Andrew Becraft 🇯🇵🇺🇸🇺🇦

Two years. It's been two years since that fucking night of February 24. We knew -- well, we've been told "it's not 100% confirmed yet...but THIS is possibly due at 4 am or 5 am, stay put." A half-glass of single malt whisky with ice poured into a glass, the final hours alone in sweet silence in front of a laptop. Scrolling through the news all the time. And then the morbid face of Putin twisted with sick rage live on TV. And, shortly after, the rolling thunder of missile strikes coming in from all around Kyiv. That was supposed to be the apocalypse of a nation, but, thanks to so many men and women standing up, that night became the beginning of Ukraine's finest hour. The one that old grandpa Winston was once talking about. Oh, it's been an epoch of time ever since that day. The Battle of Kyiv. The heroic resistance of Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv. A lone Ukrainian Marine sacrificing his life to blow up a bridge and stop advancing Russian tanks. The tragic debacle in the south. The Russian extermination of Mariupol. The Bucha massacre. The unspeakable meat grinder in Donbas. The Kharkiv operation. The cheering crowds jubilating from the Ukrainian colors getting back to Kherson. The fields of death and gore at Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Battles in the sea and the air. So many ups and downs, so many heroes, human-made miracles. The price of survival as a nation is terrible. We're going to mourn and shed tears many decades in the future over what Russia has done. We've seen unbelievable things in this war. Ukraine has done and is doing incredible things in this war in spite of all odds. The Ukrainian military has been making a gargantuan sacrifice against one of the largest and the most brutal war machines in human history. Everyone in this war has revealed their true face, from very ordinary people to the highest-ranking power brokers. Frankly, I don't get it how some could choose to side with the evil, bloodlust, blatant lies, hypocrisy, and imperial savagery over the story of a nation that was supposed to go extinct within weeks but now enters the third year of resistance against the most terrible war of extermination since Adolf Hitler. With everything that has happened over the last few months, we all should be ready for a lot of hard things to happen. A lot of hopes have been broken due to things we have no control over. Yet, we need to keep doing what we should and what is simply right. We've made an extremely long way, and the struggle continues no matter what.