Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom: Why It Matters to Europe and to America
By Andrew Borene
Andrew Borene is Flashpoint’s Executive Director for Global Security. Based in London, he is a former officer at the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Previously, he has been an associate deputy general counsel at the Pentagon, and he is a Marine Corps veteran.
OPINION – A First-Person Perspective
I woke to air raid sirens and a hypersonic boom in my room at the Kyiv Intercontinental Hotel in the early dawn of February 7, as I prepared my speech for a significant international cyber resilience forum attended by both a U.S. ambassador and an agency director from the Department of Homeland Security.
That window-rattling and building-shaking explosion, potentially involving Russian Zircon missiles against civilians, was a jarring experience, bringing the war’s realities into stark focus for me – but it marked just the latest in a long string of Russian attacks on western Ukrainian cities, commercial centers, and civilians in Ukraine who despite the deaths and dozens of injuries climbed out of shelters and immediately got back to the work of living. By 9am, the city was buzzing with life again and the most common excuse for tardiness at the cyber forum was the impact on power supply which had caused major traffic disruptions.
The Global Stakes in Ukraine
The situation in Ukraine is unlike any recent conflict the United States or its allies has faced. It is not comparable to Iraq, to Afghanistan, or even to Vietnam or Korea. The indiscriminate attacks on Ukraine’s civilians and commercial centers far from trench lines echo historical assaults on Western Europe in two industrial-age world wars, particularly the Blitz in London.
Russia’s war on Ukraine represents a different kind of information-age warfare combining such indiscriminate violence with aggressive misinformation campaigns and synchronized cyber attacks on societies – as Putin, the Russian Army general staff, and their various criminal proxies all wage a full-scale military invasion and nihilistic hybrid warfare campaign to obliterate Ukrainian identity,