What drives Ukraine’s fighting spirit?

Judging by the welcome uplift in commentary around the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the popular western view appears to be that the war began on 24 February 2022. However, that aggression – the largest incursion by one European country on another since the Second World War – was just an explosive escalation of a war that had started ten years ago. Throughout those years, Kyiv’s Mykhailivska Square has featured rows of Russian military vehicles captured during the war in Donbas.

The population of Ukraine is less than a quarter of Russia’s but despite this disparity in size the country has kept the Russian bear at bay for a decade. I returned for a second interview with Major Bohdan Krotevych, Chief of Staff in the Azov Brigade, and the intelligence officer Illya Samoilenko to ask them what phenomena keeps the Ukrainian forces fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds: ‘The spirit of freedom is in our blood…Ukrainians will either win or we will all die,’ Krotevych told me.