I Worry We’ll Soon Forget About Ukraine
“Don’t forget about Ukraine,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said last Sunday at the end of an interview with CBS. “We have the same values, we have the same color of blood, and we are fighting for freedom and we will win.”
Less than two months ago, democracy in America and elsewhere seemed to be drifting toward its own expiration. Then the Russian invasion and unbending Ukrainian resistance delivered a shock to the democratic world that restored its heartbeat. Writers and politicians celebrated a sudden revival of liberal values, as if the global rise of autocracy might be stopped in the suburbs of Kyiv and on the Black Sea coast. Ordinary Americans, Europeans, and citizens of other democracies—often out ahead of their governments—rallied to Ukraine’s cause, sending money, taking in refugees, renting empty Ukrainian houses to support their displaced owners, filling the websites of restaurants in Russia with reviews that told the grim facts of the war. Thousands of people answered Zelensky’s call to volunteer for a Ukrainian foreign legion, like the International Brigades that defended the Spanish Republic against fascism in the 1930s.
In this country, Ukraine has done what nothing else—no election or insurrection, no pandemic, no environmental catastrophe—could do: shown the difference between right and wrong, heroism and barbarism, truth and lies, with such clarity that most Americans are in agreement.
When Zelensky , Kevin McCarthy and Maxine Waters, who detest each other, sat side by side in the Capitol auditorium
