MANAGER
The Ukrainians are also fighting our battle, and they are our heroes.
WAR, BLUE AND YELLOW: Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv. Over the devastation of the war the flag waves in blue and yellow. Photo: REUTERS / NTB
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Manager: This is an editorial from Dagbladet, and expresses the newspaper’s views. Dagbladet’s political editor is responsible for the editorial.
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The world is dressed in blue and yellow. The Ukrainian flag lights up everything from the Brandenburg Gate, and signal buildings all over the world, to Holmenkollbakken, where Russian athletes were originally to participate in this weekend’s annual party in the winter sports hall. The flag – and the national anthem – is what the Ukrainians are now counting on. The flag that symbolizes the blue sky over the lush Ukrainian lands. And the national anthem, which begins with the minor-voiced phrase: “Shche ne vmerla Ukraine” – Ukraine has not yet perished.
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And more than that sometimes this phrase is valid – the prayer if you will – that Ukraine will not perish. That means everything for the 44 million Ukrainians, who in this situation are forced to be heroes. But it also means a lot to us, to us in the West. For the war the Ukrainians are now fighting, they are also fighting for our values. These are big words, but in this situation they are valid, because it is about tyranny and freedom, against democracy and freedom.
It’s a heavy fate of the Ukrainians, for it is the battle of Putinism that is now being fought in Ukraine. If Russia gets stuck in its war adventure, then the Russian president’s expanding ambitions are apparently dead. If the Russians have such a large military and political cost of taking the capital Kyiv, or other Ukrainian cities that are now also being surrounded, that they can never control the country, then the Putinist expansionist policy has stalled. Putin’s dream of uniting all Russian-speakers in one country, the dream of restoring a kind of Soviet Union, without communism, but with tyranny, it comes true, or is put to death, in Ukraine. Now.
Get them where they are
It is, of course a both screaming and heartbreaking paradox that this battle the Ukrainians must fight alone. They have our full political support, and weapons support, now also from Norway. But in this fight, the Ukrainians are doomed to stand alone. The alternative is for the West to engage in a war with Russia’s nuclear superpower, in which President Putin is in fact threatening to use nuclear weapons. One may like it, or not, but a military confrontation between Russia and NATO is too dangerous, not least for the Ukrainians, who in such an unthinkable scenario are probably the ones who first get a nuclear missile in their head.
Fate has never host gracious with the Ukrainians. After all, their fate is to live in Ukraine, which means border country, the most vulnerable piece of land one can live in. The fate is not always fair, but the Ukrainians should know that in this situation they are also our heroes.
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