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A former Nebraska state senator, once again, is calling on the United States to do more to help Ukraine win its war with Russia.
Tom Brewer, who served in the Legislature from 2017 to 2025 and earned two Purple Hearts during 36 years in the military, recently made his eighth trip to the front in Ukraine.
The trips have been part of Brewer’s personal crusade to show support for that war-torn country, and to help Americans realize that stopping Russia from overtaking Ukraine is a stand for democracy that we all should care about.
“We in America tend to take freedom for granted. They’re paying dearly for it every day, with their sons and daughters,” Brewer recently told an interviewer on a Ukrainian television network.
Ukraine, he said, is much like Nebraska – an agricultural based region with friendly, hard-working people who just want to live their lives in a safe place.
Brewer has often compared Ukraine’s fight against Russia with the patriots who fought the American revolution against Britain – a war against a much larger country with much more military assets.
Yet the patriots, and Ukraine, held their own. Eventually, the fledgling United States prevailed.
This latest trip comes as President Donald Trump is working to get agreement on a peace plan between the Russians, who invaded Ukraine nearly four years ago, and Ukraine.
Brewer, like a lot of Americans, believes the now, 20-point peace plan being proposed favors Russia, and its president. Vladimir Putin, much too much.
The state senator said that if Canada invaded and took over Montana, Americans would not stand for allowing Canada to take U.S. territory, and similarly, Ukrainians won’t accept giving Russia a huge chunk of its territory on the eastern front.
In Brewer’s view, trying to negotiate a peace deal is a losing proposition: it just allows the war to drag out, and plays into Putin’s goal of seeing Europe and the U.S. eventually give up, and allowing him to annex a huge chunk of Ukraine. Putin, he said, doesn’t want a peace deal.
Brewer, who served six tours of duty in Afghanistan, believes the better approach is to get aggressive, and supply Ukraine with long-range missiles capable of striking deep into Russia.
Russia, he said, is suffering economically due to the war, and its military is in tatters due to incredible losses of troops in Ukraine. They can’t hang on too much longer, in Brewer’s view.
If Ukraine hits hard, with the help of U.S. and European missiles, it would force Putin to strike a peace deal that favors both sides, Brewer told the Ukrainian interviewer.
“If President Trump wants to see an end to the death and dying, this is a way of doing it,” he said.
For too long, Brewer said, the U.S. has been slow-walking military weapons to Ukraine for fear of sparking a wider war in Europe, or the use of nuclear weapons by Russia. Instead of allowing Putin to be the bully, he said the Americans should make it clear any use of nuclear weapons would be a mistake and trigger a harsh response.
At age 67, Brewer could be doing a lot of things other than risking his life by traveling to the front in Ukraine. But he’s grown to admire their tenacity on the battlefield and their thirst for freedom. He’s an old warrior, who can’t seemingly give it up.
I recently watched two, excellent and brutal PBS documentaries on the war in Ukraine, “20 Days in Mariupol” and “2000 Meters to Andriivka.”
You gotta wonder, after seeing the battlefield sacrifices of Ukrainians, why we aren’t doing more to help these freedom-seeking people.
Paul Hammel has covered the Nebraska state government and the state for decades. Prior to his retirement, he was senior contributor with the Nebraska Examiner. He was previously with the Omaha World-Herald, Lincoln Journal Star
