You can’t distill a life into a line, but let me tell you something about my relationship with the Russian regime.
It very likely killed my son in Moscow and it very certainly bombed my disabled child in Mariupol. It has chased me from country to country from my birthplace in Belarus. You’ll understand if I write with some personal animus.
These days I feel uncomfortable and numb. Days when Donald Trump’s team is wrecking any chance of a better future for me and countless others in my life. Days when I want to reach out to those who put him in power and tell them that the power to elect a US President is also the power over the lives of multiple millions of people you’ve never met. People like me.
Maybe you had your reasons to vote Trump into office. But you should at least know about the collateral damage that has been caused, even unintentionally. And I hate to say it, but things like this tend to come back around.
So, who am I? I’m the man Trump doesn’t talk about. The man he treats like a disposable bargaining chip in his flirtation with Moscow.
The other day, Trump posted a fairy tale about how he and Putin “reflected on the Great History of our Nations” and how “we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many!”
It’s an incomprehensible and untrue version of history. There was no “Russia” in World War II. There was a forced union of nations, held together at gunpoint, and this collection of torturers and hostages was called the Soviet Union.
From all these nations, prison warder and captive, Russia wasn’t the one that suffered the most. That dubious honor fell to Ukraine and Belarus — already scarred, not yet recovered from Stalin’s terror — thrown straight into the furnace of a clash between two totalitarian regimes. And this did not just involve enormous sacrifice, but also horrors beyond comprehension. My grandparents’ village — like so many others around it — wasn’t just destroyed. It was burned to the ground. With the people still inside.
Something Russia was mostly spared — its heartland less touched, only lightly occupied, while Ukraine and Belarus were ground into dust. Unlike Moscow or Leningrad, where every inch was fought over, Ukraine and Belarus were abandoned to the invaders almost without a fight. No last stands, no desperate defenses — just a swift, brutal occupation. The men of the occupied lands were instead assigned to protect Russia’s heartland.
Anyone bringing up World War II should begin by acknowledging the horrific fate Ukraine and Belarus endured rather than glorifying Russia. These countries are still enduring brutality and mistreatment at the hands of Russia, even now. Ukraine — tormented by direct military aggression, that reeks of genocide, and Belarus transformed into a European North Korea.
I know what I’m talking about — I belong to both. I’ve lost my homes in both countries. I’ve lost family and lots of friends. I’ve lost the simple ability to just enjoy life. I’ve lost my territory. I’ve almost lost faith in humanity. And maybe that faith had too much of America in it.
Minsk — the city where I was born—was stolen from me. And Mariupol — my second hometown — has been burned to the ground, just as my grandparents’ village once was. My youngest son was buried, but thankfully survived, in the debris of the Mariupol theater in 2022, where the large word Deti (Children) had been spelled out so it could be seen from the air. For Russia, that word made it a target. My eldest son died in Moscow and there’s every reason to think he was murdered by the regime because of his blood ties to me.
I’m not going to pin all my misfortunes — or my people’s misfortunes — on America. That would be infantile and not entirely fair. But there are things smaller, struggling nations simply can’t uphold on their own. One is the enforcement of international rules meant to shield them from the depredations of larger, predatory powers.
For eight decades, if not more, America has been that force — the nation that stood guard over humanity’s greatest achievement: the very idea of human rights. But what has happened to that America? It seems to be gone. The vacuum left has become an open invitation for the powerful and the predatory to do their dirty work unrestrained.
I won’t say I feel betrayed — America never gave me any guarantees. But it did give them to Ukraine and Belarus when they gave up their nuclear weapons. My hopes have been shattered. And that hurts like hell.
“Don’t be afraid!” When JD Vance echoed John Paul II’s iconic words in Munich, it sounded like sophisticated mockery to me.
I’m in Poland now — a place I never expected to be. Forced into exile by Russian political and military expansion. And yet, here I am, in the very country where those words were first spoken in 1979. Back then, they weren’t just a religious call. They carried a sharp political edge, telling Poles not to submit to fear and not to bow to oppression — oppression imposed by a Moscow-backed regime.
Those words sparked something. They helped ignite Solidarity, the movement that cracked the foundations of communism and, in time, helped bring it all crashing down across Central and Eastern Europe.
Now, the US vice president has repeated them — but this time, in a context that suggests Europe shouldn’t fear Russia’s resurgence.
And this is when I feel fear. A lot of fear.
Dzmitry Halko is a journalist who has lived and worked in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Now a resident of Poland, he has written for RFE/RL and Belarusian Partisan, the web-site created by Pavel Sheremet and that he ran after Sheremet’s assassination. He has also worked as an analyst for the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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