Yuliya Tymoshenko: The roots of Ukraine's resistance

Ukraine’s success in fighting Russia’s much larger army is rooted in the fact that the country has been unified, in a way that it has not been in centuries, by a single purpose: preservation of its sovereignty, lives, and liberties, writes Yuliya Tymoshenko

Anna Shevchenko in May next to her house in Irpin, near Kyiv, built by her grandparents which was nearly completely destroyed by bombing in late March during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In her beloved flowerbed, some roses, lilies, peonies and daffodils survived. "It is new life. So I tried to save my flowers," she said. Photo: AP/Emilio Morenatti

After months of artillery shelling, rocket attacks, and the mayhem unleashed by Russia’s invasion of my country, the very idea of Halik Kochanski’s book Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939-45 is disorienting. Am I to see it simply as a comprehensive study of the resistance to Nazi rule in Europe during the Second World War, or is it, through some alchemy of history writing, something more: a warning from the past about the nature of Ukraine’s present and future?

The book’s publication came at a time when the world feared that Ukraine’s sacred capital would fall under military occupation, like Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Brussels, Belgrade, and so many other of Europe’s ancient capitals during the Second World War. Indeed, a fate worse than occupation seemed to await us because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pathological desire to erase Ukraine from the map of Europe.