As Invasion Looms, Ukrainians Are Calmly Defiant

They appear ready for what could be a savage war. Their main worry is that the United States and its allies will get so nervous they will yield to Russian pressure.

Driving through Maidan Square in a light snow on Friday afternoon, with traffic snarled and the lights of the city blazing, you could almost think this was normal life, on the eve of what could be a Russian invasion. Some people with money are buying dollars and property abroad. But the restaurants are full, and Ukrainians appeared to get the jitters only when President Volodymyr Zelensky told them this past week not to panic.

Over several days of intense conversation here, I heard the same message of resistance. Russian President Vladimir Putin might imagine that Ukrainians share his almost mystical conviction that Russia and Ukraine are the same country, but if so, he’s wildly mistaken. Putin’s eight years of war against Ukraine, beginning with his seizure of Crimea in 2014, have made him nothing but enemies here. Polls say that even a large majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians oppose him.

“Don’t trust Putin. Don’t fear Putin,” said former president Petro Poroshenko on Friday during a conversation with a group organized by the German Marshall Fund. (I’m a trustee of GMF but came here as a journalist, along with Sylvie Kauffmann of the French newspaper Le Monde and a half-dozen others, including two German parliamentarians and analysts from NATO and the European Union.)

It was partly bravado, but a defiant Oleksiy Danilov, the head of the national security and defense council, told our group: “Since 2014, we have been in a state of war with Russia. There are no people other than us who will defend us. Even if we don’t receive weapons [from the West], we will strangle them with our bare hands.”

Ukraine is where the dissolution of the Soviet Union was ratified in 1991, when 92 percent of Ukrainians voted for independence in a referendum. Putin has said that he regards the Soviet collapse as a tragedy that he is determined to avenge — and that resolve has led him inexorably toward this confrontation. He sent troops to the border in April, paused for a round of diplomacy with President Biden in Geneva in June, and then stormed back to the Ukraine border in October with what US intelligence concluded was a force ready to invade all the way to Kyiv.

As the Biden administration mobilized NATO resistance, Putin has doubled down repeatedly, saying that he wants to dismantle the post-Cold War architecture of Europe and insisting on promises that Ukraine will never join NATO. On Friday, against a firm NATO rejection of that ultimatum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went even further, demanding that the alliance withdraw its troops from Russian neighbors Bulgaria and Romania.

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This article was originally published by the Washington Post on January 21, 2022, under the headline "Opinion: As invasion looms, Ukrainians are calmly defiant" and this exerpt was republished with permission.