VIC MATUS

Washington Free Beacon

Weekend ///
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From the archives: Lest we forget, last week marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine. In March 2024 Tunku Varadarajan reviewed Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence by Yaroslav Trofimov.

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Trofimov was in the Ukrainian capital city on the day the war began: February 24, 2022. The day before, ‘Kyiv was still a city at peace,’ although girding its loins for a war that everyone knew was about to begin, since intelligence sources were screaming that fact out loud. Trofimov happened to meet Petro Poroshenko on Feb. 23. The former president of Ukraine—the predecessor of Volodymyr Zelensky, with whom his animosity was ‘visceral’—Poroshenko warned Trofimov that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was ‘going to be tomorrow after four a.m.’ and counseled him to ‘rush to the airport and hop on a flight out of here.’ Trofimov did not do so, of course, staying faithful to his calling as a correspondent of unusual courage.

“Instead, he spent much of the next year in towns and cities over which the Russians and Ukrainians fought each other to the death: Mariupol, Dnipro, Kherson, Kharkiv, Chernihiv (in the north, near the Russian border). In every place to which he goes he witnesses pitiless destruction by the Russians, accompanied by savagery against civilians, including widespread evidence of sadism, sexual abuse, and torture. In Bakhmut, in the eastern Donbas region, he observes how ‘the city, home to 72,000 people before the war, was being wiped off the face of the earth’ by cluster munitions, rained down by troops loyal to Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s former chef who came to command the Wagner Group of mercenaries. Prigozhin, who scorned the generals of Russia’s own army as ‘bitches,’ was bumped off by Putin on August 23, 2023, after he sought to challenge the Russian president’s authority in a mutiny that transfixed the world.

“Our Enemies Will Vanish is as much a tale of noble Ukrainian men and women as it is an account of places ravaged (perhaps irreparably) by the Russians. Trofimov sweeps into his narrative embrace a stirring cast of courage. Foremost is Zelensky, that improbably Churchillian Jewish ex-comedian-president who has come to embody Ukrainian defiance. But the secret behind Ukraine’s ability to resist Russia’s raw and ruthless power is the resilience that runs all the way down from the very top to the humblest soldier. Particularly wonderful, in a roster of some of the finest people you could hope to have in the trenches against monsters like Putin and Prigozhin, is Valentyn Koval, Ukraine’s HIMARS [the U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System] battery commander, whose leg was blown off just below the knee minutes after he joked—in an area heaving with Russian mines—that ‘it will be a pity if one of us loses a leg.’”

Here’s hoping there won’t be a fifth year of th