Tatyana, Trump, and
Talks of Peace
How One Ukrainian Navigates a
War-Torn Home from Santa Barbara
By Margaux Lovely | March 27, 2025
Tatyana Taruta speaks strongly and surely, but the softness in her tone when describing the brutal realities of life in Ukraine caught me slightly off guard. We talked about graphic deaths of family members and watching her hometown crumble into dust and rubble. Still, she recounted personal events matter-of-factly with a hint of nonchalance.
I asked how she did it. “It’s remarkable what people can get used to,” she said.
Taruta has taken a lot over the past three years. She watched as the home she was born and raised in was seized when Russia occupied Mariupol in the early stages of the invasion. She lost aunts, uncles, and friends to the war. Her cousin was snatched from the street and held hostage by Russian troops for two years.
But still, every few months, Taruta leaves the safety of Santa Barbara with her child and husband to visit her parents in Kyiv. Why?
“Home is home,” she said.
Tatyana grew up in Mariupol with family and friends around every corner. “When I was little, every Sunday, we had this tradition where we would go to my grandma’s house and have a big lunch together,” Taruta remembered. “My grandma would always make a sort of speech, or a toast, and she always said, ‘Let there be no war.’ I never really got it until now.”
Now, when Taruta travels back to Ukraine, she sleeps in her parents’ basement in case an air raid hits in the middle of the night. She knows the difference between the sound of a drone and the sound of a missile. She keeps tabs on the closest metro stations when she leaves the house in case she needs to find a bomb shelter.
“People just learn to live with it,” she said.
Taruta left Ukraine at age 17 to advance her education and earned two master’s degrees, one from the London School of Economics. She met her husband, a Santa Barbara native, while on a service trip to South America. Since leaving the country for school, there have been two Russian invasions of Ukraine. “Everything is still fresh in our minds,” Taruta said.
In 2014, Russian forces occupied Crimea, a Ukrainian territory, seizing its government buildings and claiming the peninsula as their own. Russia continued to push forward, and Ukraine fought back. Eventually, cease-fire deals were negotiated in the form of the Minsk agreements. Time and time again, a deal was drawn up, agreed to, and violated by Russian forces.
With little leverage, Ukraine was forced into worse and worse compromises to bring an end to the fighting. In 2022, Russia claimed that the Minsk agreements “no longer existed,” and launched its second offensive.
Taruta was in Santa Barbara when the most recent fighting began but still experienced the overwhelming loss that has characterized this war. “When you hear, ‘Oh, this person died,’ obviously it’s very horrible, but even the way they die is horrible,” she explained.
“My aunt lived in an apartment building, and Russians destroyed the whole thing. She was buried under that debris for months. No one could even get close because it was in occupied territory. Then, the Russians bulldozed the debris so no one can prove later the crimes that have been committed. And that’s only one city, one person.”
“Ukrainian people, we are very tough, as Russia has learned,” Taruta said. “But now it’s all so demoralizing.”
The United States’ actions will be absolutely critical in determining the direction of this conflict, and its seat at every negotiating table is proof of that. President Trump has friendly ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a white-knuckled grip on resources critical to Ukraine’s wartime performance — both of which put the United States in an incredibly influential position.
Following a fiery meeting in the White House last month that looked more like a mother berating her child than it did two foreign leaders talking about war and peace, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been pushed to accept less-than-ideal treatment from the United States in order to keep a steady influx of weapons, money, and intelligence from America to Ukraine. Without these resources, it would be exponentially harder for Ukraine to put up a fight.
“This is not a war of choice for us,” Taruta said. “If we cannot fight, there is no more Ukraine.”
Recent negotiations in Saudi Arabia have resulted in both Zelenskyy and Putin entering into separate agreements with Trump to “develop measures for implementing [an] agreement to ban strikes against energy facilities of Russia and Ukraine,” according to a March 25 briefing from the White House. The parties also agreed to cease fighting in the Black Sea, a vital and highly traveled commercial waterway.
Such international security agreements have existed for more than 30 years between the countries. In 1994, Ukraine surrendered its arsenal of nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
“This is why Ukrainians are so cautious about any peace talks,” Taruta explained. “We’ve seen peace with Russia before, but there are no guarantees even with a cease-fire that Russia will not attack again. We want lasting peace, and we’re not at the point where we want to sign just any deal.”
There is no logical reason for Putin to want peace, Taruta asserted. Russia is in a favorable position and pressing its advantage, with the manpower and resources to keep fighting. This could force Ukraine into surrendering to a far worse deal down the road. With the United States’ support for Ukraine ebbing and flowing under the Trump administration, what life will look like for the millions of Ukrainians living at home and abroad remains unclear.
“I think that countries with the same values of freedom, of democracy, should stick together,” Taruta said. “I haven’t had a single reason to doubt these values in Santa Barbara, but I’m not so sure now nationally.”
“We all want our kids to have a prosperous democracy,” she concluded. “That’s what we’re fighting for.”
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