Ukraine Has Passed a Point of No Return -- Masha Gessen, NYT

This is a long and powerful look at how Ukrainians have lived through four years of war.

And a reminder of the scale of the current suffering and sacrifices being made to secure democratic futures for generations of Ukraine and the West. We must remember that generations of humans' freedoms -- none of which are guaranteed -- have come out of such struggle and suffering.

https://archive.ph/nfhFL

"... Feb. 24 marks the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion. Four years is a particularly significant milestone for people who, like me, grew up in the Soviet Union, in the eternal shadow of World War II, because four years was the duration of the fight against the Nazis. The number was seared into our minds...

Mila Teshaieva, the photographer I worked with on this article, and I were both raised (she in Kyiv, I in Moscow) by parents who were born during that war. For us and so many people of our generation, the war explained why our grandfathers were absent, our grandmothers hoarded odd objects, our parents had fraught relationships to food, and all of our family members seemed at all times to be in a state of hypervigilance. Most of all, the war explained why none of the plans our grandparents had made for their future ever came true. In our generation, the future, as a category, continued to be suspect... Growing up, I never questioned the heroism and special status of Soviet society. It was only as an adult that I came to understand that the war, which ended 22 years before I was born, had recast public morality, valorizing single-minded commitment and self-sacrifice above all else — above happiness, human connection, creativity, freedom.

Many Ukrainians — even those born after the country gained independence from Moscow’s rule in 1991 — grew up with much of the same mythology of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine, which was under German occupation for most of that war, lost some 10 million people. Mila’s surviving grandparents, like mine, celebrated every anniversary of that war’s end but almost never talked about what they had experienced. After the war, the Soviet authorities sent thousands of Ukrainians to the gulag for suspected collaboration with the Germans — in many cases, as what amounted to punishment for surviving the occupation. Ukrainians never forgot that injury. Both of those World War II stories — of the heroism of Ukrainians and of the cruelty of Moscow — inform the way Ukrainians think about the war they are fighting now...

Underground schools have become symbols of Ukrainian unbreakability, along with warming tents set up in the shadow of unheated high rises. I visited the Kyiv School of Economics, a small, ambitious private university that has managed to draw some outstanding academic talent from both Ukraine and the West. Brik, the rector, excitedly led me to the basement, where the university has created several classrooms, complete with whiteboards. The school schedules only as many classes as can simultaneously convene in the bunker, so that whenever the air-raid alarm sounds, as it does on most days, classes can move down below. Then Brik showed me something else he was proud of: a classroom equipped for a vocational training program, this one in soldering — a skill newly in demand in the growing drone industry...."