• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I write this as the sun shines down on me in my window seat on a Ukrainian intercity train traveling from Kyiv to Kharkiv. Here is my take on what’s happening in Ukraine since the two months when I last rode this train:

The war is not ending anytime soon. People in Ukraine were not fooled by the false talk and false promises Russia offered the U.S administration to curry favor, buy time and avoid the heavy tariffs that camera-loving U.S. congressmen kept promising. This war will last until the invader, Russia, either decides to stop invading or is driven off Ukrainian soil. Neither will happen tomorrow.

The concept of a protracted, horrible war is unsettling to many Americans, and many just want the war to end.

As Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Olympics-banned Ukraine skeleton athlete, told J.P. Lindsley of UnderFireNews: “War fatigue is a [way of] thinking in media. So when we ask media why don’t you write so much about Ukraine? The answer is ‘because it’s a war fatigue.’ People are tired of the war. I understand it, but in some way, it’s very painful, because you don’t have less scale of war because of war fatigue. You don’t have less war simply because people are tired of it abroad.”

It’s hard to imagine that the Russians can hit much harder than they already have. The January train ride to Kharkiv wasn’t an easy one. An early morning citywide missile alert meant no chance to grab coffee in the station. It meant fast-boarding the cars from tunnels under the station. And it meant that a five-hour high-speed experience turned into fourteen stop-and-go hours crawling along the tracks.

This was the result of Russian precision ballistic missiles destroying key railway electric grid elements in the hours before we left, disabling the train’s systems, lights, power and bathrooms for most of the journey.

But nobody complained. They don’t do that here. The Kyiv we had just left was enduring its worst winter in years and under horrific nightly bombardment.

More than one-half of the city’s residents were without heat, water or electricity, forcing many to leave the city, crowd into friends' homes or emergency shelters, or make do by sleeping in winter coats, heating up bricks on their gas ovens or sleeping in camp-stove-heated tents pitched in their living rooms.

Russia hoped to break the will of the Ukrainian people by taking away their heat and power in a brutal winter. They couldn’t. This was a winter survived.

No one today is saying that Ukraine “has no cards.” Not much more than a year ago, Ukraine’s president was being dressed down in the Oval Office for not capitulating to Putin, being told that “you have no cards.”

Over the past 10 days, the U.S. and its Middle East allies have seen the destruction of billions of dollars of their strategic military assets because they didn’t know how, nor did they have the technology, to defend them from $30,000 Iranian precision kamikaze drones—something Ukraine does by the hundreds nightly. The U.S. fired off 500+ multimillion-dollar Patriot missiles -- more in just three days than Ukraine has used in four years of full-scale war.

Suddenly, everyone in the West now knows the essential value of Ukraine defense tech and know-how.

Ukraine isn’t holding grudges, for now. In spite of a year of defensive missiles promised and paid for but not delivered, and F-16 deliveries wallowing in unending red tape processes, Ukraine has already sent many hundreds of counter-drone systems and experts to the Middle East to protect U.S service members and their equipment, even though those systems and personnel are desperately needed at home.

Momentum is building. The mood on the front line is optimistic. Ukraine forces have recaptured ground these past months, and are inflicting casualties on Russia at a 10 to one ratio to their own. Having been denied access to strategic long-range weapons from the U.S. or Europe, Ukraine has started making its own cruise missiles and soon ballistic missiles, rebuilding “muscles” that it hasn’t exercised since the Soviet Union times when many of the world’s best missiles, rockets and planes were designed and built in Ukraine

Transformational leadership is taking hold. In January, Ukraine took the bold step of appointing Mykhailo Fedorov, its 34-year-old whiz kid digital transformation minister, as its new Minister of Defense.

His credentials? Not only did he help digitize the entire country’s systems and services over the past six plus years, but he built and operated the drone program for Ukraine, and built and operated its defense tech incubator and marketplace, both of which helped spawn so many of the innovations that western nations now need and want to survive the new war in the Middle East and any future wars that they may contest in Asia.

I hope that this perspective is helpful, and I hope that you believe that what happens in Ukraine matters. For me, I believe that Ukraine’s defense of its sovereign state is the most consequential event of my lifetime, what Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 was to my parents’ generation.

What do you think?