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Many people idealize Ukrainians. Some imagine us as berserkers charging toward Valhalla; others think we love freedom so fiercely that we are ready to die for it. But the truth is simpler — and more human, writes Chief Executive Officer at Protemos Volodymyr Kukharenko.
We want to survive, both as individuals and as a nation. We want our children not to face another war in 10–20 years. And we understand that fighting gives us a chance to live, while surrender means death.
Not just the death of a nation. Your own death as well. Maybe not on the battlefield, not from a drone or a rocket, but quietly. They will come to your home at night, take you away, and you will vanish. No headlines. No outrage. Everything on the surface will look peaceful — just fewer people around.
It happened to my great-grandfather and his three brothers. They were taken in the night and disappeared. No information, no grave, nothing. Only decades later did I find in an online archive that they were executed in 1938 in Zhytomyr. My mother never even knew when or how her grandfather died.
If russia occupies more land, this can happen again — to anyone. If it happens to me, you won’t know either. Trump will claim he “made peace” and that no one is dying on the battlefield. But the killing will continue in the occupied territories, hidden from view. And it will happen everywhere russia is allowed to advance. What do you think will happen to the 400,000 people living in the region putin wants as part of the “peace deal” that Witkoff is pushing?
And we remember 1933. The Soviet regime confiscated food from Ukrainians, and millions starved. My great-grandmother survived the Holodomor at age 13. Sixty years later she still panicked when the potato harvest was slightly worse than usual. Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist, reported the truth — but the US bought cheap grain because it was a “good deal,” and other journalists mocked him. Think about this: up to 10 million people died in a man-made famine, and the world shrugged. It was genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, yet few know about it.
If Ukrainians in occupied territories start disappearing again, will anyone care?
Even I — with all my posts — could end up on their kill lists.
The moscow regime is already repeating the same atrocities. Look at the mass graves in the cities liberated in 2022. Listen to the witnesses.
So understand this: for Ukrainians, “peace” can be far scarier than war if it simply means giving russia what it wants. That is why we keep fighting.
And one more thing — idealizing Ukrainians creates the illusion that every Ukrainian must be perfect. But we are real people, not movie characters. We have traitors who work for moscow. We have thieves who steal even during war. We have those who flee because not everyone is ready to risk their life. War exposes the true nature of people: some become heroes, others lose any honor they had.
But the fact remains: Ukraine has been resisting for four years against an army feared by most “civilized” countries. That alone speaks for itself.
