Vitamin R: Is Ukraine a Country?
- john raymond
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
Vlad Vexler’s video on the leaked Ukraine “peace plan” is framed as five insights, but they largely collapse into one simple question: is Ukraine being treated as a real country, or as a problem province inside someone else’s empire?
Once you state the question bluntly, the apparent complexity of the plan falls away. What matters is not whether the deal is “clever” or “balanced,” but whether it recognizes Ukrainian statehood in substance, not just in name.
Vexler’s first, second, and fourth points all live on this axis. Zelensky’s choice between a bad peace and ongoing war is genuinely existential and cannot be solved by military or economic math: he is gambling on which path gives Ukraine the best chance to survive as an independent state. The Kremlin’s push for troop ceilings is not a technical constraint but an encoded statement that Moscow has standing to define the size of Ukraine’s army.
And any forced demobilization of Ukrainian society under such terms is not “peace-building”; it is the managed cooling of a population that has been fighting for its existence. If Ukraine is a country, these are non-starters. They are not parameters to be tweaked; they are violations of regime security.
That is why Vexler’s third point — the outsourced nature of Putin’s power — is interesting but secondary. Yes, Putin rules through courtiers who anticipate his wishes rather than wait for explicit orders. But once you see that this plan cleanly encodes his war aims, the precise level of his personal involvement is a detail, not the heart of the story.
The real scandal is that Trump’s people in the White House picked up a Kremlin-coded document and ran with it as a serious “peace plan.” They behaved as Putin’s Western courtiers, giving his objectives an American return address.
Vexler’s fifth point, about land, exposes why so many in the West still misread both Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainians tie their identity tightly to specific borders and “Ukrainian lands,” including those under occupation; territorial loss is existential.
Much of the Russian population, by contrast, relates to state and territory in a more feudal, peasant way: the Kremlin is a distant lord ruling whatever shape the map happens to take this decade. Western observers often miss this because Russians are white, and we lazily assume they must think about the state the way Western Europeans do, rather than like the global south under an imperial center.
That racism makes “land for peace” sound symmetrical when, in cultural reality, it is not.
Put together, Vexler’s five points are best understood as facets of a single test. Any plan that lets Moscow define Ukraine’s force levels, push it into demobilization under threat, and treat its territory as negotiable spoil is answering the question “Is Ukraine a country?” with “no.”
The fact that Trump’s circle treated such a plan as a legitimate basis for negotiation tells us more about their alignment than it does about Ukraine.