Putin plays the long game. He has punished Ukraine – and he won’t stop there | Yaroslav Hrytsak

Like a judo master, the Russian aggressor wears down his opponents until they break. Then he comes back for more

I have a friend, an American author, who writes about war. Over the past decades, he has been to South Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and other conflict zones. In the case of Ukraine, he said one thing stood out: here it was obvious who was the aggressor and who was the victim. Alongside Bosnia, Ukraine's resistance to Russia remains, in his opinion, one of two truly just wars.

After three years of fighting a just war against Putin's aggression, we are now facing, with Donald Trump, an unjust peace. Ukraine will lose lands and will not receive compensation for its losses. War crimes will go unpunished and Ukrainians will not be provided with the security guarantees needed to protect them from future Russian attack.

Yaroslav Hrytsak is a historian and professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv