Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President,

The terms now being discussed for “peace” in Ukraine are not peace terms at all. They are the dictated spoils of a victorious autocrat imposed upon a betrayed ally. Every element of this proposal — the forced reduction of Ukraine’s army, the ban on NATO membership, the prohibition of Western troops, the removal of American aircraft from even neighboring Poland, and the demand for new elections engineered to topple President Zelensky — reads not like diplomacy, but like surrender. And it is a surrender not of Ukraine’s choosing, but of ours.

Russia is to relinquish nothing. Not an inch of stolen territory. In fact, Moscow is to be rewarded. Awarded the remaining portions of Donetsk and Luhansk still under Ukrainian control — land fortified and defended for years, the modern equivalent of handing over the Czech border forts in 1938. We have spent decades vowing “never again” to the appeasement that doomed Europe once before. Yet today, under your leadership, the United States is poised to reenact it almost line by line.

The parallels to Munich are no longer historical exaggerations — they are a warning sign flashing in real time. Russian-speaking communities deliberately inflamed. Early territorial compromise offered and rejected. Final terms forced upon a smaller allied nation while powerful outsiders negotiate over its head. A democratic president weakened by manufactured accusations and pushed aside. And, ominously, an autocrat who has already shown the world that he interprets concessions not as goodwill, but as invitations.

We know what Hitler did six months after Munich. The world remembers. Do you?

Because if Putin decides to restart the war after mutilating Ukraine and shackling it from joining the Western alliance, who will stop him? The intelligence and satellite support that Ukraine depends on — support you unilaterally terminated once already before being pressured into a brief reversal — is now positioned to be withdrawn permanently. This is not “restraint.” This is not “cost savings.” Sharing intelligence costs virtually nothing. Allowing Europe to buy matériel for Ukraine costs us nothing.

No, this is something far darker: the United States choosing a side. And choosing the wrong one.

Russia and America now stand poised to carve up the resources of a devastated ally. The façade of neutrality has crumbled. The threats of “very severe consequences” were hollow. Our closest partners — especially Britain — were cut out entirely. You sent a real-estate developer with no knowledge of the territories at stake to negotiate over the fate of a sovereign nation. Putin sent you a portrait. You sent him concessions.

This is not a diplomatic misstep; it is a geopolitical collapse. And it is one authored from within.

The tragedy is not only Ukraine’s. Britain — our most steadfast ally since 1941 — now finds itself exposed and isolated. Russia openly taunts and threatens it. Medvedev speaks of “sinking the island of Anglo-Saxon dogs.” And as this is happening, America’s historic commitments — intelligence sharing, nuclear cooperation, strategic unity — suddenly look brittle.

More brittle still is the world order we once led. The order that said borders cannot be changed by force. That democracies deserve protection. That dictators do not dictate the destinies of smaller nations. A system built not on American dominance, but on American principles.

How did that decades-old system collapse before a Russia weaker in population, economy, military readiness, and morale than at almost any point in its post-Soviet history?

Because it did not fall to Putin.

It fell to us.

To you.

To an internal abandonment of values that once defined American leadership. To a cynical reversal of alliances and ideals. To the world’s most powerful democracy placing itself in moral and strategic alignment with a regime built on repression, aggression, corruption, and lies.

Mr. President, history will not misremember this moment. Our children will not misremember it. And you must decide — now — whether you intend to be remembered as the American leader who helped a dictator dismember a democracy, or the one who finally refused to let appeasement write the future.

The world is watching. And it is watching you.