This is the last American aid package for Ukraine and what the Ukrainian authorities should do

I am very glad that the Ukrainian authorities are getting $ 60.8 billion dollars in American aid. Yet the American Congress and public will not agree to another package of aid. So what should be done, especially in view of the fact that there is a 50% chance that Trump will be elected the president of the U.S. in 2024, and will cut off aid to Ukraine? First of all, after and only after sufficient American aid (meaning weapons and ammunition) will be in Ukraine, on the battlefield and used by Ukrainian troops, and after the Ukrainians will win a square kilometer here and another one there, but before the American presidential election, Ukraine should start negotiating with Russia, that is, from a position of greater strength than now. There are some territories that Ukraine will never get back and that should be acknowledged and accepted. Ukraine should focus on keeping what it has, including independence, a path to joining the EU, a path to joining NATO and wide enough access to the Black Sea. After the aid will stop, do you have any doubt that Putin will annex all of Ukraine, and then Moldova? I don't.

The role model for Ukraine could be the Finland of 1939-1940, which fought against Stalin's Soviet attack, but then accepted reality, that is, the required territorial changes in favor of the Soviet Union, as unjust as they were. It could be the Romania of 1940, which gave up Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Herta to the Soviet Union (temporarily regained in 1941-1944), northern Greater Transylvania (Transylvania, Crisana and Maramures) to Hungary, and southern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. (Southern Dobrogea should not have been a part of Romania in the first place because it had too few Romanians, and the Romanian prime minister Ion Gheorghe Duca was ready to return it to Bulgaria, as he was saying privately in 1933.) Yes, my grandparents were the victims of the shrinking of Romania's borders. Yet if one loves Romania, one should acknowledge, and one should have acknowledged in 1940, that the Romanian leadership did the right thing, thus preserving Romania's independence and saving what could be saved, with the possibility of getting back much of what was lost over time. And, as my grandmother Rada (later Radiana) was saying in 1994, justice had recently been restored. It had indeed, through changes such as ... the creation of an independent Moldovan state in 1991, the return of northern Greater Transylvania to Romania in 1945, and the return to "Romanian schools" instead of "Moldovan schools" in the Odessa region of Ukraine in 2023-2024 by the Ukrainian authorities, to the benefit of even of some of my nephews and nieces who live in Ukrainian southern Bessarabia. Some of these Moldovans/Romanians of southern Bessarabia, Ukrainian citizens, with relatives in the Ukrainian army fighting against the Russians, whether they have a "Romanian" or "Moldovan" identity, have asked me to write this, and I am doing precisely that. And, given how some were interrogated by the Ukrainian SBU a number of years ago because they once insisted that their language is "Romanian" and not "Moldovan", they don't have the courage to state their views on this topic publicly.

There is also the "serenity prayer", an American Christian prayer found mainly among American Protestants, though also taught in Catholic schools and even Romanian Orthodox Sunday schools in the United States, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." American pragmatism is built into it. The Ukrainian leadership should make an effort to do exactly that, which is what almost half of the population of Ukraine under Ukrainian control wants according to some opinion polls. And, as a Romanian Orthodox Christian (and, within the broader Romanian category, in the Moldovan sub-category) and naturalized U.S. citizen, I had to write this as we are approaching the Orthodox Christian Easter.

I do not think that my advice will be followed. Yet I had to write what I wrote.

All the best,

Ionas Aurelian Rus