Why Ukrainians Fight
A Small, Stubborn Town by Andrew Harding
One of the many conversations I have with people on the subject of Ukraine is over the question of why ordinary Ukrainians fought so ferociously last year against the apparently overwhelming might of the Russian bulldozer, especially in the first few days and weeks of the invasion. Why the village by village resistance we saw in 2022? Much of the answer lies in the visceral response by large numbers of ordinary people to the attack on their homeland by Putin and his gang. Its fair to say that the scale of this resistance was unexpected. Resistance was not only unexpected by the West, which assumed that Ukraine would crumble and that Zelensky, the comedian-turned President, would flee. Biden even offered him from transport out of Kyiv. It was certainly not expected by Putin or his military planners in Moscow who, drunk on the Kool-Aid of their own hubris, believed that Ukrainian peasants would stand on the roadsides throwing garlands at the Russian tanks surging across the grain-washed steppes to rid the country of its supposed ‘Nazis’.
The fight at Voznesensk (it is pronounced phonetically, as its written: ‘Voz-ne-sensk’), fifty-miles north-west of Mykolaiv, in early March 2022, brilliantly described by Andrew Harding in A Small Stubborn Town, encapsulated in one small place what was happening all over eastern Ukraine last year. Remarkably, when the Russian armoured columns arrived on the outskirts of the town, many - perhaps the majority - of its inhabitants decided to fight, despite the crazy odds against them. They did not do so because they were fanatical supporters of Zelensky or because the Government successfully appealed to their national loyalty. Far from it. In the early days nothing was heard from Kyiv, although a battalion of troops was rushed forward to protect a critical bridge over the Buh river, which flows south of the town. Instead, large numbers of ordinary people chose, unprompted, to fight back against the military aggrandisement of their Russian neighbour. In so doing they helped form a new sense of what it meant to be a free Ukrainian. The majority of the people in Voznesensk and many others like it, decided without much cogitation, that they wanted to resist the invader. This is remarkable when many of the inhabitants of Voznesensk, like Svetlana, were in fact first-generation Russians, with parents and siblings living across the border in Russia. In a profound way, when the experience of hundreds of similar villages are knitted together during 2022 and 2023, the birth of a new Ukrainian identity, rising from the chaos of the pre-war political environment, can be clearly observed. The irony is that it was Russia, via Putin’s ill-judged ‘Special Military Operation’, that was the cause of it. It seems that Putin’s aggression has served in fact to create the very thing he was trying to destroy.
Remarkable too, was the ill-judged use by the Russian Army of military units from the Crimea, populated in large part by men who were, before the 2014 annexation, Ukrainians. Men like Igor, an officer in Russia’s 126th Coastal Defence Brigade, found himself being told to fight fellow-Ukrainians. Its hardly surprising that his heart wasn’t in it. Indeed, it is hard to think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was anything other than one of the most ill-considered - stupid even - invasions in modern history.
The military incompetence of the initial Russian drive into Crimea - a road-bound rather than a tactical advance, without covering artillery or air power - can be explained by the hubris I mentioned earlier. Russia didn’t expect resistance. That this resistance came from peasants armed with Molotov cocktails and NLAWs was a shock to those observing from Moscow, London and New York. It wasn’t a shock from the people of Voznesensk. The people of this otherwise unremarkable little town, along with many hundreds of others in the spring of 2022, decided en masse that they weren’t interested in being liberated by Russia. So they fought, and by so doing they halted Moscow’s invasion. It remains to be seen whether the people of Ukraine will ultimately defeat the invader and remove him entirely from Ukrainian (and Crimean) soil, but what the world saw in Voznesensk and many other similar places in 2022 was a spontaneous, visceral expression of free people to a violent and unprovoked assault on their sovereignty.
At 139-pages this remarkable little book can be devoured in a couple of hours. Please read it. It will tell you much about the why Ukrainians fought, and the sense of unity Putin’s ill-judged invasion has created in Ukraine, encouraging its unexpected transformation into a new and self-aware nationhood.