{"id":126768,"date":"2025-12-23T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=126768"},"modified":"2025-12-21T10:10:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T08:10:30","slug":"23-05-115","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=126768","title":{"rendered":"How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Ukrainians"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Ukrainians<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

Park MacDougald<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Yes, Hunter Biden was a crook, and many people who put Ukrainian flags in their bios are deeply annoying. But in reality, Ukrainians are a brave people fighting a war against a vicious foe, and their fight, in many ways, is ours<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

Young members of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade, recruited under a new model of voluntary military service \u2018Contract 18-24\u2019, take part in a tactical field training exercise at an undisclosed location in the Donetsk Region, on May 1, 2025 \/ GENYA SAVILOV\/AFP via Getty Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Last month, the Trump administration kicked off its latest effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war with its \u201c28-point peace plan,\u201d reportedly authored by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and delivered to the Ukrainians on Nov. 20. In an abrupt 180-degree turn from what had looked like the increasingly pro-Ukrainian drift of administration policy, the plan endorsed maximalist Russian positions on territorial concessions and was delivered to Kyiv as an ultimatum, backed by the threat of total abandonment if Ukraine refused to comply.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A month later, the Ukrainians have whittled down the deal from 28 to 20 points, stripping out the most pro-Russia provisions. (The original plan, in fact, now looks to have been authored in substantial part by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund.) The United States and Europe have taken turns venting their frustrations at one another, while the Russians\u2014the only party that can bring the war to a close\u2014have given no indication of any interest in a Trump-brokered peace by Christmas. The war, for now, looks set to go on.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I was not surprised at this outcome. When news of the peace plan dropped, I was in Kyiv as part of a small junket for journalists organized by the nonprofit Razom for Ukraine. Our group, which mixed \u201chawks\u201d and \u201cdoves\u201d in roughly equal measure, had spent the past few days crisscrossing the city, meeting with Ukrainians and doing our best to wrap our heads around the war. Having only followed from afar, I\u2019d expected the Ukrainians to be exhausted, and I wondered if the United States might in fact be doing them a favor by providing them with a useful pretext to end the fighting.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I was therefore surprised by the violence with which nearly every Ukrainian we spoke to rejected the American offer. \u201cIf President Zelenskyy comes to the Parliament with this deal,\u201d Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a member of parliament from the opposition European Solidarity Party, told us on the night the details leaked, \u201cI pity him. I really do.\u201d Her view was backed by survey data. A\u00a0December poll<\/a>\u00a0from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found that 75% of Ukrainians considered a deal along the lines of the 28-point plan \u201ccompletely unacceptable,\u201d while 63% were willing to endure the war for as long as necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Surrender, of the sort that many felt the United States was proposing, was not an option.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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It was hard not to be impressed. Since the collapse of the Global War on Terror, it\u2019s become common for Americans on both the left and the right to rail against \u201cforever wars\u201d in far-off locations\u2014by which they mean the United States\u2019 nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the failure of which was symbolized by the rapid collapse of the Afghan government in 2021. On large sections of the American right, Ukraine had become identified as an especially corrupt province of the \u201cglobalist\u201d empire\u2014Hunter Biden\u2019s piggy bank, artificially kept afloat by the \u201cneocons\u201d and \u201cwarmongers\u201d who allegedly profited from conflict with Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This view was impossible to sustain upon contact with reality inside Ukraine. What I saw instead was, in terms of the morality of international conflicts, one of the more black-and-white situations I could imagine. The government of Ukraine may be corrupt, but ordinary Ukrainians saw themselves as\u2014and were\u2014fighting to defend their homes and their freedom against invasion by an external empire that appeared to have all the hallmarks of evil. They were doing this not because America had tricked or bribed them, or to carry out the sinister \u201cregime change\u201d plans of Victoria Nuland or Barack Obama, but for the simple reason that they felt it was better to die free than live as slaves. This was something I thought Americans, however rightfully fatigued by stupid wars, should still be able to relate to, if not necessarily pay for.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Later that night, walking through the dark streets of mid-November Kyiv, one of my colleagues said something that by this point summed up my own feelings as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m going to be ashamed of myself as an American,\u201d he said, \u201cif we sell these people down the river.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In peacetime, Kyiv is about a 10-hour direct flight from Washington, D.C., but the journey today is an elaborate series of connecting flights and train transfers, which, for the weary traveler, can combine to make you feel as if you were visiting the dark side of the Moon. Once you arrive in Kyiv, however, you are struck by what appears as a relatively normal, even bustling, Eastern European city. Compared to cities like Warsaw, which were effectively razed during the Second World War, it has kept its gorgeous medieval core largely intact, and its skyline is still dotted by gold-domed monasteries and cathedrals. There are few visible signs of war damage, and the city\u2019s caf\u00e9s, bars, and restaurants were buzzing with activity. The only thing that seems off, at first, is the darkness. The Russians had made a special point of targeting the electrical grid, and the city suffers from rolling blackouts for up to 10 hours per day. Hotels and other large businesses have backup generators for when the city\u2019s electricity shuts off, but in residential districts, you could look down an entire city block and see only a handful of lights.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Mostly, it was the threat from the skies that reminded me of the war. The majority of attacks usually come at night, and for us, they were little more than a nuisance that meant taking the elevator down to the hotel bomb shelter at 3 a.m. It was worse for ordinary people. Most apartments do not have bomb shelters, and after four years of war, few Ukrainians are willing to drag themselves, let alone their children, out of bed in the middle of the night for what could be a 20-minute walk to the closest subway station. On the night of Nov. 18, we received warnings that Russian strategic bombers were taking off in what was predicted to be a large missile attack on Kyiv. Most of our party slept in the shelter. We awoke after a quiet night to discover that there\u00a0had<\/em>\u00a0been a major barrage\u2014not in Kyiv but in Ternopil, a \u201csafe\u201d city in western Ukraine. Cruise missiles had struck two apartment buildings, killing 36 people, including seven children.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/span>Kyiv at dusk on Nov. 19, 2025. \/ Courtesy the author<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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We were arriving in Ukraine at what locals told us was one of the most difficult parts of the war. We reached Kyiv on Nov. 15, and the big news was a massive corruption scandal that had broken the week prior. Several close associates of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had just been implicated in a scheme to steal some $100 million from the state-owned nuclear energy agency, Energoatom. In Ukraine, as in much of the post-Soviet world, official corruption was par for the course; the difference was that Ukraine also had a powerful civil society that had pushed for the creation of independent anticorruption agencies following the Maidan Revolution of 2014. It was these agencies that had investigated and exposed \u201cMindich-Gate,\u201d named after the businessman Timur Mindich, one of the conspirators.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Worse, the situation at the front was bad. After months of grueling fighting, the Russians were on the verge of capturing Pokrovsk, a town in Donetsk that Ukraine had invested heavily in defending, and they were on the move in the south, too, in Zaporizhzhia. The army was struggling to recruit new soldiers and to prevent those it did recruit from deserting or going absent without leave.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There were also worries that Ukraine\u2019s few clear advantages\u2014aside from the motivation of citizens to defend their own homes and families\u2014were now eroding. Ukraine had long enjoyed superiority in the use of drones, but over the past year, the Russians had begun to innovate in this domain. To solve the problem of jamming, they had pioneered the battlefield use of fiber-optic drones, and they had also developed specialized counter-drone units like Rubicon, which hunted Ukrainian drone crews and wrought havoc on Ukrainian battlefield logistics. The Ukrainians were adapting through the mass adoption of unmanned ground vehicles, or ground drones, to bring men and supplies to and from the front. But it was unclear if these innovations would be enough.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One could certainly find pessimists. \u201cWe are living in a big hospice where people are dying,\u201d one senior Ukrainian politician, who asked not to be named, told a small group of journalists on the second day of the trip. \u201cIt\u2019s a nice place with drinking and eating, but then you say,\u00a0Oh, this guy is gone. OK, forget about him and move on<\/em>.\u201d Morale, both at the front and among civilians, was \u201cvery low.\u201d Recruitment was stalling. The generals, including Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, recognized they were defeated, but they fed Zelenskyy \u201cbullshit\u201d about how they were winning. \u201cThey all want some bastard to sign the shitty paper,\u201d our source said of the generals, \u201cand then they will complain,\u00a0OK, we were ready to fight an extra 10 years, but this bastard did this<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ukraine was not like Russia, where the vast majority of the population had been enserfed until the mid-19th century; it was a frontier society where the people had grown accustomed to doing things for themselves.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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This politician thought Ukraine should be angling for whatever deal it could get. We were speaking days before news of the initial U.S. plan leaked, but he indicated he was already in backchannel talks with the Americans. He was worried about Witkoff, the only man who truly had Trump\u2019s ear, because he was a \u201creal-estate guy,\u201d not a \u201cdiplomat,\u201d and he had been seduced by Russian promises of \u201cbig deals.\u201d Dmitriev, he said, had \u201csold Witkoff the story of the United States and Russia making a lot of money together if only they could solve this little question with Ukraine.\u201d He was more optimistic about working with Vice President JD Vance, but Vance wanted Ukraine to offer to cede the parts of the Donbas it still controlled, which would be a hard sell to the Ukrainian public.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The real problem, he explained, was Andriy Yermak, then the powerful and widely reviled head of Zelenskyy\u2019s office. The good news was that everyone was scheming to take him out. Our source predicted Yermak would be gone by Thanksgiving. He turned out to be off by one day. Yermak resigned on Nov. 29, after he, too, was implicated in Mindich-Gate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But Yermak was hardly the only roadblock to a settlement. Zelenskyy had been steadily losing popularity in Ukraine, and the corruption scandal had weakened him further. Ukrainians did not want elections. But neither were they ready to accept a deal that looked like surrender. An earlier KIIS poll, from September, found that 76% were willing to keep fighting for a better deal even if the United States cut them off from all support. A freshly compromised Zelenskyy was therefore in no position to sign a deal that such overwhelming majorities rejected. Indeed, some of the Ukrainians we spoke to saw the corruption scandal as a good thing. It would force Zelenskyy to make the changes necessary to continue the war.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIcompletely disagree with the defeatist position that,\u00a0Oh Ukraine is screwed anyway, and it\u2019s going to be disastrous<\/em>,\u201d said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who served as minister of defense from 2019 to 2020. \u201cIt\u2019s not that disastrous. I\u2019ve been close to the line of contact and spoken to people. I don\u2019t see any despair there whatsoever. People are quite confident in what they\u2019re doing.\u201d There were problems, no doubt. \u201cOf course, in some parts of the front, Russians are applying the utmost pressure, focusing pretty much all they have,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd it\u2019s very difficult there. But in other parts, we successfully block their advances. If we had even more drones, their movement would be neutralized everywhere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zagoradnyuk\u2019s view was common among the military men we spoke to. Yes, things were hard, but Ukraine was not out of options. The Americans, after all, had been wrong before. In 2022, the U.S. intelligence community had famously predicted that Ukraine would fall in three days. Here they were four years later, still fighting.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It was in the nature of Western analysts to underestimate Ukraine, Yevhen Hlibovytskyi, a social analyst and founder of a think tank called the Frontier Institute, told us over drinks in Kyiv one night. \u201cFrom the Western point of view, Ukraine is as strong as Ukraine\u2019s institutions are.\u201d But this was the wrong way to look at it. Ukraine was not like Russia, where the vast majority of the population had been enserfed until the mid-19th century; it was a frontier society where the state had, for centuries, been distant and weak, and where the people had grown accustomed to doing things for themselves. \u201cCivil society and volunteer networks in Ukraine are stronger than anywhere in the West,\u201d Hlibovytskyi said. \u201cIn the developed world, civil society is kind of an add-on. You have the formal system, and then you have the add-on. In Ukraine, it\u2019s one of the pillars of the system.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Part of civil society\u2019s responsibility was helping to fight the war. Ukraine\u2019s formal defense and procurement industry was complemented by a massive array of civil society groups, small businesses, and informal private networks. Nonprofits and civilian volunteer groups were raising hundreds of millions of dollars to crowdsource equipment for the frontlines; during a trip to Dnipro, we\u2019d stopped at a gas station where signs advertised that all proceeds from coffee sales went to procuring drones. Small-scale defense production, meanwhile, was literally embedded in the structure of Ukrainian society.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We visited a small drone start-up whose office was concealed in what looked, from the outside, to be a mechanic\u2019s shop, tucked away near a freeway exit on the outskirts of Kyiv. The company\u2019s CEO, a demobilized veteran named Artem, was a tall man with heavy, angular features and piercing blue eyes. He walked with a limp, a product of multiple shrapnel and gunshot wounds endured at the front, and his appearance called to mind a middle-aged Dolph Lundgren if the actor had spent two years fighting in a trench. Artem spoke fluent, idiomatic English that mixed complex military and technical terms\u2014ionosphere<\/em>,\u00a0over-the-horizon capabilities<\/em>\u2014with millennial internet slang (because reasons<\/em>), a product, he said, of his prewar life writing code for Western companies to \u201cmake Black Friday sales happen.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Artem\u2019s company was working on developing an un-jammable radar system that would render fiber-optic drones obsolete and, in his telling, allow Ukraine to begin decimating Russian logistics dozens of miles from the front. The tiny workshop, a handful of computers tucked in among workbenches and machine tools, was full of the flotsam of modern warfare: drone parts, circuit boards, disassembled guidance systems. At one point, he showed us a Styrofoam doohickey that looked like a slightly oversized Nerf football with fins attached to the back. It was a cheap air-defense drone that, when packed with explosives, was excellent at taking down Russian Shaheds. Someone in our party asked what sort of outcome to the war he and other veterans would be satisfied with. Artem said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Moscow had much to recommend it as a course of action but would unfortunately be bad for the environment. He would settle for carving up the Russian state instead.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It was men like Artem, and the industriousness they represented, that made the Ukrainians confident they could continue holding out. One analyst described how, after the February Oval Office blowup between Trump and Zelenskyy, he spoke to a half-dozen American friends who predicted that without U.S. assistance, Ukraine would crumble within six months. \u201cI reached out to Ukrainian intelligence,\u201d he said, \u201cand I started asking them, what\u2019s on your radar? They told me, well, maybe we can last three or four more years.\u201d He laughed. \u201cI told them this doesn\u2019t make any sense. I understand if you have such incredible differences in the beginning of the war, but this is three years in. Where does the difference come from? They said that from the U.S. perspective, you can assess only the visible things. But the visible things are only part of the things.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This decentralized, innovative element of Ukrainian society also had a foothold in the armed forces, via Ukraine\u2019s elite \u201cbranded units.\u201d These units\u2014Azov, the Third Separate Assault Brigade, the Khartia Corps\u2014had been founded as volunteer militias by either businessmen or nationalist activists, which allowed them to operate outside the top-down strictures of the formal Ukrainian military. Many of Ukraine\u2019s most senior generals, like Syrskyi, had been educated in the Soviet system and commanded their units accordingly, but the branded units were led by men who had come up since the start of the war with Russia and thus ran them according to the principles of modern business. They used marketing techniques like sales funnels and YouTube ads to compete with each other for recruits, and they employed Key Performance Indicators to track combat performance. Their officers were young and often impressively well-educated, and they were known for delivering results while protecting the lives of their men. In mid-December, after I\u2019d returned home, I opened X one morning and read accounts of a devastating Ukrainian counterattack on trapped Russian forces in Kupyansk, a city near Kharkiv that Putin had declared \u201cfully liberated\u201d in November. The counterattack had been led by Khartia.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The branded units were particularly skilled in adapting to the frenetic pace of technological change on the battlefield. I\u2019d often heard the war analogized to World War I, but this analogy, I learned, was at least a year out of date. Gone were the tank battles, massed infantry assaults, and trench warfare of the war\u2019s early stages. Even the idea of the \u201cfront line\u201d was obsolete. In its place was the \u201ckill zone,\u201d an area stretching around five kilometers in either direction from the theoretical line of contact, in which anything visible was at constant risk of destruction. Behind this was a much larger \u201cgray zone\u201d extending some 30 kilometers from the line, where enemy drones and artillery could still strike but were less densely concentrated.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Within the kill zone, it was dangerous to mass forces or use vehicles, unless under the cover of night and fog. Troops were typically forced to hike from the edge of the zone to their firing positions, usually concealed dugouts that could fit only a handful of men. Ukrainian defensive lines were a complex web of drones, mines, sensors, and obstacles, supplemented by small teams of infantry. The Russians would probe these lines by sending \u201cinfiltration teams\u201d\u2014often only one or two men, sometimes unarmed\u2014into the zone to look for soft spots. Most died, but a few inevitably got through.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was, as one might imagine, a mentally taxing form of warfare. I spoke to \u201cOdesa,\u201d a sergeant in the Third Assault, who had volunteered in 2014 when the Russians seized his hometown and had been fighting ever since. He was still recuperating after being wounded in combat near Kharkiv over the summer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Odesa had been part of a small team assigned to a four-day rotation at a firing position on the line of contact. Driving in the gray zone on a road they had used safely earlier in the day, they struck a mine that had been dropped from a Russian drone, killing their driver. They drove back to their staging area to get a new vehicle and then tried a second time to approach the kill zone. This time they were spotted and struck by a suicide drone, disabling their vehicle and breaking Odesa\u2019s leg in two places. \u201cWhen you are hit,\u201d he explained, \u201cthe most important thing is to keep moving, because the explosion will attract more drones.\u201d His men, all of them injured, split up and walked or crawled their way to their firing position. They stayed there for four days before being relieved.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt is hard for many people, psychologically, to adjust to this phase of the war, even people who have been fighting for four years,\u201d Odesa said. \u201cEverything is difficult. Moving is difficult. So is getting supplies and evacuating wounded. You must do everything slowly. You are always looking in the air, and looking at the ground, for something that might kill you.\u201d His unit attracted foreign volunteers, and some were American veterans with combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan. \u201cThey know war,\u201d he said. \u201cBut when they get here, they say they had no idea how hard war could be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When I asked about claims that Ukrainian morale was crumbling, he shook his head. Yes, there were issues in portions of the army and on certain sectors of the front. But his own unit was well-led, and morale was high. \u201cWe know what we are doing and why we are doing it.\u201d He said he was eager to get back to the front.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Russians have a particular hatred for Protestants and evangelicals, whom the ROC denounces as heretics and cult members.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u201cI think the way it\u2019s going to go is that the most successful brigades are eventually going to grow and replace the traditional ones,\u201d Zagorodnyuk said. \u201cThird Assault, Khartia, and so on. I think they\u2019re going to grow, and they will absorb the others because they are effective. They don\u2019t have much of a problem with recruitment, they don\u2019t have problems with loyalty, and they don\u2019t have problems with combat efficiency in their areas of responsibility. So eventually we\u2019ll see a commander in chief from one of those places.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In fact, even our pessimistic politician had told us something similar. During our conversation, I had pressed him: Was it really true that everyone had given up hope? Not everyone, he said. There was Mykhailo Fedorov, the 34-year-old minister of digital transformation, widely seen as an ally of the modernizing forces within the military and civil society. \u201cHe\u2019s the only guy who has a war plan. He wants to change the high command. He wants to replace them with young people who have proved themselves through performance, so that ordinary people understand these are not Soviet Union people, they are commanders who care about people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Fedorov believes Ukraine can lean even further into automation to achieve what Zagoradnyuk had called, in an\u00a0essay<\/a>\u00a0for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, \u201cstrategic neutralization.\u201d \u201cYou build two drone lines, then electronic jamming lines, and combine everything purely in defense, and then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. So the Russians understand this is a really big wall and they cannot get through. This is a brilliant concept.\u201d Fedorov\u2019s ideas had not been adopted, our source said, due to \u201cYermak\u2019s intrigues.\u201d But now Yermak is gone, and as of my writing, Fedorov is one of the leading candidates to replace him.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many of the Ukrainians we spoke to still thought they could win\u2014not by reconquering territory, but by putting up such fierce resistance that the Russians would eventually be forced to stop. Many more felt they had no option. Surrender, of the sort that many felt the United States was proposing, was not an option. Nobody trusted Putin\u2019s intentions; he had violated a laundry list of agreements in the past, and a weak deal would simply be an invitation for the Russians to invade again. Few, moreover, believed the Russians wanted territory for its own sake. Putin wanted to destroy Ukraine as a political entity.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere is no such thing as living under Russian occupation,\u201d said Dmytro Bodyu, who had been a bishop at the Apostolic Christian Church in Melitopol when it was occupied by the Russians in 2022. Bodyu, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had attended Bible college in Texas and spoke in a slow, mellifluous baritone that mixed Slavic disregard for definite articles with a noticeable Southern twang. \u201cIf they take over Ukraine, there\u2019s not going to be a Ukraine, and most of the people who love Ukraine will be dead or gone.\u201d He described the Russian policy of demographic engineering, or what Western analysts have\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0as ethnic cleansing, in the occupied areas of Ukraine, which combined forced deportations of Ukrainians, the<\/span> arrest and murder of local leaders loyal to Ukraine, the suppression of Ukrainian language, and resettlement with ethnic Russians loyal to the Kremlin. \u201cI stay in contact with people on occupied territory,\u201d Bodyu said. \u201cMostly there are no Ukrainians left, just people from north of Russia.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The aftermath of a Shahed drone strike on an apartment building in Dnipro, in which two civilians were killed. \/ Courtesy Damir Marusic<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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In a sense, Bodyu was lucky. The Russians tightly regulate all Christian denominations aside from the Russian Orthodox Church, but they have a particular hatred for Protestants and evangelicals, whom the ROC denounces as heretics and cult members, and whom the Russian security services treat as presumptive agents of the CIA. The Russians arrested Bodyu in March 2022. \u201cThey told me, we hate Americans, we hate evangelicals, and we hate Nazis. You\u2019re all three.\u201d His captors demanded to know the name of his CIA handler and threatened to execute him when he wouldn\u2019t comply. But Bodyu still had friends in the United States who convinced the State Department to intervene on his behalf. The Russians agreed to let him go.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For Protestant clergymen without such connections, occupation often meant torture or death. In November 2022, Russian troops seized Anatoliy Prokopchuk, an evangelical deacon, and his son, Oleksandr, from their home in Nova Kakhovka. Their bodies were discovered a week later in a nearby forest.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m from the South. I\u2019m a Republican. I understand all this,\u201d Bodyu said, when one of us stated that the American commitment to Ukraine was waning. \u201cPeople get tired of war. They get tired because we live in a time where everything is fast. We need to change the pictures. Everybody is hoping, OK, let\u2019s make a deal somehow, who cares how? Let\u2019s just finish all this.\u201d He paused. \u201cYou are asking us to make a choice. There is no choice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Razom introduced us to several leaders from Christian denominations\u2014Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, evangelicals, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, all of whom relayed stories of brutality and persecution at the hands of Russian forces. This was, I figured, in part an effort to counterprogram the widespread claim, which had been advanced most prominently by Tucker Carlson, that Zelenskyy was engaged in the persecution of Ukrainian Christians\u2014a crime that, in Carlson\u2019s telling, may or may not have had something to do with the fact that Zelenskyy is a Jew. The claim was based on a series of political disputes over the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, effectively the local branch of the ROC, which had culminated in a 2024 Ukrainian law banning religious organizations with ties to Moscow.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A majority of Ukrainians supported that law, and those we spoke to were adamant that the church had been a de facto tool of the Russian state. They peppered us with anecdotes about Orthodox priests loyal to the Kremlin who had hidden weapons or ammunition for the invading Russian forces or provided lists of \u201csubversives,\u201d often leaders from rival churches, for the Russians to arrest. Several of the Christian leaders we met with singled out Carlson by name for spreading Russian \u201clies\u201d and \u201cpropaganda\u201d about Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I wasn\u2019t surprised to learn that Carlson was unpopular in Ukraine, and these leaders were making a connection I was starting to make for myself. Bodyu and several other evangelical leaders had stressed that the ROC considered Protestants, and evangelicals in particular, to be heretics and cultists. I\u2019d spent most of the past two years covering Israel\u2019s war in Gaza\u2014and the domestic information war surrounding it\u2014and I\u2019d written extensively about Carlson\u2019s attacks on evangelicals and \u201cChristian Zionism,\u201d which he\u2019d denounced as a \u201cbrain virus\u201d and a \u201cheresy.\u201d At the time, I\u2019d understood these attacks in the context of Carlson\u2019s burgeoning obsession with Israel and Jews: American evangelicals were supportive of Israel, which gave Carlson an interest in discrediting them. However, I had not linked Carlson\u2019s anti-evangelical rhetoric to Russian state propaganda, or to his bizarre tirades against Zelenskyy and fawning interviews with Russian leaders. In Ukraine, the connections seemed obvious.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One evening, we went to the former home of Mark Sergeev, one of Ukraine\u2019s most popular evangelical pastors. The home, or what was left of it, was in a new development in the outer-ring suburbs of Kyiv, a popular neighborhood for young families who needed space for their small children. Now the entire block was little more than a pile of rubble. A Russian Iskander ballistic missile, a massive nuclear-capable weapon designed to hit hardened military and infrastructure targets, had struck Sergeev\u2019s home while he and his wife were there with their three sons. They had had only a few minutes\u2019 warning to bring their children down to the ground floor, where it was safest, and their eldest son had been in his room on the second floor when the missile struck. The force of the blast had obliterated most of the home and knocked down the walls on the house across the street, but miraculously, everyone in the family survived.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/span>The remains of Mark Sergeev\u2019s home outside of Kyiv. \/ Courtesy Damir Marusic<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Sergeev arrived half an hour late; he had a problem with the generator at home, and his children needed the light to study for school. He was young, with long curly hair and a few days\u2019 worth of whiskers on his face. Compared to the man in his YouTube videos, he looked haggard and thin. He spoke adequate but halting English. Prior to the war, he\u2019d lived for a time in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he still had family, but he had felt a calling to spread God\u2019s word in his homeland and returned to Melitopol, in southeastern Ukraine, to plant a church. He lost that church, and his home, when the Russians came. We were now standing at the site of the second home he\u2019d lost in the war.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sergeev showed us a video of himself standing outside the remains of his own home the morning after the attack, playing a guitar and leading his congregation in songs of praise. It was such a beautiful, simple thing, and I was struck by the strength it took to lose everything and still give thanks.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI performed two funerals last week,\u201d he said, \u201cbut on Sunday we had 10 baptisms. So maybe in the end it is OK.\u201d At some point in our conversation, one of the guides from Razom stepped away to take a phone call. She came back crying. Someone had called to tell her that her friend had just been killed fighting in Zaporizhzhia. \u201cThis is what it is like in Ukraine,\u201d she said. \u201cBut you have to be happy. You cannot be crying all of the time.\u201d Sergeev nodded.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Later, he pulled out his phone to show us a clip of Carlson\u2019s November interview with Robert Amsterdam, a Trump-connected lobbyist for several pro-Russian causes. One of these was the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Amsterdam was explaining that Ukraine was a \u201cone-party autocratic state that has no comparison to democratic values.\u201d Zelenskyy was engaged in the \u201ccriminalization of Christianity\u201d and the \u201ctorture\u201d of faithful Christians. Sergeev paused the video. \u201cThis hurt my heart,\u201d he said. \u201cI was crying, really. Because we are trying to show the world. We are preaching the Gospel and the Russians are just killing people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThis is not just a war against us, about taking land,\u201d Sergeev went on. \u201cThis is a spiritual battle. They are trying to destroy and take our freedom. And I think Putin, even, doesn\u2019t understand how the devil is using him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I was\u2014am\u2014resistant to spiritual explanations of worldly phenomena, but there was something in what Sergeev was saying that struck a chord with me. I had, over the preceding year, become increasingly disaffected from the faction of the right that had adopted a stridently anti-Ukrainian posture. One could, of course, make rational arguments about the roots of the war or its costs, or the desirability of avoiding escalation with a nuclear-armed Russia. But these were often tinged, especially on social media, with an undeniable sadism directed toward people like Sergeev or the Ukrainians fighting on the front line, as if a pastor who\u2019d fled Russian occupation in order to freely worship God\u2014a story so primal in its moral clarity that it stands at the heart of not only the American national myth but also the Jewish and Christian faiths\u2014should naturally be an object of mockery and resentment. This type of reflexive moral inversion, complete with invocations of the need to put \u201cAmerica First\u201d and the \u201cright\u201d to question official rhetoric, seemed to stem from the wider type of epistemic confusion that had recently revived the \u201cJewish Question\u201d as a live topic in conservative debate, or sought to recast Hitler as the unsung hero of the Second World War. There was something disordered and compulsive about the whole enterprise that reminded me of Jordan Peterson\u2019s idea, borrowed from Carl Jung, that people could be possessed by ideas as if by demons, which could compel them toward ends they did not fully understand.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Sergeev believed in good and evil, and this gave him a language in which to speak about such things. \u201cThey will do it again,\u201d he said of the Russians. \u201cBecause you have 140 million people living in this crazy kind of propaganda spirit. It\u2019s the same with Israel. Does Iran stop? No, they have this crazy idea. Israel released all these guys from prison into Gaza. I think these terrorists are going to attack again. Maybe a couple years later. Because it\u2019s inside them. I mean, it\u2019s a spirit inside.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I thought, as I listened to him speak outside the ruins of what had once been his home, that this was as good an explanation as anyone had offered me over the past two years on my beat. I thought, too, of the lesson of the Alcoholics Anonymous scenes from\u00a0Infinite Jest<\/em>\u2014that the great temptation of smart people is to believe clich\u00e9s are false because they are simple, when sometimes they are the only true thing that can be said. Sometimes evil really is a kind of spirit inside.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cRight now, I understand everything,\u201d Sergeev went on. \u201cI am praying with my kids every day. Praying for our soldiers who are fighting for us. I understand God is still working with this nation because the whole world gave us a couple of days. Countries in Europe thought we had three weeks, and then we were going to die. But we are still standing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After meeting with Sergeev, our group loaded in a van to begin our two-day journey to Dnipro, a city on the Dnieper River some 300 miles south of Kyiv. Our insurance had deemed it too dangerous for us to stay overnight in Dnipro, which is only about an hour\u2019s drive from the front, and so that night we stayed at a chintzy Soviet-era roadside motel in Poltava Oblast. We woke before dawn the next morning to continue our journey. At some point, we turned off the modern highway to take a back road, and it was as if we\u2019d taken a time machine 50 years into the past. We drove over potted, narrow roads through endless wheat fields and tiny villages in which the property lines were marked by corrugated iron. Outside our window, a woman in traditional dress dragged an unwilling cow into her field. About the only signs of modernity were the graveyards full of little Ukrainian flags over the graves, which presumably contained bodies of the recently fallen. I thought of small towns in the American South where, during the Civil War, virtually all the men of a generation had been wiped out in one bad battle.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If Kyiv felt modern and European, Dnipro, formerly Yekaterinoslav and then, under the Soviets, Dnipropetrovsk, was authentically Soviet. Stalin had forcibly industrialized the city and made it into a center of the Soviet space and defense industry, and the city as a whole had something of the retro-modern quality of New York City\u2019s Corona Park. Dnipro was a large city, with more than a million people, and its population had grown since the start of Russia\u2019s invasion due to the influx of displaced people from the occupied territories. Still, it was close enough to the front to get hammered by drones and missiles virtually every night, and many residents we spoke to were considering leaving. The deputy mayor, who escorted us on our brief tour\u2014which included a stop at the John McCain reading room in the Dnipro Public Library\u2014told us he had already made his preparations for what to do if the Russians came. He had a duty to continue serving the people here, but he did not blame anyone who fled.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We met there with local religious leaders, many of whom had been forced to abandon their congregations in the occupied territories. All could reel off lists of coreligionists who had been tortured or executed. Near the end of our talk, one man introduced himself as a third-generation Ukrainian Baptist pastor. Both his father and grandfather had been persecuted by the Soviet Communists, as had many of the older men in the room. What Ukraine meant to him was freedom from this persecution. \u201cWe are thrilled,\u201d he said, \u201cthat after Ukraine\u2019s independence, every religious group and every denomination was able to blossom.\u201d He thanked us for coming to a dangerous place to hear his story, and he thanked \u201cthe people of the United States, because free people should help free people.\u201d As we were getting ready to leave, he said he would pray for us and asked us to deliver a message.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cPlease tell the American nation that when you do good, do not fatigue. It is very important to continue doing good.\u201d I shook his hand and told him I would do my best. Then our group piled in the van for the six-hour drive in the dark back to Kyiv.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On our way out, as we were stuck in rush-hour traffic, our air alert systems began going off in unison. Russian ballistic missiles were headed our way. There was no shelter to go to; our security told us to get out of the city as fast as we could. Behind us, we heard an explosion and felt a small pressure wave. There were nine of us in the van; some prayed, others joked or simply gritted their teeth. Nobody relaxed until we crossed the bridge over the Dnieper that took us outside of the city, leaving the pastor and his flock behind.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It makes me sad to recognize that large segments of my own political community are devoted to sneering at these people as embodying the worst of our own politics, when the opposite is plainly true. People who are willing to fight and die to defend their freedoms from barbarians are exactly the kinds of allies that America needs, and should seek, anywhere and everywhere around the world, to keep the world from descending into slavery. They are heroes, the same way that American patriots are heroes. The clarity and the bravery with which Ukrainians are defending their homes and their families, and their rights to live and worship freely, against violent and unending Russian attack, are the very same qualities that we need to win our own battles at home. Let us give each other strength, however we can.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Park MacDougald<\/strong> is senior writer of\u00a0The Scroll<\/a>, Tablet\u2019s daily afternoon newsletter.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Ukrainians Park MacDougald Yes, Hunter Biden was a crook, and many people who put Ukrainian flags in their bios are deeply annoying. But in reality, Ukrainians are a brave people fighting a war against a vicious foe, and their fight, in many ways, is ours Young members […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126768"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126768"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126789,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126768\/revisions\/126789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}