Ukraine Can Teach Us Much About Leadership, Patriotism

In early morning hours of February 25, as massive Russian ground and air invasion forces closed in on his Kyiv capital, a former stand-up comic and sitcom actor who had portrayed a schoolteacher turned president demonstrated a stirring real-life example of leadership and heroism that the best fiction can only hope to emulate.

Dressed in a khaki T-shirt and fatigues, 44-year-old Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted a starkly serious and vitally inspirational cellphone video message to a besieged Ukraine populace: “We aren’t afraid of anything.”

“We aren’t afraid to defend our country,” he said. “We aren’t afraid of Russia.”

Surrounded by his top aides, Zelenskyy consoled, “The president is here. We are all here. Our troops are here. We are defending our independence, our state, and that will continue.”

President Zelenskyy, who according to Ukrainian and Western officials topped Moscow’s kill-or-capture list, had declined a U.S. offer to help him flee his country.

Zelenskyyy had told the American Embassy: "The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

As the president said in his Friday video, “The enemy has marked me as target number one, my family as target number two … They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of the state.”

Then, in a statement that should haunt other faint-of-heart European leaders, President Zelenskyy concluded on the video call that “this might be the last time you see me alive.”

Ukraine military and civilian resistance forces are responding to vastly overwhelming invasion numbers and heavy equipment firepower with similar determination and valor.

One soldier sacrificed his life blowing up a bridge to stop an advancing Russian tank column. A Black Sea border guard offered a “F*** Yourselves” expletive to a Russian gunboat demanding surrender. He and a dozen others were initially reported killed by shelling, but later reports indicated they may have been taken captive and still alive.

Russia’s President Putin had made it clear that the aim of Russia’s unprovoked attack — the largest invasion of a European country in over half a century — is to remove Ukraine’s government and install a puppet regime more friendly to Moscow.

In some respects, this should have come with little surprise, offering previous bloody proof of his intent to expand “Mother Russia” — having done so with little global pushback in the Crimea, the Donbas, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Putin snatched part of Georgia in 2008 — then grabbed Crimea in 2014 — despite weak Western sanctions as Europe made itself increasingly addicted and hostage to Russian oil and natural gas dependence by abandoning their own substantial hydrocarbon and nuclear sources.

The Obama-Biden administration had refused to give Ukraine lethal weapons after the Crimea and Donbas invasions, instead providing a symbolic $53 million show of non-lethal products. NATO, wary of being drawn into a proxy conflict with Russia, had also decided against sending arms to Ukraine.

The Trump administration was far more generous, sending Ukraine 210 advanced Javelin anti-tank missiles and 37 launchers in 2018.

Since then, Zelenskyy had risen from political novice to president in a 2019 landslide peace ticket victory pledging to end a low-level war festering in Donbas that has dogged Ukraine since it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

President Zelenskyy had also launched a public campaign calling for Ukraine to regain control of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula seized by Russia in 2014.

Following a night of Russian Kyiv missile and air attacks, President Zelenskyy once again expressed exasperation regarding the West’s weak response.

In a televised address, he implored: “This morning we are defending our state alone, as we did yesterday. The world’s most powerful forces are watching from afar. Did yesterday’s sanctions convince Russia? We hear in our sky and see on our land that this is not enough.”

President Zelenskyy has reportedly been particularly irritated by what he saw as the West’s duplicitous position of indicating that Ukraine would be a member of NATO one day, later offering no clear path to accession. When pressed on the matter, their answer was always silence.

Reasons for EU nations to avoid incurring Putin’s wrath in bringing Ukraine into NATO are hardly mysterious.

Germany, a dominant NATO power which originally contributed only 5,000 helmets and a field hospital to Ukraine’s defense and blocked NATO ally Estonia from supplying weapons, depends on Russia for over half of its natural gas and a quarter of its oil imports.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was also central in working to shield Russian gas exports from sanctions imposed after they invaded Ukraine in 2014, emphasizing the importance of trying to improve Europe’s relations with Moscow.

Merkel later teamed up with President Putin to counter widespread opposition to Nord Stream 2, a second trans-Baltic Sea pipeline connecting Germany with Russia running alongside the first one. If and when certified by Berlin, it will double those natural gas imports.

After President Trump blocked Nord Stream 2 completion, President Biden inexplicably released that sanction while blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline which would have delivered Canadian crude to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

Meanwhile, skyrocketing U.S. pump prices and plummeting poll numbers attributed in large part to Democrat anti-drilling policies have since incentivized Biden to pathetically plead with OPEC and Russia to produce even more oil.

As clear evidence of self-inflicted desperation, throughout 2021 the U.S. imported between 12 and 26 million barrels of Russian oil monthly, whereas the Trump administration had made America not only energy independent, but also a leading global exporter.

Heroic Ukrainian resistance to the Russian onslaught has finally inspired (or shamed) European nations to provide support and impose stiffer sanctions.

Germany, in a dramatic policy reversal, is very belatedly sending Ukraine 1,000 Javelin anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles; France and other EU nations have agreed to end Russian access to SWIFT global interbank accounts; and Britain will banish key Russian oligarchs’ use of London as a financial safe haven by freezing assets in five major banks.

Whereas the Biden administration has agreed to provide an additional $350 million in aid, the most important longer-term benefit to Ukraine and Europe would be to marginalize Russia’s energy leverage by releasing America’s oil and gas production from ideologically idiotic climate change bondage.

Whether such responses will ultimately prove to be too little, too late for Ukraine remains to be seen, but one thing is certain.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s courageous leadership in rallying his small nation’s patriotic reprisals against a powerful aggressor offers renewed testimony that freedom from tyranny is worth fighting for.