Ninety-one years ago this week, millions of Ukrainians starved to death while grain rotted in Soviet warehouses. Stalin’s regime seized their harvests, blocked aid, and watched them die. The Holodomor – “death by hunger” – was genocide: deliberate, calculated, and monstrous.
History does not repeat itself exactly, but it certainly rhymes.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is not about territory, NATO expansion, or any other excuse that Vladimir Putin offers. It is about erasing Ukraine as a nation. The methods have changed – missiles instead of grain seizures, filtration camps instead of forced collectivization – but the goal remains the same: to destroy Ukrainian identity and make Ukraine disappear.
Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya captured this continuity in a statement today on her X account: “On the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holodomor, we remember the millions starved by the Soviet regime in a genocide against the Ukrainian nation. Today, Russia repeats the same evil in its war of aggression. Ukraine will prevail, and Russia must be held accountable.”
She is right. And the world knows it.
Yet here comes Donald Trump, already threatening to cut aid unless Kyiv accepts a “peace deal” that rewards Russian aggression. He wants Ukraine to surrender territory, accept occupation, and legitimize conquest. He calls it pragmatism, but we all know it is capitulation.
Trump should know better. He is not only selling out Ukraine, but also Europe and the rest of the democratic world that the US defended when the Soviet Union tried to crush nations under its boot, just as the Nazis had also done. Washington did not urge victims to compromise with their murderers; it helped them survive and eventually win.
Ukraine is not asking for American troops – just weapons to defend itself, sanctions that actually hurt Russia’s war machine, and the resolve to see this through. That is not charity; it is strategic sense. A Russian victory would mean a more dangerous world for everyone.
This is not just about solidarity, but also about upholding international law and the very commitments the US helped craft to make the world safer and more decent.
The Ukrainians who survived the Holodomor passed down a simple truth: never again. Never again will we starve quietly. Never again will we submit to Moscow. Never again will we let the world look away while we are destroyed.
They meant it then. They mean it now.
You cannot force a nation that has already survived one genocide to accept another. Ukrainians will keep fighting with or without Trump’s help, though with it, they will win faster and save more lives.
Ninety-one years after the Holodomor, Ukraine remains, still standing, still refusing to disappear into a Russian despotic empire. That should tell Trump everything he needs to know and reassure Ukraine’s genuine friends in the US, Europe, and elsewhere that Ukrainians are not about to give up and will hold the banner of liberty high, even if others prefer to abandon it.