Ukraine's finest hour should keep America steadfast

Inna Osipova pointed to the 30-foot pile of rubble that is all that's left of her apartment building. She and her 5-year-old son narrowly escaped when Russian shelling destroyed the structure, but her grandmother died and is interred somewhere in the wreckage. Osipova hopes her body will be found so she can be given a proper burial.

Her voice cracked with emotion, but she held together until I asked what she thought of Americans who say it's time to move on from supporting Ukraine.

"We're people, you understand," she said, and began weeping. "It doesn't matter if we're Ukrainian or American — such things should not happen."

These areas in northeastern Ukraine, recently liberated after months of Russian occupation, show what's at stake as some Americans and Europeans seek to trim assistance for Ukraine. There are bombed-out buildings, survivors cooking over open fires, children maimed by land mines, freshly vacated Russian torture chambers and mass graves.

"The Russians would often just throw dirt on bodies where they killed them. Every day we find someone," said Tamara Kravchenko, who runs the only funeral home still operating in Izium.

While President Vladimir Putin of Russia seems unable to break the spirit of Ukrainians, he is already shattering the will of some Americans and Europeans.

"Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine," says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the firebrand Republican. The Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, says that it's time to end the "blank check" for Ukraine. A Wall Street Journal poll published this month found that 48% of Republicans believe the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine. On the American left and in Germany and France, there are also signs of impatience.

He's right. Buck up, America and Europe! And take some inspiration from Ukrainians themselves. I see people here suffering enormous hardship — yet ever more determined to fight back.

Anastasia Blyshchyk, 26, was a television journalist whose boyfriend, Oleksandr Makhov, enlisted as a soldier immediately after Putin invaded. After reaching the front, Makhov proposed to her by video call, jokingly proffering a ring from a grenade.

Makhov was killed in May — and Blyshchyk signed up to be a soldier herself. I met her on an icy afternoon near her base. Wearing body armor and walking carefully to avoid land mines, she advised, "Follow in my footsteps."

"Today is exactly six months since Oleksandr was killed," she said, quivering but not teary. "I've promised myself I won't cry."

I asked her why she enlisted to fight the Russians.

There are long waiting lists for volunteers eager to serve in the Ukrainian military. People pull strings to get called up sooner — a contrast to the hundreds of thousands of Russian men fleeing their country to avoid the draft.

Stymied on the battlefield, Russia is trying an alternative strategy: firing missiles to terrorize civilians and destroy the power grid and water supply. This targeting of civilians, a war crime, aims to inflict such brutal suffering on ordinary Ukrainians that they will want to cut a deal with Putin.

It isn't working. Ukrainians aren't wavering the way some Americans, French and Germans are.

What animates Ukrainians, and should animate Americans and West Europeans, is the brutality with which Russia wages war. There are lots of complicated issues in international relations, but this is stark: Russia has tried to annex part of a sovereign country and persistently commits crimes against humanity.

This is not to say that all Russian soldiers have been monsters. Ordinary Ukrainians who lived for months under Russian occupation told me that some Russian soldiers were well behaved and thought they were rescuing Ukrainians from fascists. There was looting and torture, villagers said, but this was not universal and varied by military unit.

U.S. military planners have long worried about a Russian attack on Baltic countries in NATO. But at enormous cost in lives, Ukraine has so degraded Russia's armed forces that the risk of that today is far lower.

Ukraine's resistance may also increase the possibility that Putin himself will be toppled. That might lead to the rise of aggressive militarists who would be more likely to use nuclear weapons, but it could also moderate Russia and lead to a safer world.

The most important way in which Ukraine is arguably making the world safer is farther to the east. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, China could take that as a warning and be less likely to move on Taiwan, reducing the risk of a cataclysmic war between the United States and China.

None of this is to say that the United States or Europe should entirely defer to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has been masterly since the invasion, but his bungling of the run-up to it shows that he has no great insight into Putin, and a prolonged war will claim lives of children starving in Somalia and elsewhere because of higher food prices. It may be that at some point outsiders should encourage Zelenskyy to make concessions (as he offered early in the conflict).

But the bottom line is that we are all in debt to Ukrainians. Their courage and determination, reminds me of English pluck during the Battle of Britain. (Ukrainians have the same thought: Gas stations sell biographies of Winston Churchill.)

I'll give the last word to Alla Kuznietsova, 52, a chatty woman who is a senior manager in the Izium gas bureau. She said she had secretly communicated Russian positions to the Ukrainian side during the occupation, at enormous risk, although the Russians didn't learn of that. "They would have killed me at once if they had known," she said.

In July, Russian troops arrested her and her husband for other reasons, including her tendency to speak openly around town about the prospect of liberation from Russian occupation. She said that for 10 days, she and her husband were held in separate cells on a Russian military base and subjected to electric shocks and repeated beatings with cables.

Kuznietsova said she was also repeatedly stripped naked and raped by interrogators and sexually humiliated in an attempt to break her spirit. That almost worked: At one despairing moment, she said, she tried to hang herself by her bra but failed.

In the end, the Russians caved first. They found that they needed her to run the town's gas supply and told her that they would release her. "I said, 'I will not leave without my husband,'" she recalled, so they freed her husband as well.

Instead of helping the Russians with the gas supply, Kuznietsova made a daring escape with her husband in the only direction possible: to Russia. She talked her way through checkpoints and then crossed into Estonia and finally traveled through Poland to Ukraine. She just returned to newly liberated Izium after a month of outpatient treatment in a Ukrainian hospital for her torture injuries.

Kuznietsova seemed to struggle to come to grips with Americans' fatigue with even a distant conflict.