Ukraine and the Proud Legacy of Resistance

By Robert Loewen

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

In February 2022, with Russian tanks roaring toward Kyiv in support of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Biden administration offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He famously declined. “The fight is here,” he declared. “I need ammunition, not a ride.” He wasn’t alone. Despite the exodus of many in those early days,  news reports suggested that many Ukrainians would stand their ground. There were reports — and images — of ordinary people setting up tank traps, manning checkpoints with hunting rifles they’d brought from home, mass-producing Molotov cocktails in abandoned factories, and training with wooden Kalashnikovs.

 

National Review’s Jim Geraghty, in his travels to the country, met a resistance fighter who explained that it wasn’t merely a matter of following a bold leader like Zelensky; it was in the DNA or the national character: “Ukrainians have never relied on their government,” the individual explained. “We rely on ourselves. We won’t wait for orders to do something. Offense, defense, assault, ambush — just do it. This is our land . . . . Ukrainians can live everywhere. Even in the desert, we will find water.” Ken Harbaugh writes of a similar determination to resist the invaders in a recent piece for The Atlantic.

 

But neither bold leadership nor ethnicity can fully explain this phenomenon. Reading about these brave people reminds me (and likely many others) of the resistance fighters in occupied Europe during World War II. Their courage suggests something more universal.

 

My wife’s mother was among them. Hetty Steenhuis was a second-year student at Leiden University, more interested in boys than in war, when the Third Reich launched its invasion of Holland on May 10, 1940. I novelized her experience in The Lioness of Leiden.

 

The Dutch government fled three days later, Queen Wilhelmina accepting the offer of a quick getaway that Zelensky would refuse 82 years on. Her departure left Dutch citizens on their own against the ruthless invaders. Hetty recalled that her first thought was, “Where is the resistance?”

 

As in Ukraine, it grew organically, and Hetty became a part of it. Of the 9 million people living in Holland when the occupation began in 1940, only a small fraction — perhaps 15,000, but no one knows for sure — risked life and limb in the active resistance to challenge the Third Reich. History shows that the vast majority of Dutch people did the right thing when circumstances gave them no choice — as with farmers called upon to help Allied flight crews shot down over Holland during bombing runs against Germany. But only organized, active resistance had the grit and know-how to follow through.

 

Hetty was a courier. She raised money and delivered false papers and ration cards to help downed pilots, Jews, and others hiding from the Nazis.

 

But she rarely spoke of her experiences; the trauma buried in her memory was too terrible. But one evening, decades later in Southern California, wine perhaps having loosened her tongue, she told us about the day in 1944 when she smuggled hand grenades out of The Hague, the city where she grew up. She boarded a tram at the central train station and headed toward the suburbs. She was supposed to meet a resistance contact who would pass along her deadly cargo to Dutch commandos. It made her feel good to know the tiny bombs would kill Germans that night.

 

But when her tram arrived at the end of the line, she was forced to stand in line at a checkpoint where German soldiers were looking inside every suitcase. A fetching 24-year-old, Hetty used her natural charm to engage the German soldier in conversation. They laughed a lot, especially when she suggested that she might be available for something more when his shift ended. Still laughing, he asked, “What’s in the suitcase?” She replied flirtatiously, “It’s full of hand grenades.” They laughed. He waved his hand for her to pass, the bag unopened.

 

In the 1980s, Hetty returned to see her fellow resistance fighters for what was likely to be the last time. They asked themselves whether future generations would do what they had done: Would the youth of today risk everything to fight if their country were occupied by oppressors? During peacetime, it was inconceivable that the answer would be yes; young people are too soft and entitled, her friends said.

 

But Hetty reminded her friends that their own lives were similarly privileged before Hitler invaded. One of their bravest leaders had been an unassuming grocery clerk before the war. And all of them fought in conditions none expected to survive.

 

In peacetime, it was hard to imagine harming another person, Hetty told them. “But you never know what people will do when confronted by pure evil.”

 

Ukraine’s resistance fighters have once again shown what those pushed into a corner by a ruthless invader are capable of. Their ability to find each other organically and their guile in using human nature to trap the enemy into making mistakes have historical antecedents. Let’s pray they see the same success.