Cambridge for Europe was honoured to support a rally held in Cambridge on the evening on Tuesday 24th February 2026 to mark the 4th year of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Most of the speakers – young and old – were from Ukraine, and spoke of the hardship and loss that they, their families, and their friends had experienced over the last four years. In addition to the loss of defenders who are resisting Russia’s invasion, and the thousands of civilians killed by Russian drones, missiles and bombs, several speakers spoke of the more than ten thousand Ukrainian civilians in the occupied regions who were detained or disappeared by Russia. Many have been tortured, raped or murdered, with more held for years without any information being provided to their family.
One protestor held a sign remembering her geosciences Professor Dr Volodymyr Vorovka of the Bohdan Khmelnytsky State Pedagogical University in Melitopol, who was abducted in December 2022 and remains in Russian captivity to this day, his fate uncertain.
But the speakers also had a message of defiance for Russia, and for Trump, rejecting the suggestion that Ukraine should be forced to cede territory to Russia in return for “peace”. They were also clear that they continge to endure and resist because that know that the alternative is worse, because they know that if they don’t they will lose their freedom and democracy.
They warned that we who live in the peaceful and free parts of Europe must not become complacent about Ukrainian resiliance, and that we must increase our support for Ukraine to ensure that the Putin regime’s aggression is defeated.
Our Chair Dr Paul Browne, was invited to speak, and the text below is an abridged version of his speech:
For four years the people of Ukraine have endured the reality of Russia’s full-scale war, a war that Ukraine did not seek or provoke. Their only crime is to want a free, democratic, and European future, while living next to Putin’s vicious dictatorship.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine marked a turning point. Four years ago, brutal war of conquest and occupation, which we thought banished for good, returned to Europe. The Putin regime’s war has cost Russia over a million military casualties, and the number of Russian military dead now exceeds that sent into Ukraine on 24th February 2022. Ukraine has also lost tens of thousands of its defenders, who have held the line against great odds, but at great cost.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has been above all a war against the Ukrainian people, a people whose very existence the Putin regime denies and seeks to erase. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, men, women and children, have been murdered, by drone and missile, bomb and bullet, Research undertaken by the Viktoriia project has uncovered a brutal network of hundreds of Russian detention centres, into which tens of thousands of Ukrainians living in occupied territories have disappeared, to be raped, tortured and murdered, and more than 30,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and sent to Russia to be indoctrinated and turned into fodder for the Putin regime.
It makes me sick to hear Donald Trump say that Ukraine must give up unoccupied parts of Donetsk as a concession to secure “peace”.
The region Ukraine is being asked to give away has strategic importance to Ukraine’s defence and economy, and is home to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, but more importantly we must recognise that there can never be a real, lasting, peace if Russian aggression is rewarded. Not for Ukraine, and not for Europe.
The military, financial and humanitarian support that the democracies of Europe have provided Ukraine over the past four years has been crucial and unprecedented, and this support has almost doubled over the past year. But has it been enough? No!
The hard truth is that the Russian regime will never agree to such a just peace until it realises that it cannot win, until it realises that its strength will fail long before Europe fails Ukraine.
And we in Europe simply haven’t done enough to convince them of this yet.
So we must invest much more in our collective defence and provide Ukraine with more than enough weapons to defeat Russia on the battlefield and to destroy the factories that build Russia’s weapons. We must tighten sanctions, particularly on the oil and gas exports that fund Russia’s war.
As grateful as we are to the people of Ukraine for holding the line for freedom and democracy, we cannot ask or expect them to do it indefinitely.
Giving Ukraine what it needs to win won’t be cheap, but the cost of allowing Russia to gain from its aggression against Ukraine and escape punishment would be paid by our taxpayers in much higher defence spending for decades to come. The real damage will, however, not be to our bank balances, but to democracy itself, as we will have sent a message to the world and to our own citizens that dictatorship is stronger than democracy.
The democracies of Europe certainly have the means to force Russia to agree to a just peace, but do we have the will? I hope so.
I can see a bright future for Ukraine as part of a free, open and democratic Europe, part of our common security, united by shared values that we have the confidence and strength to defend.
But to achieve that future, we will all need to be brave like Ukraine.
