“Without a just peace, the war will continue in the occupied territories until there are no Ukrainians left there.” That is the conclusion of a senior researcher at the University of Ostrava, writing in an opinion piece for the Kyiv Independent, who argues that proposals to trade land for peace leave out the people who live on that land.
The author describes a growing chorus saying Kyiv must accept that military victory is impossible, enter negotiations and agree to territorial concessions. Supporters of the idea call it a difficult choice but the only way to avoid a crushing defeat. Russian leaders, the piece notes, continue to reject talk of ceasefires or meaningful negotiations.
The writer’s objection is that “land for peace” treats the occupied territories as empty. Citing the scholar Olga Burlyuk, the piece calls the framing a “pornography of land concessions”: if it is just land, the thinking goes, there is no harm in losing some. In reality, the author writes, millions of Ukrainians live under an occupation regime designed to eradicate their identity.
Children at the center
Moscow already treats the occupied areas as permanent parts of the Russian Federation, according to the piece. It lists the tools of that approach: integration into Russian legal and political structures, the ruble, control over information and coerced passportization. Many of them, the author says, are aimed at children, whose views are more malleable than those of adults.
From their first days in school, children go through what the piece calls indoctrination disguised as “patriotic education.” Ukrainian has been all but eliminated from classrooms, with lessons in Russian, often from ideologically reliable teachers brought in from Russia. Updated textbooks describe the “liberation” of “historically Russian land.” Children of all ages also receive paramilitary training, including battlefield first aid and the use of weapons and drones, and are taught to glorify the Russian military.
The author quotes a recent OSCE report, which said such policies are “aimed at erasing Ukrainian children’s identity and replacing it with a Russian one.”
Russia also encourages people from other parts of the country to move into the occupied territories, often into the homes of the former residents. If the occupation lasts long enough, the writer says, future generations will get Russian passports at birth, grow up speaking Russian and come out at best ambivalent toward Ukraine, if not openly hostile.
The risk of legitimizing the occupation
Concessions signed at gunpoint carry a second danger, the author argues. They would legitimize territorial aggression, and they would turn the destruction of Ukrainian identity into an “internal” matter of an enlarged Russia. What the world can condemn today as an illegal occupation would become a process carried out under Russian law inside Russian borders.
The piece does not claim to know how the war ends. It points to rumors of an imminent Russian mobilization, to tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers coming to Moscow’s aid and to a Russian leadership that, in the author’s words, remains uninterested in any negotiation short of Ukrainian capitulation. On the other side, the writer lists Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions” campaign, a stabilized front line and the growing isolation of Crimea as changes that would have seemed far-fetched a year ago.
The Kyiv Independent notes that opinions in its op-ed section belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the outlet’s views.
