Voice of Ukraine

From Maia Mikhaluk in Kyiv (335th day of ruzzian invasion): Today our media is full of news about Germany finally making the decision to give 14 tanks to Ukraine and to give permission to other countries to re-export German-made tanks to Ukraine. So on the latest count, there are 42 tanks (from Germany, Great Britain and Poland) that have been confirmed, though the timeline of their arrival in Ukraine is as slow as the decision-making – German tanks might make it here in 3 months! Other countries hopefully will be sending tanks now too – they have expressed their readiness before, but Germany was blocking them.

Ukrainians puzzle over how slow the decision-making process is. It seems there is a common understanding that this war is not only about Ukraine. Tom Nichols has summed it up well in his recent article in The Atlantic “To Defend Civilization, Defeat Russia”. At first, the world didn’t believe we stood a chance against ruzzian army, then the world was afraid to antagonize putin. It seems we have all moved beyond that. So why is the help so slow?

Here are couple quotes form Tom Nichols article:

“I suspect that many people in Europe and the United States are having a hard time getting their arms around the magnitude of this threat. We are all afflicted by normalcy bias, our inherent resistance to accept that large changes can upend our lives. I struggled with this in the early stages of the war; I thought Ukraine would probably lose quickly, and then when the Russians were repulsed by the heroic Ukrainian defenses, I hoped (in vain) that the fighting would fizzle out, that Putin would try to conserve what was left of his shattered military, and that the world’s institutions, damaged by yet another act of Russian barbarism, would somehow continue to limp along.

We’re long past such possibilities. Putin has made clear that he will soak the ground of East-Central Europe with blood—both of Ukrainians and of his own hapless mobiks, the recently mobilized draftees he’s sending into the military meat grinder—if that’s what it takes to subjugate Kyiv and end the Kremlin’s unexpected and ongoing humiliation. At this point, the fight in Ukraine is not about borders or flags but about what kind of world we’ve built over the past century, and whether that world can sustain itself in the face of limitless brutality. As the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in Davos last week: “We don’t know when the war ends, but Ukraine has to win. I don’t see another choice.”

Meanwhile decision was made to pull our troops from Soledar, a small town where our defenders have been keeping ruzzian forces that were often exceeding ours 3-5 times. Ruzzians made this small area a focus of their efforts since Dec 27th and while trying to take over, this town ruzzians lost more troops than during two wars in Chechnya. Our troops are now regrouping in the suburbs of Soledar. No doubt this area will be liberated from invaders but look what they have done to this town already.

35 days left till spring…