A report from the Associated Press is headed, “Russia rains missiles on recaptured Ukrainian city.” The report begins,

Natalia Kristenko’s dead body lay covered in a blanket in the doorway of her apartment building for hours overnight. City workers were at first too overwhelmed to retrieve her as they responded to a deadly barrage of attacks that shook Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson.

Further on, the report explains,

A barrage of missiles struck the recently liberated city . . . for the second day Friday in a marked escalation of attacks since Russia withdrew from the city two weeks ago following an eight-month occupation.

Russia is a terror-state, plain and simple. The civilized world must resolve to stop it. The Ukrainians are on the front line, bearing the brunt — bleeding and dying. And fighting.

• As another AP report says,

A new onslaught of Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure on Wednesday caused power outages across the country — and in neighboring Moldova — further hobbling Ukraine’s battered electricity network and compounding civilians’ misery as winter advances.

A further sentence, from that report:

Russia has been pounding the power grid and other facilities with missiles and exploding drones for weeks, damaging the energy system faster than it can be repaired.

Iuliia Mendel circulates a photo, saying,

This little girl was brought to a gas station to connect her inhaler to a power grid. Yes, our lives have changed drastically. Russia needs to be held accountable for this.

The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget A. Brink, writes,

As Russia works to turn off the lights, @USAIDUkraine is providing 80 generators to help keep the power on. This support is just one part of the U.S. response to Russia’s cruel, sustained attack on critical infrastructure as we continue to #StandWithUkraine.

I think that Americans should take satisfaction in the help we are rendering the Ukrainians, a people under cruel, murderous siege. We are acting like America, as I see it.

But, of course, a nation’s identity is a daily question, or a daily debate — and Americans disagree on what we should be.

Here is a video of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine, playing a concert in a blackout, and with no heat. That is a noble and stirring spirit. It reminds some of us of Londoners during the Blitz.

This is from the official Twitter account of the Ukrainian government:

Power, water, and heating will be restored. Russian empire will not.

Chutzpah. Sheer chutzpah.

• An AP report from Kyiv is headed, “Bombed, not beaten: Ukraine’s capital flips to survival mode.” The report concludes with these words:

Olena Zhura was carrying bread to her neighbors when a strike that destroyed half of her house wounded her husband, Victor. He writhed in pain as paramedics carried him away.
“I was shocked,” she said, welling with tears. “Then I heard him shouting: ‘Save me, save me.’”

• Above, I said, “. . . a nation’s identity is a daily question, or a daily debate.” In a recent column, George F. Will quotes the French historian Ernest Renan, to the effect that a nation is “a daily plebiscite.”

Will’s column is headed, “Be thankful for the pugnacious Zelensky’s magnificent resistance to suppression.” Will says,

Ukrainians cast their votes daily by putting their lives in mortal peril. It does not diminish their individual heroism to note that they are well led.

Yes.

• Our secretary of state, Antony Blinken, writes,

90 years ago, millions of Ukrainians starved to death in the Holodomor famine deliberately caused by Soviet policies. The Kremlin now wages a brutal war to subjugate Ukraine’s people, but will not prevail. We will stand with Ukraine. Slava Ukraini!

I’m glad for American leadership of this kind. I think it’s as it ought to be.

• From Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, here is a video of Ukraine’s president and first lady laying wreaths at the memorial to the Holodomor, or Terror-Famine, in central Kyiv.

(On a personal note, I first learned of the Terror-Famine from Robert Conquest, in the mid-1980s. I wrote about this last March, here.)

• Hanna Liubakova, the Belarusian journalist (in exile, obviously), circulates a video, showing “the evacuation of an elderly woman from a Donbas village,” as Hanna says. “The car got into an accident” and the woman and her helpers “had to run to another car under the shelling.”

This is a glimpse of life in Ukraine — of coping in Ukraine.

• A report by Hannah Beech in the New York Times is headed, “Ukrainian Flags Are on Display All Over Maine. Why?” This is a heartwarming report (for some of us). Reaffirming, in fact. We have our share of Putin sympathizers, and then there is the phenomenon of the anti-anti-Putinist. But there are other Americans, and their solidarity with a people under attack — an attack meant to destroy that people and its nation — is gratifying.