Since returning to the United States, I have found myself thinking often of a woman I met at a Goncharenko community center in Odessa that specializes in working with refugee children. She began serving in the Ukrainian military in 2014, and soon after the Russian invasion began in February 2022, was captured by the enemy and held prisoner for about a month. She was pregnant at the time, she told me through a translator, and during her ordeal she lost the child.
We didn’t discuss the details of what she endured — I was reluctant to press her to relive the horrors — but she particularly wanted me to know one thing: She is still “very strong.” She treats the center as a second home, she said, because it helps her deal with the trauma of her captivity. But she exuded an indomitable sense of resolve: Her experience at the hands of Russians would not break her. Some version of that resolution seems typical of the countless Ukrainians who have suffered from this war.
I think, too, about others I met, such as Ihor Chaika, the mayor of Kovel, a small city near the border of Belarus that has already buried 47 men slain in the war, and Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, the leader of the Brodsky Synagogue in central Kyiv, who survived Russian shells while in Kherson on a humanitarian mission to evacuate civilians from areas flooded by the Russians’ demolition of the Kakhovka dam.
I don’t know if the Ukrainians will win the war — I do know they’ll never quit. Every Ukrainian I spoke to expressed faith that their country will win the war, but none of them expected victory to arrive anytime soon. In Kovel, a commander in one of Ukraine’s civilian-defense units told me he expects the war will go on for three or four years.
And that attitude of raw, indefatigable, perhaps even irrational determination in the face of heavy casualties and long odds must be taken into account by U.S. policymakers.
The notion that the United States could somehow force an end to the conflict by cutting off aid to Ukraine and negotiating a lasting peace with Russian President Vladimir Putin — as technology entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy contends he’d be able to do — sounded unlikely to me before I visited Ukraine. Now, it sounds ridiculous.
First, that idea brushes aside the question of whether Ukrainians would accept any U.S. deal with Putin. When you’ve listened to a man such as Yeven Olexienko, a Bucha resident nicknamed Columbo, describe the war crimes in his hometown, you understand that the future of Ukraine must be determined by the Ukrainians. They’ve paid too high a price to accept some half-a-loaf compromise handed down by outsiders. As an ally, the United States can offer suggestions, but the final decision on their country’s fate must be left up to the Ukrainians. After suffering grotesque Russian barbarism, Ukrainians can be excused for rejecting the very idea that Moscow is capable of honest dealing.
In the unlikely event that Zelensky suddenly reversed course and announced he was ready to negotiate with Putin, he would face, at minimum, an intense internal challenge to continue the fight — and the Ukrainian people could well decide they want someone else leading them.
Maybe someday enough Ukrainians will reconsider to make the idea of concessions, territorial or otherwise, a possibility. But that’s unlikely to happen for a long while. If the United States were to cut off arms exports to Ukraine, the Ukrainians would almost certainly just carry on with aid from other allies and arms purchased on the open market. The Ukrainians I spoke with sounded like if it came down to fighting off the Russians with sticks and stones, that’s what they’d do.
The Ukrainians are not asking the United States to fight their war for them, but it feels as though some arguments against helping Kyiv are on some sort of autopilot left over from the days of Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s not that hard to find opponents of Ukrainian assistance who use the rallying cry “U.S. out of Ukraine” — a hard policy to enact when the United States isn’t in Ukraine, at least not with military personnel.
In their fight to preserve Ukraine’s independence and liberate its occupied territories, the Ukrainians are willing to do all the bleeding. U.S. support largely consists of sending arms and ammunition that, for the most part, is just collecting dust in U.S. military depots and warehouses.
Yes, there are a handful of weapons systems that are exceptions. The United States has every right to look at stockpiles and declare that the ones in short supply can’t be sent to Ukraine until sufficient replacements are manufactured. Everyone, including the Ukrainians, understands that maintaining a sizable U.S. stockpile of certain armaments is required to help deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. No one is asking the United States to sacrifice its own security.
Among the Ukrainians I met, the first words out of everyone’s mouth were “thank you” — for U.S. support. Yet Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, noted that the Ukrainians were gaining ground with U.S. equipment that was two generations out of date and wondered how much more could be achieved with the newest, most high-tech U.S. military equipment.
No, Ukraine is not a perfect country. It still has corruption problems, as Zelensky’s recent near-wholesale replacement of the defense ministry’s leadership suggests. The country is also experiencing the predictable tensions between maintaining national unity during a wartime and preserving its status as a pluralist democracy with freedom of speech and the right to criticize the government. Under the Ukrainian constitution, elections have been suspended during the current declaration of martial law; it’s impossible to have serious elections with roughly one-fifth of the country occupied by Russian forces.
And, yes, you can find morally objectionable people in Ukraine. At one point in my travels, I succumbed to the hankering for an old-fashioned American cheeseburger and stopped in a Kyiv McDonald’s. At the next table sat a man whose muscular arm bore a tattoo of a sonnenrad, or black sun, and a necklace with a pendant of Thor’s hammer — two neo-Nazi symbols. But as Rabbi Azman noted, in a country of almost 40 million people, there are going to be some antisemites.
Ukraine’s internal problems, though, are not sufficient justification for telling Ukrainians that they’ll have to go it alone in their struggle against the Russian invasion. To cut them off now, or try to force them to cede land they died to defend and are dying to recover, would be a disgrace.
Because once you’ve listened to Ukrainians describing how they survived the Russian attacks and war crimes, it’s impossible to conclude that their lives just aren’t important enough for us to bear the burden of continuing to help them.
Credit: Source link
