A Question That Demands an Answer

Around three in the morning on September 4, a Ukrainian doctor named Olesya Vynnyk was awakened by an explosion. She was staying with her parents several miles from the center of Lviv, where the blast occurred, but it was loud enough to drive her from bed. She raced to her car with a box of tourniquets and followed emergency vehicles toward the flames, until police roadblocks prevented her from reaching the site, which was close to her own downtown apartment.

A Russian Kinzhal ballistic missile, fired from a MiG-31K aircraft about 200 miles from the border with Ukraine and 700 miles from Lviv, had hit an apartment in a civilian neighborhood. The apartment was the home of the Bazylevych family: Yaroslav Bazylevych; his wife, Evgeniya; and their three daughters, Yaryna, 21, Darya, 18, and Emilia, 7. Yaroslav staggered out of the damaged building, badly injured, but struggled to return inside while emergency personnel restrained him. He had lost his entire family.

Vynnyk knew the Bazylevych family through their participation in a Ukrainian scouting organization. The girls reminded her of her nieces, and she thought about how easily the missile could have destroyed her own family. During the funeral, at the Garrison Church of Peter and Paul, which all of Lviv seemed to attend, Yaroslav moved between the four open coffins as if, Vynnyk told me, he couldn’t decide which one he should stay with to say goodbye. “There is a common thought in Lviv that he died together with them.”

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At the many funerals she’s attended, Vynnyk has noticed that people avoid looking each other in the eye, out of some complicated mix of feelings—guilt, fear of breaking down. “You want to talk to God more than someone standing next to you,” she said. As a former member of a volunteer medical battalion, she’s lost numerous friends to the war, including a soldier who was killed the day before we sat down together this week in New York. But the erasure of a sleeping family shocked her more than anything Russia has done since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago. “I don’t think anyone can describe this tragedy of the Bazylevych family,” Vynnyk said. “It was beyond our understanding, beyond what we can allow ourselves to feel.”

Vynnyk—whom I first met in Lviv shortly after the invasion and wrote about for this magazine—works for the Ukrainian World Congress, a nonprofit focused on diaspora Ukrainians. She was in the United States this month as part of her study for a doctorate in bioethics at Loyola University Chicago, and to speak with Americans about the war. She realized that our attention had moved away, and she wanted us to know that Ukrainians are still there, still fighting for values we’re supposed to share, still confident of ultimate victory. But beneath her cheerful resilience, she seemed tired beyond physical fatigue. The war had revealed to her the best and worst in human nature. At the start of the war, she told me, Ukrainians were standing in a circle, holding hands. “They are still holding the circle, they are doing it with all their strength, they will hold it until the last one of them is left standing, but that grip is not as strong as in the first days.”

We were talking on a park bench in Lower Manhattan. A few miles north, the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly was in full swing. The world’s statesmen and diplomats were clogging Midtown with their convoys of SUVs, being chauffeured between meetings and luncheons and speeches. The UN has seemed unusually feckless recently, but never more so than while I sat with Vynnyk and she told me about the Bazylevych family.

President Joe Biden was in town, and in his speech to the General Assembly he asked: “Will we sustain our support to help Ukraine win this war and preserve its freedom, or walk away and let aggression be renewed and a nation be destroyed? I know my answer. We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away. And we will not let up on our support for Ukraine, not until Ukraine wins a just and durable peace based on the UN charter.”

It was a moving speech, given by a lifelong supporter of the world body on his last occasion to deliver such an address. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in Manhattan as well. He told the General Assembly that Ukraine would not accept a peace deal that surrendered pieces of his own country to Russian imperialism, and he urged Western allies to increase their support for Ukrainian resistance to aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin was not in town—he faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children—but in Moscow, he threatened the West with nuclear war if NATO-supplied weapons are used to strike Russian territory.

But Biden’s vows and Zelensky’s pleas and Putin’s threats are just words. On the night of September 3–4, Russia fired 42 ground- and air-based missiles and drones from Russia and Russian-occupied territory at Ukraine. Ukrainian armed forces shot down most of them, but ballistic missiles travel so fast that many get through. To protect itself from those missiles, Ukraine would have to attack their points of origin, Russian bases and airfields, with long-range missiles provided by the U.S. and other NATO countries. NATO’s current policy forbids Ukraine from using its weapons to hit military targets deep inside Russia—and so the Bazylevych family no longer exists.

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From New York, Zelensky went to Washington, D.C., to urge the Biden administration to lift those restrictions. The outgoing secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has indicated his support for Zelensky’s request; so has the government of Britain. But Biden has hesitated out of a fear of escalation into nuclear and world war. Putin has been blackmailing Biden and the West since the start of the invasion, first warning against the use of any NATO weapons inside Ukraine, then against certain tanks and long-range artillery, then against strikes on military positions just across the border from which Russia has been raining destruction on Kharkiv. All of those warnings turned out to be empty. This week Putin raised the stakes. Is he bluffing?

That’s the question he hopes will paralyze the West. We can’t know his intent, and the consequences of guessing wrong could be catastrophic. But a lot of Russia experts think he is bluffing; after all, Putin cherishes his own survival above everything else, and he’s threatening suicide as well as mass murder. To give him the final say over every move his adversaries make is to surrender in advance. Perhaps we should ask a different question, one that Olesya Vynnyk asked me: If Ukraine is defending values we are supposed to hold dear, how can we not allow Ukraine to defend its people?