President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speak at a joint news conference following a meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, Sunday, Dec. 28, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) In a runup to the leaders’ gathering in Ankara, NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte billed it as a “historic” summit. Every event seems to earn that label these days. It says more about human nature, our collective hunger for significance, than about the occasion itself.
The actual history of last week was made over thousand miles to the northeast, in a Russian city most Americans, or Europeans for that matter, have never heard of: Saratov.
This is where Ukrainian drones struck the oil refinery on July 8, knocking out its only primary refining unit and forcing a shutdown. Days earlier, Ukraine did the same to Omsk, Russia’s largest refinery. Add nine tankers of the sanctions-evading shadow fleet, Dzhankoi airbase in Crimea, and Port Krym in Kerch, all in a single night’s work.
President Trump, sitting next to Ukraine’s wartime leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, in Ankara, reached for the same word again and again: settlement. It is well suited for the vocabulary of a dealmaker. The headlines will linger on the optics and messaging that emerged from Ankara, and pundits will spend days parsing Trump’s every word, but the better guide to the present moment in Russia’s war on Ukraine is the speech Trump had given four days earlier marking 250 years of American independence.
“From the beginning, we were a nation that lived by the motto victory or death and live free or die,” he said. “We defeated tyrants, demolished evil, and saved freedom again and again and again.”
Those words were a near-perfect description of Ukraine’s present. A nation refusing to be ruled by an imperial metropole. A people who will not bow to a murderous oppressor seated in Moscow, risking death in pursuit of liberty. Ukraine is holding a mirror to America’s founding story, yet America looks away.
Speaking of things “historic,” consider a counterfactual. In October 1777, British General John Burgoyne surrendered his entire army at Saratoga. This turning point that convinced King Louis XVI of France the Americans could win.
American historian Edmund Morgan wrote that Saratoga “was a great turning point of the war, because it won for Americans the foreign assistance which was the last element needed for victory.”
France’s economy was six to seven times larger than that of the 13 colonies combined. It supplied the overwhelming share of the patriots’ gunpowder, sent soldiers, and deployed the fleet that trapped the British at Yorktown.
Now imagine France, witnessing the young republic’s first decisive victory, dispatching an emissary instead of its navy. Imagine Versailles urging Americans toward a settlement with the Crown, splitting the difference between the nascent 13 states and their imperial overlord in London.
America declared independence on July 4, 1776, but for seven long years its independence existed only on paper. It became real when the metropole gave up trying to subdue the American Revolution, and it gave up because America’s key ally made the war unwinnable.
History is being made in Saratov in July 2026, just as it was made in Saratoga in October 1777.
Ukraine does not want to live under Moscow’s yoke any more than Americans wished to bow to the British Crown. And the evil empire is bleeding. Mile-long queues at gas stations are the contemporary manifestation.
To be sure, every historical analogy has its limits, but this one cuts in Ukraine’s favor. The American colonists were transplanted Englishmen. George Washington was born a British subject, fought for the Crown in the French and Indian War, and spoke the King’s English all his life.
Ukraine is a nation separate and distinct from Russia, with its own language and with borders affirmed by international law and by dozens of treaties bearing Moscow’s signature.
London fought to keep control of its colonies. Russia wages war to erase a sovereign state and a nation, while its leaders openly proclaim eliminationist, overtly genocidal aims.
Ukraine’s republican heritage is older than many realize: Pylyp Orlyk’s constitution of 1710, with its separation of powers and social contract, predated Philadelphia by 77 years. Another difference: France showed up with soldiers and a navy and spilled French blood for American independence. Ukraine asks for no such sacrifice. It asks for the moral clarity to recognize that its fight is righteous and that the aggressor deserves defeat. It asks for tighter sanctions, the transfer of frozen Russian assets, sustained political and diplomatic support, and the weapons needed to make Moscow’s war fail.
The biggest news out of Ankara was Trump’s promise to license Patriot missile production to Kyiv, a real breakthrough for a country whose cities Moscow bombs nightly and whose interceptor stocks are running critically low. Announcing it, Trump emphasized the system’s defensive nature. True. But for a nation that has been invaded, every weapon is defensive.
A Tomahawk hitting a factory where Russia assembles its Iskanders and Kinzhals is a defensive weapon and a very efficient one at that. To intercept a ballistic missile is often described as hitting a bullet with a bullet. Destroying Russian missiles on the assembly line means fewer of them in the air and countless innocent lives saved.
Poll after poll shows the American people do not see this war through the lens of neutrality. They side with Ukraine.
A predatory continent-size, eleven time zones, Goliath is attempting to strangle a smaller neighbor for the oldest reason in every aggressor’s book: because it believes it can. Ukraine, the David in this fight, has found its stride. America, which once knew how to speak softly and carry a big stick, is struggling to find the wisdom and resolve to pick it up.
On July 4, Kyiv lit its most iconic monument, the Mother Ukraine statue, in the stars and stripes to honor America’s 250th birthday. Ukrainians recognize America’s founding story. The question is whether Americans still do.
Andrew Chakhoyan is an academic director at the University of Amsterdam. He previously served in the U.S. government at the Millennium Challenge Corporation and studied at Harvard Kennedy School and Donetsk State Tech University.
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