Roman Sheremeta
April 29, 2025
CEPA
Ukraine faces a moment of acute national peril. Having fought a war for national survival against an imperialist neighbor that chose conquest as a means to colonial expansion, it now faces calls from some among its old friends in the US to surrender territory.
This would not bring peace, it would result in Ukraine’s national destruction and immiseration.
Some Western politicians believe that when a country is invaded or occupied, the flag changes, but life goes on. They imagine that people will adapt, pay taxes to a new government, and return to some version of normal life. That is a dangerous illusion, especially when the occupying power is one with a long track record of mass repression, cultural erasure, and genocide.
In fact, so-called “peace” under occupation has often been worse than war. Because it’s not peace at all — it’s domination. The occupier doesn’t just want land; it wants control over identity, language, and memory. It wants to erase the very existence of the people it subjugates.
History is full of examples. One of the most striking was shared with me by a Ukrainian friend, Volodymyr Kukharenko — a tragic story about the Moriori people of what are now called the Chatham Islands in the South Pacific.
In 1835, a vessel carrying Maori warriors landed on the Moriori’s remote island. The Moriori were a peaceful, nonviolent people who had lived without war for hundreds of years. Instead of resisting, they welcomed the newcomers and offered to share the land and resources in peace. It was a decision rooted in hope and goodwill.
The result was a catastrophe. The Maori rejected the idea of coexistence. They massacred the Moriori, hunted them like animals, enslaved the survivors, and desecrated their cultural sites. Some Moriori were even cannibalized. Their language was banned. Their sacred places became toilets. Within a few decades, their civilization was all but erased.
If you think something like that couldn’t happen in Europe today, consider what befell Ukraine after it lost its war of independence in 1919 and was forcibly absorbed into the Soviet Union.
What followed was not peace. It was decades of terror. In 1932–1933, the Soviet regime engineered a famine — the Holodomor — to crush Ukrainian resistance to collectivization. Food was confiscated from Ukrainian villages. Borders were sealed. Up to seven million people died of starvation. It was a deliberate genocide, meant to break the Ukrainian spirit and erase national identity.
The terror didn’t stop there. In 1937, Stalin launched mass purges targeting Ukrainian intellectuals. Hundreds of poets, writers, scientists, and artists were executed. Ukrainian
language schools were shut down. Books were burned. The very idea of a separate Ukrainian culture was criminalized.
That is what Russian “peace” looked like then, and it is no different today.
In Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine, such as Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, and southern regions seized since 2022, Ukrainian identity is under constant attack. Speaking Ukrainian can get you arrested — or worse. Ukrainian books are being pulled from libraries and burned. Teachers who taught history or literature in Ukrainian have been executed. In Bucha, after Russian forces retreated, mass graves were discovered — some containing the bodies of educators who had committed no crime other than sharing Ukrainian history.
Under occupation, the cultural genocide begins almost immediately. Children are indoctrinated with Russian propaganda. Streets are renamed. Churches are closed or seized. Any trace of Ukrainian heritage is treated as a threat.
In such conditions, war is often safer than a fake peace. That’s the grim reality. Because in war, there is still resistance. There is still a chance to defend your dignity, your family, your land. But under occupation, you are often left to be slaughtered quietly — in the dark, behind closed doors, with no one watching and no one to stop it.
This is why Ukraine continues to fight.
When foreign politicians or commentators suggest that Ukraine should negotiate with Russia — or give up land in exchange for peace — they either do not understand what is at stake, or they do not care. What they are proposing is not a peace deal. It’s a death sentence for millions.
You cannot stop aggression by indulging it. You cannot end genocide by negotiating the terms of submission.
Russia must not be rewarded for its crimes. Its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its war crimes, and its ongoing acts of genocide must be met with justice, not appeasement. History has shown us again and again: true peace does not come from giving in to evil. It comes from standing up to it.
And that’s what Ukraine is doing. Not just for itself, but for the world.
Roman Sheremeta, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at Case Western Reserve University.