Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!

Before we get into it, I wanted to share two updates with you.

First, the bad news. As you recall, in the first week of the war, you met my old friend Mustafa Nayyem, the Ukrainian journalist who helped spark the Maidan Revolution in 2013. Mustafa, who is now a deputy minister in Zelensky’s government, confirmed on Sunday that his younger brother, Masi, had been severely wounded in the fighting in the Donbas. Masi, a lawyer, was a veteran of the long frozen war in the east, and this weekend, he suffered serious injuries to his head and eye. He was operated on and, according to Mustafa’s Telegram channel, he is still not out of the woods.

“The life of my brother was hanging by a thread and is still in danger,” Mustafa wrote, while thanking everyone who had helped his family evacuate Masi and get him into surgery. The tragic irony of this, of course, is that Masi and Mustafa, along with a younger sister, were children when they came to Ukraine from Afghanistan in the early 1980s. They were fleeing the Soviet invasion of their homeland. Now, they are defending their adopted homeland from still another invasion by the armies of Moscow. This time, however, they stayed and fought.

Now the good news. In early March, the Kremlin passed a law that punished people for speaking the truth about the war with up to 15 years in jail. In the face of this maneuver, and growing threats to independent journalists, many Russian reporters fled. TV Rain, the only independent broadcast network in Russia, shut down and most of its staff left Russia. I asked you to donate to a fundraiser that would help keep TV Rain’s employees fed and housed until they could reconstitute their channel outside of Russia’s borders.

Yesterday, editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko announced that TV Rain had received a broadcasting license in Latvia and that it would restart its work later this summer. I’ve spoken to Tikhon and he asked me to thank you and this incredible community for helping his team live to fight another day and to speak truth to their fellow citizens back in Russia. I am so proud and grateful for this little village we have here, and for the real and meaningful impact you have on the world.

Thank you, truly.

Still, Macron is eager to find a negotiated settlement to the war, which is now in its fourth month. He is not alone in this pursuit. In his corner is a motley crew that includes Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz; many on the American left, like commentator Peter Beinart; and even Henry Kissinger, who said out loud what many in this camp of self-described realists had been starting to whisper privately: it’s time for Ukraine to cede territory in exchange for peace with Russia.

It’s worth stipulating that ending the war in Ukraine, and doing so sooner rather than later, is everyone’s goal—even Putin’s. The sooner the war ends, the sooner soldiers on both sides can stop dying, the sooner Ukrainian civilians are no longer shelled in their homes, the sooner Ukrainian refugees can come home and begin the arduous process of rebuilding what the war has torn down. Perhaps as important, for billions of people around the world, a settlement might also bring an end to the sanctions and blockades that have exacerbated the energy crisis and threaten global food shortages that could last for years.

But peace at any price is hardly worth the name, and peace without justice never really holds because it is not truly peace. It merely postpones the inevitable explosion and, in some ways, makes it more powerful by concentrating and compressing grievance.

This is my case against appeasement.

One hundred days of a foreign war is a long time for Americans, even though 100 days is not much time at all, especially in the context of war. Yet some commentators are already invoking the term “forever war” in relation to a conflict that is only in its fourth month. The term lumps Ukraine in with Iraq and Afghanistan, two largely pointless wars that went on so long that few people remembered why they had begun, and were ultimately fought by people who hadn’t been born when they were launched. When Joe Biden decided to leave Afghanistan, the argument on the left was that getting out immediately was worth almost any price, that the lives of American troops were more important than those of the Afghan civilians clinging to the wheels of ascending U.S. military planes. After decades of war abroad, Americans have developed a profound suspicion of foreign interventionism—as well as its eye-popping price tag. It is one of the few things that brings together the left and right of the American political spectrum.

The argument, according to the armchair experts, is that Russia is stronger and bigger, it has more men and materiel, and has been making gains in the Donbas. According to these analysts, there is no realistic way that Ukraine can claw back territory and win, so Ukraine should help to end the war now before it gets even worse.

This plan, brimming with realpolitik cynicism, asks nothing of Russia other than a pause on its territorial ambitions. Nor does it ask Ukrainians what they want. Do the Ukrainian people and their democratically elected leadership feel this is a price worth paying? Do they want to give up 20 percent of their territory—territory which is integral to their economy—to appease Russia? So far, it seems they don’t. While Americans may be tired of watching the war in Ukraine, there has been no evidence that Ukrainians are tired of fighting it.

How can one reach a compromise with a position that isn’t just maximalist, but genocidal? How does one negotiate with a position that doesn’t even admit to the existence of the other side? Moreover, how does one settle with a man who has yet to keep his word? Putin, after all, told us that Russia wouldn’t invade Ukraine. Then, when Russia did invade Ukraine, he said Russia wasn’t there to occupy it. Now, his puppet politicians are visiting the occupied Donbas and publicly proclaiming that, “Russia will be here for a long time, Russia will be here forever!” And how does the compromise camp account for the fact that several settlements were reached after the 2014 invasion that effectively froze the conflict in Ukraine’s east, only to have Putin encircle and invade Ukraine from three sides just a few years later?

It’s all well and good to talk about peace in theory, but those who know Russia—really know it, from the inside—know that this theory has little in common with reality. Consider what Boris Bondarev, the Russian diplomat who quit in protest over the war, told me about a negotiated settlement just two days after his resignation from the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he’d worked for more than 20 years. “No way,” he said. “You can’t. You just can’t make peace now. If you do, it will be seen as a Russian victory. Russia will spend a couple years scraping together some resources and then it will do this again.”

Putin sees compromises as admissions of weakness, and if the point is to stop the war in Ukraine before it spreads, caving to Putin will achieve the opposite result. When Putin feels there’s room to keep pushing further, he does. Putin has already signaled that the war won’t stop in Ukraine: Russian officials have made clear that they intend to march all the way to Moldova. And if we’re scared he’ll drag us in, it’s worth recalling that Putin has already gone to war with the West: in 2016, when he interfered in the American presidential election, when he stoked separatist movements in Spain, when he tried to stage a coup in Montenegro. From the earliest days of the war, Putin’s army of television hosts have been bellowing about how Russia is not fighting with Ukraine but with the entire “collective West.” The only ones who don’t realize it, it seems, is us.

It didn’t seem to matter to these so-called realists that Ukraine, like Poland and the Baltic states, actively wanted to join the defensive alliance because it was intimately familiar with Russia’s history of invasion and occupation. Notice, by the way, how Putin didn’t stop the war despite Volodymyr Zelensky’s offer of neutrality. Notice how Putin essentially disregarded Finland and Sweden’s upcoming NATO accession and said that the northern expansion didn’t pose a threat to Russia. (It’s almost like none of this was about NATO…)

Imposing Russia’s will and our fatigue on the Ukrainians, taking away their agency, both as a people and as a democratic state, is the opposite of what we should be doing. The best thing the U.S. can do is stay the course and provide enough aid to Ukraine to give them a real chance of victory, however they define it. Last week Biden was asked by a reporter if Ukraine has “to cede territory to achieve some peace?” Biden responded by restating his administration’s position that other powers would not—and cannot—decide Ukraine’s fate without Ukraine’s input. “It’s their territory,” he added. “I’m not going to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do.”

It was, quite frankly, the only correct answer.

Julia