Ukrainian mood hardens as MPs insist country should not be forced to surrender; The Guardian, August 17, 2025

 Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv and Artem Mazhulin , The Guardian; Ukrainian mood hardens as MPs insist country should not be forced to surrender

[Kip Currier: For anyone who thinks Ukraine should just capitulate to Putin and Trump's pressure to give up its sovereign territory and its peoples, realize what that means: 

all. Ukrainians. in. those. territories. will. now. be. living. under. Russian. totalitarian. rule. 

Period. Full stop.

Ask yourself, too, if you're an American, if you'd be willing to just acquiesce to pressure and surrender a half dozen U.S. states to an authoritarian invader.

Moreover, giving up those states to Russia is no guarantee that Russia won't later use those newly acquired regions as footholds to again attack Ukraine and try to take over the entire country. 

As an 8/17/25 BBC article reports:

Zelensky has consistently said Ukraine would not hand over the Donbas in exchange for peace. And confidence in Russia to abide by any such arrangement – rather than simply use the annexed land for future attacks – is low.  

For that and other reasons, about 75% of Ukrainians object to any formal cessation of land to Russia, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgv1pdkll8o

That's what a despotic abductor of Ukrainian children, a bomber of hospitals, and indicted war criminal like Putin is likely to do.

And for anyone who is a marginalized person in those territories, such as LGBTQ+ persons, your very life may be at risk if Russia takes control of those lands. (See here and here and here.]

[Excerpt]

"A string of Ukrainian politicians and public figures condemned the idea of handing over unoccupied land to Russia for peace on Sunday, arguing that their country had not been defeated and should not be forced into a surrender.

The hardening of the mood came at the end of a weekend where there was first ridicule and disgust in Ukraine at the red-carpet treatment of Vladimir Putin by Donald Trump at their summit in Alaska, followed by frustration as it appeared that Trump was siding with the Russian leader.

Trump reportedly told European leaders that he believed a peace deal could be negotiated if Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to give up the areas of the Donbas region that the Russian invaders have not been able to seize in more than three years of fighting.

Halyna Yanchenko, an independent member of Ukraine’s parliament, said the suggestion that Ukraine should “simply surrender new territories without a fight – just because Putin wants it – is absurd from the very start”.

The MP, an anti-corruption activist previously part of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, said hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would be affected by Putin’s proposal, initially favoured by Trump after Friday’s Alaska summit.

Official estimates are that 255,000 people still live in the 3,500 square miles (9,000 sq km) of Donetsk province that Russia has been unable to seize in its three-and-a-half-year invasion, which includes the industrial cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. The Donbas also comprises Luhansk province, which is almost totally occupied by Russia.

Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion the population of Donetsk was 1.9 million, so the number of people with property and other connections to the area wanted by Russia is higher. “So when someone brings up the idea of ‘trading territory’, we must understand that in practice it is trading people,” Yanchenko said...

Cartoons and memes circulated widely online over the weekend with a particular focus on the sight of US soldiers kneeling to straighten out the red carpet in Alaska for the Russian president.

“Dishonored,” wrote Serhii Sternenko, a Ukrainian drone fundraiser, on X, comparing the image to soldiers raising the US flag at Iwo Jima towards the end of the second world war.

Maksym Palenko, a cartoonist, drew a picture of a glum-looking Trump with his trademark red tie spooling out beneath him and turning into a carpet on which a laughing Putin was standing. It reflected shots of Putin smiling as he was sitting in Trump’s limousine while it was setting off.

“We do not deserve to surrender and we are not in a position to surrender,” said Oleksiy Goncharenko, an MP with the opposition European Solidarity party. “This part of Donetsk is a fortress and Putin has tried and failed to take it for 11 years. Now he wants to take it through diplomatic tricks and manoeuvres.”" 

 Geoff Bennett , PBS News; Carla Hayden on her time as a pioneering librarian of Congress and getting fired by Trump

"Geoff Bennett: What effect do you believe censorship has on our democracy?

• Dr. Carla Hayden:

  As Alberto Manguel said, as centuries of dictators, tyrants, slave owners and other illicit holders of power have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule. And if you cannot restrict a people from learning to read, you must limit its scope.

  And that is the danger of making sure that people don't have access.

• Geoff Bennett:

  She says she will keep advocating for her beliefs and feels bolstered by support from elected officials on both sides of the aisle, as well as from people across the country.

  She shared that her 93-year-old mother has been cataloging the notes and messages she's received. A former president of the American Library Association, Hayden is set to address some of its 50,000 members at their annual meeting. This year's agenda, she says, takes on new urgency.

• Dr. Carla Hayden:

  How to help communities support their libraries, how to deal with personal attacks that libraries are having, even death threats in some communities for libraries.

  So this convening of librarians that are in schools, universities, public libraries will be really our rally. We have been called feisty fighters for freedom."

Longing for the freedom not to hide myself; The Washington Post, April 15, 2018

Ria Tabacco Mar, The Washington Post; Longing for the freedom not to hide myself

"Ria Tabacco Mar is counsel of record for Charlie Craig and David Mullins in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Charlie Craig, one of the men that Masterpiece Cakeshop, a Colorado bakery, turned away because they are gay, said something about shopping for a wedding cake that stuck with me: “That day,” he said, “I really let my guard down.”

I knew exactly what Craig meant. Not just because he’s my client but because I keep my guard up most days, too — just like nearly every LGBT person I know."

The Russification of America; New York Times, February 21, 2017

Roger Cohen, New York Times; 

The Russification of America

"I’m skeptical of Trump ever running a disciplined administration. His feelings about Europe are already clear and won’t change. The European Union needs to step into the moral void by standing unequivocally for the values that must define the West: truth, facts, reason, science, tolerance, freedom, democracy and the rule of law. For now it’s unclear if the Trump administration is friend or foe in that fight."

How The U.S. Navy Named a Ship After Harvey Milk To Show Its LGBT Pride; Daily Beast, 8/20/16

Lizzie Crocker, Daily Beast; How The U.S. Navy Named a Ship After Harvey Milk To Show Its LGBT Pride:

"“It’s important to remember and honor naval heroes—sailors and marines who have sacrificed so much for America,” [Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus] said. “But it’s also important to recognize and honor those who have fought in a different way and sacrificed… those who have fought for the ideals that we cherish as a nation: justice, equality, and freedom.”

Under his leadership, the Navy has now created a new naming convention (in January, Mabus named the first ship in this new class of command replenishment vessels after John Lewis, the Georgian politician and civil rights activist).

“My uncle always told me that it poisoned the soul to have to lie about or hide who you were,” [Stuart Milk, Harvey’s nephew and leader of the Harvey Milk Foundation] said, recalling how his uncle gave him a book in 1972, Seven Arrows, about Native Americans when Stuart was 12 and not yet out of the closet.

“He told me that my authenticity and the fact that I felt different from everyone else was important, and he wrote in the front, ‘All of your differences are the medicine that the world needs, even when the world doesn’t recognize that.’ I think the USNS Harvey Milk can telegraph that message to the world.”"

We Are All Parisians, Again; Huffington Post, 11/13/15

Howard Fineman, Huffington Post; We Are All Parisians, Again:

"Once again, we are all Parisians.

Once again, the ideals of freedom and peace are under attack on the very streets that helped give birth to the idea that you can’t have one without the other in modern life.

Once again, President Barack Obama went to a podium in Washington to declare American solidarity with France -- and to vow that an attack on French society was an attack on the very ideas of decency, modernity and sanity.

And once again, the world -- or that part of it that doesn’t love murder and hate peace -- must rise up and say, simply: Stop."