The Wrong Side of History

Trump vs. the Ukrainian People

In the first week of March 2022, hundreds of Ukrainians crowded beneath the wreckage of a bridge on the edge of Kyiv. An Associated Press photograph of that scene became emblematic of the invasion, showing families with children and their belongings trying to cross the Irpin River. The photographer later said the picture could not capture the sound of the shelling behind them, from the town they were leaving.

Look at the family in that crowd. Parents hold a child and hurry, because they know the next shell may land on them.

Some did not make it. Tatiana Perebeinis, 43, and her children Alise, 9, and Nikita, 18, were killed by a Russian mortar just after crossing that bridge. That image shocked the world because it showed what the invaders were doing. Ordinary people running for their lives were not collateral damage. They were the target.

Ukrainians call the soldiers who did this “orcs,” and after Bucha and Irpin it is easy to see why. Yet many of the men Putin sends are themselves victims: the poor, the desperate, the imprisoned, used as cannon fodder for one man’s vanity.

The cost

As of October 2026, the numbers are almost too large to appreciate, and all of them are estimates.

Among Ukrainian civilians, the United Nations had verified at least 15,000 killed and more than 57,000 killed or injured by early this year. The UN stresses these are only the cases it could document, so the true toll is higher. Another 5.9 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad, and 3.7 million are displaced inside their own country.

Among soldiers, Ukraine has lost roughly 125,000 to 150,000 killed, with perhaps 500,000 or more killed, wounded or missing in all.

Russia’s losses are far greater. Independent journalists have confirmed the names of nearly 250,000 dead Russian soldiers, and the true toll is estimated at somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 killed. Counting the wounded, Russian casualties are well over a million, which would mean something like 700,000 or more injured.

Those men are sacrificed to Putin’s delusion that he can rebuild Peter the Great's empire.

One friend

I think of a Ukrainian friend of ours, exiled from her country. She works in Canada in a job she is hugely overqualified for, simply to put food on the table. Her father, in his late fifties, lies wounded in a hospital bed in Ukraine. He does not want to leave, because leaving means going back to the front. I have seen the pain in her eyes.

I lost my own father some years ago. He died with dignity, and I scattered his ashes in a beautiful barley crop, on land his father broke in 1928. My friend has been given no such mercy. Her suffering has one cause, and it is Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s mistake

I am no enemy of Donald Trump. I believe he loves his country, and I think many of his positions are right. He is a flawed man, driven by ambition and appetite, with a moral compass that works only some of the time. But I have never believed that everything he does is done in bad faith. He is still better than the socialists of the Democratic Party like Mamdani and Omar, those who want to see everything burn.

On Putin, though, Trump is wickedly wrong. This month, commentators are describing a pivot in which the President is openly helping Putin and campaigning against Volodymyr Zelensky. Whatever his reasons, he is now backing an enemy of America and of the free world.

Volodymyr Zelensky does not have to be perfect. No wartime leader is. A country does not have to be flawless to deserve not to be invaded, and the mothers on that bridge are not asking for a saint to defend them.

Trump has gone to the dark side. He is on the wrong side of history. Historians will judge him harshly.

The strongman problem

What explains it? We see here the inexplicable weakness in Trump’s character: his bizarre affection for dictators. He once joked that he and Kim Jong Un had “fallen in love.” He praises Xi. He coddles Erdogan. And Putin is the grandest of them all. Is it because they flatter his vanity? Does he envy their power, the way they rule without courts, critics or elections to trouble them? Why does he love the strongman? Who knows.

But a man who admires the tyrant over the people he tramples has lost his way.

He has gone to the dark side. He is on the wrong side of history. Historians will judge him harshly.

What Canada must do

This is not a left-wing cause or a right-wing cause. I am no fan of the Liberal Party, yet I stand with Mark Carney when he stands with Ukraine, and with Pierre Poilievre when he does the same. On this question, Canada should speak with one voice.

America, our closest friend and ally, once stood for the principle that borders cannot be redrawn by tanks and that small nations may defend themselves. To bargain with the aggressor over the heads of the invaded is to betray a noble people, and America’s own better self.

We must support Ukraine, because it is right and because it is in our interest. We should do it for the mothers on that bridge, and for my friend’s father in his hospital bed, dreading the day he is sent back.

Trump is an old man, but the verdict is coming.

He has gone to the dark side. He is on the wrong side of history. Historians will judge him harshly.

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