We Can Lose, But We Cannot Be Defeated

Yesterday my wife asked what I would like to receive for my birthday.

I couldn’t answer that question that came through a screen from a distant country, the way my family life has become and that already seems strangely normal.

The obvious answer would be victory, of course.

Next year I turn forty. It does not seem much, but it has been enough to understand one reality of life that is hard to ignore.

Life gives us many more losses than victories.

There is a word we use very carefully in Ukraine.

Defeat.

We need to remember that losing and being defeated are different things.

This generation of Ukrainians has spent years showing the world how much people can resist when their existence is threatened, and I have written about our courage so many times here.

I have written that we will win.

I think I also need to write about losing.

You can be the bravest, but war gives no guarantees, and we can still be forced into an ending we never chose.

I hate writing that sentence. Even allowing the possibility into my mind seems wrong.

Still, the possibility exists.

If we lose this war, I will remember what happened here before the ending.

I will remember Ukrainians doing what almost nobody thought we could do. Far away from us, people carried our flag through streets where, before this war, few would even have recognized it.

They learned the names of our towns because missiles had fallen there.

There were hugs from people I had never met and tears from people who had never seen Ukraine.

None of that disappears because of an outcome.

There is another thing I need to tell you.

Many times when I write that Ukraine will win, my friends, I write those words without completely believing them.

There are days when I write we will win just because I need to convince myself that we still can. I put the words in front of me and pretend that someone else wrote them for me.

The words may not be entirely honest, but the dream is.

The certainty, well, this comes and goes.

I understand why people look to Ukrainians for certainty. They want to hear that we are strong and that history will eventually reward those who stood on the right side of it.

I cannot promise you anything, history has never worked that way.

Good people lose.

Brave people die.

I wish courage guaranteed survival. It does not.

Even victory cannot return everyone we lost.

Victory cannot give children back the years they spent learning the difference between the sound of a drone and the sound of a missile.

Still, it matters enormously because we are fighting for life.

For Ukrainians, losing will mean waking up under an occupation, if we are lucky to ever wake up at all.

It will mean a home becoming a place you can see only in photographs.

For millions, losing will mean disappearing, and our enemy has given us no reason to treat that possibility lightly.

So we fight.

No ending can travel backward and erase the courage and bravery Ukrainians have already shown. No negotiations can make the children we buried matter less.

Yesterday Lyubov asked what I wanted for my birthday. It is still seven months away, and during these times something so far away in time starts to look like a very long promise.

But now I think I know what I want.

I want to be alive at the ending, whatever the ending is.

I want to be standing when it arrives, with our dead counted by name and our heads still raised.

Russia came for more than territory. It came to make us into a people who would finally agree that we were never real.

And we may lose the war.

Defeat is something a people have to consent to.

—Viktor

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Books by Lyubov and Viktor Kravchuk