Accepting certain losses won’t be a defeat for Ukraine.

History is replete with smart concessions that laid the foundations for future empires. True statecraft is not measured in square kilometers held, but in the long-term viability, prosperity, and sovereignty of the political entity.

1. Louis XI, the “Universal Spider” who forged modern France, began his reign not by crushing his feudal enemies on the battlefield, but by making humiliating concessions to them, buying time to consolidate the internal economy and administrative power that would eventually swallow them whole.
2. Consider England after the Hundred Years’ War: it was only after it was forcibly ejected from the continent—giving up the French territories it believed it was divinely entitled to—that it was forced to look inward, build its navy, and focus on commerce, eventually creating the greatest empire history has ever known.
3. Prussia forged its iron discipline and state capacity in the fires of submission, turning the humiliation of vassalage into the engine of its eventual dominance.

The lesson is clear: the obsession with “historical borders” is often a trap. Politically and demographically, Crimea and the Donbas have acted as a poison pill for the Ukrainian state since its inception.

These are areas that have overwhelmingly and consistently voted for pro-Russian candidates, dragging Kyiv’s geopolitical orientation eastward and paralyzing its integration into the West. By severing these territories, Ukraine inadvertently solves its most crippling internal contradiction.

It is a harsh parallel to post-1945 Poland: Poland lost its vast, multi-ethnic eastern territories (Kresy), a loss that was mourned as a tragedy. Yet, that loss created an ethnically and culturally homogenous state that was far easier to govern, stabilize, and eventually integrate into NATO and the EU.

Furthermore, let us be honest about the state of these lands.

The “Russian World” has treated its prospective subjects with its characteristic nihilism: they have “liberated” these cities into rubble. Let Russia inherit the ruin. Let Moscow bear the exorbitant cost of reconstruction and the policing of a traumatized population. Re-integrating these regions would not be a victory for Kyiv; it would be an economic anvil around the neck of a recovering state, draining billions in resources that should be spent on modernizing the west of the country.

There is also a necessary reckoning regarding Ukraine’s own mistakes.

Ukraine has been effectively at war since 2014, yet for eight years, the state failed to militarize its society or fortify its borders with the urgency the situation demanded. The political leadership dismissed American intelligence regarding the invasion as hysteria, preferring to maintain a facade of calm rather than mobilizing for total war. One cannot claim to be the “Shield of Europe” while ignoring the blacksmith for a decade.

The reliance on the Budapest Memorandum is the crowning example of this legalistic naivety. It was a memorandum, not a treaty; it offered assurances, not guarantees; it was a diplomatic sticky note, not a binding defense pact. To base a national security strategy on a non-ratified piece of paper from the 1990s is not a tragedy of betrayal; it is a failure of seriousness.

Finally, we must address the military reality.

The reconquest of Crimea or the entrenched east is a physical impossibility without the direct intervention of NATO air power and boots on the ground—a scenario that is simply not on the table. No amount of heroism changes the calculus of artillery superiority and manpower reserves. To continue to sacrifice the best of a generation for lines on a map that cannot be held is not patriotism.

The path forward requires a brutal pivot from the past to the future.

It means abandoning the cultivation of divisive, retrospective myths—such as the lionization of Bandera, which serves only to alienate strategic allies like Poland and fuel Russian propaganda—and focusing on the construction of a technocratic, defensible, and economically robust state.

Ukraine can be a large, failed state obsessed with its lost borders, or a smaller, prosperous fortress integrated into Europe. It cannot be both.

If I take some heat for getting real, well, facing reality has never been easy for the human being, and that’s why history looks the way it does.