DEAR PACIFISTS, OCCUPATION IS NOT PEACE
“The only thing worse than war with Russia is peace with Russia.” I once wrote this sentence on social media, and ever since I have regularly read in the comments that I am “pro-war”, that I am “fuelling the conflict” and that I “don’t want peace”. But I am not ashamed of that post. Behind it there is no militancy, only experience — personal, family and national. I have never called for war. I am warning that “peace” on Moscow’s terms has never meant an end to violence. It has only given the aggressor a breather before the next blow. This article is my answer to everyone who rushed to brand me a fan of war.
A wave of familiar claims is rising again in the information space: Ukraine doesn’t want peace, Zelensky doesn’t want peace, Ukraine should have accepted the “Istanbul peace”, and the West should simply stop supplying weapons, and then it will all be over. These narratives do not come only from Moscow. They are repeated in Berlin, Ljubljana, Belgrade and Zagreb, and, interestingly, they are often repeated by people who sincerely consider themselves supporters of peace. It is to them that I am speaking.
WHO REALLY DOESN’T WANT PEACE
In September 2026, Putin publicly accused Kyiv of “doing everything” to prevent peace. In May, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a ceasefire would come the moment Ukraine withdrew its troops from Donbas. In early June he added that the war “could be ended within a day” if Ukrainian troops left the territories Russia claims. In other words, “peace” as Moscow understands it is when the country that was attacked hands over its own land, and the people who live on it, to the aggressor.
Let us look at the facts. On 11 March 2025 in Jeddah, Ukraine agreed to a full 30-day ceasefire proposed by the United States — on land, in the air and at sea — provided that Russia did the same. Moscow replied “yes, but” and set conditions that rendered the ceasefire meaningless. For those 30 days Ukraine was to stop mobilisation and receive no weapons, while the pause itself was supposed to lead to the elimination of the “root causes of the conflict”, that is, to the fulfilment of Russia’s demands on Ukraine’s future. The Kremlin envisaged no such restrictions for itself: Ukraine would have been left for a month without reinforcements or supplies, the Russian army would not.
In May 2025, the leaders of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Poland came to Kyiv and proposed an unconditional ceasefire starting on 12 May. Putin ignored it and instead offered talks in Istanbul without a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, the strikes on civilians are not letting up. In May 2026, a Russian attack destroyed a UN World Food Programme warehouse in Dnipro. It held food aid for about 130,000 people in frontline areas. WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain called the strike unacceptable. In September, in just two weeks, Russian drones and missiles hit four large pharmaceutical warehouses — near Kyiv, in Kyiv and in Odesa. This autumn Russia is again systematically striking the energy sector, and emergency power cuts have returned to Kyiv. The aggressor state, Russia, is doing everything it can to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine.
UN figures confirm this. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 15,280 civilians were killed or injured in Ukraine in the first eight months of 2026. That is on average more than 400 people a week and 55% more than in the same period of 2025. High Commissioner Volker Türk described the war in Ukraine as a human rights catastrophe that is growing and deepening every week. So while the Kremlin talks about peace, the number of civilians killed and injured is not falling but rising. That is not how someone who wants peace behaves.
So I want to ask you something: why must a country that is defending its homes and its children constantly prove that it wants peace more than the country that attacked it? Why is it fashionable today to accuse the one who defends itself of not wanting peace, rather than the one who launches hundreds of drones and missiles at peaceful cities almost every night?
Probably because it is easier to make demands of the victim. The aggressor will not listen anyway, but the victim can be shamed, deprived of help and forced to give in. Yet a peace reached this way is not peace. It is capitulation and a round of applause for the aggressor’s attack.
Not a single Ukrainian wanted this war. No Ukrainian dreamed of losing their loved ones, their home and the things dear to their heart. No one wanted to abandon a career and a comfortable life and spend years as a refugee working low-paid jobs. No one signed up to explain a hundred times that they left not because of poverty or in search of a better life, but because Russia kills their children in their sleep and drops bombs on homes, hospitals, schools and kindergartens. We want peace more than anyone. That is exactly why we know that peace and capitulation are not the same thing. Because what comes after capitulation is not peace but occupation.
ISTANBUL: THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS
A separate word about the “Istanbul peace”, which was supposedly just a signature away. That is not true: in spring 2022 the two sides exchanged drafts, but none of them was signed. In the last published draft, dated 15 April 2022, the key points remained unresolved.
Moscow wanted the Ukrainian army limited to just 85,000 troops (Kyiv proposed 250,000); Ukraine would have been banned from having missiles with a range of more than 40 kilometres; Russia would have become one of the “guarantors” of Ukraine’s security, with the right to block assistance to it in the event of a new attack; Ukraine would have had to agree to the lifting of sanctions against Russia, withdraw its cases from international courts and give the Russian language official status. No deadline was set at all for the withdrawal of Russian troops. In other words, the country that attacked would have become the guarantor of its victim’s security, and the victim itself would have been deprived of the means to defend itself.
This is not a peace treaty. It is a plan for capitulation with a deferred sentence. How could anyone agree to a peace that, in essence, did not exist?
WHAT OCCUPATION REALLY MEANS
Some European pacifists sincerely believe that occupation is simply one flag replaced by another. In December 2025, tens of thousands of secondary school students in more than 80 German cities took to the streets to protest against the law on modernising military service. One of the slogans quoted by the media read: “You’re not a coward if you don’t want to die for Germany.” I understand these teenagers. No one wants to die. But they do not know what we know: under occupation people die no less, and often more — only without the right to defend themselves and their loved ones.
What sounds like an abstraction to German secondary school students has long been everyday reality for the men of occupied Donbas. General mobilisation in the so-called “DPR” and “LPR” was declared on 19 February 2022, five days before the full-scale invasion. Men aged 18 to 55 were banned from leaving, patrols seized them right in the streets, on public transport and at markets, and enterprises had to hand over lists of their employees. In some places up to 80% of the staff were taken, and mines and public transport came to a halt. According to the Eastern Human Rights Group, about 140,000 people had been mobilised by mid-June 2022. And by summer 2024, according to the same group and the Institute for Strategic Research and Security, more than 300,000 had been taken from the occupied part of Donetsk Oblast alone — almost three quarters of the working-age men. This is what occupation means: no one asks whether you want to die. You are simply sent to die for those who destroyed your home.
The whole world saw Bucha, where 554 people died in the community during 33 days of Russian control, 396 of them by violent death. The whole world saw Mariupol, where, according to conservative estimates by the city authorities, at least 22,000 civilians were killed. Back in 2024, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine established that Russian soldiers had committed rapes that constitute both a war crime and torture. According to the UN, the number of recorded cases of conflict-related sexual violence rose by more than a quarter in 2024. Journalist Sara Cincurová, who has spent about two years documenting these crimes and has spoken with more than sixty survivors, writes on Timothy Snyder’s pages that Russia has been using sexual violence as a weapon against women and men, the elderly and children since 2014.
Occupation means filtration camps, deportation of children, forced mobilisation into the occupier’s army, bans on the language and torture for a yellow-and-blue ribbon. Occupation is not the end of the war. It is a war waged only against the defenceless.
THE “PEACE” WE ALREADY KNOW
When I write that peace with Russia can be worse than war, I mean a very concrete historical experience. Ukrainians have already lived “in peace” with Moscow, and it was precisely this “peace” that took millions of lives.
The Holodomor of 1932–1933 did not happen in wartime. According to the Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, direct losses alone amount to about 3.9 million people. In peacetime, grain was taken from the peasants, villages were put on “blacklists”, and people were forbidden to leave in search of food. Also in peacetime, in autumn 1937, 1,111 prisoners of the Solovki transport were shot at Sandarmokh, among them about 290 Ukrainians — writers, scholars and artists. This is how a generation was destroyed that today we call the Executed Renaissance. In May 1944, when the fighting for Crimea was already over and the front had moved west, the entire Crimean Tatar people was deported within a few days on Moscow’s orders. In peacetime, the poet Vasyl Stus died in a Soviet labour camp in 1985 — for his words, not for weapons.
In other words, “peace” with Moscow has never meant safety for Ukrainians. It meant that violence simply stopped being called war. It was hidden behind words such as “collectivisation”, “the fight against nationalism” or “voluntary resettlement”, while the victims had neither the right to defend themselves nor the right to the truth.
That is why war, however terrible this may sound, is in a certain sense more honest than such a “peace”. In war the enemy has a face. We know whom to defend ourselves against, what to prepare for and how to act. We have an army, allies and the right to call a crime a crime. In “peace” with Russia we spent years having to resign ourselves and wait helplessly while we were destroyed quietly and without witnesses.
BEING FOR PEACE WHILE THERE IS STILL NO WAR
Protesting against war makes sense when it is your own state that is planning it. In a democracy, the voice of the majority really can stop a government that intends to attack someone. But when you have been attacked, a protest “for peace” changes nothing. There is no button to “unsubscribe from the war”. A student raising their hands and saying “I am against war” will not cancel it. War has a habit of arriving uninvited. None of those it came to wanted it.
The same applies to the anti-NATO protests that regularly take place in European cities, and to the outrage every time governments propose raising defence budgets. Some go even further and demand that their country leave the Alliance altogether. It is worth recalling that NATO is a defensive alliance. Its key provision, Article 5, provides for a collective response to an attack on any member, and in the entire history of the Alliance it has been invoked only once, after the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. NATO is not attacking anyone in Europe. The threat to Europe comes from the other side, and the war against it is already under way, for now a hybrid one. Russian drones fly into Polish airspace. Warehouses and railways are hit by sabotage and arson. Cables are damaged on the bed of the Baltic Sea. Europe is targeted by cyberattacks and election interference: in Romania in 2024, the results of the first round of the presidential election were annulled after intelligence on a large-scale influence campaign was made public. People who demand disarmament at such a moment are not simply mistaken. They are dangerous, because they refuse to see the threat that Russia and its allies pose to Europe and propose meeting it empty-handed.
That is why peace must be fought for while there is still no war. That is when everything really must be done to prevent it: investing in defence, deterrence and alliances. The Roman writer Vegetius, in his treatise on military matters, formulated a principle that became a proverb: if you want peace, prepare for war. And once war has begun, there is no neutral position, because there is an aggressor and there is a victim. Then you have to choose a side.
THE PRICE OF PEACE WITH RUSSIA
Supporters of the slogan “let’s just stop shooting” need to understand that Putin will not stop. Today he says: “Give up Donbas and the war will end.” But back in June 2024 he demanded that Ukraine withdraw its troops not only from Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts but also from the whole of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts, including the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which Russia does not control. So after Donbas, these regions would be next. And then Moscow might pretend to have agreed to peace, come back for the rest of Ukraine a few years later, forcibly mobilise Ukrainians (as it did in 2022 in the occupied territories of Donbas) and send them to war against Europe.
History does not lie; it teaches us what peace agreements with Moscow are worth. In 1932 the USSR signed non-aggression treaties with Poland and Finland. In September 1939 the Red Army entered Poland, and in November of the same year it attacked Finland.
In 1997 Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a treaty in which Russia and Chechnya renounced the use of force “forever”. That “forever” lasted two years. In autumn 1999, after Basayev’s fighters invaded Dagestan and a series of apartment-block bombings hit Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk, Moscow launched the Second Chechen War. The bombings were officially blamed on North Caucasus militants, but no independent state investigation was ever carried out, and a number of facts point to the involvement of the FSB. In Ryazan, residents and police found sacks of explosives in the basement of an apartment building, and when those who had planted them were detained, they turned out to be FSB officers. The agency claimed it had been an “exercise” and that the sacks contained sugar (look up the term “рязанский сахар”). Duma deputies Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, members of a public commission that tried to investigate the bombings, died in 2003: Yushenkov was shot outside his home, and Shchekochikhin died with symptoms resembling poisoning. It was on this war, and on the promise to kill terrorists “even in the toilet”, that Putin, then prime minister, came to power within a few months.
In August 2008, after the five-day war between Russia and Georgia, Moscow agreed to a six-point plan. It was adopted on 12 August with the mediation of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and provided for the withdrawal of Russian troops to the positions they had held before hostilities began. But as early as 26 August, Russia recognised the “independence” of the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russian troops are still there, and in places the occupation line keeps creeping deeper into Georgia: its markers and fences are moved onto new plots of land.
Ukrainians have their own experience too. In August 2014, Putin himself called for a “humanitarian corridor” to be opened for Ukrainian troops encircled near Ilovaisk. The Russian side gave guarantees of safe passage, while at the same time setting up firing positions along the route. The columns leaving through this corridor were shot at point-blank range by Russian troops. According to the findings of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, this was done on the orders of the command of the Russian General Staff. On 12 February 2015, Minsk II was signed, under which a ceasefire was to take effect on 15 February. On 18 February, Russian-backed forces captured Debaltseve. And in 1994, under the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In return, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom undertook to respect its independence, sovereignty and existing borders. In 2014 Russia annexed Crimea. Such agreements are not worth the paper they are written on.
“NO WEAPONS, NO WAR”
The most insidious claim of today’s “peacemakers” goes like this: stop supplying weapons to Ukraine and the war will end. In other words, people who call themselves supporters of peace actually want a country defending its sovereignty and its citizens to have nothing to defend itself with. It is like helping a rapist by telling the victim: “Relax, it will be over sooner.”
The right to self-defence is enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. Helping a country that has been attacked does not prolong the war. The war is prolonged by the one who attacked and refuses to leave. Without weapons, the war really would end quickly, but not in peace — in the disappearance of Ukraine. And the world would once again witness what it has already seen in Bucha, Izium and Mariupol.
Do people who have never had to hide their children from bombs really know best how a nation facing the largest aggression in Europe since the Second World War should act?
TWO COFFEES A MONTH
A separate word to those who sit down with a calculator today to work out how much “the Ukrainian war has cost” Europe. The very question is wrong: this is not a Ukrainian war but Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the bill for it should be sent to Moscow. Besides, the figures are not nearly as frightening as they are made out to be. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, in the first three years Germany and the United Kingdom each spent less than 0.2% of their GDP a year on supporting Ukraine, and France, Italy and Spain about 0.1%. The head of the Ukraine Support Tracker, Christoph Trebesch, noted that in the budgets of most donor countries this aid looks more like a minor political project than a serious fiscal effort. To put it in everyday terms: in 2022–2024, according to the same institute, Europe allocated on average about €44 billion a year to Ukraine. Divide that sum by more than half a billion Europeans and you get roughly €7 per person per month. That is two coffees in a café. For comparison, since 2022 EU countries have on average spent five times more on energy subsidies than on aid to Ukraine.
And this is not charity. A growing share of military aid takes the form of orders for the defence industry, including European industry, which means jobs and taxes in Europe itself. Above all, this money buys Europe something priceless: time and security. As long as Ukraine’s defenders hold back the Russian army in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, it is not standing outside Narva or in the Suwałki Gap. So let us do the maths differently: how much would it cost Europe to guard its border with a Russia that had come out of this war victorious? The answer is simple: aid to Ukraine is the cheapest insurance Europe could afford. Nobody reproaches firefighters for the cost of water while the house next door is burning and the wind is blowing towards yours.
So no, it is not the Europeans who help the victim of aggression defend itself who are dragging out this war. It is Russia, and Russia alone, that is dragging it out.
CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE
Stop seeing Ukrainian resistance as an obstacle on the road to peace. Start seeing the Russian occupation as the main obstacle on the road to peace.
Russia can stop the war at any moment: stop shelling peaceful cities and withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territory. Then there will be no war. If Ukraine stops defending itself, there will be no Ukraine.
We are not defending territories on a map. We are defending the right to live.