks an awful lot like checkmate — for the wrong side.

My dear fellow Americans — for the moment, allow me to address you this way — can you see where this is heading? Do you understand that this path leads straight to disaster? If so, please don’t stay silent.