I Will Show You How It Was

Imagine.

You lead a comfortable life. You have a job in a city, friends, a busy social life. On the weekends, you like to ride your bike and go out to bars. You have plans for the future – foreign trips, a bigger place to live, maybe even a family.

The politics in your country are a bit of a mess. The President is sinking in popularity and regarded as an unserious figure. But you live in a democracy with a free press – unlike the much bigger nation next door.

There’s talk of war. But those kinds of threats are nothing new. Bellicose language from your bully of a neighbor – that’s just the way things work in your part of the world.

But a ground war? Madness. Something like that hasn’t happened in 80 years.

Your President tells everyone to remain calm. Life goes on in your city. Christmas shopping. Holiday parties. Work drama.

Embassies begin to close. Your foreign coworkers are evacuated. Satellite photos show troops massing on the border.

You don’t know it, but your comfortable life, with 24/7 electricity, shops crammed with goods and the freedom to pursue a future – all that is about to end.

Illia Ponomarenko shares his experience in I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv.

It is brilliant and disturbing.

As Americans, we are used to war happening to other people far away. And typically, we’re the ones who brought it.

Hiding in bomb shelters, seeing your friends go off to the front, scrambling for bare necessities – that’s something that we find hard to imagine.

Ponomarenko makes it real, for the war on Ukraine is a war on the kind of free, democratic, capitalist society that we all recognize and enjoy. Missiles slam into apartments. Bombs fall on cafes. Tanks roar in the suburbs.

This isn’t happening in the 1940s, but is happening today, in Europe.

Ukraine is on the front line in the battle against dictators. It is all one fight, from the streets of Washington to the trenches in the Donbass. Either we’ll be free or trapped forever under the thumb of Putin and Trump.

Ukraine fights for us, for the kind of freedom that we enjoy and take for granted in the West. I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv demonstrates how precious – and fragile – that freedom is. We owe it to Ukraine to give them everything they need in this struggle.

Slava Ukraini!