BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman? On rejecting peace and rejecting the conditions of peace… I want to try to explain it because, on my recent trips to the US since late June, I was “challenged” by some American Christians who said that Ukraine rejects peace… That is what I tried to communicate to them, as politely as possible…

When we (the state, the society, and the Church) in Ukraine say no to a proposed deal, we are often told we are rejecting peace, which confuses two different things we keep apart… To reject peace is to want the war to continue because the war serves your goals. That is russia’s position, and they accuse Ukraine of it… since it started this war of terror and can end it any day by withdrawing its troops…

I want to use two pictures to help me explain this difference. The first is a wounded man who refuses an amputation proposed by the one who shot him. Not for the sake of healing, but to make a man crippled… Nobody at his bedside should conclude that he does not want to be healed, because what he refuses is that operation and that surgeon… The second is a family whose house has been broken into, and who are told that the intruder will stop the violence if he keeps the rooms he has taken and a key to the front door… The family that says no still wants a quiet home, perhaps more than anyone on the street advising them… We are that patient and that family… and our no to such conditions comes from the same longing for healing and for a home that is ours again…

To reject the conditions of peace is to say that a particular price cannot and must not be paid. The conditions offered to us so far would leave our people under occupation and under the rule of the “ruzzian world,” confirm that borders can be moved by force anywhere and anytime, and rest on the signature (so-called “security guarantees”) of a state that has already broken its earlier agreements with us. We have lived through this once, when the Minsk agreements neither stopped the shooting in Donbas nor prevented February 2022 (as I mentioned above).

Nobody wants this war to end more than we, Ukrainians, do… because we are the ones who sit without electricity, heating, and often without water supply, and who stand at the funerals of civilians and defenders murdered by ruzzians… That is why our no is addressed to the terms, and why it comes from people who know what those terms would mean in daily life…

The prophet Jeremiah saw the same confusion in his own time (I know, I quote it often…): “They have also healed the hurt of My people slightly, Saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ When there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). A wound that is only covered and left untreated will open again… such conditions of fake peace will lead to even broader aggression, and far beyond Ukraine…

So I have one question for every fake or Romantic peacemaker: what will this deal do to the people who have to live inside it? Are you going to move to the Russia-occupied territory to live under the conditions of that peace deal? If you are, please, move now; I am willing to contribute financially to that move… A deal that rewards the aggressor only pauses the war and sets up the next one, which is why refusing it is a way to take peace seriously… from inside, not outside of Ukraine… Keep your children away from war… Our Mission has not changed… Taras D, Ukraine