NOTHING IS CERTAIN IN UKRAINE — EXCEPT VICTORY
Afew miles west of Kyiv lies a vehicular graveyard — a wayside littered with twisted metal and charred engines. Melted and mutilated by missiles and artillery, they didn’t make it over a nearby bridge on Feb. 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine and rocked the capital city. Since then, Ukrainians have claimed most of the wrecks, or towed them away. But dozens of disabled vehicles remain, witnesses to the horrors and chaos of that day.
As I surveyed the carnage — one of the last stops on a six-week trip to Ukraine that ended last week — a mangled 2007 silver Nissan X-Trail caught my eye. Eighty-eight dime-sized holes pierced the exterior. Strewn inside were signs of life: maps, a broken pair of sunglasses, three plastic water bottles, a pink comb and second-grade lesson book, boxes of COVID masks, a stamp collection that filled four envelopes.
“A typical Ukrainian family,” my translator, Oxana Mudrenok, said, as I looked through the remains.
Whoever they were, I tried to imagine the horror that consumed them as the car careened and the roar of artillery and collapsing steel engulfed their screams. “Typical,” perhaps, in the terror and chaos that became the norm for an entire nation, as millions grabbed what few belongings they could carry and left for places unknown, or died trying.
More than 7.5 million Ukrainians ended up in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia and other countries; up to 8 million more were forced out of their homes but remained in Ukraine, mainly in safer regions in the west and south.
Nearly four months after the invasion began, the terror, chaos and uncertainty of war goes on. In the early morning of June 5, after several weeks of quiet in Kyiv, Russian missiles hit a railway compound, a few miles from where I slept. Now, after failed efforts to capture Kyiv, Russia has stepped up attacks in Ukraine’s east.
Still, there are signs of normalcy, or at least a new normal. Hours before the sirens wailed and the missiles hit the city, I ate a savory Ukrainian meal of rice, vegetables and beef at a restaurant in downtown Kyiv, packed with people chilling out and enjoying the evening.
Thousands of Ukrainians refugees, homesick or broke, are coming back. Some, like Vik tor Kuszhel ,58, and Lora Kuszhel, 57, of Irpin, have found their homes in rubble. Nearly all have lost their jobs. The war has
devastated Ukraine’s economy, creating an estimated unemployment rate of 70% or higher.
“There is no future here,” Vitalli Vasylets, 68, told me in Katiuzhanka, about 40 miles south of Chernobyl. Most of his neighbors are gone. The ones left grow vegetables in their gardens to live, he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see my country like this.”
Politicians and soldiers told me they expect the war to drag on for months, maybe years. After the war ends, how quickly Ukraine’s economy recovers will depend largely on Western aid for post-war reconstruction, and how well a government with a history of corruption uses it. A secure and prosperous Ukraine is the only lasting solution to the refugee crisis.
No concessions for peace
The only certainty in Ukraine is victory: Despite recent Russian gains around the important esastern city of Severodonetsk, I don’t believe Ukraine will lose this war, no matter how long it takes or how terrible the costs.
The invasion has unleashed an uncompromising nationalism among the Ukrainian people, along with a fierce hatred of Russia. Ukrainians will fight to their last breath. They will die before they surrender. A nurse in Mukachevo recalled a Ukrainian soldier, after losing both his legs, begging to return to the front line. “I want to kill them all,” he screamed.
Stories of rapes, mutilations, tortures, child abductions and other Russian atrocities — a few, perhaps, apocryphal — abound, fueling the fire of rage. Russia, the nation that sacrificed more than any other to defeat fascism in the 1940s, has now become the fascists.
As a practical matter, it makes sense for Ukraine to consider some painful territorial concessions in the east to end the war and stop the slaughter of thousands of people. Such concessions would be limited to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, and the contested Donbas, parts of which were already controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
But I met no Ukrainian who would not consider such concessions a despicable betrayal.
“I will protect our land to my last breath,” Warrant Officer Valentine Borishkevich of Crimea told me, touting Ukraine’s historical lineage to the Cossacks. “I would rather burn in Red Square than give up one millimeter of my land.” With a punctured lung, six broken ribs and a shattered shoulder, Mr. Borishkevich, at 55, was headed back to the front lines in Donbas.
Compare that resolve to the deflated morale of a Russian soldier who doesn’t understand why the hell he’s in Ukraine, and is really impressed by its indoor plumbing.
“I will protect our land to my last breath. I would rather burn in Red Square than give up one millimeter of my land.” — Warrant Officer Valentine Borishkevich
A global crisis
The war between Russia and Ukraine is stupid and tragic. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he said, because its drift toward NATO posed a security threat to Russia, which was nonsense. Now he is in a no-win street fight with a country that is battling for self-determination and freedom on its own turf. Such a war is practically unwinnable, even for a superpower with superior firepower. The United States learned that in Vietnam nearly 50 years ago.
Even so, Mr. Putin is willing to let thousands more Russian soldiers suffer and die to satisfy his delusions of grandeur. UN estimates of casualties are almost certainly low, especially given the penchant of Russian soldiers to hide their atrocities. Even official sources estimate 15,000 to 30,000 Russian soldiers have died. Nearly 5,000 Ukrainian civilians have died and a greater number have been injured. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died, and 100 or more a day are now dying on the front lines.
No one, however, should forget the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is only one piece of a global crisis that the world’s richest nations must address. Roughly 100 million people — twice the number of 10 years ago — have been forced by war, drought, famine, human rights abuses or civil unrest to flee their homes, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has reported.
Refugees from Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other nations have received far less attention in the West than has Ukraine, a country that is predominately white and Christian. The plight of refugees who are not is practically ignored by Western
politicians and journalists. That should shame us all. Poland has welcomed and assisted millions of Ukrainian refugees but, earlier this year, beat back Syrian refugees attempting to enter Poland through Belarus.
Lessons learned
When the war ends in Ukraine depends largely on Mr. Putin and Russia’s internal politics, a veteran Ukrainian politician told me. Viktor Ukolov is an advisor to former President Petro Poroshenko and a former member of the Ukrainian parliament.
Mr. Putin may have cancer, he said. Top military leaders are dissatisfied with his incompetence; the so-called oligarchs, Russia’s business leaders, are tired of losing money due to international sanctions.
“God only knows when the war will end,” Mr. Ukolov said. “A lot will depend on what happens inside Russia. What is important for us is to destabilize the country from inside. The weaker Russia becomes, the better it is for us.”
Ukraine’s future is with NATO and the European Union, he said, praising U. S. assistance to Ukraine’s war effort. After the war, Ukraine will continue to need help from Western Europe and the United States to rebuild.
“It is important that the world doesn’t forget Ukraine after the war,” he said.
On a personal note, I will never forget the courage, tenacity and hospitality of Ukraine’s people — those inside Ukraine and those living as refugees in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. It has humbled me.
For most of my career, I have written about people who struggle, about people in trouble. The strength of prisoners, recovering addicts and the poorest of the poor has inspired me. Witnessing a people rise after losing everything has re-arranged my priorities and put the petty pursuits and preoccupations that consume most of us into perspective.
Yesterday, I traveled to Columbia University in New York to receive the Pulitzer Prize, an award I won in 2020 for exposing the deaths of jail prisoners in Texas jails. (Due to COVID, the ceremonies were delayed.) I’d be lying to say the prize no longer matters. But a week after returning from Ukraine, it matters less. The luster of journalism’s highest honor dims in the shadow of enormous suffering and sacrifice.
Even more than the bravado of warriors, the courage of ordinary people to endure life’s cruelest blows, amid terror and chaos, and carry on with grace has moved and changed me.