Commander Yuri (left) and his brigade on the Donbas Front in Ukraine - Spring 2022. Information on how to support Yuri’s brigade at myukrainianbrigade.wordpress.com. PROVIDED

To the editor:

Do you know the Southwest Florida man who spent the past two years fighting as a soldier with Ukraine’s Armed Forces against Russia?

His name is Jeremy, military code name “Tennessee” with foreign battalion “Chosen Company,” and back home he’s both a U.S. national firefighter and a tattoo artist. When he came home from war, he found his Fort Myers Beach shop was completely destroyed by Hurricane Ian. So with his indomitable heart, he went back to Ukraine and fought.

Most people turn a blind eye to injustice, they stand by and watch in tears, they complain about our broken economy — as if it were acceptable to complain without the slightest indignation to the colluders of foreign conflict who set catastrophe into motion.

But rather than consuming that knockoff plot that’s shoved down our throats by the masses, Jeremy of Fort Myers instead took up arms and fought.

Jeremy (left) of Fort Myers returns from fighting war in Ukraine to greet Ukrainian Diaspora who fled war. Estero, Florida - March 2024 PROVIDED

Our American-Ukrainian soldier told me, “If we don’t help now, then our sons and daughters will have to pay the price later.” Jeremy also said “Ukrainians will fight with their bare hands if they have to.”

I am firmly aware of this very grave and growing urgency with every day that our country does not deliver on those weapons capability to Ukraine to put an end to Russia’s invasion.

Yet the so-called hardliners criticize my zeal to fight back, and typify me as if I’m some sort of accomplice for the American industrial military complex, as if it’s some sort of crime.

Meanwhile, they have gone soft as they push for “peace” and “negotiations” that would give our historic enemy of Russia’s state scores of our allied Ukrainian land. So who’s accomplice are “they?”

“They” are the ones who speculate that Russia will not take any other territory in Europe, a prediction which defies modern historical trend, as Russia has insidiously conquered eastern lands since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. They vow their opposition to our country’s role in foreign conflict, yet they fail to recognize it is the vastness of our foreign bases around the world which leverages security in our homeland. They, with that wooden beam in their eye, have themselves long been a part of the problem for why our own nation’s borders are insecure. They’re the old dogs who, after a lifetime’s accumulation of power, can only dream of revolution because despite appearing so, they know not a single thing on how to act…. That false libertarianitis who proclaims our country’s isolationism, who espouses free speech and a wide range of factions, yet in the same breath as he opposes the weaponization of the justice system he will just as quickly strike at the dissenter’s doorstep…. It’s nothing personal though — just politics.

I am not the one who prefers war to peace, nor death to party; not abroad, not at home. And I doubt the thousands of veterans of our Purple Heart city fought because they prefer war either.

Americans… just like the Ukrainians… just like the Israelis… and many other friends of OURS… fight because WE want to save our country from living in a world that’s going to waste.

Whatever arena WE decide, whether it be on the front or within the public, only those whose faces are marred by dust and sweat and blood will know victory.

Alexandra Zakhvatayev

Cape Coral