This was before the war.His neighborhood of northern Saltivka instead became one of the most dangerous places in the country, subject to relentless shelling during the early weeks of the war, and has since made headlines for the extent of damage it has been subject to. He persuaded local officials to set aside a small plot of land amid the walls of concrete for a park, an oasis of green where people could relax in the summer, and had plans for more such little projects. The Russian leader’s efforts are not merely failing in the narrow sense they have highlighted how different we really are from Russia, and are having the opposite effect he intended.Pavlo Kushtym had grown up wanting to play the trumpet professionally, but ended up repairing furniture to make ends meet, eventually saving enough money to buy an apartment on the outskirts of Kharkiv, where his wife was born, near the Russian border. In responding to Putin’s invasion, however, we have become more democratic, more decentralized, more liberal. Ukraine was far from perfect when the war began-we struggled with corruption, mismanagement, and centralization of power. With the central government in Kyiv often overloaded and under-resourced, local administrators, mayors, and governors have had to band together and devise their own solutions.Over time, I saw that the war hadn’t just forced us to defend our land and our freedom it has accelerated our progress as a democracy. Activists I spoke with would complain about their elected representatives but still worked with them, reaching compromises and finding solutions. Officials have addressed citizens’ needs and requests with creative and responsive government. They have not simply taken up arms, but made demands of their leaders. I watched as Ukrainians articulated their values and, more and more, I started paying attention to how they exercised them, how they interacted with the state, and how representatives of the state interacted with them.Ordinary people have been confronted with autocracy and opted against it.
A window installer in Odesa, on the Black Sea coast, told me he had learned how to fire a gun to ensure that he did not have to “live in a country where Moscow tells me whom to elect.”This started happening so often-in bombed-out villages as well as bustling cities-that I began to understand that something deeper was under way.
I heard a mayor say that his town near the Russian border was defending civilization and fighting on behalf of a world where laws mattered. Yet in reporting on Putin’s invasion, in traveling through my country, I have heard fellow Ukrainians, without any prompting, explain these enormous concepts better than many academics.I listened as those frontline fighters spoke of the freedom to choose who governed them and change course if need be, and the freedom to chart one’s own path in life.
On a recent trip to a village near Ukraine’s border with Russia, during a break between the seemingly constant explosions and skirmishes taking place nearby, a teenage Ukrainian soldier told me of how he did not want to live under a leader like Vladimir Putin, someone “who believes he may tell others what they should do.” Another volunteer fighter, a former Thai-boxing coach, chimed in that whereas Russia offered only “stagnation,” Ukraine was “a place where things are developing with the influence of the people.” In a neighboring area, a former appliance repairman recounted to me his disbelief that Russian soldiers would invade “and kill innocent people, as if they have no choice.” He would prefer to go to prison, he said.As a Kyiv-based journalist working for Ukrainian and international media, I am very much a representative of the professional class, what many may call my country’s “liberal elite.” My circle of friends and I discuss democracy, accountability, and the rule of law, but we long believed we were a minority in Ukraine, that the majority of our compatriots did not care about these abstract terms.