Even a week before the invasion, with U.S. officials warning that Kyiv might fall in as little as 72 hours, the defense of Ukraine was not actually a lost cause. It was a defining one.
The country’s T-shirted President would articulate the choice at hand on March 1, six days after more than 100,000 Russian troops crossed the border. The translator choked up during Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the European Parliament, from somewhere in the besieged capital city.
“Life will win over death,” Zelensky said, “and light will win over darkness.”
As he spoke, the world was already sorting itself out, the response to the war coming as quickly as the invaders—quicker, when Russian tanks ran out of gas on the road to Kyiv. The European Union, created to keep the peace within a continent riven for centuries by war, voted to punish the Kremlin in the ways that a bloc of 27 governments can: closing its airspace, sanctioning Vladimir Putin’s cronies, banning imports of at least some Russian petroleum. NATO, formed to defend the same continent against Moscow’s Cold War aggression, found not only new life but also new members, Finland and Sweden signing up.
Whole countries turned on a dime. Germany reversed seven decades of self-enforced pacifism, pledging
