Ukraine’s morale remains up as it fends of Russia, winter barrage: ‘Still a force to be reckoned with’

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine four years ago, there was never much doubt that Roman Ratushnyi would take up arms. The 24-year-old was a seasoned independence activist, having been a teenage leader of the street protests that toppled Kyiv’s pro-Kremlin government in 2014.

When he died just three months into his military service, a street in Kyiv was named after him, and today his grave is a place of pilgrimage for young Ukrainians. The pilgrims also learn, though, that war is irredeemably cruel — as proved by the extra headstone that now lies next to his own. It marks the grave of his brother, Vasyl, who died in combat a year ago this Friday, leaving his parents mourning the loss of both sons.

“Even now, a year later, I’m not sure I can quite accept that it’s happened,” says the brothers’ father, Taras, 52, himself now a captain in an artillery brigade. “We in Ukraine are living through the most horrific experience in Europe since World War II.”

It is men like Taras whom Vladimir Putin would have hoped to have broken by now, wearing their morale down to the point where they no longer wish to fight. Yet as the invasion marks its fourth anniversary today, Taras sees light at the end of a very long tunnel. Not because he thinks victory is immediately within grasp or because he has any faith in Donald Trump’s peace talks. Instead, it is because the past year has been Ukraine’s toughest so far — and yet it has pulled through.

After all, it was 12 months ago this week that President Volodymyr Zelensky had his infamous Oval Office fallout with Trump, when the US leader warned that he didn’t have “the cards” to win without US support.

Since then, Russia has continued its slow but steady gains on the battlefield, grinding Kyiv down by its simple willingness to sacrifice far more troops. This winter — the coldest in a decade — Putin has also tried to break Ukraine’s civilian morale, bombing power stations to leave cities unheated in minus-13 degrees. This past Sunday, though, Ukrainians finally observed Kolidii, the traditional Slavic festival that marks the end of winter. And even if temperatures are only up to a balmy 33 degrees, there’s a sense of having weathered the storm.