Volodymyr zelensky

Kharkiv, Ukraine President Joe Biden on Monday showed the world that, as Volodymyr Zelensky said in his London speech two weeks ago, we do not need to be afraid of Moscow. Or maybe we don't need to be afraid so long as Biden is on Ukrainian soil. As I write this, Biden's train has likely crossed into Polish territory, and, on cue, the air-raid alarms are wailing across all of eastern Ukraine. No one I know in Ukraine, where I’ve been since the pandemic and throughout every minute of this war, thinks that Biden's visit accomplished something magical. But it did serve a crucial purpose: boosting the spirits here, amid a week full of warnings that Moscow will do something awful.

President Joe Biden’s administration has announced that he will be crossing the pond to Poland on February 20 through 22, just days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s Ukraine invasion. Cockburn finds the dates curious — and wonders if the president will make a surprise visit to the epicenter of the conflict on the anniversary itself. The scheduled trip looks like it will already be a busy one, meeting with American allies in the region and reasserting Washington’s “unwavering support for the security of the Alliance.” The real kicker will be if Biden makes his way to Kyiv and meets Zelensky, ending the unfortunate distinction of him being one of the few Western leaders yet to travel to Ukraine.

As the battlefront news for Ukraine turns grim, with even the New York Times conceding that “Ukrainians in [the] East” are “outnumbered and worn out,” the hope, as usual, is that a magic weapon will save the day. We have seen many such invocations in the last twelve months: Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, M777 Howitzers, HIMARS long-range precision missile launchers, assorted Western tanks. All have been hailed in their time as potentially tipping the balance against Putin’s hordes. None have succeeded, or, in the case of as yet undelivered tanks, are likely to succeed, in altering the fundamental military balance in the war, though they contribute much to the balance sheets of the relevant Western arms corporations.

Kharkiv, Ukraine Wednesday, the morning after Russia sent six long-range missiles into the center of Ukraine’s second city, I went for a run in snow-covered Gorky Park listening to the music of the German band Scorpions: “Down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change.” Scorpions were singing about a park of the same name in Moscow but I wanted to hear that song here in Kharkiv. When that song was released in 1990, the Soviet Union was breaking up. There was so much hope. Ukraine and other nations that had lived under the Iron Curtain began the process of finding freedom, happiness, possibility. But Russia? Ah, I thought as I ran past the fresh crater of a Russian missile in Kharkiv’s Gorky Park, what happened to Russia? What happened to that “wind of change"?

When Volodymyr Zelensky entered the chamber to address Congress, the applause and cheers took on a particularly emotional character. It was not the stilted, forced applause that the president receives at the State of the Union; it was an affectionate show of admiration for a man who has come to embody the twenty-first century struggle for freedom. Though delivered to Congress, the opening words of the Ukrainian president’s speech revealed his true audience: “Dear Americans... all those who value freedom and justice.” It was a speech for all of us. He pulled the dusty tarp off of America’s deepest identity as the shining light of liberty in a world of tyranny.

With his whirlwind visit to Washington, Volodymyr Zelensky cemented his bromance with Joe Biden. Even as MAGA Republicans have been sniping at Ukraine — Donald Trump, Jr. derided Zelensky on Wednesday as an “ungrateful welfare queen” — Biden declared that he will support Ukraine “as long as it takes.” Welcoming his Ukrainian counterpart to the White House, he went out of his way to depict support for Ukraine as bipartisan and unflinching. Like Herman Melville in his novel White-Jacket, Biden believes that “we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.” The Russian invasion and Ukrainian defiance are the making of Joe Biden’s presidency. Biden may well go down in history as the man who finally drove the stake through the heart of the Russian empire.

Lviv, Ukraine I write by candlelight from a centuries-old coffeehouse on a snowy day, even though the electricity is working. Lviv is a history-loving city that likes to live by candlelight, so they are not panicking about sporadic power losses. But today, when my apartment here had no heat, it was clearer than ever to me: Russia is seeking to break the Ukrainian people this winter. Why? Because the Kremlin knows that in Ukraine: the people and not the government are in charge. I wish those people in the West, especially in America, who talk about freedom realized the radical nature of Ukrainian democracy. Influential Americans in media and politics often talk about how “the Kyiv regime” needs to negotiate in order to bring about peace.

It was 11:15 p.m. in Kyiv, just after the curfew, and the military had set up its checkpoints on the city streets. Finding your way home after hours can be a hazardous business. The city is paranoid about assassins and saboteurs, and in wartime few are above suspicion. Things were looking ominous until my friend Sasha declared: “we are late for breakfast.” The guards waved us through. This was the daily password, shared with those important enough to move around after curfew. Checkpoints and curfews were a few reminders of the war in Kyiv, where I was just before last week’s deadly air strikes. In the capital city, life was approaching some form of normalcy.

The Russian army has been the source of an endless list of shortcomings and embarrassments over the last eight months. There are simply too many of them to count, from the failure to move through Kyiv’s suburbs in March to the sinking of the flagship Moskva in April to the loss in September of more than 3,000 square kilometers of territory in just days. But by far the most humiliating to Vladimir Putin personally was last weekend’s attack on the twelve-mile bridge that connects mainland Russia with Crimea, the peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014. That bridge, which cost more than $7 billion to build, was one of Putin’s pet projects, a visible signal to the world about Moscow’s staying power in the region.