Good evening, we’re from Ukraine — now it’s the new "good morning, Vietnam". The Russians once again tried to intimidate the Ukrainians by launching missile strikes on the energy infrastructure and other civilian objects in our cities.
At the same time, they tried to show their people that they were striking "decision-making centers". These fabled decision-making centers are an invariable line in their playbooks, however, their target audience is mostly inside Russia. But whatever their purpose, they have failed it anyway.
To justify their botched strikes, Russian channels wrote that the pedestrian bridge in Kyiv was somehow critically important for the movement (meanwhile, the glass bridge still holds); that the building in the center of Kyiv, where the Ukrainian parliament sat 100 years ago, was the Verkhovna Rada; that all Ukrainians were without electricity and heating, and the like.
They rejoiced at an allegedly equitable (and factually off-target) retaliation for the Crimean bridge.
Meanwhile, the same Russians who cheered at missile attacks on Ukrainian cities in the morning couldn't help their astonishment as they learned that the Ukrainians while sitting in bomb shelters or subways without electricity and with poor Internet, donated almost $5 million (at the time of the publication) to Prytula and Sternenko’s fundraising initiative to purchase RAM II UAV Ukrainian kamikaze drones.
This was a striking display of the difference that repeatedly prevents Ukrainians and Russian liberals from finding common ground in social media conversations.
"What can I do, we are so few, we cannot overcome Putin" — versus millions and millions coming from Ukrainians without any previous agreement or coordination. There are also thousands of smaller fundraisers that get fewer media coverage but also regularly achieve their aim and bring the Ukrainian victory closer.
The chaotic self-organization of the people who are not willing to surrender to the enemy versus the fear that breaks millions into a bunch of individuals. Almost all totalitarian systems are driven by this fear — when a crowd is divided into fear-ridden individuals, the crowd flees. This is the way of reasoning of the Russians, but not of the Ukrainians. And this is why the Russians cannot understand why we do not surrender and beg for peace.
They also cannot understand the way the Ukrainians keep caring about others, even being under fire themselves: soldiers in trenches ask whether everyone is alive in the rear, raise money for one another, criticize their government (like the recent vote in the U.N. Human Rights Council on the Uyghurs), etc., etc.
No matter how terrible the next attacks of the enemy are, no matter how harmful their PSYOPs are (which, unfortunately, have a considerable effect outside Russia and result in such strange gestures as Elon Musk's call to give up part of the Ukrainian territory to Russia), Ukraine has already won on the moral and mental level by showing its indomitability.
It’s because of this indomitability that aid from the U.S. and the West, including military aid, is coming in increasing volumes.
After all, it was not "the Ukrainians were helped through the Maidan revolution", but a million people stood out first, and then those who wanted to support them joined the revolution.
Not "NATO is fighting for the Ukrainians", but at first the Ukrainians showed that they would fight to the end and stopped the assault on Kyiv, and then the allies, who thought we would fall in 3 to 21 days, shocked, began to increase the amount of aid and give us more and more serious weapons in addition to those intended for guerrilla warfare, which they supplied at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
Of course, this does not mean that we can unwind and just wait for victory: there is still a lot of effort to be made, and it will not be easy, including at the level of information warfare. But it is important to realize that every bit of our individual contributions adds up to a wave that will eventually sweep the enemy from our lands, and maybe it will also drown Putin's totalitarian empire.
As well as the "multi-vector world" that dreamed of "bringing the West to its knees".
The editors are not responsible for the content of the material and may not support the opinion of its author
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