If we abandon Ukraine, what will become of us?
I began writing this on July 8, 2024.
I was in the United States on personal business. I woke up to the news that Russia had struck the Okhmadyt children’s cancer hospital in Kyiv, my home for most of the year. As I watched video of the Kh-101 cruise missile—a weapon distinctive for the turbojet engine that hangs off its bottom—slam into that hospital, I was overcome with an emotion that I have often felt after leaving Ukraine: guilt.
Guilt that I was not in Kyiv that morning, enduring the attack alongside my friends and those I care for; guilt that I could not do as others did on that day and go down to the hospital to help clear away rubble or bring food and water to emergency workers and survivors; guilt that the moment I left Ukraine’s borders I once again enjoyed the privilege of safe skies and nights free of blackouts, air raid sirens, and the ever-present threat of being killed. Too many close to me—and countless more beautiful people I’ll never meet or know—have no such luxury.
I experienced this same guilt when I travelled to Poland in March for a visa.
That trip came days after a major raid on Kyiv. The night of the attack, I heard the same Kh-101 cruise missiles that destroyed Okhmadyt fly over my apartment. I saw air defense intercepting them, every explosion rattling my windows and shaking the walls. I saw a blank-faced old woman pacing back and forth in the corridor of the old Soviet apartment I was renting, mumbling to herself, oblivious to my presence, trying to decide whether she should risk going out into the streets to seek shelter in the basement of a nearby school.
Ordinary moments in Kyiv.
In Poland I checked Telegram out of habit every evening to see whether Russian Tu-95 strategic bombers, which carry payloads of cruise missiles, were in the air. There’s a grim timetable to such attacks: The bombers leave their base at Olenya above the Arctic Circle and fly thousands of kilometers south, to their launch zone above the Caspian Sea, well out of range of Ukrainian air defense. Once fired, the missiles reach Ukraine about 2:00-3:00 AM, when most people are trying to sleep.
Every time the missiles entered Ukrainian airspace the air raid app on my phone sounded an alert and the guilt began to suffocate me: I was safe in Krakow while my home, my city, my friends, and all the people I cared about were enduring yet another night of terror. None could know with any certainty whether they’d live through this time.
In hindsight, I think what I experienced can be described as survivor’s guilt, a set of emotions a person often experiences when they have survived a traumatic event while others have suffered or perished. It typically afflicts soldiers, first responders, and other direct survivors of violence, but it can affect civilians who are less directly exposed to violence as well. After fleeing Russia’s blitzkrieg in 2022, one Ukrainian refugee described her own inner dialogue like this: “‘How dare you feel happy while kids and civilians in your homeland are killed by Russian weapons and shellings?’ . . . I’d escaped. They hadn’t.”
Sitting in the US on July 8th, while my friends helped dig through the rubble of Okhmadyt, or in Poland in March, as I received text messages reassuring me that the people I cared about were safe, it was hard to avoid feeling that survivor’s guilt:
I should be there too. What right do I have to safety? I’m not doing enough. I’m never doing enough . . .
And here I am, writing these words in Vienna’s lovely Alt Wien café, safe again. I expect that most of you reading are safe, too. For us, the threat of cruise missiles annihilating a hospital or destroying our homes or incinerating our bodies and our lives and all our cherished memories and our very existence in the middle of the night as we struggle in vain to push the rubble off of the wrecked bodies of our loved ones is purely hypothetical.
No matter how much we might empathize with Ukrainian suffering, this suffering is something that happens to someone else . . .
I ask you: What responsibility does that circumstance place on our shoulders?
Aren’t you and I afflicted by a different kind of survivor’s guilt?
***
It’s November 6, 2024. Donald Trump has won the U.S. presidential election. There are now processes at work that will have profound repercussions for our country, for Ukraine, for the world.
As Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv are pummeled by massive glide bombs; as others like Pokrovsk are simply erased from the world forever; as Ukrainian civilians are terrorized and killed; as Ukrainian troops at the front—ordinary people with ordinary lives, ordinary families, ordinary jobs, and ordinary ambitions—sacrifice themselves under the most inhuman conditions, I ask you:
What kind of survivor’s guilt accrues to those of us who enjoy a security we would deny them?
What right do we have to safety?
We’re not doing enough, are we?
We’ve never done enough.
We’re never doing enough.
NATO, long a bulwark against Russian aggression, is now facing a profound crisis: What happens if the United States abandons Ukraine, as Vice President-elect Vance has suggested may happen? Can the alliance survive? If it does, will it ever have the willpower to enforce Article 5 in the event that Lithuania or Estonia is attacked by an emboldened, vengeful Russia?
The attack on the Okhmadyt hospital coincided with the beginning of the NATO summit in Washington D.C., an event that not only commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the alliance but one at which Ukraine’s security took center stage.
The summit, unfortunately and perhaps predictably, did not produce the results that Ukraine had hoped for: Along with some air defense systems that had already been announced, Kyiv received vague assurances of a “path to NATO membership” in the future. Such assurances mean little in the long run and do nothing to protect Ukraine in the short term.
Some lives are . . . Well, we’ll get to that in a minute.
In any case, since the NATO summit, numerous articles by Western scholars, journalists, and others have counseled Ukraine to come to terms with Russia; to concede territory; to negotiate. For their own good. For the greater good, really.
Others, cynically, have warned against allowing Ukraine to join NATO. There are risks, you see. Escalation and such.
Ukraine, it seems, cannot be allowed to enjoy the same protection that you and I take for granted.
But what kind of survivor’s guilt accrues to those of us who enjoy a security that we deny Ukraine?
***
Such questions seem particularly acute right now, as a growing chorus declares its unwillingness to “die for Ukraine” in response to Russia engaging in yet another bout of nuclear saber-rattling. As one British journalist wrote, “Ukraine has the right to self-defense against an unjust invasion, measured against wider risks . . . [emphasis added] I think Ukraine firing long-range missiles into Russia will mean escalation and more death, and no Ukrainian military victory.”
In other words, Ukraine has the right to self-defense against an unjust invasion—right up to the point at which comfortable Westerners decide they are “unsafe.”
Those who are not fighting; who are not dying; whose cities are not being razed; and who do not spend the nights in bathrooms and corridors now seek to weigh the relative value of life—and Western life is always given priority over Ukrainian life.
As I have written elsewhere, Ukrainians “are at the mercy of fickle allies who may decide at any time that, in the name of ‘peace,’ ‘stability,’ or simply . . . ‘war weariness’ and the realities of electoral politics, they are disposable after all. Their lives are treated by those who enjoy the privilege of safety under NATO skies as too backwards, too problematic, too flawed, too deficient according to the right ‘metrics’ to be worth preserving.”
We might question whether sacrificing Ukraine to appease Russian nuclear threats would truly make the world safer or whether this might simply signal to every country on the planet that possessing nuclear weapons constitutes a carte blanche for conventional aggression. We might ask what will happen to the principle of nuclear non-proliferation. We might ask whether the sacrifice of tens of millions of Ukrainians would actually vouchsafe the world order.
These are important questions. It is my own belief that betraying Ukraine in the name of preventing World War III is a chimera, a form of appeasement, a moral monstrosity.
Instead, however, I would like to pose a more blunt and personal question: How much do you actually value Ukrainian life?
I want you to think about that for a moment: Do you think Ukraine is worth fighting for as a moral imperative in and of itself, or is it simply an acceptable cause to support as long as it carries no real risk of impacting you and yours?
Is your support for Ukraine contingent on Ukrainians doing all the dying while you can go to bed each night knowing that Russia is not, actually, likely to incinerate the planet? Its latest nuclear threats are part of a time-honored tradition that it has engaged in dozens of times since the 1990s.The children of the Russian leadership mostly live and study in the West; the doctrine of mutually assured destruction—MAD—remains in effect; and Russia has been firing nuclear-capable missiles at Ukraine since 2022. Nothing has changed.
I cannot answer such questions for you, but in the final analysis, how those of us in the West will decide we value life—or not—lies at the very heart of everything I’ve been talking about here.
But what guilt accrues to us if we cannot admit the equal worth of Ukrainian life to our own or of our children? Are their children’s lives and futures worth less than yours? How dare we stand by and cheer their sacrifice if we ourselves are ready to sacrifice nothing—not even our sense of comfort?
***
No one, of course, wishes for nuclear annihilation. But those in the West who now call for an unjust peace as a response to nuclear blackmail do not seek peace at all—they seek merely their own self-preservation, to be paid for with Ukrainian blood.
The consequences of such a peace will be borne only by Ukrainians. Millions will be thrown away to Russian occupation and its concomitant horrors: rape, torture, brutalization, slavery, and mass murder; generations of children subjected to ethnic discrimination, repression, brainwashing, and deculturation.
But at least they’re not your children, right? Or is that question too impolite?
Apologies.
But Ukrainians are fighting not because they love making war—this struggle was thrust upon them. And they fight not merely out of a legalistic resolve to restore their internationally recognized borders. They are fighting for the lives and the dignity of their compatriots; their fellow citizens; their families; their culture; their existence; their future. The stakes for them are clear, just as they always have been. Ukrainians are not asking us to fight for them. They are asking merely for us to help them fight.
If the West will no longer back Ukraine’s victory for fear of World War III, then it should also know that it cannot force Ukraine to capitulate. If (or when) the West ultimately abandons Ukraine, Ukrainians will fight on. It will become a harder, longer, bloodier, more shocking and asymmetrical war, but it will not end with some kind of “deal” between Donald Trump, Olaf Scholz, and Vladimir Putin.
It will end in blood.
***
Abandoning Ukraine would represent an abandonment of our own principles and values. It would be a resounding victory for Russia and its authoritarian allies in Iran, China, and North Korea (the latter now fielding tens of thousands of troops on the front lines) and it would mean the eclipse of a world order that, flawed as it is, represents a more stable alternative and one that has served American geopolitical and economic interests since 1945.
To turn our backs on that order while leaving our Ukrainian allies alone in freezing trenches would be to cut off our own nose to spite our face. America and its prestige will not recover from such a betrayal, at least for a long time.
Worse, it would be an admission that we do not believe all lives to be of equal worth. It would be an admission that we chose to sacrifice Ukrainians in the mistaken belief that we could vouchsafe our own comfort and privilege. It would be an admission that, even as we in the West fancy ourselves to be better, more civilized, more rational, less enraptured by violent nationalist fantasies, we can’t help but bend the knee to authoritarian perverts in all their avarice, imperial ambition, and nuclear blackmail.
But what guilt will we then carry?
What should we do?
Because we can do something, can’t we?
Can’t we?
***
In April 2024, sitting in a Kyiv café, I wrote: “Watching thousands of beautiful and flawed and ordinary and wonderful and vital and innocent people walk past me every day, people who want only to have something resembling the kinds of lives that that those of us in and from the privileged West . . . enjoy as a matter of course, I see skeletons; refugees; slaves; rape victims. I hear it in every air raid siren. Because this is the promise of the ‘Russian world’ and the sirens are its heralds.”
My phone just sounded an alert. There’s another air raid in Kyiv. Another siren. Another skeleton.
I hope my friends are safe.
I feel guilty. For I am.
Vincent Artman is a political and cultural geographer currently splitting his time between Ukraine and the United States. He can be found on Twitter and Bluesky at @geogvma and his writings on the war in Ukraine are at medium.com/@geogvma
Thank you. Thank you for writing this.