When you are through reading this piece, you are most likely going to disagree with the main theme: the need to be realistic. Probably, you are going to stick with the idea that one should not (as a matter of fact, could not) give up a part of the country no matter what, because it is not simply abandoning one’s land but the values that make a land one’s homeland.

I am sure you are not going to think in the language that high-profile Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich has resorted to when he was responding to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger who said last week that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to help end the invasion. Kissinger was suggesting a position that a vast majority of Ukrainians are against, even as the war enters its fourth month. Arestovich, apparently a patriotic person, used such obscene language to criticize Kissinger and others in the West who kept urging Kyiv to cede part of the country’s territory to Russia for the sake of peace that quoting a translation in part could be seen as offensive for many readers.

Speaking at a conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kissinger urged the United States and the West to not seek an embarrassing defeat for Russia in Ukraine, warning it could worsen Europe’s long-term stability. According to Kissinger, the U.S. should remember Russia’s importance to Europe and not get swept up "in the mood of the moment." Kissinger thinks that the U.S. should push Ukraine into accepting negotiations with a "status quo ante," (the previous state of affairs). He thinks the negotiations should start immediately before the tensions cannot be easily overcome. Kissinger said, "Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself."

This is the cruel part of the reality: a war that will have no winner. A war that is not even going to save the values that Arestovich and his compatriots say they cannot abandon. This is the ultimate issue for Arestovich, and the man he advises, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, should respond now: Are we going to be alive to defend any value let alone a territory called Donbass?

The Ukrainian president recently said eastern Ukraine would endure a Russian onslaught, declaring that "Donbass will be Ukrainian."

Patriotism, defined as an attachment and commitment to a country, nation or political community, is heightened during the times when a foreign power attacks one’s country in a cruel and violent manner to dismember and confiscate some part of its land. Patriotism, the love for a country and nationalism, or loyalty to one’s nation, are the values that for thousands of years people deemed worth dying for. Almost all nations’ histories are filled with stories of people sacrificing their lives for a few acres of land that hold the tombstones of their forefathers. They die for it; the next generations of their nation eternize their stories. That is, if there are some living souls left to create a next generation!

Probably, Arestovich, in a mad rush at times, cannot see that what he is pushing for is not a solution. You need to be alive and have a nation around you and land that would sustain human, animal and botanical lives on it, all of which are actually threatened by a nuclear disaster that his resistance has been catalyzing further.

The writer (and the readers, I am sure) of this piece had at times dark thoughts, such as simply letting the world burn too while we are about to lose something infinitely valuable. Specifically, if that thing is what we call country, we are so affected that we can't think of anything else but to burn the whole universe.

Another adviser of the Ukrainian president, Mikhail Podolyak, seems to not be any more realistic about the prospect Kissinger suggested. He says a cease-fire would mean surrendering of some territories for peace; agreeing to some compromises would be "trading our citizens, territories or sovereignty." Podolyak says Ukrainian society has paid a terrible price and will not allow anyone to even take a step in this direction – no government and no country: "Any hint of this from either partner will receive a principled response."

"Principled responses" are chivalrous if you defend them all the time. Podolyak should remember that his country has accepted a situation in which Russia formally controlled Crimea and informally controlled Ukraine’s two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. Zelenskyy, himself, has emphasized that part of his conditions for entering peace talks with Russia would include a restoration of pre-invasion borders.

Let’s remember that Russia attacked Ukraine three months ago following Kyiv’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state. (That is what Kissinger refers to as "status quo ante.")

Now that they noticed that U.S. President Joe Biden’s security and diplomacy teams could use Ukrainian situation to expand to a war that could obliterate the Russian Federation as we know it, the Ukrainian leaders began thinking that they would benefit in this bargain: at the expense of a few lives, they could not only save the Donbass region but regain "Ukrainian irredenta" (unredeemed Ukrainian lands) in the process. Well, perhaps all the newspaper-reading public in Europe and the U.S. do not know about it, but encyclopedias have chapters about the "Ukrainian irredentism" or Greater Ukraine that refers to claims made by Ukrainian nationalist groups to territory outside of Ukraine they consider part of the Ukrainian national homeland. Some maps of it extend to the Baltic and Caspian seas. The "Sobornism" (unification) ideology of it was very much alive at least in the books that what the Russia calls "neo-Nazi groups" keep reciting in their meetings and now the "post-Russia era" that the Biden administration promises made the Sobornist eyes light up.

Where is it heading?

Again, Messrs, Arestovich, Podolyak and Zelenskyy should remember, any idea that has been whispered into their ears that it is not going to be a third world war but instead limited along the Ukraine, Poland and Baltics borders with Russia and Belarus, that the Russian "deep state" would not allow Russian President Vladimir Putin be hell bent to go nuclear on Europe, they should think again.

Nobody is asking the Ukrainian people to give up the Donbass region; it is only going to make them gain time by officially declaring Ukraine a neutral country that will not join the U.S.-led NATO military bloc. Russia denies the Ukrainian claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force. That means, as soon as the hostilities cease, the Minsk agreements will be in force and the mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format will resume.

Going back to negotiations where they left off does not mean asking Ukrainians to trade their citizens, territories or sovereignty; it is only going to stop this senseless war Putin has started. The Minsk talks is the platform where the Ukrainians show their prowess in defending their country.

It will be a realistic solution, cruel as it is, but it is the only viable alternative to the annihilation of people. Without people, remember, you have no values to uphold.