Dear Editor:

A 28-point ‘peace plan’ to end Russia’s aggression against Ukraine was drafted in Miami by two of Trump’s billionaire real estate developers and a Russian kleptocrat? And the plan they concocted restates a memo to the White House from Moscow?

Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Uri Ushakov are pressuring President Zelenskyy to give the mass murderer Vladimir Putin everything he wants: more Ukrainian territory than he controls, a reduction in Ukrainian forces, no NATO membership, and amnesty for the 200,000 war crimes he has committed so far.

This, of course, is just the latest betrayal of a nation that has suffered unimaginable losses in the last hundred years. A brief summary of the atrocities committed against Ukraine will contextualize Trump’s latest stab in the back of our democratic ally.

The Ukrainian people lost their brief, postwar independence to the Soviet Union in 1921. Under Moscow’s domination until 1991, they have suffered three man-made famines: ‘Russification’ (1921-1923); the ‘Holodomor,’ Stalin’s genocidal Terror Famine (1932-1933, four million victims); and a postwar famine (1945-1947; one million deaths).

Mass executions during Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ campaign (200,000 deaths) and World War II were staggering. The German army and SS Einsatzgruppen executed seven million Ukrainians, 1.5 million of whom were Jewish victims of the Holocaust. At Babyn Yar alone, 34,000 Jewish civilians were shot to death in just two days.

Russian mismanagement caused the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, resulting in 60,000 long-term deaths and serious health threats to 30 million Ukrainians.

Thirty years ago, newly-independent Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal, third largest in the world, to Russia in exchange for American, Russian, and British guarantees of its territorial integrity. The UN Security Council promised to defend Ukraine against invasion.

So here we are, eleven years after Russia’s clandestine seizure of Crimea and four years after the full Russian invasion. In defense of their country, 400,000 Ukrainians have died — as many as all American lives lost in World War II. Reprising the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, Trump and Putin are carving up this democratic nation as it fights for its very existence.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay