Some thoughts, once shared in friendship, continue to grow within us. These reflections, first spoken at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 2024, return now from Ukraine—tempered by time, war, and gratitude.
A year ago, in the fall of 2024, as a Visiting Fellow at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, part of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, I spoke with students about Ukraine’s experience of living, studying, and thinking amid war. Those days on campus remain vivid in my memory even as days now pass in Ukraine, each carrying its own existential weight for every one of us here. The country that, for many, once seemed a distant periphery has instead proved to be a pivotal frontier for freedom and democracy—a true game changer in what was meant to be a swift restoration of the Russian empire.
The questions I was asked in classrooms and over coffee on the Notre Dame campus have stayed with me ever since; they helped shape and crystallize the thoughts that follow. A year later, I realize that many of those reflections have not only endured but have deepened in meaning.
What follows are ten concise points—messages, really—that I first shared at Notre Dame and that continue to resonate within the Ukrainian rhythm of everyday life, loss, and hope. Each seeks to capture a fragment of truth about friendship, faith, freedom, and moral imagination. Together they form a small gesture of gratitude to my friends and colleagues at Notre Dame—to all of you who keep thinking, learning, and believing that being truthful to the truth is both an act of freedom and a source of resilience.
On Friendship
My first message is about friendship.
When I first visited Notre Dame in 2006, the idea of a real partnership with the newly re-established Ukrainian Catholic University seemed improbable. Nearly two decades later, that friendship has matured into a living alliance, tested by war and sustained by shared purpose. During his visit to Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in 2024, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., spoke of “both battles”: the military defense of Ukraine’s freedom and the educational work that equips a nation to build its future. He also named the moral ground of our partnership—solidarity that refuses to treat Ukraine as “just another part of the world,” reminding us that we belong to one human family.
I came to Notre Dame from a country under daily air-raid alarms. In such a world, resources indeed matter—to hold, to withstand, and to eventually win—yet the most decisive currency is trust. Trust makes cooperation possible across distance, while friendship strengthens resilience and turns cooperation into the future we dare to imagine.
Our institutions did not drift together by chance; they chose one another. In choosing, they discovered that friendship is not sentiment but infrastructure, an ethical bond strong enough to carry and enact hope.
On Death
"... in wartime Ukraine, death is no abstraction. Its reality is stunningly present even in the most ordinary settings, including campus life."
My second message is about death.
During UCU’s winter commencement on February 10, 2024, the valedictorian, Lubov Kurtiak, a mother of three and a graduate of the School of Journalism and Communication, offered words that have stayed with me ever since. Speaking with grace and quiet strength, she said that what makes UCU truly unique is that it “prepares you to face death.” Not in despair, she explained, but “in the context of living life honorably and in a dignified way, so that when your time comes to meet God, you stand before Him without regret.”
To speak of death in such a way—amid celebration, hope, and youth—may sound profoundly countercultural. Yet in wartime Ukraine, death is no abstraction. Its reality is stunningly present even in the most ordinary settings, including campus life. If you run a university during war, you know that all too well.
At UCU, we have lost students and colleagues whose names now mark our community’s calendar of remembrance. Through these sacrifices, the education of dignity becomes a lived response—a revelation of our university community’s resilience amid the vast disruption inflicted by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
On the Gift of Time
My third message is about time.
In Ukraine, time can no longer be taken for granted. It can stop in an instant—for one person or for many. Time has ceased to be a neutral medium in which our living unfolds and our plans take shape. It has become a moral presence—fulfilled through sacrifice and service.
Each day is a gift entrusted to us by those who stand guard on the frontlines and by those who support them through their labor, prayer, and love. It is a gift born of solidarity in action, scaled and sustained internationally by friends who, like my dearest colleagues at Notre Dame, stand firmly for what is just, true, and good.
To have a class during wartime is a gift. To complete an academic year is a gift. To hold a commencement while air alarms sound in the distance is a gift. These moments of learning and continuity do not belong to us; they are granted by others’ courage.
At UCU, we have come to understand that time, like freedom, carries responsibility. It is a gift that demands courage—to receive it gratefully, to use it wisely, and to give it generously in defense of dignity, in the fight for freedom, and in the winning of a just and lasting peace for our continent.
On Hope
My fourth message is about hope.
For Ukrainians, our country remains a land of hope. For my fellow citizens, hope is not a sentiment but a discipline of the spirit. A recent nationwide survey showed that even amid loss and exhaustion, a clear majority of Ukrainians, over 60 percent, name hope as their prevailing feeling about the country’s future. Only 40 percent mention anxiety, and a third speak of optimism. Hope prevails, and with it, agency and courage endure.
An American colleague once remarked after visiting Kyiv and Lviv: “Optimism in Ukraine has waned, but hope still abounds.” He was right. Hope is what remains when illusions and superficial optimism fall away. It is the quiet conviction that no one will be abandoned or forgotten, that good is still possible even when victory is distant.
"Hope prevails, and with it, agency and courage endure."
For Ukrainians, hope serves. It cooks, shelters, teaches, rebuilds, and fights. It is the moral energy of a society that refuses to give up on its own humanity. 70 percent of Ukrainians have volunteered in some form since the invasion began. Their hope works: it feeds, embraces, consoles, and heals.
Hope is what makes eventual moral, spiritual, and civic victory possible.
On the Ukrainian Formula
My fifth message is about what I call the Ukrainian formula.
To describe Ukraine’s struggle for freedom, I often recall George Weigel’s re-reading of Pericles’s funeral oration, in which he reformulates the ancient Greek sequence of virtues. “If the secret of happiness is liberty, and the secret of liberty is courage,” Weigel writes, “then the secret of courage is faith.” These words, inspired by the courage of Ukrainians, capture the moral architecture of our resistance.
One can face death as a free person, standing for the liberty of others, only when one’s courage is nourished by faith. Faith gives courage its moral direction and prevents it from hardening into hatred or atrocity. Courage, in turn, keeps liberty alive; and liberty, when lived authentically, fills the heart with joy. This chain of meaning embodies enacted humanity and expresses the inner logic of Ukraine’s resilience.
It is also a formula that sustains and cultivates our hope for the future.
- Without faith, courage collapses into violence;
- Without courage, liberty decays into privilege;
- Without liberty, happiness turns to complacency.
The Ukrainian experience restores this moral sequence to the world’s vocabulary.
For us, the formula is not theoretical. It is lived daily—in prayer and service, in classrooms and on the frontlines. It reminds us that victory is not only about territory reclaimed but about humanity preserved.
On Ukraine
My sixth message is about Ukraine itself.
Ukraine today is many things at once: a battlefield and a moral ground, an open wound and a source of healing, a place of martyrdom and of rebirth. It is a solidarity hub, a recovery and innovation site, a field hospital, and a social transformation lab. In all these dimensions, Ukraine has become a mirror in which the world can see both its fragility and its moral potential.
To outsiders, this complexity can seem perplexing and paradoxical. How can a nation under relentless attack become a wellspring of courage, generosity, innovation, and hope? Yet this is precisely what Ukraine reveals: that moral resourcefulness and vitality are not the privilege of safety but the fruit of endurance and solidarity. It reminds the world that even in darkness, humanity can still shine.
Ukraine’s struggle is not only for its own survival but for the moral and political order of Europe—and, by extension, of the free world.
On the War
My seventh message is about the war.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war of aggression animated by genocidal intent and driven by an imperial vision. What was meant to last only weeks has become a defining struggle for the future of Europe and the world. Russia’s goal is not simply to conquer territory but to replace the post–World War II order, founded on law, dignity, and mutual responsibility, with a world governed by fear and force.
Dominance is rarely achieved through military, economic, or political power alone. More often, it is secured by manufacturing and manipulating fear. Fear corrodes truth, paralyzes moral judgment, and weakens the will to resist. It creates the conditions in which aggression can masquerade as realism and indifference as wisdom.
Ukraine’s resistance exposes this logic at an extremely high price. Every act of courage on the frontlines and every act of solidarity at home reclaims moral agency from the politics of terror. This war is fought not only for territory but for truth and for the very possibility that words like justice, dignity, and freedom still mean something.
On Culture
My eighth message is about culture.
It took two decades for Russia to prepare its society for this war. Generations were immersed in the restoration of an imperial mindset, cultivated through propaganda, religious manipulation, and the normalization of violence. A vast cultural machine—books, television, film, education, and religion—was mobilized to anesthetize conscience and glorify domination. The atrocities of Bucha, Irpin, and Mariupol were made possible not only by orders from above but by a culture that had long dehumanized social practices and attitudes.
Culture is never neutral. It shapes the imagination through which we perceive what is real, possible, or permissible. It can sustain moral vision or suffocate it. To engage meaningfully in society, we must be stewards of culture, not its passive consumers. When we fail to cultivate culture as a moral ecosystem, we risk becoming its objects, shaped by forces we no longer question. Over the past decades, Russian autocracy has invested heavily in cultivating a culture that subjugates, numbs, and replaces people’s freedom and agency with apathy, spiritual blindness, and self-indulgent complacency.
If victorious in Ukraine, this culture of dehumanization will only grow stronger, and its corrosive influence will spread quickly and far beyond Ukraine, driven by its insatiable will to dominate and suppress.
On Justice
My ninth message is about justice.
The tragedies we have witnessed in Ukraine over these years—death, devastation, and displacement—reveal how evil gains momentum when injustice goes unpunished. The world’s complacency toward earlier aggressions and unaddressed crimes made this war possible. As Anne Applebaum reminds us in Autocracy, Inc., Western democracies for decades enriched and empowered the Soviet state and, later, the Russian autocracy through trade and accommodation, while bracketing moral reality from political calculation. Gas continued to flow westward and money eastward, even as repression and militarization deepened.
Evil draws its strength from such unpunished wrongs, from forgiveness that was never sought and therefore could never be granted. It feeds on indifference and moral fatigue. Justice, by contrast, is not only a legal principle but a moral discipline: the willingness to name evil truthfully, to remember victims faithfully, and to repair what can still be restored.
If, in view of Ukraine’s suffering and sacrificial fight for freedom, we allow ourselves to believe that managing injustice rather than confronting it is the best way left to proceed, we must also admit that such management will at best produce a peace that is nothing more than an unstable pause between wars.
On Democracy
My tenth and final message is about democracy.
Democracy’s vulnerability, as Timothy Snyder reminds us, arises when we forget “the organic connection between democracy, ethical commitment, and physical courage.” Liberty is not self-sustaining. It must be renewed by moral effort and defended, again and again, by those who believe that human dignity and truth are worth the risk.
Through their courage and sacrifice, Ukrainians have shown that democracy is not only a political system but a moral achievement; it is a daily choice made by people who refuse to be ruled by fear or lies as they engage in cultivating and defending their res publica.
This insight carries an obligation for all of us. If democracies begin to outsource their moral responsibilities—to institutions, markets, algorithms, and other forces—they will soon discover how fragile freedom becomes when detached from conscience. The strength of democracy is inseparable from the integrity of its citizens.
Ukraine’s struggle has exposed both the peril and the promise of our age: the peril of forgetting what democracy costs and the promise that it can still inspire. Its defense begins in truth, depends on courage, and endures through solidarity.
Epilogue—Thinking with Gratitude
The ten messages gathered here trace, however imperfectly, the complex and threatening reality we face in Ukraine, where researchers living in the presence of war can no longer maintain a safe theoretical distance in pursuing their academic work. Ukraine has become a vast open-air laboratory in which social, military, security, economic, business, educational, and political models are tested under extreme wartime conditions and at the mindboggling cost of lives sacrificed to withstand the Russian aggressor.
Our ultimate hope and commitment are that this wartime laboratory will serve not only to defend Ukraine and the European continent but also to help shape a more secure and humane future. Thinking with gratitude from Ukraine, as I write to my friends and colleagues at Notre Dame, remains for me a wellspring of strength and resilience. Authentic friendship, sincere and steadfast, can accomplish far more than we often imagine, especially in times such as ours.
Originally published by at nanovic.nd.edu on November 17, 2025.