I was in Ukraine this fall. While I was there, I happened to be in Lviv while it was being bombed by the Russians in the worst assault on the city since World War II.
Hundreds of explosions rocked the city for hours. Machine guns churned in the distance. Some locals, particularly those with children, heeded the air raid sirens and took refuge in the nearest bomb shelter, these provided by the Ukrainian government and the owners of any structures sturdy enough to withstand a cruise missile strike.
My cousin and I, probably foolishly, did not join the others in relative safety. We watched, awed, senses heightened, adrenaline coursing through our veins. I felt no fear.
A few months after arriving back in the United States, I had the misfortune of being in a city here as an army of masked, seemingly unaccountable ICE agents descended upon it. Traffic, the crunch of snow and ice beneath my boots, the occasional distant siren; everything sounded normal.
It did not feel normal though. People were on edge. Lines of palpable anxiety were etched into every face. The recognition of distress in another was married to suspicion: was this one worried that ICE would kidnap and shoot more people, or worried that ICE was not kidnapping and shooting enough people? There was desperation, hopelessness.
Five innocent people were killed in this Russian attack on Lviv. Many more lost their homes. These losses were felt universally, even by relative newcomers like me. Still, that day — the bombing took place early in the morning — was the most collectively joyous one I’ve ever been a part of.
Lviv’s coffee shops were abuzz in the morning. Later, crowds of people packed themselves into bars and restaurants, drinking toasts to the fallen, shouting with eyes ablaze, “Slava Ukraini!” Teens gathered around boomboxes in public spaces and danced.
Everyone shared unity of purpose. We were alive. We gazed upon the horrors together, and didn’t blink. The Russians lost. Their dark purpose was futile. The dead, the heroes, the victims of an unfeeling violence: their sacrifice meant something.
We all made our own small contributions in our own small ways, and felt honored for it. Moreover, we were assured by our certainty that Russia would eventually be repaid for its cruelty.
Bombing campaigns by one nation against the civilian population of another in order to break the spirit of the people never work. On the contrary, they have the exact opposite effect. From the Blitz against Britain in WWII to our own misadventures in Vietnam, the survivors are only galvanized. It feels good to be galvanized against a great external evil. I felt fantastic in Lviv.
Meanwhile, as the largest army of immigration agents ever assembled laid siege to Minnesota, fear and despair were rampant. Fear, because these masked men could suddenly appear and seemingly murder with impunity. Despair, because it was our own federal government waging a terror campaign against its people and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it. Fighting back in any way would subject you to arrest or worse.
Being in a city under attack by your own government is chilling. When the president and vice president of your country label the slightest act of defiance “domestic terrorism,” and make clear that anything they assess as such is to be punishable by death, even as they lie through their teeth about their assessments in the face of overwhelming video evidence to the contrary, that is very demoralizing. You feel powerless when the only thing you can do to stem the violence is vote in the next election and pray those in power fail in their next attempt to storm the Capitol or send fake electors or whatever other devilish evolution their designs on depravity take. You can expose yourself to risk through protest (and I did) though even as you do you know your leaders will only double and triple down in response.
I didn’t even see ICE agents myself. But knowing they’re out there unseen, lurking somewhere, perhaps coming to your neighborhood next, is frightening. This is why Spielberg didn’t show the shark for the first half of “Jaws” (well, that and the mechanical shark prop was on the fritz).
I was probably at more risk of death as explosions rocked Lviv than I was as agents of my own government shoved brown people into vans. Mentally, however, going through the former was incredibly uplifting whereas going through the latter has proven incredibly depressing.
I would return to Ukraine in a heartbeat. I’d happily shake my fist at the sky and curse the Russian war machine as drones rained down. Being in a city selected for one of Trump’s reprisals against his own constituents is unquestionably, unequivocally, unambiguously worse.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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