What Many Misunderstand About the War in Ukraine

I arrived in Kyiv in the early, frigid hours of late January 2022, just weeks after leaving Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I witnessed the fall of the U.S.-backed government and the rise of the Taliban. I was one of the few Western journalists who stayed for months after, watching as a painful new normal took shape.

From a hotel rooftop in Mazar-i-Sharif, I had watched in agony as the Taliban swept in on motorbikes, taking the city without an enemy shot fired. In the days leading up to the nation’s fall, I had seen soldiers abandon their bases, betrayed by leadership that sold them out and fled across borders. I had watched hungry, young recruits disappear into hiding, surrendering without a fight. There were no planes in the sky, no police patrolling the streets—only an uneasy, inevitable defeat. Finally, the president had abandoned his people, fleeing in a helicopter while the palace doors swung open to the Taliban, unchallenged.

Ukraine was the opposite.

Everyone had prayed the invasion would not happen. I didn’t think it would. Indeed, Russia had too much to lose. But when it did, there was not a moment to spare.

Every single Ukrainian stood up to fight for their country against a far bigger and more superior enemy. Grandmothers made Molotov cocktails. Ballerinas took up arms and signed the dotted line. Men and women of all backgrounds left everything they knew behind without hesitation. The president—whether you liked him or not—refused an American offer to evacuate despite being hunted.

Life transformed in an instant. There was no time to complain.

Kyiv, a city I had come to know as vibrant and full of life, had been consumed by war. Streets were barricaded with sandbags and steel hedgehogs, checkpoints operated by ordinary citizens in hastily donned fatigues. Pharmacies and supermarkets operated on skeleton schedules, their shelves half-empty. Schools were closed again—first, it had been COVID, now, it was missiles. Children played in the snow until air-raid sirens sent their parents scrambling to whisk them underground.

The soldiers I met in Ukraine did not fight for a paycheck. They were not conscripts thrown into battle by corrupt commanders. They were civilians—shopkeepers, artists, IT professionals, film students, chefs—who had chosen to fight because they had no other choice. They didn’t ask for glory. They didn’t ask for money. They didn’t even ask for help. They wanted only their freedom. They wanted the lives they had been living just weeks before, even as they understood that nothing would ever be the same again.

I saw an IT specialist, a person with paraplegia who uses a wheelchair, using a straw-controlled tablet to track Russian cyberattacks. I met a lawyer-turned-medic who had left his career to run a mobile field hospital. I watched elderly women in an apartment courtyard preparing Molotov cocktails, their hands shaking not from fear but from age and the bitter cold. I met a young man who had put his wife and children on a bus to the Polish border, then turned around and picked up a rifle.

This was not a war of resignation. This was a war of defiance.

Unlike in Afghanistan, where soldiers had been left to starve in isolated outposts, where leaders had looted national coffers before vanishing into exile, and where the very idea of a nation had long been eroded by tribalism and corruption, Ukraine stood together. And that unity made all the difference.

Almost everyone I spoke to believed Ukraine would win. Nobody wanted to imagine what would happen if they didn’t.

One soldier told me, “If we lose the war, the war won’t end. We will fight for decades if we have to.”

The war in Afghanistan collapsed with a sigh of exhaustion. In Ukraine, it had become a fire that could not be extinguished.

I have never respected soldiers more than I do the Ukrainian fighters who stood their ground, not for a paycheck, not out of fear, but because it was their home and because they knew that nobody was coming to save them.

They did not wait for hope; they became it. Isn’t that what we want from partner nations—brave men and women who don’t back down?

But war is not only about those who fight—it is also about those who suffer, those who endure pain beyond words, and those who never come home. Tens of thousands have lost their lives, many buried in shallow, unmarked graves or left in the rubble of their own homes. Others have been taken—disappeared into Russian filtration camps, their fates unknown.

The stories that do emerge are harrowing: civilians executed in the streets of Bucha, hands bound behind their backs; prisoners of war tortured, starved, and electrocuted in dark basements; children abducted, stripped of their names and identities, forced into re-education programs meant to erase their Ukrainian roots. The weight of these atrocities is unbearable, yet Ukraine continues to stand, to fight, to exist—not just for those still alive, but for those who no longer can.

That’s not to say Ukraine could have done things differently. We can all look back at every war and say what should have been said earlier on and what preparations could and should have been made. Corruption is a problem in Ukraine, yes. It’s also a far bigger problem in Russia. But we don’t hear much about that.

This war didn’t start in 2022. It began in 2014 with the Maidan Revolution when Ukrainians—fed up with a corrupt, Kremlin-backed government—rose up in protest after then-President Viktor Yanukovych abandoned an agreement with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Moscow. The protests were met with brutal crackdowns, but the people stood firm, demanding a future free from Russian influence. Yanukovych fled to Russia, but Putin did not take the loss lightly. Almost immediately, Russian forces, masked as “little green men,” invaded and illegally annexed Crimea. Soon after, Russia instigated a war in Donbas, backing separatists in a bloody conflict that simmered for eight years before boiling over into a full-scale invasion in 2022.

But in the end, this country continues to sacrifice to avoid being taken over by a far bigger and mightier neighbor. Nobody wants the war to continue. Peace is a beautiful goal, but you can’t make the invader the easy victor and expect that peace will last. You can absolutely choose not to support war, but disrespecting those who fight is hard for me to stand by and say nothing about.

Many of you may disagree. Unlike those in Russia, you have the luxury of disagreeing with me here in the U.S.

But let’s be honest about the facts. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of those in the trenches, not in glossy offices in Washington DC. Let’s not rewrite history.

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