Andreas Bartel

Do you remember that very night -- the night before the day of all days, four years ago? How many of us didn’t sleep at all. We sat in the dark in silence, in front of our laptops, refreshing news feeds. Here was Blinken saying the invasion was inevitable within the next few hours. Here was Zelensky speaking in the middle of the night in Russian, pleading with all Russians to come to their senses at the last moment and not take a fatal step. Here was the news that the runways of Ukraine’s largest airports had been blocked with overturned vehicles. We sat with Flighradar24 open. Here at 1 a.m., over northern and eastern Ukraine, an American drone was making multiple circles, monitoring the massive Russian grouping on our border from Belarus to Crimea. A plane seemed to have taken off, evacuating Turkish diplomats. They must have been among the last ones... Russia had closed all airspace along its entire border with Ukraine later on. In journalists’ chats, hundreds of colleagues just as sleepless. “Guys, be ready… it seems like today.” But hope, of course, died last. Maybe today it would pass. Maybe it was still a bluff and blackmail, because that would be logical. They couldn’t possibly go through with such madness. It would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions and a bloody slaughter in which it would be impossible to win. They couldn’t fail to understand that. And then -- “live” on Russian TV (in reality, of course, everything had been recorded well in advance as part of a pre-invasion propaganda performance) -- Putin’s face, distorted with sadistic hatred and a smirk of gloating, announcing the “special military operation.” What is there to say, four years have passed since that night. If someone had told me then that four years later independent Ukraine would be at the forefront of the entire free world, fighting alone on equal terms against the full military power of Russia, with the Ukrainian flag over every regional capital that was free from occupation that night, with Ukrainian-made drones and cruise missiles that smash Russian oil refineries, airfields, and giant military factories every single night — I would never, ever have believed it. And yet, through unparalleled heroism and enormous sacrifice, fighting Ukraine has changed the course of history. She disproved all the arrogant skeptics who were burying her alive back then and giving her no chance, already ready to run and “negotiate” with yet another deranged maniac hungry for blood and territorial grabs. Glory to Ukraine!

Goodbye, legend.