Joe Lindsley

Kyiv Last week, Texas congressman Pat Fallon asked why Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the US Secret Service, appeared in a 9/11 memorial photo op rather than focusing on his duty to protect Presidents Biden and Trump — just two months after an assassination attempt left Trump grazed by a bullet. Instead of addressing the concern, Rowe, an unelected bureaucrat, lashed out: “Do not invoke 9/11 for political purposes!” Citing his presence at Ground Zero on 9/11, Rowe seemed insulted by the congressman’s challenge to his judgment. But Rowe’s job wasn’t to be part of the story — it was to protect those who actually are the key players, current and former presidents.

Lviv, Ukraine Deep in a forested park, hundreds of people — men, women, children — in traditional embroidered clothes danced, clapped, and sang in a wild circle around fiddle-playing musicians. It was war, but it was also Easter, celebrated then according to the old calendar by the Greek Catholics of Lviv.  In that forest grove on a chilly afternoon, I stood next to Linda Netsch, a professor at Harvard Law, who had just arrived by train to give wartime guest lectures at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University.  “Now I know why Russia cannot defeat Ukraine,” she told me as she pointed at the crowd of people dancing on the chilly grey afternoon while a friend poured me a whiskey. “It’s this. This is real power.

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.

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"?

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.