Bearing Witness to the War in Ukraine

By Wendel S.

There under a bright blue sky in Irpin, the sun beaming down on our delegation, we felt a sense that despite such a beautiful day, peace was elusive.

We stood with the veterans of the war in Ukraine, those who ran into the fire when the fighting began in the winter of 2022 and turned the Russian army back from the city border.??

Many of these men had never served in the military before. They were ordinary citizens, proud, humble, and confident. Neighbors, shopkeepers, grocery clerks, and mechanics who came together, despite no formal training and no advanced weaponry, to defend their city.?One was so scrawny his compatriots joked it was impossible to find the young man a uniform that would fit his slight frame.?

Beginning on February 24, 2022, these 200 men faced off against the “mighty” Russian army for over a month. Relief finally came from the Ukrainian army, who descended on the city to push out the Russians in April 2022.?

Their defense of Irpin saved Kyiv from the Russian advance and prevented the kind of atrocities that were unleashed in the nearby suburb of Bucha. They fought against air strikes, rockets, and Russian special forces to defend their hometown.

Does that sound familiar: a volunteer, upstart fighting force defeating an imperial power??What we saw was a nation being reborn. Like America it has a history, and an inspiring origin story of punching above its weight.

Our trip took us to Bucha, another leafy suburb of Kyiv, where we saw a city mending from unthinkable atrocities. At St. Andrew's Orthodox Church, we saw the devastation and destruction the Russian army rained down to terrorize the civilian population. We paid our respects at the mass grave filled with the bodies of men, women, and children tortured, raped, and executed in a siege of terror.?

This site, once a holy refuge to the community, now exudes an eerie feeling of loss, an unnatural quiet reminding us of the abject horror that occurred here just a year ago. The war may seem far away, but I assure you it is real.?

The experience was brought full circle on our return to Kyiv where we visited Babyn Yar. It’s the site of one of the deadliest massacres of WWII, where over 33,000 Jews were executed in two days by the Germans in 1941.?In total, an estimated 100,000 – 150,000 people were murdered at Babyn Yar during the German occupation, including Romani people, psychiatric patients, prisoners of war, and other civilians.?After clearing the rivers of blood, their bodies were shoved into a mass grave, not unlike the one we’d just paid our respects to in Bucha.

It laid bare the hypocrisy and gall of the Russians. In attempting to justify this war, they claimed they were combatting Nazi forces in Ukraine, yet they're the ones working to dominate and erase an entire people and culture. Most importantly, it reminded us that to deny history is to repeat it.

But in the ashes and the rubble lies a sense of hope built on the foundation of resilience. We learned that most of the leaders of the Ukrainian government are under 45 – it seemed so young to us until we paused to consider that many of our own Founders were younger than 40 in 1776. The similarities give reason to be optimistic for the future of Ukraine: like-minded people fighting for the right to self-determination and freedom, galvanized against a common enemy invading their land, and bound by their conviction to protect their cultural identity free of tyranny and fear.

Theirs won’t be an easy course, and without the commitment of the West, they have an uphill battle against a well-armed invader. But the people have the heart and the fight to achieve victory and ensure that future generations can proudly call themselves Ukrainians in their homeland.