On return, self-determination, and one sentence the President did not need to say
The Ukrainian word is надія (nadiia). English gives us “hope,” which is close but thinner. Надія is not optimism and it is not a forecast. It is the thing a person carries while waiting, without knowing the outcome, and it belongs to the one who carries it. Nobody can hold your надія for you. Nobody can hold it on your behalf and then tell you what it contains.
I have a photograph of a railway platform. Praha hlavní nádraží, November 2025, late afternoon. I was waiting for the train back to Vienna. The sun was going down through that enormous glass arch and turning the whole hall orange, and the board above me read GRAZ HBF, via Wien Hbf, 16:42. A woman stood near it with a bag on her shoulder, not moving.
I know nothing about her. I took the picture for the light.
I do know something about the building. In the first weeks after February 2022, Prague’s main station was the principal entry point into Czechia for people fleeing Ukraine. Trains arrived hour after hour on platform 1, where volunteers met them with food, blankets, SIM cards and information about onward connections. Czechia went on to host more Ukrainian refugees per person than any other country in the European Union.
So in that hall, a departure board is not only a schedule. For some of the people standing under it, it is a question with a whole life inside it.
On September 10, 2026, President Zelensky spoke about надія and about the day when Ukraine will be at peace. A beautiful country, he said, with beautiful nature and warm people. Then came the sentence that has been sitting with me since: that all the people who went abroad will return.
I want to be careful here, because a president in the fourth year of a full-scale invasion is entitled to speak about hope, and he should. The last thing he said in that passage is the thing that matters more than anything else in this decade: that the war will stop. I hold that with him.
But I want to look at the grammar.
Two verbs, two different futures
In the published Ukrainian, the soldiers get a verb of hoping: ми сподіваємося (my spodivaiemosia, we hope, we place our hope in it). The people abroad get a flat future: повернуться (povernutsia, they will return). Hope is reserved for the outcome nobody controls. Return is stated as a fact.
Several news outlets put the whole passage under a headline that said “I hope.” That was generous editing. The sentence as spoken is not a hope. It is a prediction about several million private decisions that have not been made yet, announced on behalf of the people who have to make them.
And the passage opens with a category: всі нормальні люди (vsi normalni liudy, all normal people). Normal people, he says, consider надія very important. Once “normal” is doing work in a sentence about return, a door has been opened. If normal people hope, and what normal people hope for is that everyone comes back, then the woman in Warsaw who has decided her daughter will finish school where she started it has quietly been placed outside the normal.
No policy has been made. Nobody has been coerced. But a standard has been set, and standards travel faster than policies. They arrive in family phone calls, in comment sections, in what a person hears in her own head when she says out loud that she is staying.
I am one of the people who left
I left Lviv in 2004. Winnipeg, then Halifax, then Kamloops. Twenty-two years. I did not go because of this war, and I have spent much of the last four years organizing for Ukraine from here: rallies, fundraising, scholarships for Ukrainian students. I have also not returned.
Am I нормальний?
I ask that without bitterness. I ask it because the question is now attached to about five million people who left after February 2022 and to everyone who left before them, and because most of them are being asked it by someone who loves them.
Self-determination is exercised one person at a time
The right to leave a country, and the right to enter your own country, belongs to the individual. It is not a collective quota that a government can fill.
International refugee practice has been explicit about this for decades. Repatriation is durable only when it is voluntary, safe and dignified, and voluntariness is not a signature collected at the end of the process. It is the thing that makes a return a return instead of a transfer. Displaced people are entitled to choose among three outcomes: going home, integrating where they now live, or settling somewhere else entirely. All three are legitimate results of a just peace. A sentence that names only one of the three as what will happen has narrowed the choice before anyone was asked.
This matters more in Ukraine than almost anywhere. Our history is, in large part, a history of people being moved by decisions taken above them: the deportations east, the Ostarbeiter taken west, the postwar resettlements, Akcja Wisła in 1947. And the specific crime Ukraine is documenting and prosecuting right now is forced transfer, including of children. That is the moral ground we are standing on in every courtroom and every international forum. It is worth protecting from even the gentlest erosion.
What the world should be asked for
The correct ask is conditions. A security guarantee that holds. Demining. Housing. Working courts. Schools with teachers in them. Wages that make a life possible. Get those right and the returns follow from them, freely, which is the only way they last.
The wrong ask is a number. The moment return becomes a target in a reconstruction financing model, in a European protection review, in a ministry’s performance indicators, pressure follows. It arrives through mechanisms nobody will call force: temporary protection allowed to lapse with no route to permanence, consular services made conditional, benefits narrowed for those who stay, public language about duty and debt. None of that is deportation. All of it is displacement management by other means.
So the line should be written into the peace itself: no person’s place of residence is decided for them, by any state, at any stage.
The diaspora is not a subtraction
The sentence also treats Ukrainians abroad as a loss to be recovered, and the historical record does not support that. Across six waves of migration since 1891, the people who did not come back built churches, credit unions, university chairs, archives, dance schools and political lobbies, and those institutions carried Ukraine through the decades when Ukraine was forbidden to speak for itself. The diaspora is not a hole in the nation. It is the nation in another place.
What the sentence could have been
Something close to this: we will rebuild Ukraine so that everyone who wants to return can, and so that everyone who chooses to stay abroad remains ours.
That version costs nothing and gives up nothing. It makes no one abnormal. It also happens to be the version that produces more returns, because people come home to a country that trusted them with the decision.
Надія does not keep a list of who is coming. It keeps the door open and the light on.
In my photograph, the light does not choose anyone. It comes through the glass and falls across the whole platform: on the woman with the bag, on the few other people standing further down, on the empty track, on the board with its one named destination. It does not ask where anybody is going. It is simply there, for whoever is standing in it.
That is the country I want us to rebuild.
Love. Care. Share.
Photograph: Praha hlavní nádraží, November 2025. Taken while waiting for the train back to Vienna.
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