This is the third time the Gazette has subjected us to the same guest columnist’s view that Ukraine must surrender to its invader — sorry, must “negotiate” — by giving a chunk of its country to Putin and vowing not to join NATO. Not joining NATO would leave Ukraine with no better defense against another invasion by Russia: why should it stop at a mere two pieces of land, when its dictator has clearly said he considers all Ukraine a part of Russia? (And, no doubt, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, part of the old USSR. And why not Poland, which was once part of Greater Russia?)
Writer John Berkowitz’s main argument and the Gazette’s Aug. 15 headline “End the Ukraine war now or risk nuclear war” is that Russia has nuclear weapons and might use them. They haven’t done so since 2022, when this same columnist first raised that fear. But that’s not the point: the obvious consequence of appeasing Putin is to invite every dictator with a nuclear weapon to invade another country with impunity because of the fear that he might do the same. North Korea could invade South Korea and China could invade Taiwan. The writer remains oblivious to this.
Impossible not to think of 1938, when Hitler said “Just give me a small part of Czechoslovakia, that’s all I want.” So France and England did, in Munich. Neville Chamberlain returned to Britain crowing “Peace in our time!” Then Hitler invaded Poland.
Mr. Berkowitz goes on to state that Ukraine is being “devastated.” If only they would surrender, they could live in peace! “A recent Gallup poll showed that the majority want the war to end now,” even if they have to give up part of their country, he claims. The sources are unreliable: that Gallup Poll headline is “Ukrainians Sour on U.S. Leadership”: 59% decline in U.S. approval since 2022. Why? Because Trump has let them down. You’d think the leader of a democratic country would back a smaller democracy invaded by a larger dictatorship. Not Trump, who has in fact refused to sell Ukraine the defensive arms it needs, contrary to what Mr. Berkowitz alleges. …Still, of course they want to end the war as soon as possible! Who wouldn’t? But I could find nothing in this poll saying most are willing to appease Putin by giving him land.
I don’t know where the description of Ukrainian “exhaustion” is from, but it fits the conditions in Putin’s Russia perfectly. The column cites “the serious desertion rate in the army, and the resistance of thousands of its men to brutal forced conscription by hiding in their homes, paying huge bribes or trying to escape across the borders.” As for Ukraine, my son was working on an educational project with a group of Ukrainian high school teachers when the project stopped: they had all volunteered to fight for their country.
Conditions in the Russian army are indeed brutal. Men, including convicts and North Koreans, are used as cannon fodder by an indifferent dictator. Estimates for Russian casualties range from 1,468,760 on what looks like a Russian dissident website (published, obviously, outside Russia) to 323,000 by a western political scientist. Estimates of Ukrainian casualties: 125,000–150,000 military and 16,431 civilian deaths as of the end of June 2026 (UN Human Rights Office.) Yes, it is a terrible war.
Remember how it started? Putin launched a “special military operation” to “denazify” the democratically elected government in Kyiv, whose people had recently replaced a Russian puppet by a Jewish president. Putin thought it would be over fast, and Russia would annex Ukraine or turn it into a satellite country, like the communist countries before the fall of the USSR. But the Ukrainians fought back.
Before the Nazis occupied France, some people said “peace at any price!” After the Liberation, Marie Curie’s daughter Eve, a journalist, had this to say about it: “We discovered that peace at any price is no peace at all… and that there is something more hideous, more atrocious than war or than death; and that is to live in fear.” Clearly, Ukrainians do not want to live in fear under a brutal dictatorship. We should support them in every way we can.
David Ball lives in Northampton.