Digging In

His name was Oleksandr Matsievskyi: the Ukrainian soldier in the video. He had been captured by the Russians. He was smoking a cigarette in a shallow trench. He said, “Glory to Ukraine.” And then they executed him.

Matsievskyi has become a symbol of defiance in Ukraine. On the evening of March 12, President Zelensky honored him posthumously with the Hero of Ukraine award.

To read about this, go here (Kyiv Independent) or here (the Guardian). I admire the Ukrainians and their effort to repel this invader and keep their country. They deserve the support of Americans and all other freedom-loving people.

• The U.S. government has honored Yuliia Paievska, known popularly as “Taira.” The State Department has given her an International Women of Courage award. I have interviewed several recipients of this award. They are hard to forget.

Here is the citation, concerning Taira:

Yuliia “Taira” Paievska has demonstrated extraordinary moral and physical courage in defending Ukraine against relentless Russian aggression. She provided medical treatment to Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity protestors in 2013, and as head of Taira’s Angels, a volunteer unit of paramedics, she provided tactical medical training on the Donbas front lines from 2014 to 2018. Mrs. Paievska is best known for her work secretly filming and smuggling out videos documenting atrocities committed by Russia’s forces in Mariupol. Russia’s forces detained Mrs. Paievska on March 16 as she attempted to evacuate women and children from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhya, despite her clear non-combatant status. During a three-month imprisonment, Mrs. Paievska lived in a tiny cell with 22 other women, losing 20 pounds and enduring torture and beatings. Moreover, the Kremlin’s propagandists falsely maligned her internationally as a fascist and war criminal. Yet Mrs. Paievska refused to be silenced, and since her release has compellingly advocated for Ukrainian democracy and independence both at home and abroad.

What a woman. She will inspire people disposed to be inspired. To see the relevant State Department page, go here.

• The prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, has traveled to Ukraine, to meet her counterpart, Zelensky. The Finns can’t afford illusions. No neighbor of Russia can. The alliance between Finland and Ukraine is important. So is the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO. Can Orbán and Erdoğan block it forever? I hope not.

• Estonia is another neighbor of Russia — another country that can’t afford illusions. A country that knows, all too well, what Russian occupation is.

Last week, the party of Prime Minister Kaja Kallas won a big victory at the polls. That party is a center-right party, Reform, an unequivocal backer of Ukraine. Reform faced a challenge from a right-wing populist party, but the voters preferred Kallas and Reform by a 15-point margin.

She is impressive, Kallas. Many think of her as a Baltic Thatcher.

(For a report on the election from the Associated Press, go here.)

• On December 26 last year, I wrote this:

The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, invited the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to speak to Congress. The timing was important. Republicans will assume control of the House in about ten days.

Would a Republican speaker — presumably Kevin McCarthy — invite Zelensky to address Congress? Would he travel to Kyiv, in a show of support, as Pelosi did? Or would he fear to displease his “base”?

For some of us, these are painful questions to ask.

(For the post I have excerpted from, go here.)

Last week, Zelensky invited Speaker McCarthy to visit Ukraine. The speaker declined, telling CNN the following:

“Let’s be very clear about what I said: no blank checks, okay? So, from that perspective, I don’t have to go to Ukraine to understand where there’s a blank check or not. I will continue to get my briefings and others, but I don’t have to go to Ukraine or Kyiv to see it. And my point has always been, I won’t provide a blank check for anything.”

Well and good. But would it kill Kevin McCarthy to express sympathy for the Ukrainians, who are fighting and dying to hang on to their country? Who are on the frontlines of a wider conflict between freedom and tyranny, between the rule of law and rapacious dictatorship? Or would any expression of sympathy hurt him with his “base”?

I will say it again: painful questions to ask, for some of us.

• Among Republicans, there is a new talking point, as I discussed in a post last month: President Biden doesn’t care about America’s border. He cares about Ukraine’s border. You hear this from Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, and a great many others. Their implication is that the Ukraine war is some border dispute. In reality, Russia has invaded Ukraine for the purpose of stamping out Ukrainian nationhood and wrenching the country back into an empire, ruled from the Kremlin. As in the past, an expansionist dictator is redrawing European borders by force — and he would not stop at Ukraine.

He will not stop at all. He can only be stopped.

A column by Nick Cohen informed me that Nigel Farage is peddling the same line in Britain: their border versus our border. This is no surprise.

Farage, writes Cohen,

gave a masterclass in the demagogic art of mobilising resentment on GB News, the British equivalent of Fox.

Look at the pain England is suffering, he began. The cost-of-living crisis was threatening mass bankruptcies by Christmas. “Don’t worry,” Farage said with a sarcastic smirk, “the country is in good hands, absolutely.” The screen cut to a picture of the deputy prime minister with his children at a playground — a technique lifted straight from Have I Got News for You. The invasion that mattered wasn’t Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Farage continued, but the “invasion coming across the English Channel. And yet the prime minister, where was he? He was in Ukraine.”

The deputy prime minister, the actual prime minister and, by implication, the whole out-of-touch elite cared for more for Ukrainians than it cared for us.

Yes. That’s how the game is played — played by Farage and other such populists. They are clever, many of them. (Farage certainly is.) And their opponents — Ukraine-supporting and Putin-opposing — had better be as sharp and determined as possible.