By Mark Antonio Wright
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Kyiv, Ukraine — At times, the streets of this city
can feel like those of any European capital. There are restaurants and fancy
hotels, cafés and posh bars adorned with string lights and filled with young
people whispering over drinks. There are UNESCO world heritage sites and
cathedrals and monasteries and monuments to the patria. On the banks of the
Dnieper stands the Church of Saint Andrew, built on the spot where, according
to ancient tradition, the Apostle Andrew first preached the Gospel to the
Slavs.
Church of Saint
Andrew, Kyiv (Photo courtesy of the author)
But of course this city is not like other European
capitals. This is not Vienna or Paris or Warsaw. This is a city at war — a city
under near nightly attack. Around any particular corner, you might find a
building in ruins, or with its windows smashed out and boarded up. The string
lights around the café patio on the next block may be dark, as that section of
the city suffers through another blackout, another cold night. Many of the
major buildings and apartment blocks have portable generators set up outside on
the sidewalk. The basements have been converted into air-raid shelters. The
airport is quiet; the airspace is closed — there has not been any commercial
traffic out of Boryspil International Airport, on the eastern outskirts of this
city, since February 2022, when the Russians launched their full-scale
invasion.
On the northern and eastern approaches to this city, you
will find the burned-out hulks of Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles
rusting on the side of the road. Time and the weather may have washed away the
blood, and the bodies have been buried, but the charred and ruined steel still
carries the memory of the dead and the dying. Everyone here knows someone on
the front. Every family is affected. Everyone has lost someone. On my third day
here, one of my Ukrainian guides, Evelina, is in tears. Her friend has been
killed at the front, in heavy fighting near Zaporizhzhia. In a meeting, the
chief rabbi of Ukraine tells me he lost his adopted son to the war.
A destroyed Russian
tank (Photo courtesy of the author)
Getting into Ukraine is not easy or comfortable.
Westerners usually come in by way of Poland. We flew into Warsaw and then took
a train to the border near the town of Chelm. At that point, travelers must
switch trains. The Ukrainian railroads run on a different gauge than the
Western European network. After leaving the station, the Polish border guards
process you on their side of the international border. They take your picture
and fingerprints, and study your passport. After crossing over, you get the same
treatment from the Ukrainians. It’s slow, and it goes on through the small
hours of the morning. Finally, the train lurches forward into the darkness, and
you settle into a cramped sleeping compartment to try to get some rest.
Maidan Nezalezhnosti
(Independence Square) (Photo courtesy of the author)
At Kyiv’s central station, you begin to see the costs of
war. You see men in uniform, on leave, traveling to and from the front. You see
men on crutches and with prosthetics, having given their very limbs in defense
of their country. Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Independence Square — is the center of
Ukrainian nationalism. Mass street demonstrations here in 2004 ignited the
Orange Revolution. In February 2014, a second revolution drove the pro-Kremlin
government of President Viktor Yanukovych from power after scores of protesters
were gunned down by security forces. Afterwards, the Rada — the Ukrainian
parliament — voted for a return to the 2004 constitution and alignment with the
West. That triggered the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donbas.
The giant statues of Marx and Lenin at Maidan, erected in
Soviet times, were toppled and broken into pieces, but the pedestals remain as
living monuments to the Ukrainian people’s desire to free themselves from the
heavy yoke of the Kremlin. Now, the central square is covered with an
impromptu, and growing, memorial made up of thousands of little Ukrainian flags
representing those lost in combat, each one marked with a name and a date of
death. Among the thousands, there are hundreds of flags representing volunteers
of other nations — the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf, French and German and
Italian flags, and the Stars and Stripes.
The farther east you go in Ukraine, the more visceral the
war becomes. In the city of Dnipro, which sits less than 70 miles from the line
of contact in the Donbas, a million people live under constant Russian drone
and ballistic missile attack. Before the war, Dnipro was the fourth-largest
city in Ukraine. Many thousands have left, and yet this gray industrial city
has swelled with refugees fleeing the fighting in the east. No one here doubts
that if the Russians get within artillery range of this city, they will try to
pound it into submission with indiscriminate shelling.
The night before we arrived in Dnipro, the city was hit
by dozens of Iranian-designed Shahed kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles.
Across the street from the Makarov National Youth Aerospace Education Center,
the local public television station took a direct hit. The TV news truck is a
burned-out wreck. Shattered glass crinkles underfoot. There’s a smell of ash
and burning rubber.
“Did the Russians intentionally aim for the TV station?”
I ask Alex, a local journalist who can’t be older than 25. “I do not know,” he
answers. “The Russians all the time hit us. They hit us every night.”
“We have a five-minute warning — and then, Boom.”
***
What does this all mean to Americans? The war is
horrible, everyone agrees about that — but should the people of Akron, Ohio, or
Broken Arrow, Okla., believe that this war affects their families and
hometowns? Ukraine, after all, is a very long way away.
The question deserves a direct response. It’s the one I
came here to answer — but first it’s important to understand how the Ukrainians
themselves feel about this war. The Ukrainians are tired. No one here wants the
war to go on forever. It’s been four years already since the full-scale
invasion and more than a decade since the more limited Russian invasion of the
eastern part of Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea. It might seem reasonable
therefore to take up the refrain you hear from some quarters in the West, and
even from the lips of Donald Trump: End the war. Find a deal to end the
fighting.
But the Ukrainians don’t think this war will end with a
negotiated cease-fire. Not really. Not permanently. To a man, everyone here
thinks a cease-fire will be a mere pause in the fighting — giving the Russians
a chance to refit and rearm to try again later. “If the Russians stop fighting,
this war will end,” the exhausted deputy mayor of Dnipro tells me. “If
Ukrainians stop fighting, there will be no more Ukraine.”
The Ukrainians are not being unduly obstinate. They
understand that hard choices are on the horizon. Razom, the humanitarian aid
organization that sponsored my reporting trip to Ukraine, has released polling
data showing that only 28.2 percent of Ukrainians would demand a return to the
1991 borders as the “minimum necessary for concluding a peace agreement with
Russia.” In fact, a supermajority believe that they’ll have to make “difficult
but necessary concessions,” in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s formulation.
What most Ukrainians want is to be ready and able to
defend themselves after a cease-fire. They are determined to use any cease-fire
to build up a military so strong and powerful that Ukraine can defend itself
from further Russian aggression.
That’s why Americans should see Ukraine as a model ally.
Through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and stretching back to Vietnam,
frustrated Americans could reasonably demand to know why American boys should
fight and die for those countries when it seemed that the Vietnamese, the
Afghans, and the Iraqis were reluctant to fight for themselves. But Ukrainians
are willing to fight. They have proven their willingness to sacrifice and to
pay the price for their own freedom.
U.S. flags
representing American volunteers lost in combat (Photo courtesy of the author)
After the 2022 invasion, thousands of Ukrainians joined
the fight to defend their towns and neighborhoods. There are no pacifists here.
Clerks and engineers and pastors joined local national guard units, ambushing
Russian columns and fighting from their own homes and back gardens. A massive
domestic armaments industry has grown up from almost nothing — capable of
producing tens of thousands of drones per year and at a speed almost
unimaginable in the sclerotic defense-industrial base of the West.
But what about the corruption here? It’s a fair question.
As I arrived in Ukraine in the first week of November, a massive corruption
scandal that seemed to reach all the way to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s
office erupted after the NABU — the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau
of Ukraine — began publicizing the results of its preliminary investigation
into Zelensky’s former business associates. A kickback scheme had been robbing
a fund meant to harden Ukraine’s electrical grid — an outrage in a country
suffering from prolonged blackouts as winter closes in. But the corruption
scandal, as bad as it is, is also seen by many Ukrainians as a positive
development. The NABU investigation itself, they say, is evidence of the
resilience of their burgeoning, still imperfect democracy. Would a totalitarian
country have allowed the results of a corruption investigation into the highest
levels of government to come to light during wartime? The question answers
itself. Indeed, most people here see NABU as a critical part of the war effort.
“We must stop corruption in order to find victory,” one official tells me.
A visit to the Third Separate Assault Brigade’s “drone
schoolhouse” outside Kyiv demonstrates this wartime resolve. The brigade’s
training facility, nicknamed the “Kill House,” produces basic- and
advanced-schooled soldiers capable of operating and maintaining FPV —
“first-person view” — attack drones that have turned the limited Russian
advances of the past two years into bloody debacles fought over a few square
miles of territory or a ruined village. The Ukrainians are also moving at a
rapid pace in developing and deploying a new weapon in this new form of
warfare: unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs. Four years ago, the Ukrainians used
armored fighting vehicles or big utility trucks to transport matériel to the
front. Under certain circumstances they still do, but through hard experience,
it became apparent that those platforms were too vulnerable.
A Ukrainian unmanned
ground vehicle (UGV) (Photo courtesy of the author)
Now — at this very moment — the Ukrainians are using
remotely controlled UGVs the size of dune buggies to move ammunition and
supplies to the front and to evacuate the wounded. An instructor here, Stark —
that’s his call sign — tells me that his unit supplies a full 80 percent of its
logistical needs to the front line of trenches using utility UGVs. The
Ukrainian army can conduct fire support using UGVs mounted with heavy machine
guns and grenade launchers. UGVs can lay mines and barbed wire, and relay communications
from the rear.
This is all possible because Ukrainian brigade and corps
commanders have their own R&D funds that they can use to scale up a good
idea. If soldiers at the front identify a problem or think up a solution to
counter a Russian gambit, they can ask domestic manufacturers to develop a
prototype. Within a matter of weeks, the Kill House will test it. After trials
at the front, a unit can order production at scale. What takes two or three
months here would take years in America under our current military procurement
models. One of the higher-end UGVs can cost upward of $10,000 — and they do
lose them in combat. But UGVs save lives — and money, since the cost of
recruiting, training, and equipping a Ukrainian soldier is tens of thousands of
dollars. It’s a trade the Ukrainians are happy to make.
I ask Stark what American military observers say when
they see what Ukrainians are doing here. “They’re surprised and amazed,” he
tells me. We ought to be. The Ukrainians are doing things on the battlefield
that we are not. If Americans want to learn the lessons of this war, build up
our own capabilities, and deter, for example, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the
best thing we can do is to help Ukraine survive and thereby teach aggressive
powers that their revanchist ambitions cannot outlast the West’s determination.
***
The Russians are intent on destroying Ukrainian
independence. But they are not invincible.
“We need three things to stop them,” Dnipro’s deputy
mayor, visibly frustrated, tells me. “Weapons, money, and men.”
“You Americans can help us with the first two. We,
Ukrainians, will provide the third.”
But despite this frustration, Ukrainians are ready to
tell Americans how grateful they are for our help. “I would like to thank the
American people,” a Greek Catholic priest tells me in English, looking directly
into my eyes. “But tell the American people that, when you do good, you must
not fatigue of doing good.”
“A free people should help a free people.”
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