A year ago, as Vladimir Putin launched his so-called “special military operation” to seize the Ukrainian capital, kill Volodymyr Zelenskyy and wipe much of the latter’s country from the map of Europe, who’d have imagined that the third week of February 2023 would begin with Joe Biden strolling around the streets of Kyiv in sunglasses? For that matter, who would have predicted that Mr Zelenskyy, only recently returned from his own trip to London, would be at his side — still the president of a free country, and still very much alive?
Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. Like many, probably most Western observers, I held out little hope for Ukraine once the drums of war began to beat in earnest. A couple of days after Mr Putin’s brutal invasion began, I wrote a bullish essay looking back at Ukraine’s history of suffering and resilience. But even as I was agonising over my prose, the bleak news continued to pour in. “Now, while I have been writing, Russian tanks are rolling into the suburbs,” I wrote at one stage. Did I think they would be driven back? I didn’t. “Kyiv will rise again,” I wrote at the end. Stirring words, or so I hoped. But the person I was really trying to persuade was myself, and I didn’t succeed.
In truth, I underestimated the Ukrainian people’s resilience, their courage, their love of country. And I was wrong, too, about the Western alliance. After more than a decade of drift and inaction, from the shameful failure to respond to the seizure of Crimea to the near-criminal indifference to the suffering in Syria, I doubted whether any major Western leader would make more than a token protest about the first full-scale European invasion since the Forties. I never expected to see Finland and Sweden jump off the fence and apply for Nato membership. Nor did I imagine that Joe Biden would be so unswerving in his commitment, or so generous with US military aid. Above all, I never anticipated that Kyiv would hold out, that Kharkiv would stand or that Kherson would be retaken. As I say, it’s nice to be wrong.
It’s often said that the war in Ukraine feels like a throwback, returning us to an age when nationalistic strongmen nursed atavistic dreams of conquest, sending thousands of men to die so that they might scratch new frontiers into the soil of Europe. For all the drones and social media gimmicks, the fighting certainly feels old-fashioned: reading David Patrikarakos’s harrowing dispatch from the front line in Bakhmut, it’s impossible not to think of Passchendaele or Verdun. But for a child of the Seventies, perhaps the most old-fashioned thing of all is the spectacle of a genuinely clear-cut conflict, an unambiguous clash of right and wrong, that feels closer in spirit to the struggle against Hitler’s Germany than to most of the wars in my lifetime.
After all, just go through the list. Vietnam? A confused, dirty, morally squalid mess, a conflict defined in the public mind by My Lai, Agent Orange and that infamous picture of a little Vietnamese girl running naked in the road after a napalm attack. Yugoslavia? A horrendous internecine bloodbath, in which neighbour turned on neighbour while the Western powers stood by and wrung their hands. Iraq? A war based, at best, on a colossal exaggeration, in which an incontestably brutal dictator was toppled with little serious thought about what was to follow, unleashing a firestorm of chaos across the Middle East.
From the start, however, Ukraine has felt different — and some of that, at least, is down to Zelenskyy himself. He set the tone even before the first shots were fired, delivering an astonishing televised appeal in his own native tongue — not Ukrainian, but Russian — to the Russian people, imploring them to stand up against the invasion. Ever since, his defiant social media videos have been as cleverly judged as any Churchillian set-piece oration. More cynical readers might point out that he’s a practised performer with a clever scriptwriter, and of course they’d be right. But that’s true of any politician. And he didn’t have to choose that particular role. He could have run, and played the part of the president-in-exile, as so many leaders did in the Second World War. But he chose to stay, and history will reward him for it.
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