‘Something worth fighting for’

At the center of history in Ukraine

“You have nice ocean and don’t feel [it] now, but you will feel it in the future. … You will feel influenced.”

Nothing that Vladimir Zelensky said in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 seemed to enrage Donald Trump more than this comment.

Zelensky was warning us that even the mighty United States, seemingly so secure behind our two oceans, would not emerge unscathed if Vladimir Putin’s violent ultranationalist impulses were allowed free rein.

The Ukrainian leader was speaking most directly about the possibility that Putin’s appetite for conquest would not stop at the borders of Zelensky’s country, but would keep spilling westward.

He may also have had in mind how Russia is using Ukrainians as involuntary test subjects in a deadly real-life laboratory for military capabilities that can easily be used against other adversaries, on other battlefields much closer to us. This includes the Shahed military drone that Moscow acquired from Iran and is now manufacturing by the hundreds, as Zelensky noted last fall, and the nuclear-capable Oreshnik intermediate-range missile, which Putin has said could be used in “combat conditions” or against Ukraine’s allies.

The larger stakes of this conflict have been clear from the moment Russia invaded in February 2022, even if not everyone grasped them. Some who did were the military veterans from many countries who came to fight as part of Ukraine’s International Legion. The funeral for one of them, 21-year-old former U.S. Marine Ethan Hertweck, was held in Kyiv on the same day that Trump and J.D. Vance staged their tag-team act to humiliate Zelensky at the White House.

Another who understood the significance was Matt Gallagher, an American writer and former U.S. Army captain who went to Ukraine in 2022 to help train civilians in self-defense and other coping skills. He returned there to produce journalism about the war for Esquire, and a 2024 novel titled Daybreak centered on an American military veteran, Luke Paxton, who comes to Ukraine in search of several things. One is a sense of purpose that he lost during his traumatic Army service in Afghanistan. Another is an old love, Svitlana Dovbush, whom he has never forgotten through long years of separation and personal dysfunction in his life.

Luke keeps encountering Ukrainians who are friendly enough, for the most part, but often ask him why he has come. He doesn’t have a great answer, although he road-tests several. He keeps telling people, rather vaguely, that he wants to help, to be useful. To himself, he acknowledges a couple of reasons.

One is the pure adrenaline rush of warfare, a seductive trap, “trailing like an old loyal dog until of course you turned around and said, ‘Come on, boy.’”

The other is equally primal: the urge to be at the heart of things. “Ukraine held the world’s gaze. He was in the midst of it now. He’d walked the periphery of history before but this was its center.”

Luke’s Army buddy Han Lee, who has come with him, is much less conflicted about his reasons: He’s come to kill invading Russians. Ukraine’s independence, Lee says, is “something worth fighting for. You know how fucking rare that is?”

“Here’s a conflict where America’s doing something right … and a lot of Americans seem to not know how to handle that.”

In a 2024 interview with Julian Zabalbeascoa on the website Electric Lit, Gallagher spoke with sadness of how American attitudes toward the conflict have changed, how the straightforward proposition that he has Lee voice in his novel is no longer a matter of consensus.

When he first came to Ukraine, shortly after the invasion, Gallagher said, “there was a rare kind of bipartisan support” in the U.S. for the target of Putin’s aggression. But political tribalism has eroded that support. “It’s strange, because here’s a conflict where America’s doing something right by and large, in my estimation, and a lot of Americans seem to not know how to handle that.”

Regardless of what happens, Gallagher said, Ukrainians will keep fighting – partly because they have no choice, but also because of who they are. “These are innovative, freedom-loving people,” he said. “Nobody should support them more than flag-waving Texans, but for domestic political reasons, that doesn’t always seem to be the case.”

My own memories of Ukrainians, formed during my years as a correspondent in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, are of frank, adversity-hardened people who viewed their world with a mixture of pride and skepticism. They felt proud that Ukraine had finally become an independent nation, but also an early awareness of the problems that would continue to bedevil their country for many years: political dysfunction, corruption, and economic instability. Even then, many Ukrainians had a wary sense that the legacy of a poisonous Soviet political culture would not be easily overcome.

My time in Ukraine was just after it achieved independence, and just after it gave up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the collapsed USSR in return for supposedly ironclad guarantees of its territorial integrity from all the signatories to a formal agreement – including Russia.

That pact was signed by Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. For Putin, it turned out, the accord was nothing but a piece of paper, no more binding than a casual note, something to be discarded with no hesitance or apology when it interfered with his grand plan to resurrect the Soviet imperium.

It was also signed by one of Trump’s predecessors, Bill Clinton, and honored by another, Joe Biden, who came to Ukraine’s aid when Russia invaded. That now seems like another world, as we have been forced in the past month to witness Trump’s chummy phone call with Putin, his abusive bullying of Zelensky at the White House, and his attempt to squeeze Ukraine by cutting off military and intelligence aid.

Those events have raised an ominous prospect: that Putin-style politics, with all its cynicism and cruelty, is now infecting American governance at the highest level.

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

Further reading:

“What Trump and Zelensky said during their heated argument in the Oval Office,” PBS News, Feb. 28, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-trump-and-zelenskyy-said-during-their-heated-argument-in-the-oval-office

Julian Zabalbeascoa, “Matt Gallagher on Fictionalizing the Real Stakes of the Ukrainian War,” Electric Lit, March 1, 2024, https://electricliterature.com/matt-gallagher-interview-novel-book-daybreak-ukraine-war/

Justin Spike, “Family of US marine veteran killed in Ukraine tells funeral he died fighting for freedom,” AP, Feb. 28, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-us-marine-veteran-funeral-kyiv-aa5bd049d5a357109258a8e4a7b072fd

Siobhán O'Grady and Anastacia Galouchka, “Ukraine honors foreign fighters, Americans, as nation’s future on the brink,” The Washington Post, March 1, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/01/ukraine-foreign-fighters-marines-hertweck/

Dan Sabbah, “Zelenskyy fears Ukraine is ‘testing ground’ for Russian weapons amid rise in Shahed strikes,” The Guardian, Nov. 24, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/24/zelenskyy-fears-ukraine-is-testing-ground-for-russian-weapons-amid-rise-in-shahed-strikes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other