Ukraine has already won the war that „couldn’t be won.” Now it is our turn

”The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:4–5)

Dawn is breaking. To the east, beyond the wide Dnipro River, I see the silhouettes of buildings emerging from the night. The water flows slowly, filled with ice. Less than an hour ago, Russian missiles flew over Kyiv. Now, everything is quiet. I can even hear my own heartbeat—faster than usual. This isn’t my first night in Kyiv, yet I’m still not used to waking up to air raid sirens. It is still unusual for me to go to bed every night with the thought that someone, somewhere, can deliberately launch missiles toward the place where I am sleeping.

At 5:07 AM, when the attack ended, I ran to that hill in downtown Kyiv. Smoke rises one or two kilometers away—there must have been an impact. It is still dark. But soon, the sun will rise. Once again, light will prevail over darkness. It feels like a victory of good over evil. And it is a victory—one of many small victories that have come to define Ukraine’s fight.

I was in Ukraine for a week, part of an international group of journalists. The experience was intense—not only because of our packed agenda but also because, in bomb shelters at night, we saw what daily life is like here. We felt, even if only briefly, the price Ukrainians are paying to defend their country.

The war that „couldn’t be won,” as the U.S. President Donald Trump claimed, has already been won in many ways. Three years after Putin sought to take Kyiv in three days, Ukraine still stands. Through courage, sacrifice, and resourcefulness, Ukraine has managed to reclaim much of the territory occupied by Russia in the early months of 2022. It is a classic David vs. Goliath story. Every day of resistance, every inch of land still under Ukrainian control, is a victory.

Yes, Western aid has been crucial to Ukraine’s defense, but none of it would have mattered without the will and resilience of the Ukrainian people. The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban serves as a clear reminder: you can supply an army with modern weapons, but you cannot force it to fight. Putin believed the same would happen in Ukraine—that its army and statehood would collapse within days. He was wrong. Ukraine chose to fight, not just for survival, but for its values, its democracy, and its future as an open society. And for three years, it has been winning.

Even more than that. As American historian Timothy Snyder argues, “The Ukrainians have essentially fulfilled the entire NATO mission, absorbing the force of the entire Russian army on their own, and sparing others, including the United States, the far greater costs of a larger war. By holding off Russia, the Ukrainians have also deterred Chinese aggression in the Pacific, by demonstrating just how costly and difficult offensive operations can be.”

Я киянин

After 16 hours on the train from Warsaw, I arrived in Kyiv. For a brief time, I was a citizen of this city. Я киянин. Today, these words carry the same weight as Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner in 1963, when West Berlin stood surrounded by Soviet weapons. Now, Ukraine is holding the line. For a week, I was киянин, and now I feel a responsibility to share what I have seen and felt.

Many locals choose to ignore air alerts and avoid shelters at night. “It’s more stressful to go to the shelter than to accept the risk,” several people told me. Air alerts happen almost every night—often more than once. If you rushed to a shelter every time the sirens sounded, you’d barely get any sleep.

Not every building has a shelter, and some people must walk several minutes to reach a metro station. In many cases, there isn’t enough time—especially when missiles, far faster and deadlier than drones, are incoming. During the missile attack that occurred while I was in Kyiv, there were only two minutes between the first sirens and the explosion I heard.

Stanislav Zavertailo, co-founder of Honey and Zavertailo cafés—a chain of elegant, traditional coffee shops across Kyiv—donates a significant portion of his revenue to the Ukrainian army. A father of three, he checks social media during every air alert to assess the threat. If it seems serious, he wakes his children, and they take shelter in his bakery’s production facility.

„Before the war, sometimes we had to wake up early for a vacation flight,” Zavertailo said. “Now, when I wake them for the bomb shelter, I tell the kids, ‘Imagine we’re going to Paris for croissants‘. And then, in the shelter, we really have croissants from the bakery.”

I can’t stop thinking about the eerie resemblance to La Vita è Bella, Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film, in which a father shields his son from the horrors of a concentration camp by turning survival into a game. Eighty years later, a father in Kyiv is forced to do something similar.

One evocative detail Zavertailo shared is that after an air attack, his cafés are always full. „On mornings after a strike, everyone needs a good coffee and a pastry—but also a place to share,” he said.

Throughout my time in Kyiv, I was struck by the resilience and courage of ordinary Ukrainians. Under constant missile and drone attacks, they continue to live—to work, to innovate, to defend human rights, to create art. Yet as I followed the international news, a single thought kept echoing in my mind:

Annushka has already spilled the oil.

This line from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita haunts me. In the novel, disaster is inevitable—once the oil is spilled, someone will slip and end up in the wheels of a tram and tragedy will follow. Bulgakov, born in Kyiv, remains a controversial figure in modern Ukraine due to his political views and opposition to Ukrainian national ideas. But standing just meters from his former home, now a museum in the Podil district, I can’t help but think: thousands of kilometers away, the oil has already been spilled. The whole world is sliding downward, and the tram is approaching.

Russia Started the War

It is shocking how distorted reality can become. Few facts are as indisputable as Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Blaming Ukraine for this war is as absurd as blaming Poland for World War II. It is nothing more than an echo of Himmler’s propaganda—the false flag operation where SS officers, dressed as Polish soldiers, staged an „attack” to justify Hitler’s invasion.

Do we need to fact-check something so obvious?

We all remember the „polite green men” who occupied Crimea in 2014. We all remember the morning of February 24, 2022, when at 5 AM, Russian missiles struck Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, and Russian troops crossed the border. Should we really have to prove that Ukraine did not start this war? It is as absurd as needing to prove that „War is not Peace.”

But we must. Because, as Orwell wrote in 1984: „Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” We must keep speaking the truth, no matter how obvious it may seem. We must verify facts, even when the bar is set unbearably low.

And beyond all else, it is appallingly unjust to accuse Ukraine of not holding elections while it fights for democracy against one of the most oppressive regimes of our time.

This War Is Not About Land

I heard it again and again from people in Kyiv: „This war is not about territory. Russia already has the largest landmass in the world, much of it unused. They do not need more land. What they cannot accept is Ukraine’s way of life. They cannot accept that Ukraine is a democracy. That is what we are fighting to protect”.

Yevhen Hlibovytsky, director of the Frontier Institute in Kyiv, said that „there is no country in the world that has held general elections under martial law in conditions like ours.” Tymofii Brik, doctor in sociology and rector of Kyiv School of Economics, believes it will be almost impossible to organize the voting in the army while there is an active war. The soldiers can’t just leave their positions for a few hours to vote.

According to a February 2024 poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 69% of Ukrainians believe President Zelensky should remain in office until the end of martial law. Even among those who distrust him, 38% still believe he should remain in power until the war is over.

According to another poll of the same institute as of December 2024, 52% of Ukrainians trusted President V. Zelensky, 39% did not trust him. Although trust indicators have worsened over the year, the balance of trust-distrust remains positive +13%.

And yet, Donald Trump falsely claims that Zelensky is a „dictator without elections” with only 4% support. This is not just misleading—it is repeating Kremlin propaganda, designed to undermine Ukraine’s statehood.

Despite the U.S. president’s words, Ukrainian opposition MP Inna Sovsun of the Holos (Voice) party remains hopeful. She believes there are still people in Washington who understand that abandoning Ukraine would not only be a betrayal but would also damage America’s credibility as a global leader. If that happens, nobody will trust the US to be a reliable partner and ally.

The Train to Warsaw

I left Kyiv on the night train to Warsaw. The Central Railway Station is a place of quiet sorrow. Soldiers depart for the 1,000-kilometer-long frontline, their expressions heavy with unspoken words. Women and children board international trains, waving goodbye to fathers and husbands who remain behind to defend their country. In the final moments before departure, the silent cries of mothers and children fill the station.

Was all this suffering in vain? Are we really going to leave Ukraine to Putin?

Everyone in Ukraine knows that without strong security guarantees, this war will not end. A temporary pause will only allow Russia to rearm and return stronger. And if Ukraine falls, the security of Europe’s eastern flank will be in jeopardy.

„If Europeans do not give weapons to Ukraine, they will be forced to use them on their own territory,” said Inna Sovsun.

The train moves through the quiet Polish countryside. I stand by the window, thinking about her words. Will war reach these fields in the coming years? Will air raid sirens sound in Warsaw, Riga, Sofia, or even Vienna?

Even back at home, I keep a Ukrainian app on my phone that alerts me to air raids. It uses the voice of Hollywood actor Mark Hamill, best known as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Every time an alert sounds, it is a wake-up call—a reminder of Ukraine and its people under attack. I wait for the message: „Attention! The air alert is over. May the Force be with you.” Although it is stressful, I don’t want to uninstall the app. I don’t want to forget what it is like to live under missile strikes or how quickly a peaceful sky can turn into a battlefield.

“Ukraine kept the conflict local”, Timothy Snyder stands in Recoup the costs. The sadism of American policy to war-torn Ukraine. Until now. But for how long will that be possible? There is no doubt: the war must end soon. But not on Putin’s terms—because that would not be peace, only a pause before a wider conflict. It would be a disaster for Europe, and the cost to the U.S. in that scenario would be far greater than the aid it has provided to Ukraine thus far.

That is why we have a responsibility to resist—every day, against every lie, and against every narrative that seeks to weaken democracy and empower dictators like Vladimir Putin.

If Ukrainians have managed to stand against the world’s second-largest army for three years, then we must do our part. We can challenge every falsehood, expose every piece of disinformation, and remind the world that two plus two makes four, no matter how many times we are told otherwise.

And that is how we win this war—the war that some said could never be won. Every time we shine a light on the truth, we drive back the darkness.

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Ivan Radev is a Bulgarian journalist. He is an editor at Factcheck.bg, the largest independent fact-checking platform in the country, and the vice-president of the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria. He has over 20 years of journalistic experience in various national and international outlets. He speaks Romanian and spent five years as a correspondent in Bulgaria for the Romanian National News Agency – Agerpres. He has also translated a number of literary works from Romanian into Bulgarian.