Andrew Potter: The last honourable man

Without honour, freedom is just the temporary or fortuitous absence of tyranny.

By: Andrew Potter

Hours after the beginning of the Russian invasion of his country in late February, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky told a group of European leaders on a Zoom call that this might be the last time they saw him alive. 

He wasn’t being dramatic. The Russians had made plain their intention to take Kyiv; it was widely assumed that, if successful, they would shoot Zelensky and install a puppet regime; pretty much everyone believed the Russians would be successful within a matter of days. 

And yet Zelensky refused to leave Kyiv, remaining in the Ukrainian capital along with his family. Two days into the invasion, his response to an American offer to help him evacuate was to say: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” The line instantly became one of the great tough-guy catch-phrases of our time, fantastically meme-worthy, turning Zelensky overnight into some pop cultural admixture of Churchill and an ‘80s action hero. It also made him the moral leader of the free world. For six weeks now, the Ukrainians have stubbornly refused to capitulate, while Zelensky demanded the West stand up for the values it purports to believe in and give Ukraine weapons it needs to do the job. 

When asked by journalists to explain his refusal to head for safety, Zelensky has made it clear that he has no wish to die, and that he fears for the lives of his loved ones (his wife and kids have since been moved to relative safety.) But, he added: “As for my life: I am the president of the country, and I simply do not have the right to it.” Sure, he could flee to preserve his own life. But, he has said, how would he explain his actions to his kids? As Zelensky sees it, he has no choice in the matter. His duty requires that he remain and lead his country in the fight; to do anything less would be dishonourable. 

But while his Last Action Hero schtick has proven enormously popular with European and North American audiences, Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv, and Ukraine’s insistence on fighting off the Russians instead of capitulation, has put our so-called leaders in a bit of a bind. 

To begin with, Ukraine’s refusal to capitulate to Russian aggression has forced many governments into taking steps they almost certainly would have preferred to avoid — economic and political sanctions against Russia, costly shipments of arms and other aid, diplomatic side-choosing, rethinking of trade agreements, and so on. Ukraine’s defence is coming at a pretty high cost, and the final bill is far from being tallied. 

But beyond the economic and political price that is being paid to support Ukraine, there is the extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance Zelensky’s behaviour has generated amongst the leadership of the West. Honour? Duty? Sacrifice? What century does he think he’s living in?

For centuries, honour reflected the sorts of qualities that gentlemen were expected to possess: dignity, integrity, courage. But it is hard to even talk about honour now with a straight face. It brings to mind 19th-century aristocrats in wigs and hose, demanding satisfaction and challenging one another to a meeting over some best-forgotten offence. The old honour codes couldn’t survive the triumph of the values of liberal democracy and the arrival of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the End of History, where the willingness to risk one’s life for abstract ideas or principles has been replaced by voting and economic calculation in the public sphere and “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” in the private.

Today, the old notion of honour survives only in small and isolated precincts of (mostly) male society, places like the military and some sports, places where how you behave in front of your peers matters more than comfort, more than money, more than health, maybe even more than life itself. The rest of us have become versions of what Nietszche derided as “the last man” — creatures of liberalism who have no pride, take no risks, and desire only comfort and security. 

Anyway, what could possibly be worth dying for in the consumerist pleasure cruise of the 21st-century West? Well, as it turns out, history might have ended but someone forgot to tell the Ukrainians, who appear to be very willing to fight and die for the very old 19th-century idea of nationalism. As the historian Adam Tooze put it in a recent essay, “It is the Ukrainians, to the amazement and not inconsiderable embarrassment of the West, who are enacting a drama of national resistance unto death. Under Russian attack, they are bonding together and demanding recognition of their sovereignty.”

As Tooze notes, the West doesn’t really know how it is supposed to respond. On the one hand, there is no question that Ukraine’s courage and resolve in the face of outrageous Russian criminality has captured the imagination of the people of the West. But this has put some governments on the spot, especially those who have spent years cozying up to Russia (Germany), cynically playing both sides (France), or letting Putin-friendly Russian oligarchs and FSB assassins have run of the place (Britain). 

To their credit, the Americans appear to have finally grasped the importance of the moment, and there remains enough of an atavistic sense of Churchillian honour in the British psyche that it has stepped up admirably. For all his domestic loucheness, Boris Johnson’s trip to Kyiv, where he walked in the open streets with Zelensky, was an act of genuine courage and statesmanship. 

Then there’s Canada, the Last Man of NATO, which is performing its usual trick of doing the least amount it possibly can while still looking like it is helping. While Justin Trudeau hosts hashtag-friendly Zoom conferences and tweets about “holding the Putin regime to account,” the Ukrainians keep insisting that they don’t want justice tomorrow, they want victory today. And they are hell bent on shaming the West into giving them all the help they require.  

What the Ukrainian fight has revealed is something deeply metaphysical about the concept of freedom: Without honour, freedom is just the temporary or fortuitous absence of tyranny. That is, it is only freedom if you’re willing to die for it. But once you get there, you find that you’re already free. As a Belarussian volunteer fighting for Ukraine put it: "We are Free Men, we have nothing to fear, and as you can see, victory shall be ours.” In some way, they’ve already won. 

The Ukrainians are under vicious attack, with their cities ruined, their populations massacred. The Russian horde is massing in the East. But the men and women fighting for Ukraine are the freest people in the world right now, unshakeably led by Volodymyr Zelensky, the undisputed leader of the free world. 

The hour has come. So has the man. So has the people. 

Glory to Ukraine. 

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