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Ukraine has been an independent country for more than half Vladimir Putins adult life (he turns 70 this year). Its been a free republic for more than 30 years, long enough for the first generation of Ukrainians born since independence to have school-age children of their own. Its had seven different leaders, all of them still alive.

It would be sentimental and patronising to talk about a country having grown up. But 30 years is long enough for countries to change, for better or for worse; long enough for countries to have eras. Ukraine was well into its second era, its European era, when Putin invaded last month. Putin never accepted the right of post-Soviet Ukraine to exist in independent Ukraines first era. In terms of understanding the country, thats the period hes stuck in; Putin doesnt acknowledge that a second era began.

The west shares many of the Kremlins misapprehensions about Ukraine. We are still too ready to see the country through the cliche of a nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking west and a Russia-friendly, Russian-speaking south and east. Or, more crudely and colourfully, neo-communist miners in the east, neo-Nazis in the west. Of course it was never that simple, even in post-Soviet Ukraine. But European-era Ukraine, which emerged in 2014, overturned its own political fundamentals. Faced with an existential struggle against a powerful, ruthless neighbour, Russia, where nationalism now serves autocracy, an emergent class of Ukrainian liberals made common cause with Ukrainian nationalists. Its been an uncomfortable alliance but it has kept the country together. As Ukraine defends itself against Putins terror campaign, mutually estranged liberals and nationalists in other countries the US, England, France would do well to watch.

To talk about European Ukraine isnt to describe an achieved state but a state of hope: hope of membership in the European Union more meaningful to Ukraine, at least until Russia attacked, than membership of Nato.

Ukraines hope of Europe had its material side, a hope of grants, jobs and trade. Since the revolution of dignity also known as Maidan in 2014, trade with the EU soared while trade with Russia plunged. More than a million Ukrainians went to work, legally or otherwise, in the EU. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, much has been made in Britain of the EUs openness to Ukrainian refugees compared with the barriers put up by London. But its a depressing reflection of how mainstream anti-immigrant assumptions have become in the UK that virtually no one in Britain is aware the EU gave Ukrainians visa-free access years ago, as a reward for their countrys sacrifices in Europes name. Since 2017, as a result of that and of Brexit, Ukrainians have levelled up and Britons levelled down to identical rights of EU entry: 90 days stay without a visa.

Beyond the material hopes of European-era Ukraine, there is the prospect, less tangible and more powerful, of an alternative form of nationhood. Rather than the archaic, romantic, racial mystifications of old Ukrainian nationalism, or Putins neo-imperial vision of Ukraine pulverised and remade as a puppet state to serve Russian nationalism, its of Ukraine pursuing its free course as an equal member of a self-constraining, self-governing association of countries, the EU.

The beauty of the EU, for Ukraine, is the capaciousness of its model for both liberals and nationalists. In some ways, the aims of European-era Ukraine closely resemble those of the Scottish National party and the Irish republic: to use the economic power of the EU to leverage their own, to break out of the orbit of a delusional post-imperial culture, to find national self-determination by accepting multinational rules. As Tom Nairn wrote of Scotland, a country could aspire to a new interdependence where our nationhood will count, rather than towards mere isolation.

For Ukraines more conservative nationalists, its Poland and Hungary that offer the more appealing EU models stridently patriotic, subordinating media, courts and education to national ideals and social conservatism, all while getting subsidies and trading freely within the EU.

The prelude to Ukraines European era occurred in 2013 under president Viktor Yanukovych, a profoundly corrupt politician from the east of the country. Although seen as a proxy for Kremlin interests, and generally loyal to the idea of post-Soviet Ukraine as a Russian client state, he threw his weight behind an association agreement with the EU. He had his country on side, but Putin gave it to be understood that he considered it a betrayal Ukraine could partner with the EU or Russia, not both.

Whether Yanukovych was genuinely up for the deal with Brussels, or simply angling for a bigger bung from Moscow, he changed his mind at the last minute, took a large loan from Putin and turned his back on the EU.

It was November. Protests began in Kyiv against abandonment of the EU deal. There were calls for Yanukovych to resign. Small, peaceful protests were put down violently by the police. Parliament, then controlled by Yanukovych allies, passed repressive laws against free speech and gatherings. As 2013 passed into 2014, the protests grew, their demands expanded and their base spread. Opposition to Yanukovych and calls for deeper ties to Europe evolved into attacks on the entire corrupt, oligarchic system of business and government.

Young members of the liberal intelligentsia were joined by radical nationalist groups, by small-business owners and by factory workers. Opposition MPs aligned themselves with the protesters. Increasingly violent street battles were waged around Kyivs central square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Barricades went up. Weapons escalated from clubs and stones and shields to molotov cocktails, to stun grenades and rubber bullets, to actual bullets. Some police were shot; more than 100 protesters were killed.

In the third week of February, for reasons still mysterious perhaps because the security forces ceased to believe in the president the regime collapsed. European foreign ministers brokered a peace deal with Yanukovych, the Maidan crowd refused to accept it, and Yanukovych fled the country. Parliament voted in an interim government and prepared for new elections.

Barely had the revolutionaries victory sunk in before Russia annexed Crimea in a nearly bloodless coup de main. In Yanukovychs home region of Donbas, on the border with Russia, locals angry at the treatment of their lawfully elected president seized administrative buildings. They were quickly ousted, only to be replaced, in April, by a new wave of rebels helped by volunteers from Russia. Fighting escalated to a full-scale war, culminating in incursions by regular Russian troops. Thousands of people were killed. By 2015, the front lines had stabilised and fighting lessened, with part of Donbas under joint Russian-rebel control. The rest of Ukraine was at peace. In 2017, the association agreement with the EU came into force.

Even before the war in the Donbas began, there were warnings of what the longer term held. In what reads now as an astonishingly accurate forecast of what was to come, in an interview with a Ukrainian paper in March 2014, the former Putin adviser Andrei Illarionov spelled it out, failing only to predict that eight years would pass first. Theres an aim and a plan to attack Ukraine which was put together years ago, he said. It has many different elements Crimea, the south-east and, of course, a change of power in Kyiv. And then there are other things: a new [Ukrainian] constitution, to be written in the Kremlin, disarmament of the Ukrainian people, liquidation of Maidan, and so on.

Liquidation of Maidan sounds different from the current Kremlin programme, until you realise this is simply denazification by another name.

It might seem trivial now, when Ukraine is on fire and hundreds are being killed every day, when all that seems important is how many Russian tanks and planes and soldiers the Ukrainians have to blow up to make Putin stop, to talk about abstractions like nationalism and liberalism. And yet without these forces coming together over the past seven years of semi-peace, would Ukraine have held out this long?

I remember being surprised, when I visited Kyiv at the end of February 2014, to see how focused liberals and nationalists alike were on a European future. The spokesman for one of the most notorious radical nationalist groups, Right Sector, talked to me about Poland as a model for the country. European flags were everywhere. I went for dinner one evening with a friend of a friend, a successful businesswoman. The Maidan was very localised; a huge encampment of brown tents crowded together, wreathed in the smoke of hundreds of stoves, in which exhausted people, who had fought nightly battles in freezing conditions, lived difficult lives away from home. But right next door to it were expensive restaurants with waiters in spotless white shirts serving fine wines and tuna carpaccio. You know, the nationalists were very important, said the businesswoman, sipping her grenache. They did very good work at the leading edge.

Ive always been in two minds about that conversation with someone who had been very kind to me. On the one hand, it had that air of somebody being grateful that somebody else was doing their dirty work; that one person had education, good taste and proper gentle sentiments, and they were grateful that their interests were being protected by another person who risked their life with a petrol bomb and a brick, and whose most conservative, chauvinist views the first person would definitely not want to hear at their dinner table in peacetime. On the other hand, my friends friend was being honest about the realities of a dangerous situation, and resistance towards a nasty, increasingly repressive regime: that she was not one of natures fighters, and she was glad to have people prepared to fight for their country on her side. Nationalist and liberal, after all, are words with an extremely broad range of meanings.

For me, national is what allows me to defend Ukraine as an independent, sovereign nation, said the Ukrainian philosopher Evhen Bistritsky in 2018, at a time when disillusionment with Ukraines post-Maidan failures to get to grips with corruption and institutional inertia was running deep.

I am a liberal, defending the independence of Ukraine. Part of Ukrainian society supports conservative values, linking them to security. If were really only going to preach universal, classical, liberal values we promote discord in the country.

In a country not fighting for its existence, in the US, perhaps, or Britain, or France, in some safe part of the EU, such language would have marked Bistritsky out as a centrist, a moderate, even, more pejoratively, an undemocratic compromiser. In the present Ukrainian context, faced with the Russian killing machine, discord becomes failure to fill the ranks.

Recently the Ukrainian writer Artem Chekh published Absolute Zero, his memoir of service in the Ukrainian army on the Donbas front in 2015. In it he faces up to the strangeness of being a liberal, cosmopolitan, intellectual man serving alongside workers and farmers who see the world in patriotic, if cynical, absolutes. I went around to his flat in Kyiv a few weeks ago for coffee and cake. Now he has taken up a gun again to protect the city against the invader. In an article for the London Review of Books blog, he lists his comrades: a music producer, an owner of a household chemicals store, a teacher, an artist, a bank clerk, a former investigator, a doctor. The ability to write, paint, act, play a musical instrument or dance doesnt matter now. What counts is military experience.

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The power of the new Ukraine - The Guardian

Today, Europe is experiencing its darkest hour since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Russias all-out invasion of Ukraine put the continents future in serious jeopardy. Russian President Vladimir Putins exclusionary nationalism and imperial designs are now posing an immediate threat to the safety and wellbeing of not only those living in ex-Soviet nations in Russias vicinity but all Europeans.

Since the beginning of Moscows so-called special operation in Ukraine on February 24, it feels like Europe has had nothing but bad news: thousands of desperate refugees rushing towards borders to find safety in neighbouring nations, indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, children sheltering in tube stations and basements, even an attack on a maternity hospital.

But amid all this doom and gloom, there has also been a development that gave democratic-minded Europeans some hope for the future: the continents many far-right politicians, who have long been publicly singing the praises of Putin and his nationalism, entered into a scramble to quickly distance themselves from the Russian leader.

French far-right leader and presidential candidate Marine Le Pens party has reportedly destroyed more than a million campaign leaflets featuring a photograph of her with Putin. While Le Pen did not go as far as to publicly call Putin a dictator, she had to admit that his invasion of Ukraine was a clear violation of international law and absolutely indefensible.

And Le Pens past support for Putin and alleged financial ties to the Kremlin swiftly turned into a political Achilles heel as images of European misery and death caused by the Russian leader filled TV screens across the continent.

In early March, for example, the leader of Italys centre-left Democratic Party Enrico Letta scolded Le Pen at a televised debate saying, Your friends were Trump and Putin, one attacked the Capitol, the other bombed Ukraine. Your foreign policy is a failure. The rebuke swiftly went viral on social media, showing the difficult position Europes Putin-loving far-right politicians found themselves in after the invasion of Ukraine.

Le Pen, however, still managed to assume a contrarian stance on the European response to Putins aggression. While admitting that the invasion partially changed her opinion of Putin, she criticised the crippling sanctions the European Union imposed on Russia and claimed that they will hurt French peoples spending power.

I dont want gas prices to rise eightfold and oil prices to double. I dont want the French to commit hara-kiri, she said at a televised presidential debate, warning that the economic consequences of the war could be a hundred times worse than the pandemic.

This economy above all else stance resonated with her supporters, and allowed her to endure the massive wave of criticism she faced after the invasion of Ukraine.

The leader of Italys far-right League Party, Matteo Salvini, tried to approach his newfound Putin problem in a similar way. He spoke against Russias aggression, but refrained from labelling Putin who he publicly supported for years a dictator. When asked whether he would condemn the Russian leader, he merely said: Certainly, its obvious, we condemn the war, anyone would condemn the war and the aggression.

And like Le Pen, he also spoke against sanctions and said he believes any restrictions directed against Russia will also be harmful to Italian businesses.

Taking his damage control efforts much further than his French counterpart, Salvini also made a visit to the Polish city of Przemysl to demonstrate his support for Ukrainian refugees there. Of course, as someone who has at least twice worn a T-shirt with Putins face on it in public, Salvinis stunt in Poland was not welcomed by the local population.

I have a gift for you, Przemysls Mayor Wojciech Bakun told Salvini in front of cameras. Wed like to go with you to the border and to a refugee welcome centre to see what your friend Putin has done, what the person whom you describe as your friend, has done to these people, who are crossing the border to the tune of 50,000 per day. He then pulled out a T-shirt printed with a black-and-white image of Putin on the front and the words Army of Putin underneath a copy of a T-shirt Salvini was photographed wearing in 2014 in Moscows Red Square.

The Italian leader could do nothing other than walk away.

All in all, Putins unprovoked aggression against Ukraine had the unintended consequence of putting Europes far-right superstars on the back foot. While it is not possible to say they abandoned Putin as a role model completely (another French far-right presidential candidate, Eric Zemmour, for example, still stubbornly defends Putin despite condemning the invasion), they had to accept his brand of exclusionary nationalism leads to nothing but misery and destruction.

Anyone longing for a democratic, inclusive and peaceful Europe should count this as a win at a time when even the smallest of such victories are few and far between.

But we should also never forget that Putins supporters and enablers in Europe were not only far-right agitators like Le Pen and Salvini. Many so-called moderate politicians also had strong ties and good relations with the Russian autocrat.

Countless former Western MPs and ministers have been sitting on the boards of and offering consultancy services to Russian firms including former prime ministers of Finland, Italy and Austria. Italys former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi expressed his admiration for Putin regularly over the years. Germanys former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder too always had a close relationship with him. The former German leader, who is currently mediating to stop the war, has been widely criticised for refusing to abandon the seats he holds on the boards of Russian energy companies after the invasion of Ukraine.

In the United Kingdom and France, too many mainstream politicians have strong financial and political links to Putins Russia and as a result, have been soft on the Kremlins actions falling foul of local and international laws over the years.

Even British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who in the past few weeks emerged as one of Ukraines leading European allies in its war against Russia, is being criticised for his close relations with Moscows known operatives, and the donations his Conservative Party received from oligarchs with strong links to Putin.

Now, as far-right leaders across Europe are being forced to abandon their autocratic and nationalist role model, and being forced to explain why they supported him for so long, similar pressures should be put on mainstream politicians who also worked to whitewash Putin and his undemocratic regime for years.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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The Russia-Ukraine war put Europes far right on the back foot - Al Jazeera English

Ukraines president has warned Russians that continuing the invasion would exact a toll for generations after tens of thousands attended a nationalist event to hear a speech by President Vladimir Putin.

The remarks by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday came after a mass rally was held in support of Russian forces in Moscow the previous night.

Noting the 200,000 people reported to have attended the rally was similar to the number of Russian forces deployed to Ukraine, Zelenskyy said Fridays event in Moscow illustrated the high stakes of the largest ground conflict in Europe since World War II.

Picture for yourself that in that stadium in Moscow there are 14,000 dead bodies and tens of thousands more injured and maimed, the Ukrainian leader said.Those are the Russian costs throughout the invasion.

Putin lavished praise on his countrys military forces during Fridays flag-waving rally, which took place on the anniversary of Russias 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The event included patriotic songs such as Made in the USSR, with the opening lines Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, its all my country.

We have not had unity like this for a long time, Putin told the cheering crowd.

Taking to the stage where a sign read For a world without Nazism, he railed against his foes in Ukraine with a claim they are neo-Nazis and insisted his actions were necessary to prevent genocide.

The rally took place as Russia has faced heavier-than-expected losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home. Russian police have detained thousands of antiwar protesters.

Fighting raged on multiple fronts in Ukraine more than three weeks after Russias February 24 invasion.

The northwest Kyiv suburbs of Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin and Moshchun were under fire on Saturday, the Kyiv regional administration reported. The city of Slavutich, 165km (103 miles) north of the capital, was completely isolated, the administration said.

In the besieged port city of Mariupol, the site of some of the wars greatest suffering, Ukrainian and Russian forces battled over the Azovstal steel plant, one of the biggest in Europe, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraines interior minister, said on Saturday.

Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to establish 10 humanitarian corridors for bringing aid in and residents out one from Mariupol and several around Kyiv and in the eastern Luhansk region, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

She also announced plans to deliver humanitarian aid to the southern city of Kherson, which was seized by Russian forces.

In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said Russian forces were blockading the largest cities with the goal of creating such miserable conditions that Ukrainians will surrender. But he warned Russia would pay the ultimate price.

The time has come to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise, Russias costs will be so high that you will not be able to rise again for several generations, he said.

Vladimir Medinsky, who has led Russian negotiators in several rounds of talks with Ukraine, said on Friday the two sides have moved closer to an agreement on the issue of Ukraine dropping its bid to join NATO and adopting a neutral status.

In remarks carried by Russian media, he said the sides are now halfway on issues regarding the demilitarisation of Ukraine.

However, Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, alleged that Moscows characterisation was intended to provoke tension in the media.

Our positions are unchanged. Ceasefire, withdrawal of troops & strong security guarantees with concrete formulas, he tweeted.

Britains foreign minister accused Putin of using the talks as a smokescreen while his forces regroup. We dont see any serious withdrawal of Russian troops or any serious proposals on the table, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told The Times newspaper.

In a phone call with Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Putin laid out plans for ending the war, according to the Turkish presidential spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin.

President Putin thinks the positions on the Donbas and Crimea are not close enough to meet President Zelenskyy. What we need is a strategic-level meeting between the two leaders. There seems to be growing consensus We are hoping there will be more convergence on these issues, and this meeting will take place sooner than later, because we all want this war to come to an end, Kalin told Al Jazeera.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, during a Saturday visit to NATO ally Bulgaria, said the Russian invasion had stalled on a number of fronts but the United States had not yet seen signs that Putin was deploying additional forces.

Major General Oleksandr Pavlyuk, who is leading the defence of the region around Kyiv, said his forces are well-positioned to defend the city.

We will never give up. We will fight until the end. To the last breath and to the last bullet, said Pavlyuk.

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Ukraines leader warns war will cost Russia for generations - Al Jazeera English

KYIV, Ukraine A tall woman with blonde and pink hair and a small dachshund stood out among the crowd of police officers and volunteers at the checkpoint on the edge of Kyiv. She looked as if she were out for a stroll, but she had just survived a dangerous evacuation under mortar fire.

The woman, Sasha Myhova, 21, and her boyfriend, Stas Burykov, 19, were evacuated Friday from their home in Irpin, the northwestern suburb that has become one of the most fiercely contested areas in the three weeks of fighting since Russias invading troops advanced toward the capital and Ukrainian troops blocked their way.

It was dangerous, she said. They were bombing as we drove.

The heavy boom of artillery sounded again as she spoke. Shells were landing right in our yard, she said, pulling out a piece of metal shrapnel she had kept.

As the war in Ukraine settles into its fourth week, the suburbs on the edge of Kyiv have become important if unlikely front lines of the war, where the Russian and Ukrainian forces are stuck in a savage give-and-take at one of the gateways to the capital, in positions that have not really moved.

Blocked and badly mauled, Russian forces have nevertheless established positions around three sides of the capital. Ukrainian forces have successfully stalled them, and on Wednesday mounted a series of coordinated counterattacks to challenge those positions.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine hailed the defense of Kyiv, led by the commander of land forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, saying that Ukrainian forces had regained control of 30 settlements around the city in the counterattack. The enemy suffered significant losses and was driven away from the capital, he said.

Yet the mortar fire and gunfire was so heavy in Irpin that the Ukrainians stopped attempting further evacuations after the one that included Ms. Myhova. The Ukrainian counterattack seems to have been met by a ferocious response from Russian forces. Residents and volunteers helping evacuate them said Russian artillery fire and even machine gun fire had intensified over the last few days.

One man, Vitaliy Kalman, was standing beside his suitcase hoping for a lull in the fighting. He said he had tried to go back into the district to retrieve some clothes from his apartment but came under mortar fire just beyond the ruined bridge that marks the entrance into Irpin. The bridge was destroyed by Ukrainian troops to forestall advancement by Russian troops in the first days of the war.

They are very close, he said of the Russians. I saw the shell explode just near my house, and I ran back here with the evacuation team.

A volunteer member of the Territorial Defense Forces described the street fighting in Irpin as an all-out guerrilla war. On the attacking side are the Russian troops, which Western military analysts say are likely elite airborne Special Forces units.

Defending against them are local volunteers, many of whom had just been handed rifles a few days before the Russians arrived in their town, alongside veteran militia fighters and uniformed troops.

Street fighting had been raging for days, according to soldiers interviewed on the edge of the town on Saturday. As of then, Russians controlled one of the three main thoroughfares, one was contested and the third was under tenuous Ukrainian control.

The locals have been slipping out at night and shooting at Russian positions, said the volunteer, who asked only to be identified by his nickname, Spotter, for security reasons. Its understood that they will be taking no prisoners, he said of the firefights. These are people who have weapons and know the local area perfectly.

A doctor at a nearby hospital said it had received 25 wounded soldiers on Wednesday on the first day of the counterattack.

Ms. Myhova said Russian troops had twice entered her home in recent days. First, two soldiers who seemed to be scouts came into the yard, then three days ago, just before the Ukrainian counterattack, 10 Russian soldiers entered the house.

They searched everything, she said. They said they had picked up a telephone signal from the house.

The soldiers warned the family that if they informed anyone about the location of the Russian troops, they would shoot them. They pointed their guns at us, she said. They said, We can shoot you because we know your location.

When Mr. Burykovs 70-year-old grandfather, the owner of the house, began to remonstrate with them, the Russian soldiers told them that they were securing control over what was Russian land, citing the medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus, which Russia claims as its ancestral state.

My grandfather tried to argue, Mr. Burykov said. He said, Its rubbish that its your land. I was born here. Go away.

On Wednesday, the day Ukraine mounted its counter-strikes, residents said the shelling worsened dramatically. There were four explosions around the house that shook the doors, and the sound of gunfire from assault rifles in the yard, Ms. Myhova said.

When they learned that volunteers were evacuating an elderly woman nearby, the couple, along with a sister of Mr. Burykov, asked to get out. But Mr. Burykovs parents, grandfather and other siblings stayed behind.

They want to go when there is a green corridor, Ms. Myhova said, referring to a humanitarian evacuation with guarantees of safety. But there will not be any, she said, since even if one is agreed, they shoot at the cars.

The Ukrainian army and volunteers evacuated about 150 residents from Irpin on Thursday, many of them pensioners who were struggling to survive after the fighting disrupted water, gas and electricity.

They are out of strength, said a volunteer paramedic, Oleh Lutsenko, 32, who was on duty at the entrance to Irpin Thursday. He treated three wounded soldiers, one with severe wounds from artillery fire, among the evacuees, and his team also brought out the bodies of three dead civilians all grandmothers, as he called them. Maybe they died from hunger, he said.

As his team pulled out just before 5 p.m., they came under machine gun fire, he said. Despite two days of counterattack, they were still in range of Russian guns.

While Ukrainian troops had success in stalling the Russian advance as it lumbered down the main highways toward Kyiv, Russian units have continued pushing south on the eastern and western flanks of the capital in an attempt to encircle it, military analysts have said.

The long columns of tanks that had backed up on highways to the north of Irpin have now fanned out into villages and forests outside of Kyiv, according to the volunteer, Spotter, who was interviewed at a gas station in a western district of the capital.

In his mid 50s, with a salt and pepper beard, he carried a walkie-talkie and said he ran an ad hoc intelligence unit, collecting information on the Russians positions in the suburbs and outlying villages.

They are hiding tanks in villages between houses, he said, adding that soldiers were also quartering in homes to avoid the cold.

Their dispersal was complicating the Ukrainian counterattack, since the Russian armor was interspersed in villages, where civilians lived, even if most people have fled the area.

After two major ambushes on Russian positions outside Kyiv, in the suburban towns of Bucha and Brovary, which together left dozens of charred tanks on main roads, the armored vehicles are now avoiding traveling in columns, he said.

They are now digging in, Spotter said of Russian soldiers, as Ukraines artillery has been pounding them from the edge of Kyiv. They didnt expect this resistance.

Volunteers guarding the checkpoint on the main western highway that heads out of Kyiv to the city of Zhytomyr said Russian troops had seized control of the road and vehicles could no longer safely use the highway except to a nearby settlement of Chaika.

It was unclear, Spotter said, how far south Russian troops had moved after crossing the Zhytomyr highway, though it appeared the intention of the Russian forces was to keep encircling the capital and eventually seal off access routes.

The advance was now stalled. They are regrouping, he said.

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What Happened on Day 23 of Russias Invasion of Ukraine - The New York Times

In September,1949, two Ukrainian agents working with the C.I.A. landed near Lviv, in what was then the Soviet Union. They were the vanguard of an operation that would acquire the code name Redsox. Its aim was to connect with anti-Soviet insurgents fighting by the tens of thousands in Ukraine, as well as in smaller numbers elsewhere on Russias rim. Soviet moles betrayed the program, however, and at least three-quarters of the Redsox agents disappeared. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, Moscow had quelled Ukraines rebellion while forcibly displacing or killing hundreds of thousands of people. The C.I.A.s glancing intervention was ill-fated and tragic, an internal history concluded.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered Russias unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, on February24th, the United States has acted as if to redeem itself; the Biden Administration has led its NATO allies to airlift planeloads of Javelin anti-tank weapons and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukrainian forces, while pledging billions of dollars more in military assistance and imposing punishing sanctions on Russias economy and Putins lite. More than three weeks after the crisis began, the mood in Western capitals remains pugnacious and emotive. Last week, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appeared by video before Canadas Parliament, and, the next day, he addressed a joint session of Congress. In both venues, politicians rose to applaud and chanted an improbably viral invocation of Ukrainian glory: Slava Ukraini!

Yet NATO has declined to provide Ukraine what Zelensky has repeatedly soughta no-fly zone to ground Russian warplanes or a transfer of fighter jetsfor fear that such actions would bring the U.S. and Russia into direct combat. We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine, Joe Biden reiterated on Twitter recently. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent. The President is, of course, right about that, and yet, as Russian planes and artillery daily pound Ukrainian apartment buildings and hospitals, he can surely understand why Zelensky is pressing for more.

Zelensky has been justly celebrated for his personal courage and his adaptations of Churchillian rhetoric for the TikTok era. His presentation to Congress last week was a study in discomforting moral provocation. He invoked Pearl Harbor and September 11th to describe Ukraines daily experience under Russian missiles and bombs, then showed a graphic video depicting the recent deaths of children and other innocents. Later that day, Biden called Putin a war criminal and announced a new package of military supplies, including anti-aircraft systems and drones. The aid may help, but it cannot relieve Zelensky of the terrible predicaments he must manage in the weeks ahead. Ukraine may be facing a long war costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, a war that may not be winnable, even with the most robust assistance that NATO is likely to provide. In any event, NATOs greatest priority is to strengthen its own defenses and dissuade Putin from attacking the alliance.

Zelenskys alternative may be to pursue a ceasefire deal with Putin that could require Ukraine to forswear future NATO membership, among other bitter concessions. In the light of Putins annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and his years-long armed support for pro-Russian enclaves in Ukraines east, such a deal would be unstable and unreliable. Still, Zelensky appears torn. Even as he asked Congress last week to do more for Ukraines war effort, he pleaded with Biden to lead the world to peace, and he recently signalled his willingness to bargain with Putin on Ukraines relationship with nato. The countrys past failure to win admission to the alliance is a truth that must be recognized, he said.

It has become common to describe Russias invasion as a watershed in history comparable to 9/11 or to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The war in Ukraine marks a turning point for our continent and our generation, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, said earlier this month. Perhaps, but some of this speculation about Europes destiny and the future of Great Power competition may be premature. Certainly, the war has already produced a humanitarian disaster of shocking and destabilizing dimensions. Three million Ukrainians have fled their country. The 1.8million of them who have gone to Poland constitute a population roughly the size of Warsaws. If the fighting drags on and Ukraine implodes, the country will export many more destitute people, and, as happened in the former Yugoslavia during the nineteen-nineties, it may also draw in opportunists, including mercenaries and extremists.

Meanwhile, Russias economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, could shrink by thirty-five per cent this year under the weight of Western sanctions. Putins oligarchs and enablers can endure the loss of super-yachts and private jets, but a sudden economic contraction on that scale would crush ordinary Russians and inevitably cost lives. (Our economy will need deep structural changes, Putin acknowledged last week, adding, They wont be easy.) Russias isolation from large swaths of global banking and trade, and its loss of access to advanced U.S. technologies, could last a long time, too: democracies often find it easier to impose sanctions than to remove them, even when the original cause of a conflict subsides. (Ask Cuba.) When the history of this era is written, Putins war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger, Biden said in his recent State of the Union address.

Still, some introspection may be in order. In his address, the President also declared that, in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment. But Europe is troubled by illiberal populism, including in Poland. And Donald Trumpwho, just two days before Russia rolled into Ukraine, called Putins preparatory moves geniusretains a firm hold on the Republican Party, and appears to be all in for a relection campaign in 2024. As long as Trumps return to the White House is a possibility, Bidens declarations will require some asterisks.

Every night for three weeks now, Zelensky told Congress, various Ukrainian cities, Odessa and Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, Zhytomyr and Lviv, Mariupol and Dnipro, have endured attacks. We are asking for a reply, for an answer to this terror. Ukraine is an unlucky country, and the restoration of its independence and security may be a long and costly project, but it is one the U.S. cannot afford to abandon again.

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The Complexities of the Ukraine Dilemma - The New Yorker