Ukraine’s struggle deserves our support to protect the free world against tyrants
VITALIY Deynega’s military buzz cut and short staccato speech first caught our attention in 2018. The 30-something former computer programmer who lives in a typical Soviet apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine, wanted nothing more than to make enough money to ride his motorcycle through Asia and enjoy life.
But Vladimir Putin had other ideas. In 2014, when Russia illegally annexed the Crimea Peninsula and then part of eastern Ukraine, Deynega began to informally collect money to buy equipment for the ill-equipped Ukrainian army.
At the time, volunteers rushed east to defend their homeland, without uniforms, weapons or even proper boots to support the cause. Deynega, founder of the Come Back Alive Foundation, was so successful crowdsourcing that he quit his day job and launched what has sent millions of hryvnia of equipment to Ukraine’s frontlines.
Deynega’s story is unfortunately all too common in Ukraine. Eight years later, he is finally riding his bike through Asia, but tragically Putin has only increased his pressure on the Eastern European country of more than 40 million people.
Putin has launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine after surrounding the country with more than 190,000 Russian troops on three sides. We don’t know Putin’s end goal, but the ageing autocrat wants to freeze the country’s Westernising drive and probably install a pro-Russian leader. This remarkable country will lose yet another chance at a oncein-a-lifetime transformation.
Putin has already interrupted lives unnecessarily with his Ukraine obsession. Kateryna Kruk, the English language voice of the Euromaidan who live-tweeted the high drama from November 2013 to February 2014, when a Russia-backed leader tried to keep Ukraine ensnared in Moscow’s orbit, fought hard for Ukraine’s reforms, even working for the reform-minded minister of health, Dr Ulana Suprun.
The Euromaidan Revolution transformed Ukraine. Ukrainians went to the streets and demanded that their country join Europe and leave Putin’s sphere of interest behind forever.
In 2019, Kruk reluctantly moved to Warsaw, Poland, where she works in tech. “I dream of going home every day,” Kruk said, wearing a T-shirt with the map of Ukraine on it.
In searing tweets recently, Kruk reminisced about turning 30. Rather than getting married and having a baby, she’s single, childless and living in a foreign country trying to ensure that social media companies treat the Russian-Ukraine conflict fairly.
The escalation on Ukraine’s borders is not Putin’s first rodeo in Ukraine. For the past eight years, the Russian president has been destroying ordinary people’s lives and rendering them into a permanent state of limbo. His record speaks for itself: more than 14,000 people have lost their lives, 1.7 million people have been displaced and scores more have been wounded. But why does a country in Eastern Europe without Nato membership matter to the United States?
A free world that favours democracy with predictable rules so other countries don’t cheat at trade and other things helps our bottom line. A world with rules that protects countries big and small is more peaceful than a world where dictators can start wars at whim, as Putin has done. Supporting Ukraine’s desire to join the free world and leave behind the Kremlin’s control helps us.
Ukraine’s story recalls our own. We wanted to break free from the British king, and the Ukrainians seek freedom from the Russian czar. Ukrainians overwhelmingly support membership to both the European Union and Nato because they believe that this is what they need to live in peace, and we should do everything in our power to support those aspirations.