After three years of war, evil is growing stronger and bolder by the day

I bet you woke up the morning after Trump betrayed Ukraine, read the newspaper and thought in disbelief: is this really happening, has the world really descended into complete chaos and madness? You would like to wake up from this nightmare as soon as possible, but it is increasingly becoming the new normal and part of your daily life.

This is exactly how Ukrainians felt three years ago (with all the horrors of war on top of that), when Russia launched its criminal large-scale invasion and started bombing our peaceful cities. We wanted to scream then: this can't be happening, where is the world going?

After three years of war, we Ukrainians have gone through several stages in our relationship to reality. First, there was a categorical rejection, a refusal to accept what was happening, because we believed that a large-scale war was not only a crime, but complete nonsense that had no place in the 21st century. We had the impression that it would be enough to take millions of photos of the war, post countless stories and reels on our social media, and translate our texts into every possible language to wake up the world and make it see the truth. A few weeks later, this horror would be over.

Feeling of euphoria

Then came deep indignation and righteous anger, which resulted in several brilliant military operations by the Ukrainian armed forces, which, through superhuman efforts, pushed the occupier back meter by meter from our territory. At that time, at the end of 2022, the solidarity within our country and the solidarity of the West created a sense of euphoria. It seemed as if people of good will who stood up for moral and just principles could together overcome anything.

By 2023, war had become a familiar everyday occurrence for us, a normal part of everyday life. Anger had evolved into helpless hatred, and fear no longer oppressed us as it once did, because we had grown accustomed to it. When the Kremlin tried to frighten us with nuclear weapons, we responded with laughter, for what else can a person offer in the face of the most destructive bomb?

If we had to die, we would do so with dignity, a broad smile and our heads held high with pride.

Ukrainians immediately came up with a meme about Shchekavytsa, a historic hill in the center of Kyiv. The joke was that if a nuclear attack were to start and reduce us all to ashes in a millisecond, we would all gather on Shchekavytsa first for a festive and passionate orgy in ancient Greek style. The tyrant would not defeat us, and if we had to die, we would do so with dignity, smiling broadly and holding our heads high. In no time, T-shirts with the slogan “First to Shchekavytsa” became real bestsellers in Ukraine.

When the war entered its third year, however, we had no strength left for anger or for jokes. It turned out that both fear and hate are particularly energy-consuming emotions – you can’t keep them up for long. A feeling of exhaustion and numbness began to set in, a kind of acceptance of reality as a fate from which you can’t escape. So we focused our remaining strength on the daily struggle to survive – often without electricity and heating in our homes, but above all without hope that it will ever end.

What can I tell you today, as we enter the fourth year since the bloody invasion and the attack on the established world order? We have gone from dreaming of victory over the aggressor to humiliating hopes for an unjust peace.

In practice, this means that the maximalist demand for a return to our 1991 borders (including Crimea) is no longer popular in Ukrainian society. No one speaks with full conviction about the occupied territories anymore – the only thing that matters is that the war stops and our people stop dying at the front and in the rear.

The word 'victory' itself has become a faux pas. In the past, every birthday party was concluded with wishes for a speedy victory, every good deed was described on Facebook as 'a contribution to our common victory'. Now it has become embarrassing to talk about it. Our military heroes in the trenches might get away with such a high-flown style, but in the hinterland such pathos sounds cheap and mean.

Justice

There is now talk of a potential peace treaty, which will be more or less beneficial for Ukraine, but it is already clear that it will be humiliating in any case. Such a peace treaty will at least temporarily stop the bloodshed, but it will not bring back the most important thing. And I am not talking about the occupied territories, but about justice.

What kind of world will we wake up to after this peace treaty? Not just a world where a stronger country has taken 20 percent of the territory of a weaker country. We will have to move on to a world where a criminal gives the green light to execute prisoners of war while they are standing on their knees, unarmed, and later broadcasts the images of the execution through his media. A world where people are beheaded or their brains bashed in with a sledgehammer, where children's oncology hospitals are bombed, where power stations are destroyed in the middle of winter so that millions of ordinary citizens have to brave the cold, where during a crucial security conference a drone with explosives is deliberately sent to the sarcophagus above an old nuclear power plant. And no one is held responsible for it.

There it is – the disgust you feel after reading these words is completely justified, and Ukrainians have been familiar with it for some time. From now on, this feeling will gradually become part of your daily life. Because even if it is about peace, a humiliating peace truce will fail to produce a crucial result – the condemnation of the atrocities and the prosecution of the perpetrators.

Please forgive me in advance, but you may not like to hear my message from Ukraine after three years of war

Instead of ending up in prison or in solitary confinement, the aggressor simply takes part in major international events and imposes his terms. The murderer, whose crimes have been captured on film countless times in the most documented war in human history, is not punished but laughs in our faces. How can this be accepted?

That is what we felt exactly three years ago, in February 2022. We wanted to grab everyone by the shoulders to wake them up. The West sympathized with us and helped us, but it refused to recognize that this war was also being waged against them. Today, this shocking insight is finally sinking in among Europeans, because everyone has now understood that the US will not fight for Europe in the event of war and that NATO is of little value.

Unfortunately, Europe was not awakened by Putin's crimes or by reminders from Ukraine, but by Trump. The geopolitical upheaval, or rather the betrayal of the US, confronts Europe with a frightening fact, which was actually already evident three years ago.

Aggression with impunity

The cause of the global chaos, in which Trump, for example, starts talking about the occupation of Greenland or the Panama Canal and strikingly demonstrates that Europe is no longer under the American defense umbrella, is very simple.

It lies in unpunished evil, in Putin's impunity for aggression against Ukraine, because it has definitively disrupted the established world order and thrown all the rules overboard. It is this successful cynical attack on the world order that has led, for example, to the situation in which the International Criminal Court, which had issued an arrest warrant for Putin, is being sanctioned by the (now clearly former) leader of the democratic world. We now live in a world of ridicule, belittlement and the arrogant trampling of all political and especially moral and ethical values ​​that form the essence of Europe.

Evil has been unleashed and is growing stronger, bolder and more aggressive by the day. Is there any doubt that if it is allowed to run free, it will eventually attack again after a peace treaty – and this time probably not only in Ukraine?

So please forgive me in advance, but you may not like to hear my message from Ukraine after three years of war. We, Ukrainians, are happy that you are finally being overtaken by the realization that this war is directed against all of us, including you, while the aggressor does not even bother to hide his bloody grin. Yes, we are pleased that finally, after almost 1,100 (!) days of war, from Ukraine to Amsterdam, an awareness has arisen that we are all together on this Titanic, and that it will never reach America – because that is far away, while our misfortune is here.

We, Ukrainians, continue to persevere after all this time and do everything in our power to escape from this doomed ship alive. Now we are curious to know what choice you will make: to search for a lifeboat together or to sink without a will to the tune of the 'Ode to Joy'.