Ukraine is alive. Ukraine lives. Ukraine fights. Ukraine advances, Ukraine overcomes the path. Ukraine gains. Ukraine works. Ukraine exists.
In his new year’s speech this week, Volodymyr Zelensky was characteristically bullish about his country’s prospects as the war heads towards its second anniversary next month and as the Ukrainian people descend into what many of us in the northern hemisphere – even without a war to contend with – think of as the bleakest months of winter.
Following some of the worst airstrikes of the war so far in recent weeks, Zelensky reminded his listeners that they had seen this all before last year – and faced it down. The cold, the dark, shortages of power and food. Uncertainty. He said: “Ukrainians will cope with any energy shortage as they have no shortage of resilience and courage. We did not fade away in the darkness. The darkness did not engulf us. We defeated the darkness.”
He took time to thank the Ukrainian people, talking up the country’s unity in the face of existential threat. But there was also a flavour of Shakespeare’s Henry V Agincourt speech with a superficially coded message to the estimated 600,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age “now a-bed” – living in other European countries – rather returning home to fight alongside their heroic compatriots: “I know that one day I will have to ask myself: who am I? To make a choice about who I want to be. A victim or a winner? A refugee or a citizen?”
The cold hard fact is that 2023 ended badly on the battlefield for Ukraine. The anticipated advances from spring and summer counteroffensives failed to materialise........