Anastasiia Marushevska
When US President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House next week, his foreign policy priority will be ending the war in Ukraine. As he seeks to engage with the Kremlin, however, Trump is likely to discover that Moscow’s war aims extend far beyond limited territorial gains and leave little room for any meaningful compromise.
If Trump’s peace initiative fails to make progress, it should come as no surprise. After all, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a simple land grab that can be resolved with some kind of compromise deal. Instead, it is an old-fashioned war of colonial conquest that forms the latest chapter in an historic campaign of Russian imperial aggression against Ukraine stretching back hundreds of years.
Russian rulers have been attempting to suppress Ukraine’s statehood aspirations and subjugate the country ever since the seventeenth century and the days of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate. Throughout the Tsarist and Soviet eras, successive generations of Russian rulers sought to dominate Ukraine and extinguish the very idea of a separate Ukrainian nation. This led to a vast array of crimes and atrocities including as the Holodomor, an artificial famine engineered by the Stalin regime in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians in their own homes.
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