Riding the Wave of Liberation
What Ukraine's counter-offensives are doing for morale
We were having a good war that day. In Lviv, Commander Mamuka of the Georgian Legion met with US senior policy adviser Paul Massaro, and my wife and I went along for some of the activities. So did a few of the legionaries, which made our walking party quite the tourist attraction.
After a long week in Chernivtsi in the southwest, Lviv on that morning seemed enormous. A September sun fell in hazy layers over the old red rooftops; tour guides droned on. Doves, fatter and less jumpy here than in the capital, gathered in the squares to fight over croissant crumbs.
The Kharkiv and Kherson offensives hadn’t really began, but were soon about to, or so I became convinced. There was a tinge of happiness in the air, a new certainty in the eyes of those I talked to: Ukraine was about to start winning.
Paul – as a Swede, I’m highly comfortable with fake first-name familiarity – turned out to be very kind, and more intelligent than I had perhaps expected. He told me that America is waking up; that, yes, it’s taking its good time to do so, but waking up it is. I agreed with him that the world will be a better place for it.
The drive home to Kyiv took about five hours. That’s right. No, it wasn’t me driving. I learned some good swear words in Ukrainian and Russian, and, for the first time in ages, got to speak some Georgian. Despite being sober, I coined the phrase “terminal russophobia”.
For a full day, I took in no bad news. I laughed more than I had since spending an afternoon in May drinking with a gang of elders in Gdansk, and I started to have this feeling … the one that is with me still, only stronger now. As Ukraine liberates more and more territory, the people here are doing a waking up of their own.
The other day I went to the supermarket, dressed in a T-shirt from Saint Javelin. The print motive is a sunflower and a kalasjnikov. Now the young man at the teller in that store is not exactly the talkative kind, not even with his own countrymen. We have developed a full-scale silent routine, except for when I buy cigarettes (which luckily is not often). But on this occasion, maybe the second day of the Kharkiv counter-offensive, the lad broke out into a beautiful, bloodthirsty grin and said, “Cool fucking shirt, man.”
It is everywhere, this last week. You can see it in people's faces, in ... in the way they walk. You can hear it, too: in sudden bursts of laughter over the phone, in the loud gangster rap blaring out from car stereos. Ukraine is winning so hard that it's becoming more like itself.
I'm not saying that anyone thinks the war is over; I'm saying everyone now knows that Ukraine will win. And let me tell you, this is the mightiest fucking feeling I have ever come near in my life. It’s heavily intoxicating, and absolutely all-encompassing. Even the dogs look happier.
Yes, horrors are being revealed as we speak. The fascist invaders have committed unspeakable crimes against Ukrainian civilians, all over the occupied territories now being liberated. Not a day goes by without new atrocities coming to light.
That doesn’t change the fact that Ukraine is winning this war. It is becoming a nation that will never, ever take shit from anyone again. One day, NATO will beg it to join.
Thanks. A good read. I now need to get a new cool T-shirt to show off to the students next week. Maybe the tractor pulling the tank? Should cause some of our guest students to think.
Do you think that the. Russian soldiers and officers believe that the war is lost?