Ukraine stood strong because the nation chose to fight. An attempt to sell at negotiations what has been suffered and endured will lead to a deep moral breakdown. Andriy Biletsky, commander of the Third Army Corps, wrote about this in a blog on the anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He reminded that four years ago, the Russians were going to take Kyiv in three days. In four years, they have not been able to fully occupy a single region of Ukraine. The country stood strong not because it had external support, but because hundreds of thousands of people decided to fight.
"Hundreds, thousands of Ukrainians drove the enemy like a mammoth. Within a month, the Russians fled, abandoning everything — the bodies of their dead, cars, equipment. 13 captured Russian tanks are still serving in the Third Assault Brigade. The Russian 'TOR-M' air defense system captured by us in the Kyiv region still covers one of the Ukrainian cities from the Russians," Biletsky recalled the battles for the Kyiv region in March 2022.
He stated that Ukraine needs a true peace that preserves sovereignty and the ability to defend itself in the future. This excludes handing over Ukrainian territories to the enemy in exchange for a "false peace" — Russia will use the pause for revenge and rewriting the history of its shameful failure.
"If today we abandon Ukrainian land and our people in Donbas, what guarantees are there that we will not similarly abandon Ukrainian Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson under the threat of renewed war?" the corps commander stated.
Biletsky emphasized that the main peacemaker is the Ukrainian soldier on the front, and the only path to true peace is stopping the enemy along the front line. In his opinion, only then will the Russians be the first to sit down at the negotiating table and offer real conditions, not a "Trojan horse."
"The Russians failed to take Kyiv in three days. They failed to break Ukraine in four years. And they will not succeed in gnawing out our capitulation by deception," the brigadier general stated.