We Have to Remain Human

What russia has done to Ukraine is the greatest evil of our lifetime. But it cannot turn us into itself.

A letter I did not know I needed

A colleague of mine wrote me a letter a few days ago. It was one of those letters that arrive at exactly the moment you need them. I call this providence. Here is what she wrote:

“I wanted to tell you how much I admire and the example you are in leading your life from a place of integrity, grace, and love. I know this is a major part of your life, but often people claim it is part of their life but don’t actually live it, and you do. I just observed it, and I have in your writings and how you speak generally. You are an amazing researcher and beyond the intelligence of most, but I will always think of you as leading with love and high morals. Thanks for being that example.”

I sat with her letter for several days before I answered. I did not know what to say. The truth is that the version of me she was describing did not entirely feel like the version of me I have become.

What I told her

I have noticed, over these past few years, that I have become harder. Rougher at the edges. More black and white than I used to be. I have less patience for people who cannot see what is happening in Ukraine. I have less generosity toward those who equivocate, who “negotiate”, who ask why we cannot see the russian point of view. I have watched my own capacity for a certain kind of gentleness narrow. When I read the news each morning, part of me does not flinch anymore. That is a thing I have lost.

I have also gained something. I understand pain now in a way I did not before. I understand what it means to lose people. I have lost three friends in this war. Five of my cousins are in the Ukrainian army. Every phone call has a small tightening in the chest before it is answered. I know grief and fear in ways I could not have written about three years ago.

(Kyiv, July 6, 2026.)

So when my colleague wrote to me and told me she saw grace and love in how I carry myself, what she gave me was not a compliment. It was a reminder. She reminded me that I could carry what this war has done to me and still remain a decent human being. That the hardening did not have to become the whole of me. That there was still a person underneath capable of being seen the way she saw me.

I want to write today about that reminder, because I think many of us in the Ukrainian community – Ukrainians, Ukrainian-Americans, allies who have made Ukraine’s fight their own – need to hear it. And because I think what is happening to us is the second-most-important thing about this war, after Ukraine’s survival itself.

The trap

I have called russia the manifestation of pure evil. I stand by it. There is no other honest way to describe a country that fires missiles at maternity wards and cathedrals, that kidnaps children by the thousands, that murders civilians in their homes and then denies it, that has spent centuries trying to erase the Ukrainian nation and is trying again now with new weapons. Russia’s crimes in Ukraine are the greatest ongoing evil of our lifetime. I am not going to soften that sentence. Anyone who softens it is participating, at some level, in the erasure russia is trying to accomplish.

(Kyiv, July 6, 2026. Photo by Efrem Lukatsky)

But if russia is evil, our great temptation is to become what fighting evil so often makes people become. Angry all the time. Contemptuous of anyone who does not immediately see what we see. Willing to write off entire populations, entire countries, entire categories of people, because their governments or their internet trolls have failed us. Willing to imagine terrible fates for russian civilians because russian soldiers deserve them. Willing to become, in our imagination and eventually in our behavior, a mirror of the thing we are fighting.

This is the trap. And I am not writing about it because I am above it. I am writing about it because I feel it in myself, and because I suspect I am not the only one.

The strongest argument for Ukraine is not a military argument. It is not even a legal argument. It is a moral argument. Ukraine deserves to survive because Ukraine, at its best, represents something russia has been trying to extinguish for four centuries – the idea that a people can govern itself with dignity, worship freely, speak its own language, remember its own dead, and refuse to be told by an empire that it does not exist. That is what my grandparents fought for. That is what my cousins are fighting for now. That is what the friends I have lost died for.

If we become what russia is in order to defeat russia, we will have lost the argument even if we win the war.

What remaining human actually looks like

This is the discipline the moment requires. Not softness on russia. Not moral equivalence. Not a false symmetry between the aggressor and the defender. Those framings are lies and I will not participate in them. But a refusal, inside ourselves, to become the kind of people russians have become. A refusal to hate because russia hates every Ukrainian. A refusal to write off children who happen to be born in Belgorod because children are being killed in Kharkiv. A refusal to lose our capacity to see other human beings as human beings, even as we name their government as a criminal enterprise waging genocide against ours.

The Ukrainian soldiers who feed russian prisoners of war know this. The Ukrainian medics who treat russian wounded know this. The Ukrainian families who lost sons and daughters and still refuse to hate every russian mother know this. They are teaching us, by example, what “remaining human” actually looks like under conditions the rest of us are only imagining from a distance. It is not a soft or naive posture. It is the hardest discipline in the world. It is what will let Ukraine, after this war, look at itself in a mirror and see something worth having fought for.

What we owe

I am writing this partly for you and partly for me. I am reminding myself of the person my colleague saw in her letter – the person she said still spoke with love. I want to remain that person. I want to raise my daughter to be that person. I want Ukraine to be that kind of country – a country that suffered the worst evil of our lifetime and did not become evil itself.

Christ said we would know the tree by its fruit. Russia’s fruit is on display for the world to see – the burned cathedrals, the kidnapped children, the maternity wards in ruin, the murdered civilians. Ukraine’s fruit must be different. Different in the sense of remaining human.

That is what we owe those who have died for Ukraine. That is what we owe those still fighting. That is what we owe the children hiding in the metro tonight.

And that is what I owe my colleague, for writing me a letter I did not know I needed.

Slava Ukraini. And glory to those who defend her without becoming what they fight.