Freedom Must Be for All

I know a town in southern Ukraine where every single house has been destroyed by shelling or bombing. Even the ruins are riddled by bullet holes. Posad-Pokrovske, in the Kherson region, was occupied by Russians for most of 2022, before they were driven out by the Ukrainian army.

I visited there a year ago and met Mariia. She was living in a corrugated-metal hut behind the rubble of her house, her possessions arranged neatly, water bottles in a line, extension cords from the generator well hidden. She was proud of her Ukrainian government and cried in sympathy with her president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He seemed so young to her. Mariia is 86.

When we spoke, in Ukrainian, she used the word “de-occupation” rather than the expected “liberation.” I had a draft of a book about freedom in my backpack. I got it out and made a note.

We like to think that people are free when the correct army arrives: a liberation. But removing evil is not enough. Mariia would be less free without her temporary dwelling, provided by an international organization. She will be more free when the lane through the rubble is wide enough for her walker, and when the buses are running again.

The Ukrainians don’t expect us to bring them freedom. One soldier told me to remind Americans that they don’t need our troops. They do need our weapons, as one tool of many to keep their futures open. No one can bring anyone else freedom. But freedom can arise from cooperation.

Ukrainians have to keep fighting because they know what Russian occupation means. They have every reason to think of freedom as negative, as just the removal of what is wrong. But in the hundreds of conversations I have now had with Ukrainians about freedom, including soldiers on the front this month, I have never heard anyone say that. Freedom is about moral commitments and multiple possibilities. The Ukrainians driving vans to the front and rebuilding houses also speak of their actions in terms of freedom.