Why Ukrainians Are Prepared to Fight
By Marci Shore, Feb. 25, 2022, WSJ

On Feb. 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the early
morning hours, before dawn, Russian artillery began
bombarding Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv.

A few weeks earlier, as Putin was ostentatiously amassing
troops on the border, I had sent an email to two journalist
friends in Kyiv.

“Ya s vami,” I wrote in Russian. I’m with you.

“We’re always mobilized,” one wrote back, “and ready to work,
whatever comes.”

These women are still young, yet between them they have
covered war and revolution in their own country, Belarus,
Egypt and Iraq. Born around the time of the 1986 Chernobyl
disaster, they come from a country that has been through a lot.

During WWI, the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war that
followed, Kyiv was occupied by five different armies. In the
1930s, Stalin engineered a famine that killed over 3.5 million
Ukrainians. Then came the Great Terror, WWII, Nazi occupation,
the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, mass deportation to the Gulag,
nuclear catastrophe. When the U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, Russia
became its successor state; Ukraine and 13 other constituent
Soviet Republics became newly independent states. In Ukraine,
years of corruption, gangsterism and oligarchy followed.

In 2004, the former Soviet republics in the Baltics—Latvia,
Estonia and Lithuania—joined both the European Union and NATO.
By then it was clear that a Russia ruled by Mr. Putin would
resist any attempt by Ukraine (a country with a population over
7 times that of all 3 Baltic states combined) to follow their
path. In that year’s Ukrainian presidential election, the
Kremlin supported Viktor Yanukovych —a criminal with robbery
convictions, who used election fraud and dioxin poisoning of
his chief opponent to claim victory. In protest, thousands of
Ukrainian citizens gathered on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s
Independence Square, in what became known as the Orange Revolution.

For 3 weeks they froze, resolutely—and victoriously. New elections
the following month brought their preferred, westward-leaning
candidate to the presidency. But the Orange Revolution’s victory
was ephemeral. The new president proved a disappointment.
Yanukovych reappeared to run again in 2010—this time assisted by
a slick Washington PR agent named Paul Manafort, who gave
Yanukovych a makeover—haircut, clothes, body language—and coached
him on how to scare Ukrainian Russian-speakers with threats that
Ukrainian nationalists would persecute them. (Ukraine is a bilingual
country, and Ukrainian and Russian are like Spanish and Italian,
related but distinct.) The coaching was effective.

Under Yanukovych, Ukraine was bound to the Kremlin, and the
country’s resources flowed largely to the president and his
inner circle of oligarchs. A younger generation, born after the
fall of the Soviet Union, looked to the prospect of EU membership
for the horizon of their future. Then, in November 2013, under
pressure from Putin, Yanukovych abruptly declined to sign a
long-anticipated association agreement with the EU.

Thousands went out to the Maidan once again. They were largely
students, young people who felt as if their future had been
torn from their hands. They weren’t interested in ethnic
differences or language politics. They were interested in
Europe’s being open to them. Their slogan was “Ukraine is Europe.”

Yanukovych sent riot police to beat them. It appeared that
he was counting on the terrified parents to pull their kids
off the streets. But he miscalculated: Instead the parents
joined their kids there. At one point over a half million
people were on the streets of Kyiv, now with the slogan:
“We will not let you beat our children.” All winter they
stayed on the Maidan.

On Feb. 18, 2014, Yanukovych sent a militia to confront a
crowd with stun grenades, tear gas, truncheons and rubber
bullets. An iconic photograph appeared on the internet: a
59-year-old father and his 27-year-old son, their hair soaked
in blood. In the days that followed on the Maidan, people
dug up paving stones and crushed bricks to reinforce barricades.
They set fire to clothing and tires and anything else that
could burn. The sky turned black from smoke. Snipers fired
from the rooftop of the high-rise Hotel Ukraina, and bodies fell.

Over 100 protesters lost their lives in the revolution. After
a cease-fire on Feb. 21, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Most
people went home, but some stayed on the Maidan, where they
had lived for weeks and seen people killed. The psychoanalyst
Jurko Prochasko described the conversations he had there when
he came to offer help: “When you experience being with people
who are ready to die for you, to make themselves vulnerable
for you, to carry you if you’re wounded, a willingness appears—
it’s a kind of rapture, a wonder at the possibilities given to man.”

Ukraine was a different country than it had been a few months
earlier. All winter long the border had blurred between night
& day. People had opened themselves, overcome social divisions,
crossed to the other side of fear. Ukraine had become a civic
nation in a new way.

Philosophers have long struggled with how to think about the
present, which cannot be grasped because it has no duration.
For Jean-Paul Sartre, the present was the border between
facticity—what simply is, what has happened and cannot be
changed—and transcendence, an opening to go beyond what and
who one has been until this moment. Revolution illuminates this
border. It is as if, in Blanche’s words from “A Streetcar Named
Desire,” “You suddenly turned a blinding light on something that
had always been half in shadow.”

This week marks the anniversary of the sniper massacre on the
Maidan. In the eight years that have passed, Ukraine has lost
the Crimean Peninsula to an illegal Russian annexation. The
Kremlin has instigated a war in the east Ukrainian region
called the Donbas, where thousands of Ukrainians have been
taken captive and tortured, and some 14,000 killed in a war
that serves no purpose—apart from Putin’s amusement. And now
Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, not
limited to the east.

For 8 years, the Donbas has been a laboratory of post-truth.
An early Russian TV narrative held that the Maidan was a
CIA-sponsored fascist coup and Ukrainian Nazis were now
heading east to kill all Russian speakers. In response, the
story went, local separatists, all on their own initiative,
had risen up to protect their people.

In late winter 2015, Elena Kostyuchenko, a journalist for
Novaia Gazeta in Moscow, was in the Donbas, reporting on the
Russian soldiers there, who officially didn’t exist. After
one battle, she talked to a 20-year-old Russian tank driver
named Dorzhi Batomunkuev at a hospital in Donetsk.

Yes, he said, he had known he was being sent to Ukraine. His
unit had disguised themselves; they had painted their tanks,
stripped them of identification. He had been told that Polish
mercenaries in the Donbas were killing peaceful civilians.
Kostyuchenko asked if he’d seen them. No, he said, but he did
not doubt they were there. “Of course I’m not proud of what I
did,” he told her, “that I was destroying and killing. Obviously,
you can’t be proud of that. But on the other hand, I calm myself
down with the fact that it’s all for the sake of peace, for
peaceful citizens.”

The Ukrainian writer Vladimir Rafeenko, whose novel “Descartes’
Demon” won the Russian Prize for literature written in Russian
by non-Russian citizens in 2013, is from Donetsk. Born in 1969,
he lived there all his life, until 2014, when he joined some
million and a half internally displaced persons who fled
westward into the part of Ukraine not at war. Like many
Ukrainians, Rafeenko is a native Russian speaker, and it was
obvious to him that the Russian language had been under no threat
in Donetsk until Putin started a war there. “I’m a Russian-
language writer,” Rafeenko told me. “And now I can’t even bear
to watch Russian films. I’m unable to forgive.”

Rafeenko has written a novel in Russian about the grotesque
absurdity of the war and a novel in Ukrainian about being a
refugee in one’s own country. Last year, via Zoom, he taught
a literature course that devoted four weeks to Anton Chekhov’s
“Uncle Vanya” and “The Cherry Orchard.” In passionately opposing imperial Russian aggression, he draws precisely on the rich
tradition of Russian literature.

At present, every third Ukrainian is prepared to resist a
Russian invasion with armed force. An additional 21% are
prepared to organize civil resistance. In any case, Russia has
been engaging in a war with Ukraine for the past eight years.
My journalist friends, too, are readers of Chekhov and know
that it is axiomatic that once a gun appears on the stage, the
director must see that it is fired before the end of the last
act. Putin has arranged very many guns on the stage. What choice
is there but to be “ready to work, whatever comes”?

—Dr. Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale University
and the author of “The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution,” published by Yale University Press in 2018.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-ukrainians-are-prepared-to-fight-11645801045

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