Glory to Ukraine

On the courage to strike back and the dignity that cannot be conquered

Photo by Rostislav Artov on Unsplash

Let us begin with what happened this morning and why it matters. While the world slept, Ukrainian intelligence operatives completed an operation eighteen months in the making: a coordinated drone strike across four Russian airfields that destroyed over forty strategic bombers deep in enemy territory. Not a lucky shot or desperate gambit, but the kind of patient, methodical dismantling of tyranny's machinery that would make Prometheus himself weep with pride.

Operation Spiderweb—even the name carries poetry—involved hiding FPV drones in trucks, positioning them near their targets with infinite patience, then launching them in perfect synchronization to find the very aircraft that have rained terror on Ukrainian civilians for three years. Putin's bombers, tucked away in the Russian heartland where the tyrant thought distance would provide sanctuary, reduced to twisted metal by Ukrainian ingenuity and Ukrainian steel.

Glory to Ukraine. Slava Ukraini.

The Sweet Precision of Justice

There is something magnificent in the precision of this strike—not just its tactical execution, but its moral clarity. These were not random military targets but the specific instruments of terror. The bombers that have systematically targeted hospitals, schools, power grids, and civilian shelters. The aircraft whose crews have spent three years implementing Putin's strategy of breaking the Ukrainian spirit through the deliberate targeting of innocence.

Ukrainian drones found them all. Miles from any battlefield, protected by the vast expanse of Russian geography, shielded by nuclear threats and diplomatic niceties—none of it mattered. Justice traveled four hundred miles per hour and arrived precisely on time.

This is what competent resistance looks like when it meets unwavering moral purpose. Not the flailing of desperate victims but the calculated response of a people who have refused to accept the role Putin assigned them. Who looked at the full machinery of Russian terror and decided not to endure it, but to dismantle it, piece by carefully targeted piece.

The Tyranny of False Realism

Even now, as smoke rises from Putin's strategic aviation, we can predict the chorus of outrage from the West's fascist apparatchiks. David Sacks will thunder about “dangerous escalation.” John Mearsheimer will emerge from his academic redoubt to lecture about “provoking the bear.” The entire ecosystem of comfortable capitulation will explain why Ukrainian resistance threatens “stability” and why the victims should have accepted their fate more gracefully.

But what really disturbs these apostles of appeasement isn't escalation—it's that the impulse to resist domination refuses to be extinguished. Their fury at Ukrainian success reveals what truly outrages them: the demonstration that submission is choice, not destiny. That accommodation with evil is cowardice masquerading as wisdom.

These Western enablers have made their peace with authoritarian power. They've convinced themselves that resistance only makes things worse, that fighting back is irresponsible when surrender remains available, that the strong naturally dominate the weak and attempts to alter this equation are naive or dangerous. Ukraine's eighteen months of preparation followed by minutes of devastating execution stands as rebuke to every comfortable rationalization they've constructed.

Sacks, Mearsheimer, and their fellow travelers understand instinctively that every Ukrainian drone finding its target challenges their entire worldview. Every successful strike against Russian strategic bombers offers evidence that they could have chosen differently—that their collaboration was preference, not prudence, that their counsel of despair was moral failure disguised as strategic sophistication.

The Loneliness of Moral Clarity

Perhaps the most telling aspect of Operation Spiderweb is what it reveals about Ukraine's splendid isolation. They told no one. Not their allies, not their benefactors, not even the United States that has provided billions in military aid. This wasn't ingratitude—it was wisdom of the highest order.

Ukraine has learned what many Americans refuse to acknowledge: that our government harbors forces that would sell out democracy itself. That sharing operational plans with Washington means risking Ukrainian lives to protect American political comfort. That the country once known as the “arsenal of democracy” now requires protection from its own compromised leadership.

So they planned alone. Executed alone. Achieved alone what may prove the most significant tactical victory of the war. Their operational security against us stands as both their salvation and our judgment. They fight for principles we claim to share while protecting those principles from the very allies who profess to defend them.

There is something heartbreaking and magnificent in this—a democracy fighting for its existence that cannot trust the world's most powerful democracy because that democracy has been infected by the same authoritarian virus Ukraine battles. Ukraine's silence is their integrity. Their secrecy is their strength. Their refusal to trust us is recognition of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

The Grammar of Resistance

What Ukraine accomplished this morning transcends military action—it represents the reassertion of a grammar of resistance that every tyrant desperately wants to erase. The insistence that power, however overwhelming, does not equal legitimacy. That victims retain agency. That the strong, despite their pretensions, remain vulnerable to the ingenuity of the free.

Every dictator depends on a fundamental lie: that resistance is futile, that power flows in only one direction, that the weak must accept whatever the strong choose to impose. Ukrainian drones shattered that lie along with those bombers. They demonstrated that tyranny, however sophisticated its machinery, however vast its territory, however nuclear its threats, remains vulnerable to free people who refuse to accept their assigned role.

This is why Putin rages. This is why his propagandists invoke Pearl Harbor and demand nuclear revenge. Not because the military damage threatens Russian victory—though it certainly does—but because the successful strike threatens the psychological foundation of tyranny itself. Ukraine has reminded the world that tyrants are not gods, that their power is not absolute, that their victims are not helpless.

The Power of the Powerless

As Václav Havel understood from his own experience of resistance against impossible odds: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Ukraine's eighteen months of planning, their patient positioning of assets in enemy territory, their willingness to strike at the heart of Russian military power—this makes sense regardless of how the war concludes. It makes sense because it affirms something essential about human dignity: that it cannot be bombed into submission, that it will find ways to assert itself, that it will exact costs from those who would destroy it.

Havel grasped what Ukraine demonstrates: that even apparently powerless people possess a form of power that tyrants cannot touch—the power to remain human, to choose dignity over survival, to act on principle rather than calculation. This power offers no guarantee of victory, but it guarantees meaning. And meaning, once established in the world, becomes indestructible.

Ukraine did not choose to defend human dignity against authoritarianism on the world stage. But they have played that role with such courage, such ingenuity, such uncompromising commitment to principle that they have transformed not just their own destiny but our understanding of what resistance can accomplish when it refuses to accept defeat as inevitable.

The Center Still Holds

Glory to Ukraine. Glory to their patience, their precision, their absolute refusal to surrender. Glory to their demonstration that resistance remains possible, that justice can be delivered even to the deepest recesses of tyranny, that the idea of human dignity cannot be bombed into submission no matter how many strategic bombers Putin deploys against it.

The rebellion continues. Not just in Ukraine, though they lead it with incomparable grace and skill. Everywhere that free people refuse to accept that might makes right. Everywhere that human ingenuity confronts brute force. Everywhere that the impulse to resist domination burns bright enough to illuminate the darkness.

Ukraine fights alone because it must, but it fights for all of us—for everyone who believes that consciousness deserves better than subjugation, that dignity is non-negotiable, that the future belongs not to the powerful but to the free.

Sometimes the smallest among us carry the greatest burdens. Sometimes ordinary people change the course of history through extraordinary acts of moral courage. Sometimes eighteen months of silent preparation culminates in minutes of perfect execution that remind every tyrant watching: you cannot kill an idea whose time has come.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And this morning, Ukrainian drones carried a message that echoes across time and space to every corner where freedom confronts tyranny: the spirit that refuses to be extinguished will find a way to strike back, precisely and devastatingly, when justice demands it.

We rebel.