KYIV—After another long night of thundering bombardment, the people of Kyiv are exhausted, shaky, and seething with anger. “We look at one another, clench our fists, and growl,” said Juliia Turba of the Snake Island Institute, a think tank based in Kyiv. “Then we get back to work.” Bakers go to bakeries, hair stylists go to salons, and analysts go to think tanks. Rush-hour traffic on the Pivdennyi Bridge is as maddeningly slow as ever. Young volunteers from civic initiatives like Kyiv Bats, Repair Together, and the all-women Velyke Divnytstvo are first to arrive at the sites of destruction, where they sweep up glass, clear debris from the streets, and board shattered windows. It’s a matter of dignity for Ukrainians that Russia’s cruel strikes don’t throw their lives into complete disarray—much less break them.
Ukraine has pulled off the extraordinary: repelling the world’s third-largest superpower with an army that, in 2014 when the war began, was largely unfit for battle of any kind. The military’s rapid modernization, turbocharged since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, is a credit to the country’s leadership. On the battlefield, the Ukrainian armed forces’ bravery and ingenuity is the stuff of legend. Bolstered by U.S. and European spending and weaponry, Ukraine has ground down Russia’s advances, making the invaders pay extravagantly in terms of blood and treasure.
KYIV—After another long night of thundering bombardment, the people of Kyiv are exhausted, shaky, and seething with anger. “We look at one another, clench our fists, and growl,” said Juliia Turba of the Snake Island Institute, a think tank based in Kyiv. “Then we get back to work.” Bakers go to bakeries, hair stylists go to salons, and analysts go to think tanks. Rush-hour traffic on the Pivdennyi Bridge is as maddeningly slow as ever. Young volunteers from civic initiatives like Kyiv Bats, Repair Together, and the all-women Velyke Divnytstvo are first to arrive at the sites of destruction, where they sweep up glass, clear debris from the streets, and board shattered windows. It’s a matter of dignity for Ukrainians that Russia’s cruel strikes don’t throw their lives into complete disarray—much less break them.
Ukraine has pulled off the extraordinary: repelling the world’s third-largest superpower with an army that, in 2014 when the war began, was largely unfit for battle of any kind. The military’s rapid modernization, turbocharged since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, is a credit to the country’s leadership. On the battlefield, the Ukrainian armed forces’ bravery and ingenuity is the stuff of legend. Bolstered by U.S. and European spending and weaponry, Ukraine has ground down Russia’s advances, making the invaders pay extravagantly in terms of blood and treasure.
But the story of Ukraine’s historic defense is incomplete without the engaged citizenry that has labored and innovated to sustain the front-line troops and pick up other responsibilities of the overwhelmed state.
This civic resistance consists of millions of ordinary Ukrainians across the country—and in the global diaspora, too—who supply the front with weaponry and kit, tend to injured veterans, outfit and staff tactical medical units, integrate refugees, and fortify democracy in a time of martial law. Like Ukraine’s resourceful defense industry, these everyday activists also shapeshift to meet the moment: In 2022, the homefront housed refugees, fabricated Molotov cocktails, and fed troops, and today, it builds underground schools, reimagines workplaces for injured veterans, and much more.
This vast patchwork of civic initiatives encompasses a myriad of forms—from volunteer work crews and registered nonprofits to informal groupings and community projects. They’re as tiny as friends assembling battlefield drones together on weekends and as large Come Back Alive, a multimillion-dollar global charity that supports the armed forces in many ways. With women usually at the fore, civilian brigades evacuate wounded soldiers, architecture students rebuild their towns as class projects, and environmental groups put solar roofs on hospitals and schools.
On the ground in Ukraine, one witnesses firsthand that neither the four-year invasion—now nearly as long as World War I—nor Russia’s regular bombings, even in the iciest of winters, have broken the population’s spirit. In Lviv, there’s minute of silence respected across the western city every morning at 9 a.m. local time, a daily reminder that the fight is on and everyone is part of it.
This is a fact that outsiders struggle to fathom. Ukrainians’ commitment to a democratic, compassionate homeland has become etched in their national consciousness since 1991, and the contrast with Russia’s extreme brutality only deepens these convictions. This is why the bombings of their homes, the winter nights without warmth or water, and the ghastly casualty toll do not prompt surrender but rather cause Ukrainians to double down on the course they set on Kyiv’s Independence Square 12 years ago, when the nation braved sharp shooters and freezing temperatures for months on end to replace increasingly authoritarian rule with Western-style democracy. This determination is evident today everywhere in the country, where businesses and schools collect for the military, for example, and in the high number of active volunteers.
Amid the war’s harshest winter yet, I saw volunteer-run spaces like the Goncharenko Centers fuller than ever. There, Ukrainians weave camouflage nets for the infantry, operate 3D printers to manufacture drone parts, and conduct arts-and-crafts projects for kids who can’t go to school—all in one room. “Everyone understands that if we stop fighting, we’ll be destroyed,” said Oleksandr Solomaschcheno, head of a Kharkiv charity. His nonprofit has lost volunteers over the years—including to emigration, exhaustion, and the battlefield—but new ones take their place, he said.
There is a widespread sentiment that I’ve heard from many Ukrainians that explains their perseverance: If we don’t do it, no one else will do it for us. Late 2025 surveys show that nearly two-thirds of Ukrainians are prepared to endure the war “as long as it takes.” When the Trump administration stopped sending humanitarian and military aid in early 2025, Ukrainians didn’t despair. They deftly pivoted to other sources.
Most organizations have said that monetary donations are down from 2022, when many people emptied their bank accounts for the cause. Because of insufficient funding for construction materials in 2025, for example, the volunteer construction brigades of Building Ukraine Together had to turn away applicants who wanted to spend the summer repairing schools. But there were more applicants for the brigades than in any year since its founding in 2014.
This grassroots engagement optimizes itself in real time. It takes orders from neither officialdom nor other authorities but thinks for itself along all the supply lines leading to the battlefields. Its smart, horizontal networks reach across Ukraine and into Poland, Germany, and beyond, where millions of Ukrainian citizens are organized for the purpose of procuring essential items for their hometowns and military units to fight another day. Through social media and crowdfunding platforms like Spilnokosht and Dobro.ua, they are in touch daily with their units and respond directly to their real-time needs—not what international organizations think they need.
Ukraine’s ethic of self-organization reaches back deeply into history, during most of which Ukrainians did not have a state of their own. Even today, 34 years after independence, Ukrainians do not tend to trust their authorities or expect very much from them. When Igor Korpusov, an Odesan sailor, and two of his friends, both first-year university students, noticed that Ukraine’s post-Soviet military lacked adequate front-line medical care in 2014, they didn’t lobby the state to provide it. They trained themselves for the purpose by downloading U.S. Red Cross instruction materials and set up their own training program for medics, as well as founding a separate private-sector company to bankroll their project. Since then, their teams have schooled more than 34,000 military personnel, rescuers, police officers, and volunteers free of charge. Now, they also administer blood transfusion programs on the front.
Ukrainians’ do-it-yourself ethic received tremendous boosts during uprisings like the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005 and the Maidan Revolution of 2013-2014. In both cases, countrywide street protests ousted corrupt governments taking an authoritarian turn. In the aftermath of the monthslong Maidan Revolution—which Ukrainians waged during a subzero winter much like this current one, with scores of protesters losing their lives—civil society blossomed profusely across Ukraine. Tens of thousands of nonprofits rose up to put the revolution’s ideals into practice, including groups to fight corruption, combat Russian disinformation, and empower women.
In the same vein, Oleksandra Matviichuk, a lawyer with the Center for Civil Liberties, observed Russia’s war crimes in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk in 2014 and immediately dispatched the center’s mobile teams to document them. Her organization continues this work today with a full-time staff of 25 people, and in 2022, Matviichuk was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the center’s work.
This broad civic engagement in Ukraine helps assuage the deficits caused by martial law. Since the full invasion began, there’s been a curfew, travel has been restricted for men of fighting age, and national elections have been suspended until the end of the war. But through participation, Ukrainians directly express their interests and constitute society. For the moment, theirs is a participatory democracy, which they are eager to augment with elections as soon as the war is over and the constitution allows.
Ukrainians’ patience, however, ended abruptly last July, when authorities moved to put the country’s main anti-corruption agencies under government control. These independent bodies were one of the Maidan Revolution’s primary achievements and had curtailed corruption significantly, though not completely. Ukrainians were so incensed that they ignored the martial law ban on public assemblies and flooded the streets with signs scrawled on paper cartons, which led to the protests being called the “cardboard revolution.” “My brother didn’t die for this,” read one placard, underscoring exactly what was at stake for Ukraine. Schoolchildren too young to have experienced the 2013-2014 uprising led the furious outpouring that demanded the measure’s rescission, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky undertook the next day. The episode illustrated that Ukraine’s citizens pack formidable clout—elections or not—and that they will assert it if needed.
Despite the fact that 2025 was the most lethal yet for civilians and this winter is unprecedentedly harsh, there has been no further exodus from the country. Even after long, sleepless,and nerve-shattering nights of bombing, Ukrainians get up in the morning and go to work, and children go to school when they can. Clean-up brigades of high schoolers arrive at the sites of urban destruction to sweep up debris. Cafes, bookshops, and hairdressers open windowless doors to customers.
This helps explain why morale in Ukraine remains high, despite the exhaustion and tragedy. They foil Russian President Vladimir Putin by ignoring his malice. Missiles be damned, Ukrainians seem to say, they will live a civilized life with their heads held high. And if ordinary Ukrainians have pulled off this extraordinary feat thus far, then they’re certain that they can see the struggle to a virtuous end.
