In her acceptance speech for the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, Ukraine’s laureate, Oleksandra Matviichuk, said: “You don’t have to be Ukrainians to support Ukraine. It is enough just to be humans.”
Her country has suffered human rights abuses on a biblical scale. Eighty years ago, Ukraine bore the brunt of the Nazi onslaught on Europe.
Some 75 million people died in the Second World War. Ukraine suffered eight million deaths, more than five million of which were deaths of civilians. This figure represented more than 40% of the total casualties of the Soviet Union. Ukraine lost more people in the Second World War than any other European country, adding to the estimated five million Ukrainians who starved to death under Stalin during the Holodomor famine in the early 1930s. Nearly one-third of Ukrainians died in little more than a decade.
But that was not enough to quell the flame of Ukrainian nationalism. In August 1991, Ukraine finally threw off the yoke of Soviet rule and reacquired independence. Thirteen years later, the Orange Revolution, led by Viktor Yushchenko, eased Ukraine further away from Russian neo-colonialism. Then, after his successor, the Russian-sponsored Viktor Yanukovych, was forced out of office in 2014 in the Maidan protests, Vladimir Putin responded by invading the east and seizing Crimea.
Decapitation
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a “decapitation” assault on Kyiv, which was slowed at Hostomel, some 37km from the capital city. In an action that became known as the Battle of Antonov Airport, led by Spetsnaz and VDV (Vozdushno-desantnye voyska Rossii), the airborne troops that form a separate service within Russia’s armed forces, the initial heliborne assault was disrupted by a group of 90 National Guard forces based at the cargo airport, mostly conscripts, which bought time for other Ukrainian forces including special forces and regular soldiers from 72 Brigade to arrive.
Using two ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns, the unit claimed the destruction of five Kamov Ka-52 helicopters and one Mil Mi-8. The downed choppers and other vehicles blocked the runway. The delay forced the orbiting Russian Ilyushin-76 transport aircraft, each carrying hundreds of VDV troops, to retreat and land back at their airfields of origin in Belarus. Russian forces took 80 casualties; the National Guard unit just one injured.
The failure to seize Hostomel in the war’s opening move derailed the assault plan, causing the armoured column from Belarus that was supposed to link up with the VDV forces to stall, and blunting the Russian attack. It gave time for the Ukrainians to blow up three bridges across the river Dnieper at Irpin and Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv, and to flood the area, slowing the advance into the capital and ending any chance of a rapid Russian victory.
Other attempts to approach Kyiv from the north, in the process encircling Chernihiv, similarly failed, with small Ukrainian units blocking the Russian sweep between the villages astride the road to Nizhyn south of the city, which lies 120 km north of Kyiv.
By 8 May 2025, in a war that many expected would last for just a week, but had been underway for 1,170 days, Russia had sacrificed more than 700,000 troops, killed and wounded, and had failed to achieve its strategic objective of turning Ukraine into a colony.
By that measure alone, Russia has lost, and Ukraine has won.
Three years on
But three years on in a war that was expected to last just three days, the unbroken resistance of Ukrainians teaches many lessons aside from the obvious stoicism of its people, who have themselves suffered more than 440,000 casualties.
Even with all the requests for more arms and donations, with the external supply bill now running at €267 billion in financial (€118 billion), humanitarian (€19 billion), and military (€130 billion) aid – the Ukrainians have agency. They own the struggle for national identity and survival.
This is not about, as Putin might like to posit, removing a bunch of Nazis running Ukraine, or a pseudo-state, or, for that matter, liberating a Russian minority from Ukrainian oppression. It is a deliberate process of self-determination for a people long oppressed and suppressed, who want to choose their future for themselves.
This is not only, however, a liberation from Russia. The war has also bolstered the role of women in Ukrainian society, who now take many of the jobs once presumed to be for men. This includes women taking their share of the defence burden, including serving with distinction in assault units.
The war has also catalysed a process of European integration and expanded NATO, which now includes Finland and Sweden: precisely what Putin said he was trying to prevent. The movement of five million Ukrainians, many of them children, into Europe as refugees is tragic, but it is also leading to the creation of networks of Ukrainian commerce and education, interwoven with other European families.
The other liberation underway is from the old ways of doing things, from the corrupt oligarchies who dominated the Ukrainian economy and the tediously Soviet mentality and pace of organisation, service and hierarchy. This shift is most pronounced in the army, a change born of necessity.
Stoicism
In the process, the stoicism of Ukraine has translated into survivability: a combination of leadership, esprit de corps, and ingenuity. The country is now the most dynamic laboratory for drone warfare, this capability itself a product of education, motivation, and desperation, the latter an outcome of the artillery, armour, and manpower advantage enjoyed by the Russians. Drones have become a great battlefield equaliser.
Ukraine’s message of human rights is critical for those who want to live in a world respectful of individual freedoms. Conversely, Putin’s appeal is precisely to those who wish to emulate his record of fake elections and an elite-based extractive economy.
This explains why authoritarians have proven adept at sticking together and stoking the forces of illiberalism, in Europe, but also farther afield in Africa and Latin America. Their enthusiasm is apparently waxing, as evidenced by Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and Putin’s creation of the ‘Friends of Steel’ pact, undergirded by the sale of Russian energy and the supply of materiel to Russia by this authoritarian axis which includes Iran and North Korea. Two-thirds of Russian machine tools and 90% of chips are reportedly acquired from China.
“Putin is now in a strategic marriage with China, on which he is completely dependent”, says former Ukrainian president Yushchenko. “Ukraine is fighting a war against Russia, while Russia is fighting a geopolitical war against democracy. We are,” he notes, “Europe’s body armour.”
Putin’s worst nightmare, and that of authoritarians elsewhere, is to see a vibrant, free economy and society thriving in Ukraine.
Putin’s appeal to authoritarians rests precisely on undoing the rules-based order and the alternative that his regime presents to democracy, transparency and accountability. Ukraine’s narrative for the Global South has, in this light, to be driven by empathy and agency: it must show that it is fighting a war against colonialism and is a force for good over evil. It must show that it is a global bellwether for democracy and aims to put people first in politics.
And it should be responded to in exactly the same manner.
A poem by Dr Greg Mills, read by Ludmila Nemyria, written during a recent visit to Ukraine.
Filmed by Dr Greg Mills during his recent visit to the eastern European country, this video shows the Mayor of the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, performing what has become a daily ritual of receiving the bodies of fallen soldiers outside the Town Hall.
Mills and Hartley are in Ukraine for www.thebrenthurstfoundation.org
The views of the writers are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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